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- [Kelly] Welcome to The
Leading Voices in Food podcast.
I'm Kelly Brownell, Director
of the World Food Policy Center
at Duke university.
This podcast is part of a series
focused on the impact of
the COVID-19 pandemic.
This pandemic is exposing a deep flaw
in the country's food system,
namely stunning levels of food insecurity,
but also the transformation
of emergency food assistance
into what some have
characterized as an industry
as food charity become big business.
Andy Fisher, our guest today is a leader
in the Food Security and
Food Justice Movement.
He founded and led The National
Community Food Security
Coalition and led Federal
Legislation campaigns
to gain more than $200 million
for community-based food security
and farm to school projects.
Andy thanks so much for
being with us today.
- [Andy] My pleasure,
thanks for having me, Kelly.
- [Kelly] So Andy, you wrote a book
with a very provocative title,
"Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance
between Corporate America and
Anthony Anti-Hunger Groups."
What are you hoping people take away
from the work that you did on this book?
- [Andy] Sure, so the book was
both an expose and a vision.
It was expose of those relationships
between mainly the food industry,
but a little bit broader than that
and anti-hunger groups
especially food banks.
So exposing what I call the
hunger industrial complex
or those connections that keep us
in a place of maintaining hunger
rather than solving hunger.
And it presents a vision of
how to do things differently
and identifies a number of examples
and models of projects that are engaged
in public health advocacy,
have a public health perspective
that foster economic democracy,
and that also support economic justice
or support kind of addressing the root
causes of hunger and addressing poverty
and racism in the light.
- [Kelly] So Andy, when you
look at the anti-hunger groups,
food banks and other such organizations,
what most people see
is a well-meaning group
of people trying to
provide food for people
who are in desperate need of it.
And I think what you're saying
is that there's kind of
a complicated picture
back behind the curtain and once one open,
so you see some things you
wouldn't know otherwise.
Tell us what you see back there.
- [Andy] The first thing I wanna say
is that folks who are working
in emergency food system,
they're all good people.
They're good people who are
trapped in a bad system.
That system has been going on since more
or less the early 1980s.
And it's a system that nobody expected
to continue until 2020
and to thrive and grow.
I think extent it has.
I mean, before the pandemic hit,
emergency food system
and network of charities
have a 200 food banks
and 60,000 food pantries
and soup kitchens where
people get access to food,
we're serving over 40 million people
with about $5 billion worth of food.
So it's grown exponentially,
it's institutionalized,
it's industrialized,
but it hasn't solved the problem.
If you look at food security data
that the USDA has been
collecting since 1995,
back then 12% of the
population was considered
to be food insecure,
which meant that they had issues
or concerns or experiences
which meant that they
couldn't feed their families
or feed themselves.
If you look at 2018 data,
you'll find that we have almost
exactly the same percentage
of people who are food insecure, 11.8%.
So the numbers go up, the numbers go down.
As a nation, we've been treading
water for the past 25 years
or so on this issue and even longer.
Food banks aren't solving the problem.
They're in many ways
institutions of community caring,
but they're also have
their collateral damage
and they also have their
issues that hold us back
from solving the problem
at its root causes
rather than just putting
a bandaid onto it.
- [Kelly] Out of corporate interest figure
into this picture.
- [Andy] In many ways, food
banks are a downstream appendage
of the food industry.
And by that, I mean that most of the food
that is coming into
the food bank industry,
so it's post-retail, it's post-processing.
For a lot of folks that make sense,
that idea of not throwing food
into the garbage is a great thing.
But if you look at the
quality of some of that food,
it's certainly pretty atrocious.
It's getting better,
but there's still a lot
of junk in the system.
But in general, there
are more early preferable
ways for industry to get this food out.
One good way of looking at
this system is through Walmart.
Walmart is the nation's largest retailer.
Walmart has committed to donating
over $2 billion worth of food
and cash to the emergency food system.
And it's more than met those goals
over a five year period,
but it's doing so in a way
that benefits its bottom line.
It's paying its workers sub-living wages,
encouraging them to go to food banks,
encouraging them to get
onto the SNAP program
as a way to make ends meet.
And then it's donating money to food banks
and to anti-hunger groups
to do SNAP outreach
and to support their programs.
But it turns out that it's
also the single largest
redeemer of food stamps in the country.
One out of every five
or one out of every six food stamp dollars
goes into the coffers of Walmart.
So it's double dipping and triple dipping,
but it's also so using that philanthropy,
that charity as a way
to build it's reputation
as a hunger fighter, rather
than a hunger causer.
So it uses that strategically
to help it build
its access into desserts markets.
Walmart has a few dozen of it.
Executives are on the
boards of the 200 food banks
around the country and they
along with other industry
players are instrumental in
keeping the food bank industry
in a very politically neutral place
where they do not advocate
for higher minimum wage
or do not advocate for affordable housing
or universal healthcare.
All of those issues that are essentially
causing people to show up at their door.
- [Kelly] So how sizeable
is the amount of money
in food given to food
banks coming from industry?
Do they pretty much rely
on these sort of contributions to exist?
- [Adam] It's less cash than it is food.
I don't know the exact percentages
because it varies food bank by food bank,
but roughly 70 to 80% of food
in the food banking system is
coming from private sector.
About 20% comes from the government.
Increasingly food banks
are buying more food
and they're buying more food
from farmers and buying healthier food.
But corporations are at the center
of where the food is coming from
because they're at the
center of the food system
in our country.
- [Kelly] So I'd like
to come back at the end
and ask you about equity
issues in particular.
And you alluded to some of these
in your remarks before.
Let me ask this question.
So there've been much attention
in recent months to mass
amounts of food waste
and the diversion of some
of what might've been food
waste into food charities.
What does this say about
our food system in Europe?
- [Andy] Well, I mean, I
think what's happening now
with the pandemic is with
the closures of restaurants
and of colleges and schools,
we have a bifurcated food system,
one of which is serving
retail institutions
and one of which is serving food service.
That food service sector
obviously closed down
in the spring because
all those institutions
closed down the market.
Their markets went dry.
So you saw a lot of waste.
You saw, there's zucchini
is rotting in the field.
You saw pigs that were not able to get
processed through the slaughter houses.
You saw milk being dumb, things like that.
So people's natural
inclination is not to want
that food to go to waste.
They want to go to people
who are gonna eat it,
which has its very
positive community-oriented
implications as well.
Prior to the pandemic
in the past few years,
USDA committed about $5 billion worth
of what they call tariff mitigation foods.
They bought an extra $5 billion
worth of food from farmers
and donated it through
the emergency food system
as a way to kind of shore up farm prices
in a way to support those farmers
who are hurt by the tariffs that the Trump
administration put on China
and China's retaliation.
So you have that system
and now you're seeing
about another $4 billion worth of food
that the government is buying
to support that industry.
So you're seeing that
essentially nutrition policy
is downstream to agricultural policy.
And this is just one
example of a long history
that goes back to the 1930s
when the food stamp program was created
to bolster farm beef prices.
The food industry has been instrumental
to the maintenance and the growth
of Federal Nutrition
Programs since the 1930s
and the food banks are
just one aspect of that.
In some ways it's been
couched as an alternative
to the SNAP program
but it's very much tied
into farm surplus in our country.
- [Kelly] So Andy, with an
estimated 40 million people
recently unemployed,
there have been pictures
of miles long line except food banks,
doesn't this mean that
the emergency food system
is more needed than ever
and that we're well-positioned
to address people's needs?
- [Andy] On one level it does,
and one level it's become the safety net
under the safety net.
So I think you have to rewind
a little bit to February
before the pandemic really took hold.
Many food banks were
operating near capacity
even though we are in an economic boom,
they were still serving 40 million people.
They was pumping $5 billion worth of food.
They were still filling their warehouses
and getting them out.
And you saw generally a growth model
within the food banking industry
where they measure their success
and the number of pounds
that are distributed.
And it's a very easy and intangible way
to measure what you're doing.
This year we wanna put
out 5% more poundage
than we did last year
and we're more successful
and we're doing our job because of that.
So we were at this high point anyway,
we weren't starting from zero.
Food banks are starting
from 80, 90% of capacity,
whatever it might be
at an individual level.
And when the pandemic hit and 40 million
people became unemployed overnight,
essentially you saw huge
pressure on this food banks
to distribute the food,
but you also saw that
because the administration
has been very reluctant to
increase the SNAP program,
there's been a lot of pressure
put on them to increase
SNAP benefits by 15%.
And they're very reluctant to do that
because there's a
reluctance to kind of buy
into that entitlement mentality,
that entitlement type of program that is,
more of a rights-based program
than a charity program as food banks are.
So the food banks have
become the last resort.
As the government abdicates
its responsibility
to the public, to the poor,
can make sure that food is a human right,
in a sense, and tells them
to go to the food bank
and supplies those food banks
with more and more food.
You see strengthening of policy
away from an entitlement program
towards the charity program.
That's really a public
private partnership.
That's been alternative
way for the government
to support nutrition programs,
but much more cheaply and much less
in a justice-based framework
and the core USDA nutrition programs.
- [Kelly] What positive changes do you see
in the food bank world?
And are there ways to
accelerate those changes?
- [Andy] Food bank
world is really changing
in a very positive fashion.
There are many food banks who are doing
some excellent work around
community development
around food systems, around
supporting farm to school,
about supporting job training.
Some are advocating for minimum wage.
For example, in Rochester, New York
Foodlink is doing some great work
around building a community
economic development model
of buying local food and using it to cater
school meals and to
support community gardens.
There's a growing network
called Closing the Hunger Gap
based out of a group called
Why Hunger in New York city.
That's a network of four or
500 individuals in groups
that are identifying how to accelerate
that change and how to make
that change more mainstream.
Places like England and
Scotland, for example,
have a poverty truth commission
where they're mentoring,
especially women who have lived experience
of hunger and poverty and helping them
to train politicians to break down
those myths about poverty,
where they're actively trying to reduce
reliance on food banks in that country.
A group in Toronto and Ontario
called Freedom 90 has
been organizing volunteers
at food pantries to make claims
on the provincial government to increase
social assistance programs.
So there's lots and lots of great examples
all around the country.
It's a growing movement,
really of how to change,
how we do food charity, it
needs to be accelerated,
it needs to be supported, needs
to be made more of the norm
than what we're doing now.
- [Kelly] Oh, it'll be
so interesting to see
where this goes in the upcoming years.
So let me ask one final question.
How does the charitable food system
impact racial equity?
- [Andy] In writing this book,
I realized I had never volunteered
at a food pantry before.
So I was like, "I think I should do this."
So I called up my buddies
at the Oregon Food Bank.
They pointed me to what they thought
was one of the best food pantries
in Portland, where I live.
And it's a choice pantry,
which means like half of the pantry
is set up as a waiting room,
the other half is set up as
kind of like a grocery store
with coolers and shelves.
And you get to go in and shop basically,
to choose what you want rather
than get in box of food.
And I get an orientation
from this teenage girl
who tells me in my role is to be across
between the security guard
to make sure that people
don't take too much 'cause there's rules
on which you can take and
then be somebody's personal
shopper and walk them through the system.
So I got it, I'm doing my shift.
It's a four-hour shift.
I'm halfway through, I come
up on my next set of clients
and it's an elderly,
African-American couple
who's been waiting there for two hours
and they're looking tired and dejected.
And I grab a shopping cart
and talk to them a little bit
and find out how many
people in their household
and start taking them down the aisle.
And I start telling
them what they can take,
few cans of beans, a can of tuna,
some pasta, whatever it is.
And as they're shopping,
I realized I'm watching
what they're putting
into their shopping cart.
And I catch myself and try
to give them some space,
but I still find myself doing that
because I find myself in
this very uncomfortable
position as a white middle class guy
watching this elderly
African-American couple,
make sure they didn't
take an extra can of tuna.
And I realized that there's
just this really uncomfortable
power dynamics in that food pantry
that were replicated time and time again
during my volunteer stint.
And I think that's endemic
of the kind of the racial
injustices within the system.
Again, it's not right-based,
it's charity-based.
It tends to be kind of a
white savior mentality.
It's really a system that's
based upon structural violence
and that does nothing to address
that structural violence.
It does nothing to help
people build wealth,
to help people get out of the
streets in which they're in.
I mean, some do, I shouldn't
be so extreme about that.
But in general it is not helping people
to address the needs that they have to get
out of the system.
It keeps them trapped in that
mentality, in that modality.
Again, things are changing and things
are not as black and white
as I think I'm portraying.
But I think what we're
seeing is that capitalism
and racism are very much interconnected.
And this is a system that
they're very much based upon
putting a bandaid on that extraction
of wealth from brown and black people
and from American general
and it does nothing to address
that racial implications.
But in many ways, like my
example, it furthers those,
it further deepens those relationships
that are very uncomfortable.
- [Kelly] Well, so many people are touched
by the food assistance world
that it's really nice that creative people
are looking into this and
thinking about what might be done.
So thanks so much for talking
to us about your book Andy
and thanks so much for joining
us and sharing your ideas
with our listeners.
- [Andy] Sure, my pleasure.
Thanks for having me Kelly.
- [Kelly] And thank you to our
listeners for being with us.
If you would like to subscribe
to The Leading Voices
and Food podcast series,
you can find it on Apple
Podcasts, Google Play,
or your favorite podcast app.
Podcasts and transcripts
are also available
on the website of the Duke
World Food Policy Center.
This is Kelly Brownell.
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