Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups

"Everybody who works in the emergency food system understands that if you’re going to address food insecurity, you need to pay higher wages, give better benefits for people who are disabled, and support families, because the vast majority of people who are on public assistance are either disabled or have young children. They want to advocate on increasing wages, but they can’t do it because the big companies that hold up the emergency food system are the same companies that want to keep wages low. Which brings us all the way back to Caesar’s Palace — to show you how much everybody is collaborating to keep the poor poor and build everybody else’s profits. In Big Hunger Andy Fisher shows that. He updates Jan Poppendieck’s work and shows that the big food companies squash any attempt for advocacy on increasing wages. He demonstrates that those big companies are the ones paying the CEOs of the food banks high salaries so the people who run the food banks don’t advocate on hunger. They’re just pushing food around. They’re not really working to address hunger, nor have they even read books about hunger, which is why this is a really good thing that you’re doing to get people to read more about it. He builds on Poppendieck’s argument that this is really about the loss of democracy. Andy Fisher shows how big business is in control of what’s going on in the United States when it comes to our society and how we allow poverty to continue. Hunger is big business. Going back to your question — should people donate to food banks? They should think twice. Maybe just help your neighbor and give them cash, or make sure that the government has the appropriate social assistance programs. The concept of a welfare state, without the stigma, is that you help people meet their basic needs, and that it should be the government doing that. That’s what taxes are for. Hunger can never be understood in a vacuum. Hunger never happens by itself. You have to be poor to experience hunger, unless you’re fasting or something. And if you’re poor, that means you can’t pay your rent, maybe you don’t have a job, or you’re very isolated, or you are extremely depressed because you’ve experienced a lot of abuse or racism. All of those things are tied up with hunger. Oftentimes you hear me or others talk about poverty and hunger almost as one and the same. Hunger captures people’s attention because we all experience hunger on a day-to-day basis. We need to eat. So we have a sense of what that could be like, and we all have a spiritual understanding that no other person should go hungry. That’s just built into what it means to be an animal, what it means to be alive. We don’t want our people to be hungry. So hunger becomes an easy way to talk about poverty. Hunger is the thing in public health that becomes something measurable that we can understand and helps us get a sense of what the experience of poverty is like. Don’t try to disentangle hunger from poverty. You can be poor and not be hungry. But that thinking can also become a trap. Poverty without hunger is like being in a gilded cage or in prison. I can take this even further: sometimes people will go to prison so that they have a place to sleep and some food to eat. So they’re not technically ‘hungry,’ but they’re trapped.The quality of the food is pretty bad, and conditions are bad too. That helps them maybe for two or three days, but it’s not going to help them get up and out of poverty. It may help them to be slightly healthier. It might help them stay out of the hospital, but they’re still going to be poor. It’s like a cycle that continues and continues and continues."