Big Hunger

The Shift Away from Simply Feeding People + Why This is Critical.

I’m getting ready for my lecture at the University of Las Vegas next week, so I’m just going to post something short and potent that has reached out and grabbed me this week. 

I have been reading Andy Fisher’s excellent book, Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups. His book is largely about how food banks and government policy are deeply in bed with Big Food companies and that these relationships make it so everyone is working for corporate money-making objectives, not actual things that liberate and raise people up permanently. 

I have been struggling with feeling like any philanthropy we do lets the government and our elected officals off the hook. I touched on this a bit in my book. The people in power don’t have to enact legislation to raise people out of poverty as long as regular citizens are filling in the gaps. I have been feeling this way for awhile now, unable to get off my ass and contribute to the community. Why am I enabling the government to not take care of its citizens? But Big Hunger is really giving words to my feelings. The book is very specific and eye opening. I am learning a lot. 

Big takeaway as I read: Focusing on food and feeding people is problematic.

How so? Well, the problem isn't that people are hungry. It’s that people are poor. I think I have always focused on food because I love cooking food and feeding people and I want people to experience the true all-in bounties of eating together, community, having plenty. 

But it’s a band-aid. Man, Andy’s book has really made it clear for me: We, as a society, fix the hunger problem with food. You don’t have money? You’re hungry? Okay, here are six pounds of chicken parts, a tub of cottage cheese, some commodity cheddar and a bag of apples. 

We fed you. Maybe we even fed you with dignity, choices, community, healthy food and camaraderie, access to all kinds of services and resources. Even better.

Problem fixed. 

But this is the easy way out. As long as we continue to make the issues of poverty about people needing to eat, then we never get to fixing the problems of poverty. Poverty is hard to crack. (See my breakdown of Matthew Desmond’s book Poverty By America) But it’s time to focus on that work. 

It’s time to work on the structures that create poverty and not dilly dally any longer trying to get people better access to food. And this plays into the idea of food deserts and how even they are a grandiose fallacy. 

In his book, Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate, Kenneth Kolb says that when Black community activists asked for access to healthier foods in poorer communities, researchers - who tended to be from middle and upper classes and predominately white - believed they meant these communities needed better access to a proper grocery store and created all kinds of interventions to help bring supermarkets to depleted areas. 

The term “food desert” is now used all the time to refer to “communities with a poverty rate of 20% and higher, median family incomes below 80% of surrounding areas, and at least 500 people living more than a mile from a grocery store.”

But this missed the point. Because researchers followed up and found that “more than half of food desert residences bypassed their closest grocery stores” and chose their preferred grocery store miles away. And in city after city, these supermarkets inside food deserts closed their doors. (I wrote more about Kolb’s book, Retail Inequality here.)

Simply putting in a supermarket in a neighborhood didn’t change the way people ate because food is deeply intersectional with how people live. What you eat is connected to factors like: 

• what kind of housing you have, affordability of rents and how much housing is available

• what kind of kitchen

• what kind of income

• cultural underpinnings about caregiving and food in general

• generational pulls and historical legacies around food

• the quality of their mental health

• the extent of their sicknesses and disabilities

• addictions

• family separation through CPS overreach

• the overarching influence of white supremacy and white flight

• thoughtless gentrification and harmful urban planning

• clumsy or non-existent public transportation 

• the amount of crime, shoplifting, domestic violence around them

• the middle school to prison pipelines

There are no fast fixes here.  Better lives = better food = better health etc etc etc.

Anyway, Andy’s book is inspiring me. Please buy it (or check it out at the library) and read it. And if you feel inclined, the books by Matthew Desmond and Ken Kolb. All three will rock your mind a whole lot and you will see how it’s all connected.

Also, two last minute things:

My friend, Shauna Ahern, in her Substack talks about being denied two dairy items at a Seattle food pantry. Um, uh….what? This is exactly the shit that makes me crazy. It is a testmaent to Shauna’s genuine, authentic, from-the-heart writing that she is out there talking about this. Check her out.

In the news today, Big Food (in this case, General Mills) is targeting “anti-diet culture” by pivoting and using “anti-diet” language (anti-body shaming) to get people to consume more of their highly processed foods. They paid for the study that supports the campaign (no bias there) and paid the dieticians encouraging people to eat their food (also no bias LOL).

Seriously. Is there no end to the gall?

___________________

END NOTES:

I will be making a few appearances this month, if you are in Las Vegas or Southern Utah.

• April 18: I have been asked by Black Mountain Institute to give the Spring Forum lecture at the University of Las Vegas, which will be about poverty. I will be bringing a big pot of pozole. Join me.

• April 26th: I will also be teaching a class on the intersection of poetry + memoir with our poet laureate Angela Brommel. This will be fun!

• April 27th, 1-3p: I will be in St George, Utah at Bungalow Books, reading, talking, listening. More info to come.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

xo Kim