ABSTRACT
For centuries, advocates for the poor, social reformers, and policymakers have debated ways to address inequalities in access to food and other resources. Debates have centered on the conflict between sympathy for the plight of poor people and complaints that public assistance is too expensive and might encourage recipients to become dependent on charity. Since the English Poor Laws of the 1500s, public and private assistance policies have been explicitly designed to provide minimal support—that is, just enough to prevent overt starvation, but not so much as to encourage dependency. This balance, however, is not easily achieved. In the United States, for example, hunger and welfare policies have shifted in response to political change, sometimes strengthening but sometimes weakening the “safety net” for the poor. Today, welfare policies are dominated by concerns about dependency far more than they are about the nutritional, health, or social consequences of entrenched poverty.
