How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes
of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income
inequality.
Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an
economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the
recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in
federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This
was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the
"emergency food system" became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew
Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new
vision for the anti-hunger movement.
From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily
effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and
federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty
programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are
missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven
by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money,
anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for
offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural
communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a
"hunger industrial complex" that seems as self-perpetuating as the more
famous military-industrial complex.
Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger
characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and
economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots
organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the
rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these
that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.
