Confronting Portrayals of Poverty and its Impact on Program Design: Examining Federal Food Insecurity in the United States

Concepts of worthiness, dependency and deservingness inform the narrative of poverty in the United States. As such, poverty is presented as an individual rather than systemic problem. This narrative informs social welfare policy and program design. This paper reviews a brief history of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, to exemplify how this ideology informs program design in America’s largest and most important anti-hunger program. Given these harmful ideological influences on policy and program design, it is proposed that a novel type of policy analysis should be used to address social welfare policies: a human rights approach to policy analysis. This policy analysis is informed by citizen participation and human dignity. Using a human rights approach to policy analysis will generate policy alternatives that honor values of justice and equity, yielding recommendations that may address the systemic roots of poverty.