Hunger Economics in Appalachia: How Trump’s Food Aid Cuts Revive a Cruel Economic Philosophy
When food aid disappears, deprivation transforms from a side effect into calculated policy.
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In late March 2025, food banks across America received devastating news. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was canceling $500 million in expected food deliveries. For Second Harvest Food Bank of East Tennessee, this meant the immediate loss of 21 tractor-trailer loads containing $722,000 worth of USDA commodities—over 377,000 pounds of protein and dairy that would have fed vulnerable families throughout 18 counties in one of the nation's most economically distressed regions.
"The loss of these shipments is significant and impacts a critical element of our hunger-relief programs for communities in need," said Elaine Streno, the food bank's executive director. Her organization now scrambles to replace nearly 400,000 pounds of nutritious food in a region where economic hardship is deeply rooted.
This isn't merely budget-cutting—it's the implementation of an economic ideology with deep historical roots. The withdrawal of food aid represents the modern manifestation of a theory first articulated in the late 18th century: that hunger functions not as a social ill to be remedied, but as an essential market mechanism that compels labor participation.
The Intellectual Framework of Manufactured Scarcity
The philosophical underpinnings of this approach were explicitly articulated by Joseph Townsend in his 1786 "Dissertation on the Poor Laws." Townsend argued that hunger was the necessary goad that drove economic productivity.
"Hunger will tame the fiercest animals," he wrote, "it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most brutish, the most obstinate, and the most perverse." For Townsend, hunger was "the most natural motive to industry and labour" and "calls forth the most powerful exertions.”
This wasn't a personal belief but a foundational economic doctrine. As economic historian Philipp Lepenies notes, Townsend's innovation was defining competitive markets as "a 'natural law', a principle of nature that should not be meddled with." What made Townsend's approach revolutionary was his removal of "the market mechanism from any cultural and social context in the name of science"—a methodological sleight of hand that has characterized market fundamentalism ever since.
Karl Polanyi observed that "by approaching human community from the animal side, Townsend bypassed the supposedly unavoidable question as to the foundations of government. And in doing so, he introduced a new concept of law into human affairs, that of the laws of Nature." This intellectual maneuver allows government withdrawal to be framed not as a political choice but as deference to natural law.
Following the rise of these biological-economic ideas:
In 1795, British politicians saw fit to remove certain protections that had existed since the reign of Elizabeth I, striking from the books “poor laws.” These laws, though admittedly imperfect, wove a safety net of sorts. Parishes interpreted freely statutes governing taxation and the distribution of aid. Some established shelters for orphans and the elderly. Others ensured that every pauper received a dignified burial. Patchy yet effective, the “nearly sixteen thousand Poor Law authorities of the country managed to keep the social fabric of life unbroken and undamaged,” as economist and historian Karl Polanyi observed.
Once removed, starvation ensued.
Justifications for Manufactured Hunger
Listen carefully to the administration's justifications for these cuts and you'll hear Townsend's economic philosophy echoing across the centuries. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins denounces these life-sustaining programs as "nonessential" and dismisses them as "an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary. This language—strategically framing basic nutritional support as partisan wasteful indulgence—reveals the true ideological nature of these cuts.
The claim that these are merely "Covid-era" programs that have outlived their usefulness deliberately obscures the fact that hunger persists irrespective of pandemic status. One in six Americans sought food from food banks in 2023—a 38 percent increase from, and in Appalachia those numbers were even higher. This isn't a problem that has solved itself; it's a problem the administration has consciously chosen to intensify.
Appalachia: Laboratory for Market Discipline
In Appalachia, the consequences of this economic discipline are playing out in real time. The region has long served as America's economic sacrifice zone—a place where the human costs of market purification are most visible. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission:
Appalachia was home to an estimated 3.4 million food insecure residents in 2020, or 13% of its population, a higher rate than the national average of 11.5%. Central Appalachia has the highest rates of food insecurity among Appalachian subregions. And while food insecurity rates declined both nationally and for Appalachia from 2010 to 2020, those declines were less pronounced in Appalachia.
Mark Broyles of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, is one of thousands who has relied on food boxes from Appalachian Sustainable Development, a local nonprofit that had provided free food to residents. A retired mechanic who injured his shoulder in 2022 and has been unable to work since, Broyles used these boxes to feed not only himself but also his mother, who broke an arm and couldn't cook, her husband, and his own family of four.
"Not only is it food that you can put on the table, but it's good food that you can put in your body," said Broyles. "And it's good food that can build bonds in the community.”
These weekly distributions, which helped 2,000 residents across Central Appalachia, abruptly ended in March when the USDA terminated the program's funding. Sylvia Crum, director of development at Appalachian Sustainable Development, described the situation as "heartbreaking" for both the thousands of people they feed and the 40 farmers who will now lose income.
The programs being cut specifically target the most nutritious foods—proteins, dairy, and fresh produce—essential for human development and working capacity.
This strategic elimination of precisely the most nutritionally valuable foods aligns perfectly with Townsend's philosophy. Without these foods, people remain alive but weakened—physically present in the labor market but perpetually struggling, their lives consumed by the constant pressure of meeting basic needs.
The Mechanism of Economic Coercion
For residents of rural Appalachia, where living-wage jobs remain scarce after decades of resource extraction and deindustrialization, treating hunger as motivation for work doesn't create opportunity—it deepens entrenched poverty.
Trey Yates, a 27-year-old butter maker in West Virginia, felt the impact when Mountaineer Food Bank ended his butter contract due to funding cuts—ironically on the same day Trump signed a declaration celebrating National Agriculture Day. "They are taking fresh, local foods out of our kids' mouths and those facing hunger," Yates said at a town hall meeting in Beckley, where elected officials failed to appear.
The administration's inconsistent approach—cutting, restoring, then cutting again—has disrupted food distribution networks, creating exactly the kind of uncertainty that prevents long-term planning and forces reactive, survival-oriented behavior—precisely what Townsend saw as hunger's disciplining function.
The seven swing states that delivered Trump his 2024 electoral victory are losing nearly $178 million in local food that would have gone to schoolchildren, according to The Washington Post. This is the brutal paradox at work in regions like Appalachia where communities vote for the very politicians who promise policies that intensify their economic immiseration, persuaded that government intervention, not its absence, is the source of their suffering.
The House Agriculture Committee has been directed by Republican leadership to cut food aid programs by at least $230 billion through 2034, primarily targeting SNAP. Les Sinclair of the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank warns that "even a 10% cut in SNAP programs could double the demand on the food banking network," potentially making "the hunger relief system unmanageable.”
For the Trump administration and other policymakers animated by classical liberal economic theory, the hunger that now stalks Appalachia isn't an unfortunate side effect of budget cuts—it's the intended mechanism through which market discipline is enforced. Strip away the rhetorical veneer of fiscal responsibility, efficiency, and debt fears and what remains is Townsend's cruel calculus: be productive on the market's terms, or don't eat at all.