Hunger’s whip: why connecting US food stamps to work is outdated and ineffective

For more than 200 years, common wisdom and policymakers have assumed that to get people to work, you had to make them hungry. New work requirements for Snap food benefits, which went into effect in most of the US on 1 December, are only the latest in a long line of policies based on this idea. The new rules cut off benefits for any non-disabled adult up to age 65 who cannot prove that they are working or seeking work at least 80 hours every month (that includes homeless people, veterans and former foster youth). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 2.7 million people will lose their benefits.

You’ve heard this reasoning before: people are motivated to work because they and their families have to survive. If you give someone welfare – especially food aid – they become dependent and lazy. The Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative thinktank that has been campaigning for years to cut welfare, calls this “the dependency trap”. Starving people by taking away their food stamps is supposed to “incentivize individuals to better themselves and transition from dependency to work and self-reliance”.

House speaker Mike Johnson called work requirements a “moral component” of the Republican budget: “When you make young men work, it’s good for them.” Wherever welfare benefits or foreign aid come up for debate, some politician trots out a version of that old commonplace. Historian Moishe Postone called this idea, that people must work to eat, “the basis for the fundamental legitimating ideology of the capitalist social formation as a whole”. But it is not true that hunger motivates people to work. It is a fiction, and drugs like Ozempic can prove it.

Today’s politicians and pundits are recycling a notion with deep roots. Hunger, wrote prominent Anglican minister Joseph Townsend in 1786, is “the most natural motive to industry”. Hunger “teaches obedience and subjection” and “tames the fiercest animals”. Townsend, like many after him, argued that feeding the poor only makes their situation worse by removing their desire to work and support themselves. “It is only hunger which can spur and goad [poor people] on to labour.” Ideas like Townsend’s justified cutting off food and support from the unemployed and the famine-struck in England and Ireland, India and East Africa. Hunger was the whip. And this idea was planted in the American mind from the very beginning of the republic.

During much of US history, government agents applied Townsend’s prescription literally. US officers in the 19th century purposefully withheld food supplies from Native people to force them to sell their treaty lands, send their children to American Indian boarding schools designed to “civilize” them and work for wages instead of tending to the land. After emancipation and the American civil war, government agents and plantation owners withheld food supplies to force freedpeople to work. As one Union army commander put it: “The liberty given [freedpeople] simply means liberty to work, work or starve.”

Employers used this tactic too. In US mines and plantations, for example, owners have often disciplined workers by controlling their access to food. Employers kept workers in debt by advancing credit for food at the company store. Forced to purchase from their employers, and without the means to clear their accounts, sharecroppers and miners toiled under a form of servitude. During the great miners’ strikes of the 1920s and 1930s, local Red Cross and welfare agencies colluded with employers and refused to support protesting workers. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms improved working conditions in some sectors, but Black farmworkers were excluded from those benefits. Modern plantation owners in the US South “used hunger as a weapon” through at least the 1970s, according to sociologist Monica White. Anyone who challenged their political and economic power could find themselves hungry.

Anti-welfare politicians today still use hunger as a weapon against poor people and workers. When Covid hit, conservative lawmakers opposed expanding food aid and welfare benefits to impacted Americans, for fear of a “moral hazard“ that might discourage them from working. During the November government shutdown, federal authorities held hostage 42 million Americans (nearly one in eight people in the US), who rely on Snap benefits.

But does hunger actually motivate people to work?

There is a reason why Townsend’s ideas might seem intuitively right to many of us. Utilitarian ideas like his are baked into the way that we think about human nature.

For decades, psychologists used the words “hunger” and “motive” pretty much interchangeably. When psychologists wanted to know how learning works, or how to get someone to complete a task, they ran experiments where they made rats hungry and dropped them in a puzzle maze. Still today, some psychologists deprive their subjects (especially mice) of food in order to get them to perform an experiment. If the mouse does its job, it gets some peanut butter or a piece of bread. Psychologists’ assumptions about hunger and motivation have entered popular culture. I’ve heard people at my university say that students are “hungry to learn”. Artists motivate each other with the catchphrase “Stay hungry.”

But hunger and motivation are not the same. Psychologists have known this for at least 75 years. Poor people have known it forever. In 1951, Yale physiologists Bal K Anand and John Brobeck used a thin needle to lesion specific areas at the base of rats’ brains, making the animals become insatiably hungry. These rats were not motivated in the least. They became ill-tempered and refused to run, solve puzzles or do any experimental work at all. When offered food, these hungry rats simply couldn’t stop eating; some of them ate themselves to death.

Around the same time, psychologist Paul Thomas Young found that offering animals a sweet treat is much more likely to get them moving than depriving them of food. If you want to make a rat work, give it some sugar. Hunger, especially acute hunger, often lessens motivation. Hunger saps brainpower, energy and immune strength, leading to sickness, exhaustion and defeat.

GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound are the ultimate proof that hunger has very little to do with motivation. GLP-1 drugs are finally convincing the public that controlling hunger is not just a matter of individual willpower. Many users of these drugs had cycled through diet after diet, feeling like failures because they could not suppress their own hunger. To some, these drugs are a miracle. We are learning not to blame people for their hunger. Yet somehow that has not had any impact on the way that we talk about hunger and poverty.

Hunger is stimulated by an extraordinary complex of hormones and neural pathways in the mouth, the gut and the brain. An empty stomach sends out ghrelin to increase appetite. Endocannabinoid receptors in the brain stimulate a sense of pleasure when eating. Gut hormones signal to stop eating when the stomach is full. There are multiple flavors of hunger: wanting, craving, liking, needing. Hunger also describes what it feels like when you know that you have to eat cheap snacks or skip meals because you do not have enough money to buy nourishing food.

For many people, hunger has little or nothing to do with individual decisions. Hunger is the result of collective, political choices about minimum wages, childcare, food subsidies and welfare.

It should be no surprise that Snap work requirements don’t work. Where states have imposed work requirements for food benefits, there has been no meaningful increase in employment. In many places, the jobs are just not available. Having to prove how many hours you are working is itself a huge burden and a lot of work. The Urban Institute estimates that even before Congress created these new requirements, one in eight Snap recipients lost some food benefits due to paperwork problems.

Snap work requirements are wrong, punitive and cruel. These rules are based on outdated moral judgments and erroneous claims. Most Snap recipients who can work are already working. Snap, for many, is a supplement to starvation wages. Benefits are tied to income, and many working people are paid so little that they qualify. More than half of adult non-disabled Snap recipients in 2015 were working. Almost 90% of Snap recipients had a family member in the household who worked some time within the two years before or after getting benefits. The share of Snap households with some earnings has gone up since the 1990s. Working people cannot buy enough food to survive. More often than not, hunger is produced by forces beyond an individual’s control. This has nothing to do with motivation.

• Dana Simmons is a professor at the University of California at Riverside and author of On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic. The open-access book can be downloaded here