Welcome, dear reader!
I’m grateful you opened this book. It means you care about the world and your place in it.
Before we begin, I’ll ask, “How are you feeling today?”
This is the first question we ask each other in our “community meeting” at the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, which I founded twenty years ago at Drexel University’s School of Public Health in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The center is a place where staff and program members deeply care about each other and ending hunger. As an expression of that care, before we start our meetings, we ask each other “How are you feeling?” Not “How you doin’?” as many say in Philadelphia, but “How are you feeling in your emotional landscape or your own body?”
As responses, we hope for more than “fine,” “good,” or “OK.” Those are answers that people use to bypass their bodies or emotions they may not want to touch. Or they don’t say more because they assume people don’t want to know. Or they are concerned for their safety. But addressing emotions is built into our structure, so we take the time to say how we are feeling; we take the time to listen to and sense one another. This is where the true work of solidarity begins.
Me? I’m brokenhearted. I’m brokenhearted because learning about people’s experiences with hunger tore me apart, challenging my ability to make sense of the world and find my place in it. I also feel joyful. Surprisingly, joy can emerge from pain and grief. I didn’t come to joy easily. This book invites you along with me to understand the pain and injustice of hunger, and find ways to overcome it through transformative policy change, building solidarity, and, yes, generating joy.
Since you’ve read this far, chances are you might be brokenhearted too. Clearly you care about hunger and suffering or you wouldn’t be here.
If you are willing, put your hand over your heart. Feel the comings and goings of your blood in your own body. Feel your own warmth? This is where the action is.
Perhaps we agree: the reality that millions of people in the United States do not have enough food to eat for an active healthy life fills us with grief. Let us consider this potential shared grief to be the grounding of this book. Grief is an important emotion to feel and acknowledge; in doing so, we can understand many other emotions such as anger, rage, and despair that are contained within grief. If we feel grief, we know that there is a felt sense of what was, what is, and what could be. Grief can be an acknowledgment of loss for someone we love or something (an idea, dream, job, and so on) that we have loved. So where there is grief, there is evidence of love. Love for a person, for people, love for a feeling, a sense of connection and belonging, and a sensation that all is well. Where there is love, there is gratitude. And out of gratitude the possibility for joy can blossom.1
This brings me to the second question we ask each other in our community meeting. We ask, “What is your goal?” We ask this to help people articulate what they hope to get out of the meeting; this way, we can understand each other’s expectations and stay focused on the task at hand without getting bogged down in our emotions. Perhaps your goal is to learn more about the experience of hunger or find some new ways of doing. My goal is to help you with that and to help you feel that you belong in here so you can share in the relationships with the people I have met over the past twenty-five years. Perhaps you might take comfort in knowing you are not alone. Many people are in here with you and me. I’m hoping you can learn alongside them. We are in good company.
Perhaps you work in an organization, run programs, or do research or make policy in response to hunger and food insecurity. Maybe we engage in the same circles. I’m a professor of public health and health policy. I am an ethnographer (meaning I work alongside people and participate in their lives while also learning and observing to understand their worldview and experiences) and epidemiologist (meaning I’m interested to understand how health and flourishing are distributed across large groups of people or a population). Twenty-five years of research and engagement alongside thousands of people who shared their experiences and wisdom with me supposedly makes me an “expert.” I’ve testified before Congress to try to convince policymakers to invest in families and communities and ensure everyone is nourished. I’ve been quoted in hundreds of news articles and appeared on television and the radio talking about hunger in the United States and what to do. I’ve led research studies and created programs that address and treat hunger at its roots. I was the cochair of the National Commission on Hunger, which was created to advise the US Congress and secretary of the US Department of Agriculture on ways to eliminate hunger. An “expert” knows the facts, advances the truth, and helps identify solutions.
But don’t be fooled. In my position, as an upper-middle-class white woman who has never experienced hunger and deprivation, I am an unexpert. I’m a beginner and always will be. To be a beginner is a wonderful stance; it keeps all of your options open and helps you keep learning.
People who have experienced hunger are true experts. They know hunger in their bodies, their histories, and their families. It was for this reason I started the program Witnesses to Hunger in 2008. I wanted to create the infrastructure for the true experts on hunger to speak directly to members of Congress, the press, and the public. For twelve years, we did just that. Members of Witnesses to Hunger visited the White House and Congress to speak directly to legislators. They talked to the press, appeared on television, and spoke on the radio as experts. It was the people in this program that instilled courage in me. They also taught me that it was a courageous act to admit you don’t know. They didn’t have the all the answers or expect me to have all the answers. We could explore them together and learn from one another on how to create collaborative solutions. What was most important to members of Witnesses to Hunger was to be in good relationship with each other. To show up. To be a good friend. To generate joy. To express love. In loving relationships, everything is possible.
My goal is that, by reading this book, you too can gain courage to enter a place of unknowing, become aware of the trauma underneath hunger, and be unafraid to plunge into the depths of that suffering to help heal it.
When I started talking about the violence underneath hunger, many advocates, researchers, and agency administrators asked me to stay quiet about this. People were worried that it would detract from actions to reduce hunger such as the multibillion-dollar policy fights in Congress regarding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. But it’s time to stop pretending we’re doing the right thing and pay deep attention. Once and for all, let’s listen to the people in this book, most of whom are Black women, women of color, and other marginalized women who, for generations, have been expressing their pain in hopes of inspiring the world to change and make opportunities to feel and express joy. If we stay with the pain long enough to understand and transform it, our work could provide grounding for social, cultural, political, and economic revolution. Only then can we say we are seeking to end hunger in America.
Perhaps you are a student or lifelong learner whose goal is social, political, cultural, and economic transformation. You may be studying in the disciplines of history, public health, medicine, social work, nutrition, anthropology, economics, political science, and beyond. Maybe you are on the road to creating your own organization or preparing to write policy. Hopefully this book inspires you to be honest, take courage, and stay with your resolve. I invite you to not rely solely on your intellect. I hope you take time to know your body, emotions, and spirit. When addressing hunger, having a strong and tender heart, sense of body sovereignty, and meaningful spiritual practice are just as important as having a sharp and disciplined mind.
This is no textbook nor standard journey through simple quick fixes. What’s ahead is an attempt to dissolve stale ideas that keep regenerating in the antihunger and social justice spaces. In this book, I rely on four strategies. First, I ground this book in the wisdom and lived experiences of hundreds of people who know hunger firsthand. Second, I describe what I learned through working with my team, partners, and colleagues over the last twenty-five years. This includes what I learned through my work with Indigenous people, primarily the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho nations in my early career, and then with Black and Latinx people to create programming and take action through participatory advocacy. Third, I root my analysis of hunger in the generations-long scholarship of Black and Indigenous people who have been engaging with the possibilities of abolition and decolonization by tapping into wisdom traditions more than five hundred years in the making. Finally, I outline the potential for nourishment from perspectives I gained through reading, listening, and practicing alongside monastics and laypeople engaged in the Plum Village spiritual tradition of Zen Buddhism—a tradition that taps wisdom developed over twenty-six hundred years.
I was driven to write this book because I see many people in the antihunger and social justice spaces who sincerely care but have yet to engage with the deep and violent roots of hunger. This book serves as my invitation to plunge the depths of despair in oneself and others, and to tap into wisdom traditions deep enough to support the goal of ending hunger.
This brings us to the final question we ask each other: “Who will you ask for help?” This is an important aspect of starting a meeting because it indicates that we cannot do the work and achieve our goals alone. Dominant culture in the United States makes us feel like we cannot ask for help, that it is a sign of weakness or place of unknowing. But asking for help is healthy. It is a way of acknowledging and building our sense of community as well as the reality of our interconnectedness. Ahead I show that public assistance programs seek to separate and isolate us from each other. Through isolation we become lonely, we lack creativity, and lose our power. Alone we are vulnerable. Together we have more power to make the changes we want to see in the world. In our community meeting, we ask a person or people who are in the meeting for help (not someone outside the circle we are in). So I’m hoping the people you meet in this book can help you. I, too, will do my best to help you stay interested and go deeper page by page. I hope you can also help me by attending to the wisdom of the people herein.
Yes, it’s a little rough going ahead, but I hope I can help you to take courage. So if you please, hold your heart, look to the horizon, and feel free to gently turn the page.
1. Francis Weller and Michael Lerner, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2015).