Tag: food-security

You Can’t Solve Hunger With Grocery Stores

In 2011, I moved from Oregon to a rural, isolated region in eastern Montana. My AmeriCorps position was tasked with helping build a school garden in a neighboring town and to explore the possibility of developing a cooperatively run grocery store in the community next door. Both these tiny towns had high poverty and hunger rates, but the one lacking a grocery store faced some serious challenges. With less than three hundred aging residents, this community was approximately thirty miles from the nearest small grocery store, and eighty miles from a department store. My workplan proposed assessing the feasibility of bringing a grocery store to this “food desert.”

At the time, eliminating food deserts was a trending solution for fighting hunger. Spurred on by Michelle Obama’s healthy food initiatives, the movement assumed that distance was a primary barrier to healthy foods for these communities. Her campaign advocated for bringing grocery stores and retailers of fresh produce to communities experiencing hunger to facilitate access and consumption of healthy foods, to the benefit of children and communities alike.

Over the past decade, we’ve learned that hunger in low access communities is far more complex than simply being able to get to a grocery store. Although physical access is an important barrier to consider, it is not necessarily the one most significantly influencing hunger rates.

Although still in occasional use, the phrase “food desert” has fallen out of favor, and for good reason.

The term itself is misleading. The official definition of a food desert is a region that is more than one mile from a grocery store in an urban setting or more than ten miles in a rural area. Rather than recognizing the assets available, the phrase defines a community based on what it lacks. A desert conjures up an image of a desolate wasteland, bereft of resources. This paradigm disempowers communities by ignoring the power and resources they do have, and glossing over the fact that what they lack is determined by external influences.

Another reason the term is no longer regularly used is because it recognizes that a desert is a naturally occurring ecosystem, whereas a food desert is a deliberately manufactured setting.

Choices are made at every level of administration and government to determine whether a region gets a grocery store, or a farmers’ market, or nothing but fast-food restaurants. The creation of a food desert is anything but passive, and it’s rarely a decision that residents have influence over.   

In the 1980s, activist Karen Washington introduced the term “food apartheid” to describe communities lacking adequate food access more accurately. It references the racial disparities of hunger highlighted by redlining, segregation, and discrimination.

Over the last ten years, the food justice community has improved our appreciation of terminology which explicitly recognizes that hunger and poverty is never an accident. Too much of our society’s understanding of food access focuses on individual responsibility, but adopting language that uplifts the systemic nature of hunger is an essential step to helping evolve our cultural paradigm. Calling out apartheid is a powerful and impactful way to engage with the systemic nature of hunger.

In the Montana community where I worked, surveys revealed that most residents wouldn’t shop at a store in town unless its prices were cheaper than those of the major retail chain eighty miles away. Residents recognized that the prices for a local grocery store, no matter how well managed, would never be as low as the supercenter even considering the price of fuel to get there, and they simply couldn’t afford it.

Introducing a local store would have had minimal to no impact on residents.

This explicitly demonstrated that income and cost were the greatest barriers to food security for this small town. Calling it a food desert oversimplified these challenges, and ignores the fact that poverty prevented people from shopping or eating how they like. Montana’s high population of Indigenous People, and economic forces that produce the ultra-cheap, exploitive, centralized supercenter grocery model, absence of living wages or healthy retirement accounts, ensured that this town remained food insecure.

Calling it a food desert prompts solutions that bring resources to the area that don’t empower residents, while confronting food apartheid makes us address the reality that hunger can’t be solved without systemic change.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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We Can’t End Hunger By Improving Production

Hunger has always been a part of the human experience, and we are largely conditioned to assume it is unavoidable. But as technology improves, networks grow, and our understanding of the world evolves, it becomes increasingly apparent that it is not a foregone inevitability.

Trending solutions for fighting hunger often focus on improving agricultural production and reducing food waste. Considering the growing impacts of climate change, the issues of production and conservation certainly deserve attention, but these solutions fail to address the real barriers to ending hunger.

Hunger is a distribution problem, which means we need to address food access rather than food supply.

We are failing in the distribution of resources. Baring a major disaster, people with wealth always have the means to purchase the food they need. The cost of food may rise astronomically, or it may drop to more accessible levels, but wealth insulates against scarcity.

Individuals and communities living in poverty don’t have the resources to overcome these barriers. If they had the resources to access food, then they would no longer be food insecure.

Hunger isn’t a food problem.

Some people face greater barriers than others in accessing food, such as higher transportation costs, greater storage challenges, or culturally specific needs, but all these barriers can be overcome with money. None of these obstacles result directly from a food shortage or high rates of food waste. We lack systems that facilitate food access for everyone, both nationally and globally.

Food distribution is complicated, because food is perishable and there is a limited amount of time that it can be stored, shipped, and distributed before it spoils.  Some parts of the country (and world) are in close proximity to agricultural production which fosters affordable prices and culturally appropriate foods. This makes it simple to get the food people need. Other regions experience greater scarcity, which means residents depend on food traveling greater distances. This increases the cost and makes it more vulnerable to disturbances.

This is why the food justice movement places so much importance on food sovereignty- on empowering people to have ownership over their food system to ensure it meets their needs best and minimizes the risk of external disruption.

Food sovereignty does not demand increasing agricultural production. Instead, it recognizes that empowering people with ownership over their food choices is the best way to build individual and communal health.

Food is an intensely personal choice, and expression of individuality. Every individual, family, community, and culture have their own preferences when it comes to culinary traditions, nutritional needs, and celebration. We are our healthiest and most empowered when we have access to the foods that are a part of our identity.

This is another reason why increasing agricultural production does not solve hunger; mass-produced crops are not often the ones that a community craves. Bringing more corn or wheat to a community may briefly alleviate starvation, but does little to empower health, celebrate cultural traditions, or build food autonomy. When a community has influence and power over its food choices, it can ensure its options are right for everyone.

Increasing the food supply is an easy go-to answer to ending hunger, but the reality is that it completely ignores the root causes of food insecurity.  Without addressing the inaccessibility of our food supply, increasing it only ensures that those who have food will have more, and those who don’t have access will continue to go hungry.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Are You Really Fighting Hunger if Your Staff Can’t Afford Food?

At the very first food pantry I ever worked at, our parent organization (one of the biggest nonprofits in the region) was enthusiastic and vocal about prioritizing the client experience. I was excited to partner on this mission, until I learned that this focus on client services was achieved at the expense of staff. Our leaders were adamant that the organization could only afford the most minimal wages and benefits to ensure maximum support for our clients. Because I could not afford groceries on this wage, I became a client at my own food pantry.

Although this happened over a decade ago, it is a pattern I have seen repeated at every food pantry I’ve worked with since. Full-time staff members unable to support themselves or their family on their wages become clients of their own services, which the organization provides without a second thought.

Can you really be an anti-hunger advocate if you’re not willing to make sacrifices for the mission? This attitude is pervasive, and perpetuates a culture that actively inhibits people from thriving while doing this work.

Why is food insecurity accepted within anti-hunger organizations?

American society has narrow attitudes about nonprofits. The belief persists that nonprofit employees should do the work out of the goodness of their hearts rather than for the money.

I once had a Board member brag that our organization paid staff in “heart” to make up for low wages, as if that was an achievement to be celebrated that employees would appreciate.

Paying individuals less than a living wage is a primary cause of food insecurity.

Whether or not money is a motivating factor for nonprofit professionals, it does not mean that we are somehow exempt from paying rent, buying gasoline, or the rising cost of groceries.

When organizations advocating for food justice perpetuate food insecurity, it should throw serious doubt on their commitment. Denying employees the resources to buy their own food while employed at an anti-hunger institution demonstrates a perversely performative interest in fighting hunger.

While every organization benefits from leadership who knows what it’s like to be food insecure, we should not tolerate those that force lived experience upon their employees.

Food banks and pantries who recognize hunger as a systemic problem rather than an individual responsibility are slowly beginning to demonstrate it by working towards institutionalizing living wages.

This is not a simple or easy change. Nonprofit culture uplifts and celebrates low overhead costs and strong client services, an attitude deeply internalized by funders. My previous food pantry regularly received donations specifically allocated for food to ensure that it was spent on clients rather than staff. But this is short-sighted. Who do donors anticipate will do the work if no one should be paid?

Most nonprofits already lean heavily on volunteers, and have paid staff for the jobs that require additional expertise, reliability, or confidentiality. The nonprofit field is one place where these professional individuals are regularly degraded for seeking a comfortable wage that appreciates their skills.

Developing effective solutions to social ills requires that we have the most creative, passionate, and enthusiastic people working on the problem. But the nonprofit field as it currently exists offers weak incentives for attracting or retaining these individuals.

Ending hunger is a complicated and multi-faceted challenge. Amidst the complexity, it’s easy to ignore how we treat the people doing the work. Paying anti-hunger advocates a living wage requires changing priorities, educating funders, and adjusting budgets. But the long-term implications are higher retention rates, improved productivity, stronger competition, and one less client waiting in line at the food pantry.

Next steps:

Check out some resources for starting these conversations from the Next Shift, a campaign encouraging anti-hunger organizations to examine internal processes and attitudes about social justice parallel to their external goals.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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