Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement

"I love Sweet Charity? . This was another book that had a major influence on me early in my career. It was published in 1998 but it’s still very relevant today. What Sweet Charity? demonstrates is that when you have food pantries and food banks growing in number, it is a direct indication of the loss of democracy, of public programs, and the cutting away of public assistance programs. So back in the 70s, after the time of the Welfare Rights Movement and Jimmy Carter , you had a lot of fantastic programs that were coming up and hunger was going way down. It was phenomenal. But then Ronald Reagan came into power and started cutting all of these assistance programs: the food stamp program, the WIC program, housing assistance. Wages started getting very stagnant, and so in order to make up for the loss of investment by government, churches and community organizations started running food pantries. So there’s a direct correlation between what the government stopped doing for its people and what different churches started to do. Ronald Reagan and many others encouraged the idea that all of a sudden basic needs should be met with charity. So what Jan Poppendieck does in this book is she problematizes charity. She talks about how in all religions, we don’t like people to go hungry. All religions talk about feeding and clothing the poor. This is a deep spiritual need that we have, to ensure that no one goes hungry. But she talks about how that gets utilized by the emergency food system. The people who are working in the emergency food system — food banks, food pantries, food cupboards — feel as if they’re doing spiritual work, but what they’re doing is encouraging more of a breakdown in democracy. The quality of the food is very poor. It’s not always accessible. It’s a scattershot system. What I like is that she’s interviewed people who work in the system to show the good intentions, but that those good intentions actually can cause harm. That book is important for people to read, because she talks about how easy it is for us to let ourselves off the hook by saying, ‘I give cans of food to the poor, so I’m helping to address hunger.’ Actually, you’re not. I have a chapter on that in my own book called “Feeding America with Pounds of Food”. I talk about how the emergency food system simply lifts up people who are wealthy and praises them for giving money to the food banks. And anybody who goes to a food bank is humiliated and is squashed down. It feeds into what I talk about as a culture of domination. That charity model is a culture of domination in and of itself. Food is a fundamental human right and we have to start thinking about it like that. Most of the world does think that way, except for in the United States and perhaps the UK. The growth of Trussell Trust is deeply concerning. People think, ‘Oh, thank god Trussell Trust is there to make sure that food is getting to folks.’ But they have simply taken the emergency food system model in the United States and taken it to the UK. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t work. It’s very scattershot. The quality of the food is poor, and the people who benefit the most are the food industry and the food companies, which brings me to the next book. It could potentially be a solution. But when you’re donating it’s not clear you’re really helping. Let’s talk about Walmart in the United States. This is where you learn about the dynamics of the big business that’s involved in emergency food. Walmart doesn’t want to pay the huge dump fees when food is outdated or going bad. They have to pay a fee, and they have to pay the trucker to get the food to the dump. So in order to avoid those fees, they donate the food to Feeding America, the big food bank conglomerate. Feeding America comes to pick up the food. Not only does Walmart not have to pay for the dumping, but they get a huge tax write-off because they donated it. So that keeps Walmart’s profits very high. Then they get goodwill, because everybody thinks, ‘Oh, Walmart really cares about the poor’ — because we all believe the stupid myth that helping hungry people has to do with food, and that the big businesses can save us. This is not true. Walmart pays wages that are so low that a person cannot afford to buy food with them. So they get public assistance — SNAP benefits or food stamps — from the US government to supplement those wages. They also get Medicaid, which is healthcare. The government is supplementing the wages that Walmart refuses to pay. Then, finally, the people who work at Walmart use their food stamps at Walmart. Walmart is getting so much money back from donating food to Feeding America. Hunger has become big business in the United States and that’s where Big Hunger comes in."