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Why isn’t there a government program providing extremely easy access to basic food? (US)
I imagine that it would be incredibly cheap to provide easy, no-questions-asked access to food that is somewhat nutritious yet low status and not desirable (old bread, red delicious apples, etc.)
SNAP has a large admin overhead, and this could easily supplement it.
2Free school lunches (+ sometimes breakfasts) is a real world policy adjacent to your idea, we could look to it for hints about outcomes of a larger basic food program. My recollection is that it has pretty good outcomes but a deeper dive would be better than my recollections.
More starving people = more criminals = more money to for-profit prisons (which lobby/bribe politicians towards their interests).
It also makes people more desperate for jobs to pay for food, which gives leverage to the corporatocracy when it comes to hiring and labor practices.
Is it at all plausible that for-profit prisons are lobbying to make more people starve? This explanation seems motivated by partisanship.