UC Press Blog

By Dana Simmons, author of On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic

"There is no question or doubt that nobody will starve or go hungry in the United States." Herbert Hoover spoke those words in 1931, days after thousands of poor Americans converged for a Hunger March on Washington DC, demanding government aid. The Great Depression had thrown millions out of work and into poverty, but President Hoover refused to consider how he and Congress could help them. He opposed any form of welfare or “government dole.” Media reports of hunger and destitution were “over-exaggerated,” he said.

Almost a hundred years later, the Trump administration is repeating that same playbook. Researchers in The Lancet wrote that Congress’s proposed cuts to Medicaid could cause 14,660 American deaths each year, which otherwise would not have happened. Unprecedented cuts to food benefits (SNAP) will make millions of people hungry and malnourished, increasing the risk of suffering and premature death. Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, went on CNN and called these reports “totally ridiculous” and “astroturf.” 

The Boston University School of Public Health’s Impact Counter estimates that almost 60,000 children worldwide have already died of severe acute malnutrition as a result of Trump and DOGE throwing USAID’s humanitarian aid into the woodchipper. Scientists in Nature calculated that 369,000 more children will die of malnutrition every year, children who would have been saved if aid had not been cut. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called these numbers “false” and “fake:” “There’s just no evidence of the fact… that 100,000 children have starved to death because of cuts to USAID." Rubio told the Senate that poor countries are to blame for having their aid cut, because they don’t make business and mineral deals with the US.

This has happened before. The United States has a long history of using hunger as a weapon and a policy, and denying responsibility for its impacts. 

The hunger marchers of the Great Depression recognized that food was power. Government authorities, charities and employers colluded to keep poor people hungry so that they would work and do what they were told. Plantation owners withheld access to food from the croppers on their land, to keep them obedient and disciplined. Mine owners paid their workers with little brass tokens called scrip, which could only be used at the company store, where prices were high. When miners or textile mill workers went on strike, or when their labor was no longer needed, owners tried to starve them out. Local charity offices made sure that only obedient workers had access to relief. Striking workers’ self-help kitchens were bombed and destroyed. Their children went hungry.

Hunger forced poor people to work. As one Union army commander put it after Emancipation, “the liberty given [freedpeople] is the liberty to work, work or starve.” US Indian Agents used hunger to discipline Native people who had been removed from their homelands to reservations. Agents withheld food rations to force Native people to sell their land, work for wages and send their children to Indian schools. US agents then blamed Native people and freedpeople for their own hunger, accusing them of backwardness and indolence. 

Welfare agencies also used hunger as a tool for discipline and exclusion. Local welfare officials sometimes made poor people labor for public works to access food benefits. In the 1960s, county welfare offices in the South set up barriers to accessing food aid by making poor people pay an impossibly high deposit for food stamps, or by requiring a letter from a landowner to sign up for benefits. When thousands of people suffered from hunger and malnutrition, public officials blamed them for making bad food choices or for being lazy.

Early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, drastic welfare cuts led to long lines at food pantries across the country. White House Counselor Edwin Meese dismissed reports of rising hunger in America. Like Rubio, Meese called statistics on hungry children “purely political.” He claimed that there was no evidence: “we do not know how many people there may be who are hungry.” And he suggested that poor people were faking hunger. “People go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that's easier than paying for it.''

Poor people are not fooled by this kind of duplicitous rhetoric. Eleven year-old Grace Chiaramadi, daughter of two unemployed textile workers, joined the Children’s Hunger March in 1932. A skeptical reporter told her, “you don’t look hungry.” “Oh, don’t I though!” she retorted. “Sometimes we go for days without eating anything.” Chiaramadi told the reporter that she had a two-month old brother, who she feared would die of starvation. “I want to tell you I know what it means to be hungry.” Children across the US and worldwide know what it means to be hungry. If Trump and Congress ignore them, the price will be suffering and death.

Learn more about On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic.