by Julianne Malveaux
(Trice Edney Wire) – The White House was built in part by enslaved Black people. They quarried stone, hauled materials and did skilled work. The wages recorded for their labor went to their enslavers. That history ought to haunt every occupant of the building. It also ought to sharpen our attention to families struggling to put food on the table in the capital today.
The Capital Area Food Bank reports that 38 percent of households across the Washington region experienced food insecurity during the past year. In Prince George’s County, the figure was 56 percent. Food insecurity means that families could not count on having enough food. Some stretched what they had; some sacrificed the quality of their meals; some went without. Where decisions about the nation’s food programs are made, those numbers should provoke more than a ceremonial food drive.
As Hunger Action Month draws to a close, hunger shows no sign of doing the same. Nor does hunger stop at the Beltway. A new survey finds that 36 percent of Chicago households lacked consistent access to enough food in June; nearly half of households with children were affected. In Los Angeles County, 24 percent of households experienced food insecurity in 2025. These studies cover different places and periods, but their message is unmistakable: too many Americans are making impossible choices at the grocery store.
What does a parent put back when the total at the register is too high? The fruit? The milk? The medicine that must also be paid for this week? Meanwhile, in Washington, somebody can put another steak dinner on an expense account without asking whether it will crowd out the electric bill. Food insecurity is an economist’s term for brutally personal calculations. It is also an indictment of an economy that produces extraordinary wealth without assuring people enough to eat.
Hunger is not evenly distributed. The Washington-area report finds that households of color face food insecurity at two to three times the rate of white households. In Chicago, the highest rates are on the South and West Sides. Unequal pay, insecure work, housing costs and the racial wealth gap determine who has a cushion when groceries become more expensive—and who has none.
Consider that cushion. In the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the median white family held $285,000 in wealth; the median Black family held $44,900. That is roughly six dollars to one. Wealth lets a family absorb a layoff, a rent increase or a medical bill without the grocery budget collapsing. When politicians tell people to tighten their belts, they ignore how many families have run out of notches.
A wealth gap this wide is a policy failure. But families cannot wait for policy to catch up before they eat. Feeding America, the nationwide network of food banks that launched Hunger Action Month, asked us to “play your part.” We should keep doing so after September. Food banks and neighborhood pantries do indispensable work. Donate money. Volunteer. Make sure people know where to find help. But a volunteer cannot replace a paycheck, and a pantry cannot repair a national safety net by itself.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, is part of that safety net. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that participation fell by more than five million people—nearly 13 percent—between July 2025 and June 2026. That figure alone cannot tell us why each person left. But the 2025 law expanded SNAP’s work-related time limits to adults ages 55–64 and parents whose youngest child is 14 or older, and ended exceptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness and former foster youth. Congress should reverse those restrictions and ensure eligible families can get the benefits they need.
American politics has a perverse habit of demanding proof that poor people deserve dinner while asking remarkably little of those who profit from their labor. The debate becomes a referendum on the shopping carts of SNAP recipients, as though policing purchases could solve low wages, high rents and inadequate benefits. It cannot. If we care what children eat, we must care whether their families can buy food throughout the month.
The enslaved people who built the White House under bondage were denied the fruits of their own work. Their circumstances and today’s are different, but this nation has long taken essential labor while resisting the obligation to provide a decent life to the people who perform it. That history calls for more than sympathy. It calls for economic justice.
Hunger Action Month should leave us with questions for every elected official: Will you protect access to SNAP? Will you support wages that keep pace with the cost of living? Will you tackle the wealth gap that leaves Black families especially exposed to economic shocks? Will you treat a child’s empty refrigerator as an emergency, rather than a talking point? And will you listen to people facing hunger before writing policies in their name?
The campaign may end with September. Families will still need breakfast. Our action must last longer than the month.
Dr. Julianne Malveaux is a DC based economist and author.
