After the Reapers: Place Settings of Race, Class, and Food Insecurity

Abstract

Combining personal narrative and cultural theories by food and performance scholars, this qualitative case study on hunger analyzes the nutritional issues, hegemony, and sanctions that shape race and class identity in the United States. It focuses on the social disparity negotiated by one urban, low-income African-American family from the early 1950s through the 1970s by engaging the harvest metaphor of reapers and gleaners to critique the USDA euphemism of “food insecurity” and to define anticipatory performance.

Keywords:

• Food Performance
• Hunger in America
• Anticipatory Performance
• Identity Performance
• US Social Policy

Acknowledgements

This essay was written in loving memory of my parents Frank and Ethel Mae Cherry. I express my deepest appreciation to my wonderful siblings, Joseph, Estella, Frank, and Gloria, and my husband, Richard D. Chandler; for the priceless assistance of Lucy Long, Ronald Shields, and Vanessa Baker of Bowling Green State University; Myron Beasley, Linda Park-Fuller, Shane Perry, my anonymous reviewers; and food relief workers and recipients around the world.

Notes

1. Geis attributes this quote to performance artist Suzanne Lacy, interviewed by Linda Montano.

2. “Reagan cheese” is slang for the block of blended cheese distributed from US government surplus, or a political term referring to government aid provided to needy persons. This particular term was coined during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–89) even though this commodity was used prior to his administration.

3. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) legislative history of food distribution programs, Section 32 of the Agricultural Act of 1935 encouraged the domestic consumption of certain farm commodities in surplus supply. Under this act and the Agricultural Act of 1949, over half of the foods that USDA distributed domestically between 1935 and 1970 went to needy families. The Food Stamp Program also emerged during this period. In January 1961, the first executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy mandated that USDA increase the quantity and variety of foods donated for needy households. This executive order shifted the Commodity Distribution Program's primary purpose from surplus disposal to that of providing nutritious foods to needy households (United States Department of Agriculture 2–3). Also see Levenstein's analysis of social, economic, and political factors impacting the American diet since 1930 and what he describes as the “New Deal legacy” behind the USDA surplus food distributions in the 1950s (148–56).

4. Spam™ is the world's largest selling canned meat. George Hormel invented it from surplus pork shoulders blended with more ham, salt, sugar, and sodium nitrate. He sold half of his company's supply to the United States Armed Forces during World War II and to the old Soviet Union after the war. The remaining supplies were donated to impoverished Americans to fight off childhood malnutrition.

5. KalČik asserts that “food can be used to express tensions across cultural boundaries.” She cites the ethnographic research of Margaret Cussler and Mary de Give in the 1940s and 1950s, who found among their white informants the perception that “Negroes do not need as much to eat as whites and are less discriminating in food choice.” KalČik quotes from one of their subjects: “some niggers never think about anything but cornbread half cooked, and syrup. Up there where we used to live, the niggers eat kidneys—Daddy said the niggers saved everything about a hog but the squeal. They eat fatback three times a day and this ole poke salat. Sometimes we cook it in a big pot and feed it to the pig. They just don't have milk and butter. Them niggers don't have stuff like that” (51–52).

6. Charlie's store participated in a USDA food subsidy program for low-income families. Food stamps are actually certificates that qualifying families use for the direct purchase of groceries. Used just like cash but distinctive in appearance, they are considered a class stigmatizing practice in food checkout lines throughout the United States.

7. See Levenstein about pregnant mothers eating laundry starch and the Black Panther food program (153).

8. As a girl, I participated in a regional chapter of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) founded in 1896 by Mrs Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. It was dedicated to “raising to the highest plane the home life, moral standards and civic life of the race” and service to humanity (<http://www.nacwc.org>, 2007).

9. See Cozzi's fascinating etymology of the word “hunger” and the graphism of the letter “H” in “The Dance of Hunger/Between Simulation and Hunger: Injustice” in section one of his essay (121).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eileen Cherry-Chandler

Eileen Cherry-Chandler (PhD) is assistant professor of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University