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

Food, Health, and the Environment

Series Editor: Robert Gottlieb, Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy, Occidental College

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Jill Lindsey Harrison, Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice

Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman, eds., Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability

Abby Kinchy, Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops

Vaclav Smil and Kazuhiko Kobayashi, Japan’s Dietary Transition and Its Impacts

Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Nelson Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey, Lauren Gwin, Monica Moore, and Jennifer Sokolove, California Cuisine and Just Food

Brian K. Obach, Organic Struggle: The Movement for Sustainable Agriculture in the United States

Big Hunger

The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups

Andrew Fisher

Foreword by Saru Jayaraman

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Sans Std and ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fisher, Andy, 1963- author.

Title: Big hunger : the unholy alliance between corporate America and anti-hunger groups / Andrew Fisher ; foreword by Saru Jayaraman.

Other titles: Food, health, and the environment.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2017] | Series: Food, health, and the environment | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016040544 | ISBN 9780262036085 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262339506

Subjects: | MESH: Nutrition Policy | Malnutrition--prevention & control | United States

Classification: LCC RA645.N87 | NLM QU 145.7 AA1 | DDC 362.1963/9--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040544

ePub Version 1.0

d_r0

For Orion, may you always have such a fierce sense of justice.

For Kassady, may your love for the natural world and its inhabitants lead your path.

Table of Contents

Series page

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Series Foreword

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Lost Opportunities and Collateral Damage

1 Occupy Hunger

2 The Charity Trap

3 The Politics of Corporate Giving

4 SNAP’s Identity Crisis

5 Economic Democracy through Federal Food Programs

6 Who’s at the Table Shapes What’s on the Agenda

7 Innovation within the Anti-Hunger Movement

8 Innovative Models from Outside the Anti-Hunger Field

Conclusion: Toward a New Vision for the Anti-Hunger Movement

Appendix 1: Primary National Anti-Hunger Groups in the United States

Appendix 2: Trends in Prevalence Rates of Food Insecurity and Very Low Food Security in U.S. Households, 1995–2015

Appendix 3: Index of Acronyms

Index

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Corporate Employees on Food Bank Boards

Table 2.2 Highly Paid Food Bank Staff

Table 4.1 SNAP-Related Lobbying Activity by Food Sector in 2013

Table 4.2 States That Have Introduced Legislation to Restrict Foods from SNAPa

Table 5.1 USDA Foods and Federal Nutrition Programs

Table 5.2 Commodities Diverted for Processing in Oregon (School Year 2014–15)a

Series Foreword

Big Hunger is the twelfth book in the Food, Health, and the Environment series. The series explores the global and local dimensions of food systems and the issues of access; social, environmental, and food justice; and community well-being. Books in the series focus on how and where food is grown, manufactured, distributed, sold, and consumed. They address questions of power and control, social movements and organizing strategies, and the health, environmental, social and economic factors embedded in food-system choices and outcomes. As this book demonstrates, the focus is not only on food security and well-being but also on economic, political, and cultural factors and regional, state, national, and international policy decisions. Food, Health, and the Environment books therefore provide a window into the public debates, alternative and existing discourses, and multidisciplinary perspectives that have made food systems and their connections to health and the environment critically important subjects of study and for social and policy change.

Robert Gottlieb, Occidental College

Series Editor ([email protected])

Foreword

This book could not be coming out at a more important moment in our history. We as a nation are facing the greatest income inequality since the Gilded Age. The lowest-wage sectors of our economy are the fastest growing, with incredibly dangerous portent for the viability of our gross domestic product. Where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in metropolitan regions across the country, gentrification is both increasing housing costs and displacing thousands of working-class communities, and bringing their survival into question. And, as Andy Fisher points out, food insecurity remains a persistent facet of the economic landscape, as the rates of hunger were just dropping to pre-recession levels in 2015.

At the same time, social movement organizations working to raise the minimum wage, fight displacement, and generally curb income inequality are reaching a zenith. The Fight for $15 has spawned a wave of ambitious minimum wage increases nationwide, the likes of which have not been seen in decades. Alongside millions of workers, hundreds of high road employers have come out publicly in support of policies like raising the minimum wage. The possibilities for a true social movement to end hunger in the United States—one that addresses the root causes of hunger—are more visible and viable than they ever were.

Unfortunately, as Andy points out, the hunger industrial complex is not sufficiently focused on income inequality or any other analysis of the root causes of hunger. All too often it is focused on sustaining and growing itself as a sector, and in doing so it not only assumes that hunger is inevitable and even increasing, but it also depends on hunger remaining a fact of American society. So how can it call itself an anti-hunger sector? This is the national paradox Andy refers to—if the goal of an anti-hunger sector is to eliminate hunger—and not just manage it—then the sector should be willing to focus on putting itself out of business.

For me, as the leader of a social movement organization dedicated to improving wages and working conditions in the restaurant industry, the questions this book raises are incredibly vital. In my mind, the epitome of this national paradox is the restaurant industry, in which large and small restaurant corporations and franchise operators spend millions of dollars on charity for anti-hunger programs while simultaneously paying the lowest wages of any sector in the United States, and sending millions of its employees to food banks to feed their families. In my last two books I tell stories of restaurant workers working at an array of restaurants—fine dining, fast food, coffee shops—having to go to food banks to feed their families. All too ironically, many of these workers’ employers are well-known nationally for their championship of the anti-hunger cause.

There certainly are exceptions to this rule. Several notable restaurant employers championing hunger do pay their workers well and support minimum wage increases. But it is notable that the chain restaurants contribute in great volumes—and with great fanfare—to food banks and anti-hunger organizations, and at the same time spend millions to lobby against minimum wage increases for the very same population of people using food banks. At one point I shared information about an Applebee’s franchisor in Texas whose daughter raised a great deal of money for a charity she set up for her father’s employees while her father continued to pay his workers a minimum of $2.13 an hour, the subminimum wage for tipped workers. I do not blame the franchisor alone—$2.13 is all that Applebee’s corporation requires franchisors to pay, and in fact, Applebee’s lobbies with vitriol, on its own and through the National Restaurant Association, against any kind of minimum wage increase. Why not demand that these multimillion dollar corporations simply pay their workers more? We certainly would save millions in overhead for anti-hunger organizations that raise money from restaurant corporations that should be paying their own workers a livable wage.

This book raises fundamental questions about the assumptions undergirding the current focus of the anti-hunger sector, with implications for the viability of our democracy and our economy. First, an anti-hunger sector that is focused on raising funds from corporations and the American public to sustain and grow itself assumes that poverty is a necessary, ever-present, even growing evil. The very idea that hunger can be solved by simply increasing the flow of charitable food assumes that there will always be a substantial population of people who cannot be self-sufficient. History tells us this is not true—in any number of other nations and even in other moments in history in America, people have not suffered the levels of income inequality and lack of self-sufficiency that a growing number of Americans face. Further, if we presume that there will be persistent and growing poverty, what does that say about the long-term viability of our residents’ ability to consume and support the economy—or even to support the very corporations willing to provide charity, but unwilling to raise their workers’ wages?

Second, an anti-hunger sector that believes that the best way to address hunger is by feeding the need assumes that a growing underclass of people cannot or perhaps need not be self-sufficient. It assumes that there must be an underclass that is dependent on the largesse of their superiors, rather than being able to earn enough money from working full-time to support their families. It is important to note that an increasing number of clients of food banks and food pantries are working people, often with multiple jobs. They clearly seek self-sufficiency, and a solution that focuses on increasing charity rather than increasing income denies them the ability to be so.

Third, and perhaps most disturbing, the notion that hunger will be solved by charities receiving funds from large corporations that simultaneously lobby to keep minimum wages as low as possible fundamentally removes all accountability and responsibility from these corporations to actually pay their employees livable wages that allow them to support their families. The notion that these corporations are to be lauded for providing funds for charities that serve much of the same population they employ promotes the idea that these corporations are supporting charities with largesse, on a whim, and removes all public accountability for their role in the economy.

On the other hand, there are some shining examples in the anti-hunger movement that do as Andy suggests, and partner with groups like mine and others fighting for higher wages and better working conditions for low-income people. If more agencies within the anti-hunger sector were to follow suit, the results could be truly transformational. The possibilities are dazzling. An anti-hunger sector that worked collaboratively with labor on raising wages could effectively reduce the number of clients on its rolls and reduce the need for greater funding. Instead, these organizations could harness their power, stature, and resources to support movements for change that would both increase their clients’ self-sufficiency and provide food and other necessities needed to live until support was no longer needed. They could look at broader systemic issues faced by their clients, including housing and transportation, and partner with organizations working on these issues to move policy that addressed their clients’ needs. By partnering with these and many other types of organizations, the anti-hunger sector would be more effectively able to call itself an anti-hunger movement.

Saru Jayaraman

Director, Food Labor Research Center, University of California, Berkeley

Co-Founder, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United

Acknowledgments

This book draws from the writings of Janet Poppendieck, Mark Winne, Graham Riches, and Nick Saul. Sharon Thornberry played a key role as a sounding board throughout the project. In particular, pertaining to the beginning of the research process, I owe a debt of gratitude to Ellen Parker for her generosity, wisdom, and insights. Mark Winne was, as he has always been, extraordinarily thoughtful and supportive, and he helped me to think through the structure and purpose of the book. Wayne Roberts, in his affable Canadian way, was able to provide insights into the American political system, which few of us Americans possess.

Robert Gottlieb was instrumental in making this book happen. As the editor for MIT Press’s Food, Health, and the Environment series, he was key in gaining the press’s approval to publish this volume from a first-time author. He reviewed and commented on the book, chapter by chapter, and provided countless instances of advice and encouragement when I got stuck or frustrated. Bob has been a steady friend and mentor over the course of some 25 years as well.

Numerous persons reviewed sections or chapters, providing invaluable feedback. These individuals include Katherine Alaimo, Anne Barnhill, Andrew Kang Bartlett, Mariana Chilton, Alison Cohen, Monica Cuneo, Robert Egger, Mara Einstein, Kate Fitzgerald, Thomas Forster, Kim Hanson, Janie Hipp, Betty Izumi, Becca Jablonski, Sonya Jones, Marion Kalb, Joann Lo, George Manalo Le Clair, Kevin Morgan, Robert Ojeda, Ellen Parker, Janet Poppendieck, Jess Powers, Wayne Roberts, Nick Saul, Kathryn Scharf, Frank Tamborello, Julia Tedesco, Sharon Thornberry, and Mark Winne.

Scott Richardson was instrumental in helping me find information and understand the arcane world of USDA Foods. Jerry Hagstrom was kind enough to grant me an extra-long free trial period of his inside-the-Beltway, food and agriculture–oriented Hagstrom Report. Daniel Bowman Simon provided me with countless articles and tidbits of information. Numerous others shared articles and pointed me toward individuals to interview.

Saru Jayaraman was kind enough to take the time to write a compelling foreword.

I was the beneficiary of the generosity of more than a hundred friends, colleagues, and neighbors who supported me through a crowdfunding campaign. Their generosity not only helped make the book a reality, but also made me feel accountable to them to continue the research and writing when my focus on the project wandered. Thanks in particular to Margie Roswell, Gus Schumacher, the late Tom Ferraro, Nancy and Barney Straus, and Chris Schwier.

This book truly would not have happened without Luci’s moral, financial, and emotional support, which allowed me to pursue my dream. Her encouragement and advice were instrumental to the completion of this book.

And thank you to all the folks at MIT Press who labored to get this book to press, including Beth Clevenger, Marcy Ross, Anthony Zennino, Susan Mai, Susan Clark, Miranda Martin, and Mary Bagg. Their contributions helped to make Big Hunger a much more powerful, well-written, well-distributed, and impactful document.

If I missed anyone, I apologize for the oversight. Your omission does not diminish your valued contribution.

Introduction: Lost Opportunities and Collateral Damage

Rust Is Not an Emergency

In 1958 Youngstown, Ohio was a thriving city, its vibrant economy fueled by steel. Located halfway between Chicago and New York City—and between Cleveland and Pittsburgh as well—it occupied a central place in America’s industrial heartland. Youngstown’s population hit its apex of 167,000 residents by the late 1950s, and at that time became the fourth-largest steel-producing region in the United States.¹

The demand for steel with its multiple uses—for the country’s 19th-century westward expansion, for World War I, and for the burgeoning auto industry as well—had contributed heavily to America’s prosperity, and Youngstown’s in particular. The city had survived the Great Depression better than most. A magazine promotion in 1931 described Youngstown as the City of Homes, fifth in the nation in home ownership.² The union members employed in the area’s steel mills, and later on in the nation’s largest auto assembly plant at nearby Lordstown, continued to enjoy the trappings of middle-class life.

In 1958 my parents and three siblings moved from New York to Youngstown. Five years later I came along, and when I was five years old, the city suffered devastating civil disturbances, like so many other urban locales around the country, protesting the racism and unequal conditions that plagued the African American community. By the end of the 1960s, the city’s population had declined 16 percent to 140,000, as the white population fled to the suburbs.

Youngstown had its challenges in the 1960s and 1970s, including a high degree of racial segregation. Growing up in this period I experienced Youngstown, if not as a culturally progressive community, at least as a modestly prosperous one. Downtown bustled with people shopping at department stores or working in the five-story office buildings. The public golf course, where I spent my summers playing barefoot and shirtless, hummed with steel and autoworkers on their days off, or those who worked the night shifts.

Black Monday interrupted Youngstown’s prosperity in 1977, when Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed its local plant after having been bought out by a larger firm. By 1980, the bottom fell out, as U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, and other mills closed up their ancient, inefficient plants after struggling to compete with Japan’s modern mills and lower labor costs. The steel giants had chosen not to invest in modernizing the Youngstown-based mills, and the workers suffered as a result. Youngstown reportedly lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs, 400 satellite businesses, and from one-third to three-quarters of school tax revenues during this period.³ Unemployment soared and stayed unusually high for more than a decade.

This scene was replicated across the region, in places like Detroit, Cleveland, Dayton, Gary, and Flint, where Michael Moore chronicled the decline of his hometown in Roger and Me. Sixty-five miles southeast of Youngstown, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the United Steelworkers (USW) locals worked closely with the Hunger Action Coalition to create a rapidly growing network of food pantries to support the newly struggling unemployed steelworkers (and others whose businesses were affected by the loss of income in the region). These local economic collapses, combined with the devastating recession of the early 1980s and Reagan-era rollbacks in human services, gave birth to the emergency food system.⁴ The emergency in this case referred not to a natural disaster but to the ravages resulting from changes in economic and political policies that moved the country toward austerity and globalization. As the 1980s rolled on, the Hunger Action Coalition became closely aligned with labor unions and saw itself as part of a broader progressive movement.⁵

I went off to college in 1981, coming back to northeast Ohio only for vacation. My mom had moved to the suburbs of Cleveland after remarrying, but my brother had returned to Youngstown in the mid-1980s to practice medicine. Every year for the next two decades or so, I would visit my hometown and watch it become a shell of what it once was. The local shopping plaza first lost its department store, then its movie theater, then its supermarket, bank, and even its discount stores. In their place now sits a Walmart Supercenter.

Today Youngstown seems to top all the negative indices. Some have called it the most vanishing city in America. The Brookings Institute noted that it has the most concentrated poverty in the United States, with almost 50 percent of its population in poverty in 2011.⁶ MSN ranked Youngstown as the most miserable metropolitan area in 2013, due to its income levels, violent crime rates, poor rates of educational attainment, high unemployment, and population shrinkage.⁷ By 2014 the population had declined to 65,000, a 60 percent drop in a bit more than 50 years.⁸ Entire neighborhoods were boarded up, as the city shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. Even the private prison that created some 400 jobs lost its federal contract and laid off half of its staff in 2015.⁹

Not coincidentally, the decline of Youngstown since the early 1980s has been paralleled by the institutionalization of the emergency food sector—the vast array of food banks, pantries, and soup kitchens in the United States that now serve 46 million people each year. What was once a response to an emergency caused by a crisis of capitalism is now a national institution, existing far beyond its original temporary intentions.

From one perspective, the 200 plus food banks and the approximately 60,000 food pantries and soup kitchens that distribute $5 billion worth of food every year in virtually every corner of America are a tribute to the astonishing ingenuity and dedication of the American spirit. Food charity has become one of the largest focal points of civil society in America, embedded in churches, schools, and volunteer associations, with tens of millions of donors and volunteers. Charitable food receives a billion dollars or more in government support through tax credits to donors, cash, and USDA commodities. Companies large and small donate billions of dollars’ worth of food and cash to the effort as well, while encouraging their employees to volunteer by packing boxes and sorting food.

Tens of thousands of Youngstown area residents remain dependent on the charity of the emergency food system that was geared to benefit their parents and grandparents. The Second Harvest Food Bank of the Mahoning Valley (serving a three-county area around Youngstown) boasts that it served 7,916,667 meals in 2014.¹⁰ It can be argued that the emergency food system and the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),¹¹ are both doing their jobs in helping reduce poverty and hunger in depressed communities such as Youngstown.

On the other hand, the continued expansion of the charitable food system marks a national paradox. The emergency that launched this effort has long passed. In its place has come a period of long decline with a new reality of shrinking cities, budgets, and entrenched poverty. The industrial heartland comprising Youngstown, Gary, Flint, Toledo, and similar cities is now known as the Rust Belt.¹² But rust is not an emergency. Rust does not happen in one day, but over a long period of time.

Reversing rust requires different strategies, ones that bring living-wage jobs back to the region. Food charity was once an admirable stopgap for a man-made economic disaster, but has since become little more than a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. Yet anti-hunger groups continue to dedicate enormous amounts of resources to protecting and expanding food charity in isolation from necessary longer-term approaches. Not only does this compartmentalization fail to address hunger’s root causes, it limits our collective sense of what social change is possible. It shortchanges the longer-term upstream solutions, diverting public attention and resources from them. By not coupling short-term hunger relief with structural reform, anti-hunger leaders have reinforced the false notion that hunger can be solved through charity, while diminishing our collective ability to make the deeper reforms. But anti-hunger advocates are not alone in this decoupling of human services from social change. Their narrow emphasis has followed the broad nonprofit trends of specialization and professionalization over the past few decades.

Nevertheless, the laser focus of anti-hunger advocates has had its benefits. By concentrating their efforts on those issues where they enjoy the greatest power and expertise, anti-hunger leaders have by some measures been extraordinarily effective. For example, federal food programs have remained intact against the onslaught of small government ideology, whereas other programs targeted for the poor have been eliminated or slashed (such as welfare).

Overall, however, the disconnect between upstream and downstream approaches has resulted in lost opportunities and collateral damage. For instance, the reluctance of anti-hunger advocates to publicly address long-term solutions has made it seem like they believe charity and public benefit programs to be the primary answer to food insecurity. As a result, significant parts of the public have come to believe that the answer to hunger is increased dependence on government nutrition programs and charity. This in turn reinforces the stigma that the poor face as being reliant on public or private handouts. Precious resources, public awareness, and political action will have been diverted to programs that by definition cannot solve the underlying problems. These programs place the emphasis to solve the hunger problem on the voluntary efforts of the private sector and nonprofits, and on the narrow role of the government to fund food assistance programs. Advocates have failed to hold the business community accountable for its anti-worker practices, such as offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, and resisting minimum wage increases.

This strategy may have been a blind spot in the vision of anti-hunger leaders, or simply a tactical division of labor. Or both. The fact is that the anti-hunger sector has done little to support the return of well-paying manufacturing jobs to Youngstown and similar cities, or to fight against legislation that reduced the power of labor unions, such as right-to-work statutes. Few if any anti-hunger leaders marched in Seattle against the World Trade Organization in 1999, or fought against free trade agreements, such as NAFTA or the Trans Pacific Partnership in 2015. As will be seen later in chapter 6, only a small fraction of anti-hunger groups even actively supported increases in the minimum wage.

Working toward Community Food Security

In 1990, I moved to a place that couldn’t be more different than Youngstown: Los Angeles. I came to pursue Latin American studies and later Urban Planning at UCLA. In the wake of the 1992 civil disturbances after the acquittal of the police officers that beat Rodney King, five fellow graduate students and I, under the tutelage of Professor Robert Gottlieb, decided to examine why the food system seemed broken in South Central Los Angeles, and how it could be a force for community development. Our report, perhaps the first-ever community food assessment, was completed as a pro bono consulting project for the Southern California Interfaith Hunger Coalition (IHC), the leading anti-hunger group in Los Angeles at the time.

Back in the late 1970s, IHC had launched the first farmers markets in Los Angeles as a means to increase access to healthy food in low-income neighborhoods while supporting small farmers. In the 1980s, IHC had dropped this path to focus on protecting nutrition programs in the wake of Reagan-era cutbacks. But by 1993, IHC’s associate director Carolyn Olney embraced a new vision for her organization, one that was grounded in urban ecology, health, and connections with family farming. She turned out to be ahead of her time.

A few years later, UCLA’s Gottlieb, the Hartford Food System director Mark Winne, and myself launched a national coalition to unite the anti-hunger sector with others in agriculture, gardening and community development. We called it the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC). At its heart was the new concept of community food security. This loosely defined idea helped both the small farm sector and urban consumers, especially in low-income communities, recognize that the mainstream food system marginalized their interests alike. Community food security provided a framework for connecting these disparate elements politically and programmatically. It was an idea that played a pivotal role in building today’s food movement.

CFSC was embraced by the leading edge of the anti-hunger movement, as a few dozen food banks and advocacy organizations became members over the years. Over time, support for community food security would gain a toehold if not a foothold in the anti-hunger arena. Yet, at the same time, the field was narrowing its agenda and goals in the face of policymakers and portions of the electorate who were increasingly hostile to government social programs. As the bipartisan consensus around reducing hunger, framed by the partnership between Senators George McGovern (D-SD) and Robert Dole (R-KS), began to dissolve the anti-hunger field retrenched. For its part, the anti-hunger lobby and its network, seeing the challenge to federal food programs, refocused their energies on protecting them at all costs.

In doing so, the anti-hunger movement was defining a narrow role for the government (its redistributive function), while largely ignoring the government’s role in setting the terms of how the marketplace worked (the types of jobs available, how much they paid, and of how workers could organize to protect their interests). It was ignoring the lessons from Youngstown’s decline.

The anti-hunger sector was also slow to take into account the changing nature of hunger in America, in which individuals employed in low paying and/or part time jobs were increasingly populating the food stamp rolls and relying on food pantries to make ends meet. Stagnant wages, the decline of employees represented by labor unions, and the growing predominance of service sector jobs have been key factors in this trend.

Instead, the anti-hunger movement chose to build an alliance with corporate America. The business community provided the movement with money, political capital, and food donations in exchange for positive publicity and a de facto (although at times explicit) commitment not to oppose corporate interests. Hunger became a cause célèbre for numerous corporations, and anti-hunger advocates embraced that partnership under the guise of hunger’s universal immorality: we’re all in this together.

In both allying themselves with corporate America and not pursuing labor-related issues, anti-hunger advocates tacitly exonerated businesses from their role in fostering income inequality and, in various cases, of engaging in practices that perpetuated hunger among their own workers or subcontractors. One effect of this alliance has been to obfuscate the role of Big Business in causing food insecurity and, in the case of the SNAP program, reinforcing its role in generating wealth for the food industry.

To give credit where credit is due, this alliance has ameliorated hunger through contributing to the political survival of the SNAP program during various Farm Bill cycles and by enabling the emergency food system to reach many more people in need with more food. Yet, the anti-hunger sector’s overarching strategy has not been successful in reducing food insecurity, much less income inequality over the past 20 years.

Since 1995, when the federal government began to keep statistics, food insecurity has remained largely unchanged from 12 percent in 1995 to 12.7 percent of the population in 2015. Similarly, it has not eased the depth of food insecurity, with 4 percent of the people experiencing very low food security in 1995 and 5 percent in 2015 (see appendix 2).¹³ While the rise and fall of these rates are linked to economic cycles, it remains striking nonetheless that there has been no overall downward movement in these indicators over the past 20 years. These stagnating indicators can be compared to progress in reducing hunger globally during roughly the same timeframe. The United Nations reports that the percentage of undernourished people in lesser-developed nations fell by almost half from 23 percent in 1990–1992 to 13 percent in 2014–2016.¹⁴

The logical response is to ask what can be done differently, to seek out innovation and change. The world around the anti-hunger community is changing and it must evolve as well. The bipartisan consensus around federal nutrition programs in Congress has largely evaporated. Reducing economic inequality has become an imperative, backed by such powerful figures as the Democratic presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders, President Barack Obama, and Pope Francis. The links between obesity, diabetes, and food insecurity require a new coordinated approach that connects dietary behavioral change with income boosts. The food movement is demanding and gaining substantive changes to the way our food is produced, processed, and sold based on sustainability concerns, including climate change. The labor movement is experiencing a small but important renaissance in efforts to increase the minimum wage to more livable levels.

Much of the anti-hunger community has embraced change in the form of adding health and sustainability concerns to their portfolios. For example, food banks are increasingly offering more produce, and at times paying local farms to grow it for them. Many groups have embraced incentives that allow SNAP users to double their money when buying fruits and vegetables at farmers markets. However, going upstream to address the root causes of hunger, to join forces with the progressive community in reforming the economic and social structures that have led to poverty and food insecurity continues to prove challenging, especially for emergency food groups. Some, such as Hunger Action Network of New York State and Illinois Hunger Coalition, have been able to make that leap. Most have not.

Those who do not, whose solutions only address the symptoms of the problem and not the problem itself are kicking the can down the road. They are fostering the institutionalization of the problem. This business-as-usual approach speaks of an anti-hunger industrial complex, in which anti-hunger work has become big business, and big business profits from anti-hunger efforts. It is not unlike President Eisenhower’s farewell address of 1961 in which he warned of the military industrial complex, as entrenched economic interests linked to the government were threatening progress toward peace.¹⁵

Chapter Summaries

This book is an indictment of the business-as-usual practices endemic in the anti-hunger industrial complex. It draws upon my 20-plus years of experience in the field as a researcher, policy advocate, coalition builder, executive director, organizer, and thought leader. It incorporates interviews from hundreds of anti-hunger, public health, food movement, and economic development leaders, and draws as well from my careful analysis of hundreds of printed and electronic materials, journal articles, books, and reports.

Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups is not a book about hunger and its impacts on individuals and communities. Much has been written on that subject. It is instead an analysis of the actions and communications of groups and individuals involved in the anti-hunger field, of how our American society organizes to define and address a wicked social problem.¹⁶

As I critique the way our country addresses hunger in this book, I attempt to point out efforts in a new direction. There is an urgent need to redefine the anti-hunger field away from business as usual, to take it back, or, using the lexicon of the popular protests, to occupy it. I strive to lay out a vision for what anti-hunger work could be, based on the examples of cutting-edge initiatives in the United States and abroad. I also include numerous recommendations, both long and short-term that can help steer us in the right direction.

Specifically, Big Hunger comprises this introduction, eight main chapters, and a ninth as a conclusion. The first part of the book lays out the problems with the private sector response to the hunger problem. Chapter 1, Occupy Hunger, explores the meaning of the social construct hunger, in the United States. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of hunger as a problem statement, asking who benefits from the usage of this highly emotional yet imprecise term. It also considers alternative frameworks, such as food security and the right to food.

Chapter 2, The Charity Trap, delves into the history and structure of the emergency food system to understand its scope, strengths, and numerous weaknesses. The chapter explains the collateral damage food charity causes to individuals and society, while seeking to shed light on the rationale behind its continued expansion. It closes with a vision for reforming food charity.

The amount of money that corporations give to anti-hunger causes, and for what reasons, is the focus of chapter 3, The Politics of Corporate Giving. It examines the rationales behind these gifts, as well as the implications that such philanthropy imposes on the hunger movement and low-income individuals. It discusses in particular the concept of cause marketing and Walmart’s $2 billion commitment to anti-hunger efforts.

The next part of the book lays out a vision for the anti-hunger field, grounded in public health, economic democracy and economic justice. Chapter 4, SNAP’s Identity Crisis, delves into the conflict