Tag: poverty

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.

Want to learn more about food justice? Subscribe so you never miss a post!

How We Get Started Solving Hunger

Hunger has long been a part of the human experience. Throughout history, our ancestors endured starvation enough that our physiology adapted to withstand periods of abundance and of scarcity, which is why we struggle so in our current calorie-rich environment. Despite the abundance of food in our world today, hunger remains so normalized that eliminating it tends to be added to lists of aspirational-but-unobtainable goals like world peace and time travel.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) framework for food security identifies four essential conditions necessary for an individual, community, and nation to be food secure- access, availability, knowledge, and stability. An evaluation of these conditions can help inform us on why hunger persists, and provide a starting point for action.

Is hunger really inevitable?

To eliminate hunger completely in the US, we need to ensure that every resident has each of these conditions fulfilled:

  • Access: This is our biggest hurdle. Inflation and high costs of living severely cut into food budgets. Even living in close proximity to grocery stores, too many people cannot afford to nourish themselves. In isolated or rural regions, the higher costs associated with accessing it make food even harder to maintain food security. People experiencing discrimination have further reduced access because of lower wages, poorer housing, or a lack of physical safety in their community.

High food costs force many people to work longer hours or multiple jobs, which further cuts into time and energy available for cooking. Inadequate and unaffordable housing necessitates survival with substandard kitchen and restricted cooking capabilities, which further impacts the ability to safely store and prepare food.

  • Knowledge: People living in poverty are regularly condemned for lacking budget-friendly cooking skills, as if knowing how to cook dry beans can somehow extricate them from poverty. Knowing how to cook is a powerful way for improving quality of life and adding fun to the process of nourishment, but the idea that a lack of cooking skills is a cause of hunger comes from the assumption that hunger is personal failure rather than systemic problem. Further, programs that uphold this idea often teach cooking a precise way, or use specific ingredients, which ignores cultural traditions and identity. By dictating that there is a “right” and “wrong” way to eat, it implies that those who don’t use these specific practices perpetuate their own poverty. A lack of knowledge is not a contributor to food insecurity in the US.

Improving food access is the primary solution for solving hunger in America.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is our primary tool for addressing food insecurity (although there are many others). SNAP provides families with an allotted amount of money every month that can be spent on food at participating retailers. The amount of money received assumes that household costs for food are much lower than they actually are. As a result, even those receiving food assistance still experience food insecurity.

At the onset of the pandemic, when millions of people lost their jobs or had their hours reduced, hunger loomed. In response, the government both expanded the amount of benefits as well as the flexibility of anti-hunger programs, and it worked.

Effective policy action has shown us that hunger is not inevitable. We have the resources, the knowledge, and the policy mechanisms to end hunger. We simply lack the political will.

As the Covid-era programs implemented to fight hunger expire, we see the need once again rising. Fears of welfare fraud and belief in individual responsibility have overridden our commitment to ending hunger as supports are reduced or eliminated.

Next Steps

We must change the way we think about hunger. The cultural assumptions we carry and the policy tools we use perpetuate the attitude that hunger is a personal failure rather than a systemic problem.

 To facilitate the evolution of our policy solutions, our discussion on this issue must evolve too. By adjusting how we frame and talk about hunger, we can significantly impact the anti-hunger environment around us to transform this nebulous issue into a tangible problem with a practical solution.

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

Want to learn more about food justice? Subscribe so you never miss a post!

Do You Advocate Like Everyone Deserves to Eat?

When I say that “everyone deserves to eat,” no one argues with me. This statement is lauded as commendable, generous, and noncontroversial.

But when I start to discuss individual populations and how to make sure they have the food they need to thrive, I regularly encounter resistance. Even with mission statements about universally ending hunger, many individuals and organizations have confidential qualifiers about who is really included in their anti-hunger efforts.  

Who is regularly excluded from the idea that everyone deserves to eat?

The idea that children are helpless to fight hunger makes them a high priority for food assistance programs. Adults without children, less so. In 2019 the anti-hunger community had to aggressively rally to prevent SNAP rule changes increasing the burden on individuals without children to continue receiving food assistance. The assumption is that people able to work can make enough money to be self-sufficient if they just try hard enough, regardless of the mountains of data demonstrating otherwise.

For the same reason, seniors are a primary focus of anti-hunger efforts. Living on fixed retirement incomes, they are vulnerable to economic fluctuations and sudden changes in circumstance.

As a result, many anti-hunger organizations seeking noncontroversial community backing will emphasize through their mission statements, goals, and donor outreach that they support and nourish families, children, and seniors. But this comes at the expense of people who don’t fall within those demographics.

To maintain the impression that anti-hunger efforts only support individuals truly deserving of help, few food justice organizations are brave enough to advocate for people living in poverty just because they live in poverty. Even fewer are comfortable identifying the racial and systemic injustices that produce this condition.

Beyond the anti-hunger community’s preference for serving families, there are several other demographics who are consistently judged as undeserving of healthy food and food access.

The quality and health of food in prisons is a growing topic lately, with many people promoting the assumption that breaking the law exempts an individual from the right to healthy food and a healthy body.  

Further, people with criminal convictions may be restricted or banned from receiving food assistance long after they complete their sentence, again justified by the idea that breaking the rules exempts them from privileges.

Regardless of your opinion on whether these demographics really deserve to eat as much as anyone else, it demonstrates that the concept that ‘everyone deserves to eat’ is far more loaded than it appears.

If we’re committed to being true anti-hunger advocates, then we need to make sure there is alignment between our words and our actions. Here’s how to check:

  • Who does your organization serve? Are there specific groups or demographics targeted more than others? Is that specifically identified in your outreach efforts? Does your mission statement and/or vision reflect this?
  • How narrow or broad are your advocacy efforts? Do you only act on childhood hunger, but offer food access services to adults?
  • Do you use data to inform your policy actions? For example, does your organization prioritize demographics like families or children even when your region has uncomfortably high hunger rates among other, deemed “less deserving” demographics?
  • What relationships will you gain or lose if you’re honest about who your organization does or does not prioritize/serve?

Ensuring anti-hunger advocates and organizations have a clear alignment between their mission and actions ensures we’re building trustworthy leaders. It is hard to let go of preconceived ideas about what our community wants to support, what our leaders are comfortable fighting for, and the easiest ways to achieve our goals. Transparency in how we think about and act on our anti-hunger aspirations is the only way we will build a truly effective and motivated coalition that can actually end hunger.

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

Want to learn more about food justice? Subscribe so you never miss a post!