Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
A police officer directs a double line of cars, stretching over a mile at times, in a queue waiting to pick up food outside the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, April 6, 2020.
We never see a headline
’Bout a breadline
Today.
And when we see the landlord
We can look that guy
Right in the eye.
So sang the pre-Fred-Astaire Ginger Rogers in the classic Warren-Dubin song “We’re in the Money”—a peppy number of unbridled, deliberate irony—in the Warner Bros. musical Gold Diggers of 1933. Early 1933, when the picture was released, was the very bottom of the Depression, and the show that showgirl Rogers rehearses in the picture is closed down by creditors as soon as she’s belted the final note. Gold Diggers of 1933 is no documentary, but the show’s closure was entirely on point: The vast majority of Broadway theaters were dark in 1932 and 1933. The money to put on shows or buy tickets to see them just wasn’t there.
Now as then, the theaters are all dark, for a different set of reasons. Now, as in the film, actors, singers, dancers, stagehands, and ticket-takers are without work. Now, as in the film, many New Yorkers are ducking their landlord.
And now, throughout America, the breadline is back.
Perhaps we should call them neo-breadlines. During the Great Depression, people lined up on sidewalks for food; today, they sit in their cars and inch toward food banks in lines that in places like Pittsburgh have exceeded a mile in length.
The surge in food bank patronage should come as no surprise. Surveys have long shown that a sizable share of Americans—roughly 40 percent in the most recent polls—don’t have enough money in the bank to handle an unexpected expense of $400. As ten million Americans have filed for unemployment in the past two weeks, and as the funds that the federal government has now made available will take time to get to recipients, food banks are being called upon to feed more people than ever before. As The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell has noted, one Dayton, Ohio, food bank that normally serves between 175 and 200 households daily saw that total rise to more than 650 on a recent Friday.
New York City, which historically has been home to the nation’s most expansive social programs (well short of European standards, but exceptional by America’s), has upheld its traditions by providing three meals a day to all children and adults who need them. On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that meals would be made available at school sites to those who would otherwise go hungry, and deliveries would be made to the households of children who for whatever reason couldn’t have their meals picked up. Taking the notion of universality more seriously than it is usually taken in the United States, the city said no identification would be required of those receiving the food.
For its part, the federal government needs to do what it did during the Great Recession: raise the maximum value of food stamps and lower the threshold for recipient eligibility. Republicans have long railed against food stamps, equating hunger with a moral weakness—one that inexplicably surges during times of increased joblessness. President Trump’s Department of Agriculture has altered food stamp regulations so that able-bodied adults with no dependent children are required to work at least 20 hours a week to receive the assistance, and a new regulation set to take effect on April 1 would have eliminated most exemptions from this requirement. The CARES Act temporarily scrapped the work requirements and added $15.5 billion to the overall food stamp program, but that just covers the expected influx of newly eligible recipients. The government now should increase the maximum value of food stamp grants, which would enable more Americans to actually buy their food and thereby reduce the burden on food banks—and the lines around them, too.
José Andrés, who is America’s most socially responsible top chef, has provided meals at low or no cost to the homeless and indigent at his Washington, D.C., restaurants during the current crisis, just as he managed to feed tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Writing in The New York Times, he has called upon the government to fund a nationwide food preparation and distribution program, subsidizing otherwise unemployed restaurant cooks to feed the hungry. As the share of the hungry rises with the share of the unemployed, there’s a lot the government must do to alleviate this corollary crisis that the pandemic has brought in its wake.
