At no time during the Great Depression was the contradiction between
agriculture surplus and widespread hunger more wrenchingly graphic than
in the government's attempt to raise pork prices through the mass
slaughter of miliions of "unripe" little pigs. This contradiction was
widely perceived as a "paradox." In fact, as Janet Poppendieck makes
clear in this newly expanded and updated volume, it was a normal,
predictable working of an economic system rendered extreme by the
Depression. The notion of paradox, however, captured the imagination of
the public and policy makers, and it was to this definition of the
problem that surplus commodities distribution programs in the Hoover and
Roosevelt administrations were addressed.
This book explains in readable narrative how the New Deal food
assistance effort, originally conceived as a relief measure for poor
people, became a program designed to raise the incomes of commercial
farmers. In a broader sense, the book explains how the New Deal years
were formative for food assistance in subsequent administrations; it
also examines the performance--or lack of performance--of subsequent
in-kind relief programs.
Beginning with a brief survey of the history of the American farmer
before the depression and the impact of the Depression on farmers, the
author describes the development of Hoover assistance programs and the
events at the end of that administration that shaped the "historical
moment" seized by the early New Deal. Poppendieck goes on to analyze the
food assistance policies and programs of the Roosevelt years, the
particular series of events that culminated in the decision to purchase
surplus agriculture products and distribute them to the poor, the
institutionalization of this approach, the resutls achieved, and the
interest groups formed. The book also looks at the takeover of food
assistance by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its gradual
adaptation for use as a tool in the maintenance of farm income.
Utliizing a wide variety of official and unofficial sources, the author
reveals with unusual clarity the evolution from a policy directly
responsive to the poor to a policy serving mainly democratic needs.
