History Adjacent Life Update

Good morning! It is Monday, about 30 minutes before I need to clock-in for my virtual work day in Nottingham. This is obviously not an #OTD post, and I’m still working out what exactly I want this space to be. So I’m thinking maybe I’ll do a monthly life update, with the rest of the month’s weekly posts being about history #OTD, or some other discussion of translating the practice of history to other parts of the world.

I’ve been thinking about that last bit as I’ve been apply to a bagillion jobs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area over the past few months (also known as the DFW Metroplex). Ok, not actually a bagillion, I’m only at 16 or 17 right now. In about a month’s time, my tiny fam (of partner and pup) will be heading back stateside. My partner received a tenure-track job offer at a university in DFW, so off we go again on our next history-led adventure! We’re doing the millennial thing and crashing with my parents for a month before embarking on a road trip from the PNW down to Dallas. Things are basically all sorted, but planning a transatlantic move mid-Covid while it seems lots of things in the U.S. are exploding has still been a bit stressful. We have plane tickets (including one via a pet travel agent for Finch who has to fly cargo!), a shipping company scheduled to come pick up our few boxes of things, and an agreement with our landlord to leave our furniture. We don’t have much stuff over here, so that’s good!

On the job hunt, I have not branched outside of colleges or universities yet… There are no teaching positions because #Coronavirus (and I’m still not sure that is the right move for me), but the University of Texas system is still hiring tons of administrators and other kinds of office people! I feel like I’m capable of doing lots of different kinds of things in a university context (student facing support/ advising, research and grant administration, editing and writing roles, and I want to be able to do library things but am library degree-less!). However, I seem to be struggling to convey this in my cover letters and resumés as I’ve only had 1 interview so far. I mean still having a foreign address probably doesn’t help either.

I’ve been complaining about this (or having a moan, as the Brits would say) about how lame it is to be applying to jobs. To try to focus on something positive, on the flip side of the challenges, it is fun to imagine myself in all these different roles and thinking about ways that I want to contribute to the world. I’m really excited about the 1 role I did interview for and hope I’ll be hearing back at some point this week. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

So, that’s it. That is where my life is at the mo’ (another Britishism for at the moment). I thought it was clever to title this post history adjacent as my life is literally adjacent to someone who keeps doing history, while I am also still trying to stay engaged in history land but not doing so through my actual job for the last 2 years.

For real last thing – I just realized I filed my dissertation 1 year ago yesterday (September 20). CRAZY. So this could have been a #OTD post, about how I pulled an all nighter to try to clean up my footnotes, create my bibliography, write my acknowledgements, and do all the formatting of my manuscript in a 24-hour period. It was not pretty, but I submitted it!

Coming up: look for a post this Sunday, September 27 about history #OTD related to the explosion of food banking in the early 1980s. Then I’ll #OTD every Sunday (or do a history adjacent post, I’m thinking something on transferable skills) until my next life update in October once we’ve moved. Wild 30 days ahead everyone. Talk soon!

Here is Finch looking majestic in front of a giant tunnel thing in Nottingham that we discovered on one of our lockdown hikes. We will miss Nottingham!

History adjacent – meal prep time and thoughts on welfare politics

I don’t have a primary source document to share this week, but wanted to talk about some interesting facts in the news I’ve come across in the past few days related to my research interests!

On Thursday, I listened to The Guardian’s “Today in Focus” podcast which dove into Boris Johnson’s anti-obesity policies. The whole episode is a fascinating look at the relationship public health officials are trying to establish between obesity and COVID (see this Food, Fatness, Fitness blog post for a counter argument). The podcast discusses the barriers to health, particularly for poor Britons, including the cost of fresh food and time constraints. Then a statistic in the episode stopped me cold as I walking around running errands on my lunch. Guess how long the average British person spends cooking each day. Any thoughts? Well, turns out, it’s only 15 minutes. I was SHOCKED when I heard this, and had to investigate similar figures in the U.S.

Turns out, the Economic Research Service of the USDA used a study to estimate just this back in 2014. Using data from the American Time Use Survey,  the author’s found the amount of time was slightly higher in the US, at 37 minutes. However, this also includes time cleaning up in addition to cooking and I’m not sure if the UK figure accounts for this. But it does not matter if these figures are exactly comparable because I am not writing a peer-reviewed publication here! I can say what I want. The joys of blogging.

Back to the where I was going. Interestingly, the US data broke out its ‘preparing and serving food’ measures by gender. Men spend, on average, 22 minutes preparing and serving food whereas for women it’s 51 minutes. The study also found that for families who receive SNAP benefits (supplementary nutrition assistance program, more commonly known as food stamps) or WIC (assistance for pre- or post-natal mothers and their children up to age 5), participants average daily meal prep was more than 10 minutes higher than the respondents as a whole, at 50 minutes. This could have to do with more women being beneficiaries of both programs, but as the authors’ note, it has to do with the rules of food stamps and WIC, too.

You cannot buy hot or prepared foods with food stamps or WIC. You can’t walk up to the deli counter and purchase a ready made salad or sandwich. Instead, program beneficiaries have to buy ingredients to cook these items from scratch. There are even more rules on what can and cannot be purchased using WIC, which only allows the purchase of very specific food items with particular nutritional components geared towards new mothers and young children. Check out this very intense table on the Food and Nutrition Services website outlining these requirements.

I was once in line behind a woman in the grocery store in Santa Barbara who made the mistake of picking up a gallon of regular semi-skim milk instead of vitamin-D fortified milk. The WIC coupon would not go through on the milk she selected. As the line backed up while we waited for an associate to grab the proper milk, I could sense others growing restless as this ‘welfare mother’ inconvenienced their day. This made me think about the way policies very directly impact program beneficiaries, but the way they also create public reactions and feed into decades old stereotypes.

Welfare does not have to be demeaning and stigmatizing, and in many countries it is not. A basic income or adequate cash benefits would allow people to buy what they want and reduce the burden on the poor. But in the U.S., we went a different direction, at least with programs like food stamps and WIC. They are classified as ‘near cash’ benefits. They do provide added flexibility by setting aside funds for specific items, i.e. food, but can’t be used to help in other areas where people’s budgets may be tight.

I’m not quite sure how I get from stats about time spent cooking to discussing features of food welfare programs, and welfare politics in general. But unimportant! If you want to dive deeper into food studies, Tropics of Meta released a list of the “Ten Greatest Books in Food Studies.” This is a bit dated, coming out in 2015, but a great starting point for anyone that wants to think more about food politics, inequality, and all kinds of other things. I hope you enjoy!

 

 

Fifth Annual Report of the Maryland Food Committee – June 1974

In 1969, this Committee was incorporated by Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders as a non-profit, charitable organization to see that low-income children in Baltimore’s public schools got free lunch… However, it was soon apparent that such a course of action would only serve to relieve government of its rightful responsibility. 

The Maryland Food Committee (MFC) began in 1969 with a narrow mission. Members of the MFC first focused on providing food to hungry children in Baltimore’s public schools, but quickly came to wrestle with the underlying structural and systemic roots of hunger in their region.

Written 46 years ago, the Maryland Food Committee’s Fifth Annual Report from June 1974 doesn’t have a splashy cover and can’t be found online. Below is a picture I took while spending a summer as a Fellow on Inequality at the University of Baltimore. I spent three months in the University Library’s Special Collections going through dusty boxes of unfiled papers, uncovering treasures like this report.

MFC June 1974 Cover

This report is near and dear to me because its authors are talking about an idea that is at the crux of my research interests: what is the responsibility of ‘the public,’ in this case state and federal government, to meet basic needs of people? And how does this intersect with the role of private organizations?

The Maryland Food Committee began as a voluntary organization focused on local fundraising to feed school children a hot lunch. Over the five years from 1969 to 1974, the group branched out to lead food drives and open pantries in high need areas. But what is most interesting, and what the author brings up in this annual report, was their turn to providing legal expertise on federal food programs.

By 1975, members of the Maryland Food Committee were well on their way transitioning from just providing material assistance to serving as experts on the federal, state, and local food assistance programs. Members of the Maryland Food Committee became fixtures at state Congressional hearings on food programs, and also testified before Congress in Washington, D.C. They were experts on the laws that defined food stamps and other food welfare programs, and pushed state and federal governments to implement food programs in the way they were designed in legislation.

The 1970s were an expansionary moment for food welfare legislation. Prior to 1974, counties had to ‘opt-in’ to provide food stamps, and many counties refused to operate a food stamp program arguing this would inhibit local charity. This was the case especially for counties in the South. But in 1974, Congress nationalized, requiring operation of the food stamp program in every county. In addition, Congress eased many eligibility requirements, making it easier for people to receive food stamps. However, state and local offices did not always keep up with changes in federal legislation and did not expand food stamp coverage in line with new laws and guidance.

Local offices explained they didn’t have enough money or staff to meet new federal requirements, and in other areas some public officials refused to enact new laws arguing they overruled local custom. National legislation will only get you so far. As my advisor at UCSB liked to remind me, “the devil is in the details of implementation.” Organizations like the Maryland Food Committee advocated for expanding food programs, and access to them, when local governments could not (or would not) expand programs in line with changing federal standards. The Maryland Food Committee became a key voice pushing the state of Maryland to expand food stamp coverage for all that were eligible. In this way, the Committee went from a role they saw as filling the gaps in public provision to then arguing more forcefully that public programs serve everyone eligible, and serve them equally.

This document represents the role everyday citizens can play in holding state and federal government accountable to provide for people’s basic needs, something relevant in today’s continuing conversation on the legacy of racial inequality in the United States.

Welp, this turned into a much headier post than anticipated. I hope you’ve learned a little something about welfare politics and policy, and look forward to bringing you another document, photo, or audio snippet next week!

New Direction: #OTD/ HistoryDays

Today marks the first of what will become weekly posts, looking to the past to make sense of the present. Some background: I completed a PhD in history last year. It was a LONG TIME COMING. PSA to all: writing is hard. I started in the History department at UC Santa Barbara in August 2011 and completed my final edits in September of 2019.

Since submitting my diss, I have not “done” any history. I feel disconnected from the me that spent so long becoming an expert in a tiny sliver of the history of public policy, and miss sharing my findings with friends and colleagues!

For starters, I’m going to review material I collected over my 3ish years of archival research for my dissertation, so get ready to learn about food assistance and food welfare in the 1970s and 1980s! I’m most excited to share my findings about food banking, which I think are some of the coolest bits of the diss.

Aside from food stuff, I will occasionally foray into the world of LBJ, highlighting audio I found while working on LBJ and the Great Society. The First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, recorded a daily audio diary that is AMAZING. I love her Texas drawl, and getting insights into national politics and policymaking from a different perspective in the White House.

I am going to try to highlight materials #OnThisDay (#OTD) when possible because that makes it like a treasure hunt for me to find something. It will also allow me to demonstrate how some narratives unrolled over the course of weeks or months in future posts. As with all new projects, I’m sure these posts will evolve as I figure out a direction for this blog.

Last thing – this will also be a test of consistency for me. I want to blog to show myself I can stick to self-set deadlines, something I have always struggled with. Thank YOU for being here, and I look forward to sharing the past with readers here.

 

Desmond King’s “The New Right,” 1987

Last February, Desmond King came to the Center for Work, Labor, and Democracy on campus here at UCSB to talk discuss his new research on demise of the Federal Civil Rights Act. There is a student Q+A after every talk, and I stuck around to ask questions about doing comparative historical work since I knew he had done this in the past. King suggested I take a look at one of his first books, The New Right: Politics, Markets and Citizenship which was published in 1987. Continue reading “Desmond King’s “The New Right,” 1987″

Off to a slow start…

Happy 2017! I’m currently in London on my last big research trip of the dissertation process, woot woot! And it has been 6 short months since my first post, don’t know how that happened already. Thankfully no one is holding their breath, since I haven’t shared the link yet with anyone, there have been zero views of le blog. Maybe today that will change. Continue reading “Off to a slow start…”

Hello!

Why, hello there, world! I want to use this first post to tell you a little about myself and what is going to happen here. I’m Caitlin, about to start the 6th year of my History Ph.D. program at UC Santa Barbara, and needing some motivation to keep going on research and getting moving on writing. And I know some of you are thinking, “6 years and she’s not done?!?!” which is totally valid. History-land is ssssslllloooooowwwwww. We read a lot of books, and then have to write about all the books, and the final product, the dissertation, can require traveling to far-flung archives and looking through thousands of documents. This all means that the average time to degree for a history doctorate is something like 8 years. So here I am! 6 years down, 2 years – give or take a bit – to go.My thought is if I write here most days, it will make the whole writing process much less daunting and make these last 2 years dissertating a fun part of the grad school process. Continue reading “Hello!”