“If you’re like me, and you’re on food stamps or you’re low income, a lot of the way that you survive is, you have to know which stores to go to and what to buy where, and that option has now been taken away in the era of COVID. Anything that could help and provide food would be a huge boon,” Fox says.

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Jersey City’s poverty rate is 18 percent — that’s more than 47,000 people out of a population of around 265,549 (by comparison, the national average hovers at around 10.4 percent). About 32 percent of those living below the poverty line — around 14,751 people — are African American; another 17,000 people who identify as Hispanic live in poverty.

Google Maps’ distribution of grocery stores throughout Jersey City shows at least 160 places to buy food, many of which are concentrated around the busy, densely populated Journal Square, McGinley Square, and West Side neighborhoods. In areas like South Jersey City’s Greenville, where 53 percent of the population is African American, and Bergen-Lafayette, where that number jumps to 62 percent, the choices thin out considerably, especially if you don’t have access to a car.

That startling lack of food access was the impetus for a new initiative: In partnership with AeroFarms and the World Economic Forum, 10 vertical farms located in senior centers, schools, public housing complexes, and municipal buildings were slated to begin opening at the end of 2020. The pandemic slowed the project’s progress, but Stacey Flanagan, head of the Jersey City department of health and human services, still expects “the first two farms to be ready by the end of [March 2021].”

The farms will grow 19,000 pounds of leafy greens such as kale and arugula annually. Flanagan says the program’s initial rollout focuses on providing nutrient-dense greens to residents, with a wider variety of produce in the future.

The greens will be distributed to the public for free — all that’s required is that the participants register for the program. The three-year contract with AeroFarms will cost Jersey City $1 million — half of the money will go toward building the farms, while the other half will be dedicated to maintenance once the farms open.

On the surface, the program seems like it will be an asset to a city plagued by food inequality issues. Fox tells me that, as a high-risk person during the pandemic, she’s shopping at outdoor farmers markets much more often, despite the expense. She feels that any produce that would supplement her SNAP benefits would be a blessing — especially if the city could find a way to deliver her allotment.

Still, some Jersey City residents are skeptical.

There was immediate backlash to the implication in initial press releases announcing the initiative that participants would be required to take nutritional classes or even attend health screenings. That raised immediate concerns about participant privacy, as well as concerns that it could be condescending to users.

“If there’s a signup table with one person sitting in the corner saying, get a health screening here, that could benefit people who maybe don’t have the ability, or don’t have the time to go to a doctor, but we need to understand how the city is going to use [that data] and where that data is going to be stored and, and how it might potentially be shared,” says Leslie, a Jersey City resident of 13 years  who asked that her last name not be used.

Flanagan told me that residents will not be required to participate in any outside programs in exchange for their allotment of free produce. Instead, there might be what she calls a “point of education,” at the pick-up location, where participants might receive a recipe for a smoothie along with their produce, or an offer to check their cholesterol, through the city’s partnership with Quest Diagnostics. She added that every aspect of the program involving data collection will be conducted by a “city or medical professional,” and that it will be kept “completely confidential as per HIPPA laws.”

Tatiana Smith, a single mother, doula, and founder of the Westside Community Fridge, says she has to travel to other parts of the city for food but she’s still decidedly unenthusiastic about the vertical farming program. She says that the city should drop the education portion altogether, because it feels disconnected from the needs of many low-income communities.

“What would be engaging is to take a community member and have them come in and talk about a recipe from their culture and pass it on. But not to give out random recipes. People already know how to cook,” she says. In fact, nearby community gardens all over New Jersey and New York frequently host community potlucks —  some specifically aimed at the neighborhood’s international community —  in which residents are invited to share a favorite dish, meet each other, exchange recipes, seeds, and vegetables, and ultimately build bonds of closeness between neighbors.

Smith is still undecided if she’ll be signing up for the program herself. If she does, she says she’d ask city officials why they never consulted directly with community members about whether or not they even wanted a program like this.

“It’s typical of these types of initiatives that want to help but don’t bother to tap in into what the community is doing and how they live,” she says. “There is this idea that black and brown people seem to not care about their health, but black people have had a long history of food justice work, and now [the city is] saying, ‘We’re gonna introduce healthy eating to you.’ We’ve been eating like this for a long time, but because of systematic racism, low income people have had to resort to poor quality food.”

When your grocery budget is entirely reliant on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), your mom’s Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and other assistance programs designed for low-income disabled single parents and their disabled children, you have to be very specific about what you buy. It’s easy to spend your entire food budget before the month is over and find that toward the end of the month, you’re hungrily eating cheap cereal and off-brand white bread for every meal.

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Recently, Democratic Senators Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bill with Senator Bernie Sanders that would expand the SNAP benefit. The bill would increase the baseline for SNAP benefits by roughly 30 percent and expand benefits to those living in U.S. territories. Currently, the Families First Act is temporarily increasing SNAP benefits for households that haven’t been receiving the maximum benefit, and many states are allowing customers to purchase SNAP-eligible items online, a move that makes grocery shopping during a pandemic safer for low-income elderly, disabled, and high-risk individuals. A permanent increase to SNAP benefits and expanded delivery options would make a significant difference in the lives of many SNAP recipients, giving them the ability to purchase more food each month and making it easier for people to shop even if they can’t physically go to a grocery store.

The maximum SNAP benefit for a household of two in Massachusetts, where I live, is currently $355 per month. A 30 percent increase to that would be $106.50, bringing the total to $461.50 per month. That would mean SNAP recipients could almost afford the average cost of groceries ($489.16 per month in Boston, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though the average monthly spend on food overall is $805.58 once you include takeout and restaurants). Although many families don’t receive the maximum SNAP benefit — in Massachusetts the average monthly household benefit is only $210, or $1.36 per person per meal — the proposed increase in SNAP benefits would at least bring low-income and poor Bostonians closer to being able to afford a full months’ worth of food.

I know how it feels to be able to expand your food budget, even by a little. I remember the first time my dad, who took over raising me after my mom died, had a particularly good month driving the cab. This was before the 2008 recession, and his specialty was driving kids with busy working parents to and from school. We had an unexpected, albeit small, increase to our food budget. I no longer had to survive on $1 Celeste frozen pizzas. I could get a few higher-cost pizzas, like DiGiorno. I was allowed to get inexpensive sushi at the Stop & Shop seafood counter twice a month, and we bought lobsters when they were on sale for $4.99 a pound. We kept the house stocked with sodas and Little Debbie snacks for when my friends came over.

I could actually tell my new high school friends we’d feed them instead of asking them to come over “after dinner,” and we spent one New Year’s Eve trekking through a blizzard to get takeout Chinese food from the best restaurant in the city. I felt rich enough to try crab rangoon, which I’d always assumed I wouldn’t like — when you’re poor, you don’t take risks spending your limited money on food you’re unsure about and may have to throw away. The crab and cream cheese tasted like the freedom of choice and exploration, and I’ve loved them ever since. Then the recession and the rise of Uber and Lyft made it harder for taxi drivers to make money. We went back to eating cereal when we ran out of food money. I got part-time jobs and saved my birthday and holiday money to help my dad pay for groceries.

When I went to college, my food budget slowly started to increase again. It wasn’t much, but I went from being truly poor to just being broke. I’ve always defined the difference by how often the threats of eviction, running out of food, or having the electricity or heat turned off crossed my mind at any given moment. If I had enough money that those things were just background noise, I was broke. If I had so little money that I couldn’t help my dad pay down the electric bill so the power company wouldn’t turn off the lights. I was poor.

Being broke meant I could sometimes save enough money to take my girlfriend (now my wife) on a sushi date, if we kept the meal inexpensive or it was a special occasion. It meant splitting pizza delivery with my friends on Saturday nights, after we’d all had a few cheap vodka cocktails and were sitting around the dorm room laughing at weird memes. Broke was being able to get something else out of the freezer if I’d overcooked my chicken nuggets to a burnt crisp, instead of laying on my bed devastated because I’d ruined my chance to eat.

A few years ago, after my wife and I both got full-time jobs and were no longer relying on the modest budgets of grad students, we first noticed the difference at the grocery store. We were no longer poor or broke; we could get fresh salmon for dinner instead of frozen. We never had to put things back if we were over-budget, we could just have an honest conversation in the car afterward about whether we wanted to cut back the next time. I didn’t even cry when our zucchini went bad the day before we were planning to cook it, even though the child in me — the one who still remembers eating a free pizza lunch at the park with my mom on the August day that she died — was determined not to let it happen again.

That’s how a 30 percent SNAP expansion could change your life. It gets you from poor to broke. From hungry to offering to split your Caesar salad and brownie with another broke friend in the school cafeteria. It’s the bare minimum a person needs to be able to spend their days without low-level anxiety about how they’re going to survive. In the richest country in the world, the bare minimum shouldn’t be too much to ask for. We all deserve to get freshly baked muffins from the grocery store bakery every once in a while, and take the small risk of trying crab rangoon for the first time.

I’m not alone: A 2018 study from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding found that one-third of Muslims in America are at or below the poverty line. In fact, Black Muslim households are more likely than any other racial group to earn less than $30,000 a year. Of course, Muslims are feeling the economic impacts of the coronavirus crisis, such as soaring unemployment. However, the pandemic is also changing how Muslims will practice their faith. This year, Muslims in the United States must adapt to a Ramadan under the shadow of the novel coronavirus.

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In early April, the Fiqh Council of North America, a body of Islamic scholars from the United States and Canada, wrote “masajids and Islamic centers shall strictly follow the health and state official guidelines for social gatherings and distancing.” These necessary guidelines mean Muslims will not have access to some of the usual spaces for community in Ramadan, including the masjid’s iftars. For Black Muslim hubs, like Philadelphia, where community leaders estimate the Muslim population to be at 150,000 to 200,000 — or 10 to 15 percent of the total population — a Ramadan under lockdown can have drastic impacts on the community.

In Philadelphia, five masjids are responding to the pandemic with Philly Iftar 2020 where volunteers will help deliver iftars. It is one way to ensure that those who normally rely on the masjid to provide iftar are able to still access that service. Qasim Rashad, Amir of the United Muslim Masjid (UMM), located ten blocks from Philadelphia’s City Hall, told TalkPoverty, “We do service a low-income population and we rely upon those who have greater resources to help us do that.”

Outside of Philadelphia, Muslims continue to worry about how their communities will fare. Aicha Belabbes, a Muslim living in Boston, shared that she was furloughed due to the pandemic and it has amplified some of her pre-existing concerns for her community.

“In Boston, there were iftars galore. If you needed food, there was always a place to go,” Belabbes told TalkPoverty. “Now, I think for students, for low-income people, for [essential workers like] delivery drivers, Uber drivers, there’s no longer those places of food. Ramadan served as an escape for so many people who had difficult relationships with their families and things like that and were able to find their safe spaces. Now, that’s no longer the case.”

Belabbes said pre-existing organizations who deliver food to Muslims have been “at capacity during the virus.” In addition, a food bank run out of a local Black masjid shut down after the imam showed COVID-like symptoms. Safiyah Cheatam, a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist, also told TalkPoverty that go-to gathering spots in her city are no longer viable. Many in Cheatam’s community rely on masjids or Muslim-owned establishments like Nailah’s Kitchen, a Senegalese restaurant, for iftar and she sees a need for relief like the mutual aid grants popular on social media.

Masjids are not the only ones taking on the issue of food access. In Buffalo, New York, Drea d’Nur, an artist and mother of five, founded healthy and halal food pantry Feed Buffalo in 2018. She was inspired by her own experiences using food pantries where there were no halal options and few healthy foods. d’Nur told TalkPoverty, “In the discussion of building healthy communities, we stand on the truth that no one should be exempt from healthy food access despite health conditions or spiritual practices. It was important to me that Muslims have a space that honors the halal standard and that all are served with love.”

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Feed Buffalo is now functioning as an emergency food relief center for at least four hours every day of the week. In addition, the pantry will hold its second annual Ramadan Healthy Food Giveaway, where d’Nur estimates that Feed Buffalo provides 200 healthy food bags to fasting families, and commits to preparing soups for at least 50 families using ingredients from local farmers once a week.

Support for low-income Muslims in Ramadan extends past food alone. For example, while some Muslims may be able to access community by congregating with their families (or whoever else they’re already social distancing with) in their homes, this isn’t an option for everybody. Both Belabbes and Cheatam raised concerns over reports of rising domestic violence rates during the pandemic. Home may not be a safe space or, like myself, you may live alone and be the only Muslim in your family. Rashad shared that the UMM is conscious of this and will continue making plans to look after the spiritual needs of its community. Rashad said, “We want to keep and maintain that spiritual connection because spiritual mental health is important. We want to maintain their connection to Allah and their connection to the masjid.”

Belabbes hopes that the larger Muslim community understands issues amplified by the pandemic will not disappear when it ends. Belabbes said, “I’ve seen a lot of people saying, ‘I’ve never had to do things virtually.’ But a lot of Muslims who are marginalized had to do things virtually for a long time. I would like there to be an understanding that in the eyes of Allah, everyone’s equal, and everybody deserves to be seen equally in the community.”

But income isn’t the only issue: Camden is also infamous for being a “food desert.” According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, huge swathes of the city are populated by people who live in low-income neighborhoods, don’t have a car, and don’t have a grocery store within half a mile of their homes.

New Jersey lawmakers have been trying to “help” Camden for what feels like forever, and one of their ideas was to use tax incentives to entice new grocery stores into the city. But instead of bringing in new shopping options and addressing entrenched inequality, the effort showed how giving tax breaks to private corporations doesn’t help local economies or reduce poverty.

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First, some background. At the behest of Gov. Phil Murphy (D), a task force is looking into New Jersey’s corporate tax incentive programs, which, in theory, use tax breaks to entice and retain businesses, thus creating jobs and boosting incomes. What the task force has found so far is that those programs are a total mess: Instead of creating good jobs for residents of the state, they’ve allowed connected lawyers and lobbyists to direct tax breaks to their clients, who often broke their job creation promises, all at an exorbitant cost to taxpayers.

Case in point: The effort to bring a grocery store to Camden. In its first official report, the task force noted that a provision of a 2013 rewrite of New Jersey’s corporate tax incentive programs specifically addressed grocery stores in Camden, under a program called Grow NJ. But a politically connected law firm called Parker McCay — whose CEO happens to be the brother of a prominent New Jersey Democrat — “drafted large swaths of the [tax incentive] bill in various respects that appear to have been intended to benefit the firm’s clients,” according to the task force. That included shaping the grocery store provision to explicitly help its client, ShopRite, and prevent other grocery stores from benefiting from the tax break.

Here’s what the law firm allegedly did: It represented a joint project to have a ShopRite anchor a larger retail area in Camden, which was announced before the state legislature rewrote New Jersey’s tax incentive programs. That project, per the task force “was planned to be over 150,000 square feet, with at least 50 percent occupied by the grocery store.” Another developer was, at the same time, pushing a smaller project that also included a grocery store.

When New Jersey’s new tax incentive programs were later announced, the criteria for grocery stores were very specific. Grocers only qualified if they were “at least 50 percent” of a larger retail development “of at least 150,000 square feet” — the exact specifications that ShopRite had planned. (At the time, the average grocery store in the U.S. was 46,000 square feet.) As a result, the incentive explicitly helped ShopRite and rendered its competitor ineligible for the tax break, even though either project would also have fulfilled the goal of opening a supermarket in an underserved area.

Ultimately, ShopRite didn’t follow through on its Camden project, and neither did the second store that was made ineligible for subsidies. So the end result was no new grocery store in Camden at all. Instead, a sealant company took the site ShopRite would have used, thanks to $40 million in tax breaks; per the Philadelphia Inquirer, “No explanation has been provided for why the ShopRite project collapsed.” (In 2014, a PriceRite opened in Camden that was also too small to qualify for the tax breaks ShopRite would have enjoyed.)

Camden’s grocery stores were one of many examples in New Jersey’s incentive programs in which private concerns trumped the public interest. As the task force put it in its report: “Certain aspects of the Grow NJ program’s design are difficult to justify from a rational policy perspective and can be understood only as the result of a process in which certain favored private parties were permitted to shape the legislation to their benefit — and further, in some cases, to disfavor potential competitors.”

Sadly, such inside wheeling and dealing is a standard part of corporate tax deals. In fact, according to a study by the Kansas City Federal Reserve, an increase in a state using corporate tax incentives is correlated with an increase in its officials being convicted of federal corruption crimes. That connection makes a certain sort of sense, since corporate tax incentives are targeted to specific industries, if not specific companies, making a coziness between elected officials and corporate interests nearly inevitable.

But inside dealing aside, was using tax breaks to entice grocery stores into Camden even a promising strategy? A growing body of research says probably not.

One problem inherent in tax incentives is that they often go toward “incentivizing” actions that the business receiving them would have taken anyway, for other reasons. A study by Timothy Bartik at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that at least 75 percent of incentives wind up merely being free money for companies that planned to take such action regardless of the incentive. That’s also true with grocery stores: A 2017 study found that up to about 70 percent of grocery stores that entered low-income areas due to the federal New Market Tax Credit likely would have done so even in the absence of the credit.

There’s also plenty of evidence that bringing grocery stores into food deserts isn’t necessarily the panacea for those areas that advocates claim it is. Higher-income and lower-income households actually spend about the same amount of money on average in supermarkets: 91 cents of every dollar spent on groceries versus 87 cents, respectively. They also travel roughly the same distance to those stores, on average.

So simply bringing a store into the neighborhood cuts down on travel costs, but doesn’t have all the ancillary benefits — better diets and better health — that policymakers claim will occur. Diet is much more closely connected to the amount of money a household has and in what region of the country it’s located.

“The primary factors are economic and time constraints that are affecting people, not geographic barriers, in wealthy countries,” said University of Iowa College of Law Adjunct Professor Nathan Rosenberg. “The more studies that have been done, the stronger those studies are, and the better the data we have, the more clear that’s become.”

In 2018, Rosenberg argued in a paper he co-wrote with Nevin Cohen entitled “Let Them Eat Kale” that incentives for grocery stores get the food access solution precisely backward. Instead, Rosenberg and Cohen noted that boosting wages, strengthening worker protections, and increasing funds for programs such as those providing school lunches will all do more to address the root causes of food-related inequality.

So New Jersey lawmakers took a dubious idea, made it worse by allowing politically connected players to influence the process, and wound up achieving nothing for the people of Camden. Sadly, that’s often how programs like Grow NJ shake out: Good for the rich and connected, and leaving everyone else hungry for better solutions.

The study starts in the 1950s and 60s, when Sweden gradually rolled out high-quality, nutritious, free lunches to every child in its school system. Thanks to Sweden’s meticulous data collection, the authors were able to link detailed information about individual schoolchildren—including how many years they had access to free lunches—with decades of subsequent earnings, employment, and even medical data.

The economists discover that the school lunch program had tremendous positive effects, increasing adult earnings by about 0.35 percent for every year a student had access to the program, for a total of 3 percent—or $11,700 over the working years—for the average kid who was exposed throughout nine years of primary school.

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The program’s positive effects were nearly universal, with large gains for the students with family incomes in the bottom 75 percent. Even the richest students derived some benefit, though it was statistically insignificant. For the lowest-income children, the gains were particularly substantial: Kids in the bottom 25th percentile of family income increased their adult earnings by nearly 5.5 percent, for an average of $21,560 more in lifetime earnings.* That means the program’s benefits were seven times larger than the cost of the meals. And, since low-income students benefitted more than students in higher income groups, the program can actually be credited with decreasing inequality.

The study adds to abundant evidence that getting enough food helps kids succeed in school—and in life—with improved school performance, greater economic self-sufficiency, and better health.

Implementing a similar program in the United States would likely have an even larger effect than the one researchers observed in Sweden. In part, that’s because more students stand to gain. School lunches in the United States are typically free only to the lowest-income students—about 20 million kids last year—and experts say they have historically been underfunded and inadequately nutritious.

There’s also a dramatic difference in inequality between the two countries: Swedes have a much smaller income gap between the rich and the poor, and Swedish kids are only half as likely to grow up in poverty as American kids. As the authors note, “Food shortage and hunger was uncommon in Sweden during the 1950s and 1960s.” The program’s primary goal was to improve nutrition—similar to more recent U.S. changes like the School Meals Initiative for Healthy Children in 1994—rather than addressing a nationwide problem with childhood hunger.

By contrast, in the United States about 1 in 12 families with children experienced food insecurity in 2016, and our nutrition assistance benefits for families (like SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) are so modest that they can’t address the issue. That means school meals are all the more important for low-income American kids; it’s where they get as many as half of their calories. As a result, we’d likely have an even more significant proportion of students making the types of large income gains that Sweden observed with its poorest students.

The argument against such a program, of course, would be its cost. At $3.23 per meal, extending free school lunch to every American schoolchild would cost roughly $19.6 billion per year. ** That’s about 13 percent of what Trump and Republican lawmakers just spent on their monumentally unpopular tax bill. But unlike the tax plan, research shows that this would significantly boost an average worker’s earnings—and it’d be a lot more than the temporary bump of $1.50 per paycheck Paul Ryan boasted his tax law is bringing to workers.

Next week, the stakes are about to get much higher for kids when the Trump administration releases its fiscal year 2019 budget. Trump will likely propose deep cuts to nutrition assistance; last year’s budget cut SNAP benefits by nearly 30 percent. And despite opposition from two-thirds of Americans, congressional Republican lawmakers are already chomping at the bit to help. For kids whose families struggle to put food on the dinner table, that means the cafeteria lunch line may become a lifeline.

* Calculation is based on study’s report of a total real program cost per student of $3,080 over nine years, and an estimated benefit-cost ratio of seven compared to lifetime earnings (that is, earnings between ages 21 and 65) for students in the bottom quartile of household income. Figures representing dollar-value changes in lifetime earnings are based on the study’s calculations, which use the Swedish rather than the US distribution of income and earnings.

** In 2017, an average of 20 million students in primary and secondary schools received free lunch from the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) during each non-summer month. The total federal cost of the program was just over $13.6 billion, of which approximately $10.9 billion went toward reimbursements to schools for free lunches—an average per-participant cost of about $546 for the school year. If all 35.9 million additional schoolchildren in prekindergarten through twelfth grade at schools tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics (which captures all local public school systems and most private schools) were to participate in a newly offered free lunch program to the same extent as the current 20 million participants, the additional federal costs for reimbursements to schools would be about $19.6 billion per year. However, this likely represents an overestimate because many students prefer to bring lunch from home some or all of the time, and the newly eligible students—whose families tend to have higher incomes—may have more resources to do so.

I sent the post to my little brother, a well-coiffed yuppie who organizes most of his social life around food, and asked what he thought about the recipe. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Ham’s still hard for me.”

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With consistent refrigeration, a baked spiral ham will stay fresh for three to five days. That’s when its color shifts from a cheerful pink to a dull grayish-green, as the preservatives begin to buckle under the pressure of prolonged oxygen exposure. After a few more days, it starts to develop a thick, snot-like slime. That’s the bacteria breaking down sugars in the meat, as the decay sets in for real.

Most people throw their food out well before they have to confront this arc in the circle of life. But most people aren’t starving. If you are, you learn to wash the slime off—under hot running water, with soap if you need it—and hope for the best.

There was a point before the weeks of rotting ham, or months of tortillas and processed cheese, when I could have asked for help. I didn’t.

I had already been fat for my entire life. When I was born, my baby cheeks were so big that they squeezed my eyes shut for the first three months of my infancy. As a kid, I was the worst-case scenario in every game of “would you rather.” I was also stable, smart, and well-adjusted—except that I was miserable. That’s what being fat does: It swallows up everything you do right and hides it in the giant failure that is your body. For women in particular, being fat is such a colossal fuck up that it squeezes out the room to be anything else: Being fat and isn’t an option. (The only exception is being fat and funny, if you manage to be in on the joke of your own fatness.)

By the time I was a teenager, I had learned how to avoid anything that would draw attention to my body: to wear clothes that hid my size, to avoid activities where people looked at me, and above all to hide the fact that I ever ate.

Hiding your eating is tricky in the best of circumstances—there are only so many times that you can just “not be hungry” during lunch, and there’s a thin line between tapping your pen just loud enough to cover the sound of your stomach growling and actually doing desktop drumrolls during Math class. But hiding your eating and asking for help getting enough food is actually impossible: You have to admit that you eat to tell someone you don’t eat enough. And I couldn’t do it.

Instead, my little brothers and I made it five years without setting eyes on a vegetable, eating stale scraps and spoiled meat. It sounds almost foolish now—like we were undone by our own vanity. But the truth is, society uses appearance as a shortcut to determining value. Thin is good; fat is bad. Fat people know that. We are acutely aware that we are considered lazy, weak-willed, and even incompetent—doubly so if we’re also poor.  But humans simply can’t endure being told we’re terrible all of the time. So we avoid situations where that’s likely to happen.

It turns out the stigma against being fat is so intense that it stops people from getting health care, exercising in public, or interacting with other people. For me, that also included finding someone who could help me get food. I knew what I would be up against—what it would take to convince someone I was telling the truth—and I didn’t have the energy. I had homework to do, power to get turned back on, and college essays to write.

Eventually, through no work of my own—I’ll cut off my own feet before anyone ever turns me into a “pulled herself up by the bootstraps” folk hero—the food available to me got better. It got more plentiful. It got healthier. I stayed fat. And now that I’m okay—now that I have water, and heat, and trash pickup—that’s fine. I have the luxury of rejecting the idea that the things that society says give me value—like thinness and prettiness and obedience—mean anything. Because right now, my survival isn’t tied quite so closely to whether or not other people think I deserve to be alive.

That claim is objectively false.

Meals on Wheels serves more than 2 million seniors every year who aren’t able to shop and cook for themselves. Research on home-delivered meal programs shows that they improve diet, nutrition, and quality of life, and reduce food insecurity among participants. In short, when seniors get meals, they’re healthier. My casual field research—otherwise known as every conversation I’ve ever had with my grandparents—also backs this up. If you don’t feel well, you should eat something.

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I’m guessing, based on Mulvaney’s argument that cutting the program’s funding is the “compassionate” thing to do, that he hasn’t watched someone nearly die from malnutrition. But I have.

My grandmother had the dubious honor of being the only person to check into her hospice house two separate times.

The second time she was admitted, she spent a month fighting off the beleaguered staff’s attempts at kindness while she settled into an uncharacteristically peaceful death. She wasn’t an easy woman to care for during her life, and she wasn’t any different when she was dying. Once, when a hospice worker took her outside to spend some time in the sun, she dismissed the house’s small garden as “prissy bullshit.” When a volunteer dropped a curler during an attempt to wash and set her hair, she snapped that she “didn’t have that much time left, and didn’t want to waste it fumbling around.” When a grief counselor asked her what she’d miss about her life, she answered “gimlets and a fucking cigarette.”

We held her memorial service in the same room that she died in—another first for the house’s staff. When the nurse leading the service offered us the opportunity to share a warm memory about her life, we all shifted uncomfortably in our seats as we struggled to think of one. My aunt finally broke the silence with a long story about my grandmother’s legendarily mean tortoiseshell cat, Cleo, who lashed out at anyone within striking distance.

My aunt didn’t mention her plan to have Cleo euthanized shortly after the service.

Two years earlier, when my grandmother was admitted to that hospice the first time, she only stayed for two weeks. What we had been convinced were signs that she was nearing death—exhaustion, weakness, confusion—turned out to be malnutrition. After a few healthy meals, they sent her back home, and we made sure someone went to her trailer at least once a day to check that she ate and to ration out just enough scotch to keep her withdrawal tremors at bay.

My grandma survived those two years between hospice stays because my aunts split up the responsibility of taking care of her. If they hadn’t been able to do that, I can only hope that Meals on Wheels would have been around to help her before she slipped back to the place where hunger made it impossible to finish a sentence, or stand up from the kitchen table, or put in her dentures.

In other words, I hope Meals on Wheels would have been there to show a mean old lady some compassion.

Dear Senator Toomey,

You don’t know me. You have never met me, or answered any of my calls. But you have power and influence over my life—and my children’s well-being—and that scares me.

So Senator Toomey, let me introduce myself:  My name is Myra Young. I’m a mother, an advocate, and I live in poverty.

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I work hard to take care of my family. For the last 22 years I worked as a certified nursing assistant, but I still lived in poverty and needed government assistance to put food on the table and to keep my kids healthy. Two months ago, the company I worked for closed and I was laid off. Now without my job, my struggle is even more difficult.  I only receive $33 a month in food stamps—barely enough to get my family through one healthy meal. My kids need fruit and vegetables, but I simply cannot afford them.

Last week, my 10-year-old son asked, “Mom, why do you cry so much?”

I told him, “Because I want to take care of you and your sister, but it’s so hard.”

But why is it so hard, Senator?

It’s hard because wages are too low.
It’s hard because we have to beg for scraps when we need help.
And it’s hard because of politicians like you, Senator Toomey.

You have everything I want: a safe home to go to, a job that pays a good wage, and a family in good health.  But you want to take away the little bit I have by cutting programs that help me—and people like me—feed my family.  That hurts us.  That keeps us down. And that makes me angry.

You are wrong, Senator Toomey.
You are wrong if you don’t protect these programs.
You are wrong if you don’t care about my family.

Would you be able to survive one week in my shoes?  Would you be able to manage the daily struggle of trying to feed your family? Manage the stress of not knowing if you will be able to pay rent for the month? Manage the fear that your child may need health care that you cannot afford?

If I were in your shoes, and had the power to help a mother with two disabled children, I would do it.  I would make sure she has the services she needs to care for her family.  I would take care of the more than 1.6 million people in Pennsylvania who live paycheck to paycheck.

Senator Toomey, as a member of Witnesses to Hunger, my sisters and I will continue to speak out and fight for the needs of our children, families, and communities.

It’s your responsibility to do the same.

“Momma, I’m hungry.”

My chest tightens, a visceral reaction to these words, because I know I cannot feed them what they need.

“Okay, baby.”

I leave the bedroom, making sure to quickly close the door behind me, and I’m hit with an icy chill. Shivering from the lack of heat, I walk into the kitchen knowing exactly what I would—and would not—find there.

Pancakes it is.

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While I’m preparing the last of the mix, I realize that there is only enough for one person. I split the pancakes between two little napkins while my own stomach growls ferociously. I walk back into the bedroom. The food is gone almost as soon as I hand it to them.

“I’m still hungry, Momma.”

But I already know. I tickle them in hopes that they forget the churning feeling within their little bellies. My heart breaks.

Getting them ready for the doctor is more ritualistic than the everyday grind. I’m careful to part their hair perfectly, placing the curls into well-groomed styles. Then I pull out two brand new outfits—Christmas gifts from Grandma—that I was saving for a doctor’s appointment or a food pantry visit (whichever came first). I did not qualify for the local food pantry this month, so the doctor’s visit it is. Once my children look as perfect as possible—as normal as possible—we set out in the Volkswagen my sister gifted us. The gas is just about gone.

It is hard to miss the luxury vehicles in the doctor’s office parking lot, or the families tossing half-eaten breakfast sandwiches and lattes into the trash. Once we’re inside I watch a woman at the front desk rummage through crisp dollar bills, searching for one small enough for her co-pay. I think about the $70 I lost by missing work that day.

I’m anxious for the visit to be quick and painless. I know that the doctor will ask questions that I would rather leave unanswered. My children move sluggishly beside me.

“Momma, I’m hungry.”

With weak arms, I lift my smallest child and hold her close while I check in at the desk. After telling the nurse my children’s names and appointment time, I hurry to find a seat—trembling from the weight of my two-year-old child.

The nurse comes to take their weights and measurements, then shows us into Examination Room Three. I change them into the office robes without messing up their hair, and fold their new outfits with precision. As the doctor approaches, I start to worry about what he would say about their progress—or lack thereof—on the growth scale. Are they underweight? Am I a bad mother because I do not have more to give?

The doctor enters the room.

He is always polite, clean, and empathetic. He cares about the children he sees daily, and wants them all to grow healthily. Yet he is ignorant to the realities that the families face—or at least, to the one that my family is facing.

“All seems great,” the doctor says. “Is everything alright at home?”

“I’m just tired and hungry.”

“Me, too! Be sure to eat breakfast next time,” he says, blithely.

As we leave to go home, I listen to the music of my dwindling gas tank. There are 69 cents on my debit card, $12 on my food stamp card, and a week left in the month. My kids have fallen asleep, and I am already thinking about what I will feed them when they wake—singing an all-too-familiar song of hunger.

Elizabeth and her daughter, Jennifer, are Loudon County residents that struggle with hunger.  Both women once had full-time jobs, but Elizabeth was let go from her job as a car mechanic when she injured her wrist. Then, Jennifer had to quit her job to help care for Elizabeth’s four-year-old daughter.

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Elizabeth and Jennifer’s story is far from unique.  Life is equally tough for Donna of Washington County, Maine.  In an effort to feed herself, the 77-year-old grows vegetables when weather permits but she still has difficulty covering her bills and buying food. And in Bartlett, Texas, Stephen, his wife Victoria, and their 4-year-old son face a similar struggle. For a time, Stephen says, the family was “living the American dream” in a 3-bedroom house with a 2-car garage.  But when Victoria’s mother developed Parkinson’s, the family moved from Lubbock to Bartlett to care for her.  The cost of the move consumed their life savings.  While Stephen hunted for another job, he and Victoria relied on a food pantry about 25 miles away for regular meals.

Food insecurity exists in every county across the country

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that more than 48 million people in America—including 15 million children—are food-insecure.  In April, Feeding America released new research that proves that this is not an isolated problem: food insecurity exists in every county in the United States.

For six consecutive years, we’ve conducted a comprehensive study called Map the Meal Gap to improve our understanding of hunger and to fight food insecurity at the local, regional, and national levels.  Our most recent analysis shows hunger’s vast reach.  On average, the food-insecurity rate among the nation’s 3,142 counties is a staggering 14.7 percent (and the numbers are even higher for children).  Food insecurity ranged from a high of 38 percent in Jefferson County, Mississippi to a low of 4 percent in Loudoun County, Virginia.

But these numbers don’t tell the whole story.  As Elizabeth, Donna, and Stephen’s experiences suggest, a complex relationship exists between food insecurity and multiple, interconnected factors like unemployment, poverty, and income.

Unemployment drives hunger and poverty

Unemployment is the primary driver of food insecurity.  The average unemployment rate across all counties was 6.3 percent in 2014, compared to an average of 9.2 percent among the top 10 percent of counties with the highest food-insecurity rates.  We also found that the unemployment rate had a statistically significant effect on the rate of food insecurity, a relationship supported by the academic literature.  Simply put, without income that comes from a job, people often lack the resources to purchase an adequate amount of food.

Hunger, poverty, and federal programs

According to the USDA there are 353 counties struggling with “persistent poverty,” where at least one-fifth of the population has been living in poverty for 30 years.  There is also a significant overlap between these counties and those that fall into the top 10 percent for food insecurity nationwide: of the latter, nearly two-thirds suffer from persistent-poverty.

Moreover, hardship doesn’t necessarily stop once someone is above the income eligibility threshold for federal nutrition assistance.  In fact, there is considerable food insecurity among families that are ineligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): More than one-fourth of all food-insecure people live in households with incomes above 185 percent of the poverty level, and thus are ineligible for federal food assistance programs.

Consider a man trying to recover from a job loss or a medical emergency that plunged his family into hardship. Over time he cobbles together a number of part-time jobs. A local food agency provides nutritious meals and even helps enroll him and his family in federal assistance programs. Through hard work and frugality, the family saves $10 to $15 every month. They slowly approach self-sufficiency, a precarious tipping point in which they’ll either slide back into poverty or move forward with their lives.  At that very moment, certain federal programs halt because they’ve reached the income threshold.

Earning too much and not enough

Among all people struggling with hunger in the U.S., more than half—56 percent—have incomes above the federal poverty level.

There are now 115 counties where the majority of food-insecure individuals are likely ineligible for most federal nutrition assistance programs based on their household income. Beyond the help of friends and relatives, charitable organizations are often the primary resource available to them.  My organization, Feeding America, serves some 46.5 million people annually through a nationwide network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs. But we cannot address hunger without strong federal nutrition programs.

Even after the end of the Great Recession, we continue to witness historically high levels of food insecurity. Many stories illustrate the complicated circumstances that push people into a state of food insecurity and, in many cases, anchor them there for years. But by working together and implementing data-driven solutions, we can move closer to creating a hunger-free America.

This displacement has resulted in significant demographic shifts across the D.C. area. Until recently, black families comprised a majority of the city’s residents—about 60 percent in 2000. But as of 2014, only 49 percent of Washingtonians are black. Black families who have been displaced from the city due to its high cost of living have been replaced by an influx of mostly white newcomers, along with a growing Latino population.

Gentrification in our cities isn’t new, nor are the debates that surround it. But what is less discussed is how gentrification weakens displaced families’ access to social services that are critical to achieving social mobility. In D.C., local organizations and advocates that work to bring food access to low-income families have watched the number of families they serve dwindle.

One such organization is Martha’s Table, a nonprofit that has been part of the fabric of D.C.’s 14^th Street Corridor for over 35 years. Martha’s Table provides everything from early childhood education and after-school programming to youth employment and service learning opportunities. It is perhaps best known for its Healthy Eating Initiative, which coordinates mobile food trucks and farmers markets, reaching some 20,000 residents a year.

But its holistic efforts to ensure that services are meeting the needs of the surrounding community have been compromised by a troubling trend: long-time residents and Martha’s Table beneficiaries are being priced out of the neighborhood. New residential and commercial developments in the historically black neighborhood have attracted a flood of white, affluent newcomers. Due to the lack of affordable housing in D.C., low-income residents are pushed to the periphery of the city and surrounding suburbs, which has undermined the ability of city-based organizations like Martha’s Table to serve them. As Director of Stakeholder Engagement Ryan Palmer says: “35 years ago, this was the epicenter of all of the things that we are trying to address. Now people are taking two to three buses to get here.” In order to stay true to its mission of working in the communities it serves, Martha’s Table is reducing services in its current location and moving its headquarters east of the Anacostia River to Wards 7 and 8 by 2018.

Even when residents don’t leave the neighborhood, they now have to travel far and wide for basic necessities. Kim Williams is a mother of three children who have benefitted from Martha’s Table programming for four years. She has lived in the 14^th Street neighborhood for over 35 years and has seen how its changes have shaped her family’s access to healthy, affordable food. “I can’t afford to grocery shop in the area, so I physically live in the neighborhood but I leave to shop for food. The stores in the neighborhood are for new people coming [here]—not for the families who have been here for generations.”

Williams went onto discuss the tradeoffs she is forced to make to ensure she has food for her family. “It’s more cost-effective for me to buy meals from McDonald’s than to spend money on healthy food. And if I do buy healthy food, something else suffers—I won’t be able to pay my bills or something else.”

In an effort to bring a comprehensive set of services into a single location, Martha’s Table is now engaging residents of Wards 7 and 8 in order to shape what will be provided at their new headquarters. But these efforts may be undermined by looming residential and retail development projects that would add 900,000 square feet of commercial properties and 500  residences to Martin Luther King Avenue, a mere 8 percent of which will be affordable housing units. The development is already projected to shift the demographics of these neighborhoods. As Martha’s Table’s Palmer told TalkPoverty, “I would be lying if I said I haven’t wondered what changes will happen in the neighborhood between now and the two years when we get there.”

Across the city, D.C. Central Kitchen (DCCK) has also experienced the effects of gentrification. Through its Healthy Corners effort, DCCK sells nearly 88,000 healthy food products in corner stores throughout low-income wards. But increased rents in those areas have undermined efforts to increase participation in the program.  As Chief Development Officer of DCCK Alexander Moore states, corner store owners are “worried about getting a return on their investment and that makes it much tougher to integrate those stores into our program.” And, due to the decreased supply of affordable housing that arises from gentrification, many store owners simply cannot afford to live in the community where their store is located—which makes them less invested in building the community relationships necessary for marketing the healthy produce and increasing food access for low-income residents. The end result? Low-income residents are unable to access fresh, affordable produce at the local corner stores, while affluent newcomers have access to multiple full-service grocery stores within walking distance of their homes.

The effects of gentrification have also spilled over into the organization’s employment programs. DCCK offers a 14-week Culinary Job Training Program to more than 100 residents in order to prepare them for careers in the food service industry. This initiative has a hiring rate of over 90 percent for graduates. But, due to displacement, there is a growing demand for job training from Maryland residents who once lived in the District. It’s not unheard of for DCCK to provide job training to a parent living in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, while their child resides at a family member’s apartment in the District so they have access to D.C. public schools.

A key way to meet the needs of long-time neighborhood residents—rather than simply shifting them elsewhere—is by investing in more equitable development strategies that ensure the engagement of these residents in the planning, implementation and evaluation of development projects. Currently, there is little opportunity for residents to actively participate in discussions about changes in their neighborhoods. In a recent interview for Empower D.C., Linda Brown, a public housing resident, stated, “The main thing is that residents aren’t presented with the facts and so they can’t make sound decisions or have any input if they’re not presented with the facts.” Brown said that residents are often asked for input only once development processes have begun to take place, at which point they wield very little power or influence.

One hope for ensuring that long-time residents are able to reap the benefits of food-access initiatives is D.C.’s inaugural Food Policy Council. The Council will work to promote food access, sustainability, and a local food economy in which residents, local schools, hospitals and other organizations buy locally-grown food. Advocates like DCCK’s Moore see this development as positive. He is hopeful the Council can provide a “forum for diverse insights for what we need to do with our food system” by “investing purposefully in equity and ensuring all community voices are at the table.”

Organizations like Martha’s Table and D.C. Central Kitchen have set a good example for addressing inequities that are compounded by gentrification, such as hunger and food insecurity.  The Food Policy Council has the potential to expand upon these efforts by making a more sustainable local food economy in the city. But unless we engage the very communities that these programs intend to support, these initiatives will serve a shrinking population—and not because low-income residents have achieved social mobility, but because they have been priced out.

As one of millions in this country struggling to make ends meet, I am weary of inequality and poverty—not only from my own personal hardship and the financial hurdles that exhaust me each day, but also because of the differences in treatment I experience compared to the more affluent.

Case in point: Denver, my hometown—one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. In Denver, the poor and the well-off are practically on each other’s doorsteps. On the 16^th Street Mall in Downtown Denver, young professionals walk past homeless individuals daily. Recent college graduates hit the bar scenes in posh Cherry Creek or the exploding RiNo District as minimum wage workers prepare customers’ food and clean their homes—just one of the two or three jobs they likely juggle. At the King Soopers in Stapleton, one customer pays for groceries with a Platinum MasterCard and the next with an EBT card. And in areas like Park Hill, while the majority-black side of the neighborhood struggles with poverty and gang violence, middle and upper class families—mostly non-minorities—live in architecturally ornate homes valued at over a half-million dollars.

These inequalities are more than visual—they add to the huge burden that already weighs on those of us who face economic hardship. Research has demonstrated that inequalities in the housing market drive up rents, and Denver is no exception. While I am grateful that my children and I have been able to live in a two-bedroom apartment for eight years, my rent went up by 11 percent this year and it has been a struggle to meet that increase every month. At this point, I cannot afford a three-bedroom rental (which would be helpful to accommodate my growing children), let alone secure the money to put down a deposit.

And there are also psychological impacts that arise from these inequalities. A 2010 study highlighted this phenomenon when it revealed that countries with high levels of income inequality face high rates of mental illness. In no country was this more evident than in the United States, where income inequality is associated with heightened risk of depressive symptoms and anxiety disorders. This also applies to Denver—I’ve seen firsthand that where there is stark hardship in close proximity to wealth, there will be unrest and desperation.

There are times when I struggle with envy, wishing that I could simply afford a bigger place to live that was closer to the kids’ schools, my evening and weekend jobs, and our friends. My children and I are frugal and enjoy everything we can on a minimal budget—which means not going to full-price movies more than two to three times a year, rarely visiting museums or attending events that cost money, and avoiding vacations. In fact, last summer my kids and I took our first vacation in years—and it was 48 hours long. While we appreciate all that we are able to do and what we do have, it only exacerbates our hardship when we struggle to make rent month after month, and then look across the street to see a manicured lawn, two nice cars, and a double- or triple-sized garage attached to the five bedroom house that holds a family of four.

To make matters worse, my daughter’s friends started excluding her from their plans, saying, “There wouldn’t be a problem if you just had an iPhone.” My child was distraught, telling me, “They don’t understand because their parents haven’t lost their jobs, they’re not on food stamps, and they live in nice homes and drive nice cars.”

The inequalities don’t stop there. We can’t afford to live close to school so my kids spend a significant chunk of their after-school time in the car and with me at work. When other kids are benefiting from enrichment activities outside of the classroom (and have nannies to facilitate the process), my kids go without because I am not always able to be there at drop-off or pick-up time due to my unusual work schedule, and I cannot always afford the fees. It’s these kind of income-based differences in afterschool participation that fuel the widening achievement gap between rich and poor.

And then there are health issues. I haven’t been to a dentist in years because it has been a major challenge to find one who still accepts Medicaid—it’s generally more cost-effective for doctors’ offices to accept private insurance, which more and more Denver residents are able to afford. Unfortunately, the same principle applies to mental health care. And when those in poverty or on the brink of it cannot afford care, mental health needs often go untreated. Meanwhile, those who can afford a therapist or psychologist get the help that they need and it positively impacts their health.

The fact is that how much money you have relative to others matters: from the level of health care you can afford, to the quality of your kids’ education, to where you can live. And as the gap widens between those who have enough and those who are barely making it, it threatens to divide us as a country and as a society.

In some of the worst performing states, almost one in five households don’t consistently have the resources to put food on the table.

Despite performing so poorly, many states on this list have adopted conservative policies that have made life harder for low-income families:

• States like Ohio are restricting access to food stamps for unemployed residents—even if they live in regions with few job opportunities. Governor Kasich’s administration has opted to reinstate a three-month time limit on nutrition assistance benefits for some unemployed adults ages 18 to 50 who are not disabled or raising minor children, even though some counties within the state are eligible for federal waivers of this requirement. Advocates have charged that this decision disproportionately impacts minorities, as the state accepted waivers for counties with predominantly white residents while refusing them for counties largely populated by people of color.

• Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas maintain restrictive asset tests for nutrition assistance, which decreases low-income families’ self-sufficiency by requiring them to spend down their savings or sell off assets to access assistance. Assets are important for economic mobility generally. For example, when working-age families can put aside even sums of less than $2,000—they are less likely to face hardships such as running short on food, forgoing needed health care, or having the utilities turned off.

In some of the worst performing states, almost one in three children live in poverty.

Despite performing so poorly, many states on this list have adopted conservative policies that have made life harder for low-income children:

• In Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, fewer than 10 families for 100 living in poverty can access cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Arizona presents a particularly brutal example of prioritizing cutting families off of aid over cutting poverty. Although the state still faces one of the nation’s highest child poverty rates, it has dramatically reduced eligibility. As a result, the number of families served by TANF fell 61 percent between December 2006 and December 2013.

• Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina fully ban individuals with felony convictions from accessing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and TANF—even well after they have served their sentence. Such bans increase the risk of parents being unable to provide for their children’s basic needs or being charged with child neglect; these policies also encourage recidivism by denying individuals the services they need to successfully reenter society after incarceration.

• Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee do not allow incarcerated noncustodial parents to pause child support orders—this policy traps non-custodial parents in a vicious cycle of debt, nonpayment, and even re-incarceration, further undermining their ability to be involved with their children. It is this cycle that led to the tragic death of Walter Scott, a South Carolina father who was pulled over for a broken tail light and then shot in the back while trying to flee law enforcement for fear of being arrested for owing child support debt.

While hunger is difficult for any family to endure, those with very young children seem to be the hardest hit. Researchers estimate that half of all children under age 3 live in low-income or poor households. The challenge of finding child care that is both trustworthy and affordable makes it all the more difficult for parents who are trying to work their way out of poverty.  For families with employed mothers living in poverty and making child care payments, 36 percent of the family’s monthly income is spent on child care.

As a result of these high costs, too many families are forced to choose between child care, meals, and other basic necessities.  But the CACFP indirectly subsidizes child care by providing healthy meals and snacks for young children at care facilities. By providing these resources, the tradeoffs that most low-income families make in securing child care become a little easier to manage.

Given that child care is now more expensive than in-state college tuition in many states, the affordability of quality child care should be the prime focus of any CACFP reform effort. The law that authorizes this program – which served nearly 2 billion meals last year, mostly to young children – is scheduled to expire this September. As Congress considers the next Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, it marks an opportunity to renew and strengthen our public investment in quality child care and education. The CACFP not only makes quality child care more affordable for countless families, it also encourages school readiness for children who are at the greatest risk of developmental delays – health outcomes that are often connected to frequent hunger and food insecurity.

A few key changes to CACFP would allow the program to reach more children and families who need to access these benefits. Current reimbursement rates for the sites providing the meals are inadequate and out of step with rising food costs, especially as quality child care centers strive to serve healthier meals. Moreover, since many parents are now working longer and nontraditional hours, the next Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act should allow three meals per day to be reimbursed by the CACFP, instead of the current two meals.

Administrative procedures also need to be updated. Congress should reform the CACFP area eligibility test so that more sites are able to participate in the program. Further, we should recognize that CACFP is the direct point of contact between government and our most vulnerable young citizens, and use the program to ensure safe child care settings that promote best practices.

By taking these modest steps we can expect to see more accessible, affordable, quality child care centers. And if parents can count on these programs to keep their kids healthy and secure, they’re better able to work and support their families.

Editor’s note: To learn more, read “How the Child and Adult Care Food Program Improves Early Childhood Education”.

Alyssa Peterson: Can you explain the mission of D.C. Central Kitchen (DCCK)?

Mike Curtin: We run a whole portfolio of social enterprise programs including catering and a locally-sourced, scratch-cooked school [meals] service here in D.C.

We also run culinary job training classes for men and women with histories of incarceration, addiction, abuse, homelessness, and chronic unemployment. We work with them intensely for 14 weeks, and empower them to find employment in the hospitality sector. If we have openings available, we will hire job training program graduates [for our social enterprise] programs… One of the beautiful things about [DCCK] is that 45% of our 150 employees are graduates of our program.

Our basic model is using what’s existing around us; whether that’s food that’s going to be thrown away, or people that have been marginalized, or kitchens that aren’t being used, or produce from farms that isn’t commercially viable because it’s aesthetically or geometrically challenged– it’s too big, or too small, or too skinny, it doesn’t fit in the right box.

We prepare 5,000 meals a day out of our main kitchen, using predominantly food that would have otherwise been thrown away from restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, food wholesalers, food producers, and farms. We then send the meals we prepare to agencies [(non-profits and shelters)] that are working to empower and liberate their clients. We are very intentional about this model. Our goal isn’t to simply pass out food in the hopes that someday that will end hunger. We’re never going to feed our way out of hunger.

Alyssa: In terms of empowering and liberating clients, do you have an example of that?

Mike Curtin: The goal is to help people get to the place of self-sufficiency so that they have a job that pays a good wage that hopefully has benefits. One of the things that we often forget when we talk about civil rights leaders in the past, such as Dr. King, Gandhi, Chavez, or Bobby Kennedy, is that these folks were not just talking about physical inclusion.

Dr. King was not fighting and ultimately dying for the right for anyone to walk into any restaurant and sit at any table; [it] was for the right for anyone to walk into any restaurant, to sit at any table, and to be able to afford that meal. So it’s the economic freedom and the economic inclusion that we’re looking for.

For example, a student comes from a shelter into our training program. They’ve been incarcerated, maybe in a halfway house, maybe in prison for 30 years. Maybe this person is in their 50s and has never had a job. Maybe this person has children. And they come to us, and they go through the training program, and they get a job. And they get out of the halfway house. They get their own apartment. They support their families. That’s empowerment. That’s liberation. It’s a small start, but it’s a start.

Some of the most rewarding times for us are when graduates come in and show a gas bill or a lease they just signed. Someone may come in with a new set of keys to a house, and the only people that they’ve known that have had keys for the last 30 years were prison guards.

Alyssa: What separates your training program from others and also contributes to its success?

Mike Curtin: I think one of the things that makes the program different is that it’s part of this larger enterprise. People that work here in the kitchen are graduates of [our training] program. The woman who’s the director of that program was a heroin addict for 20 years. She got clean and went to culinary school and then eventually ended up coming here.

Even if some of us don’t have those particular stories, all of us come here a little broken, including myself. But I’ve been lucky to live in safe communities, go to good schools, and have a stable family life. I made a lot of mistakes, but I always had someone put me back on track.

A lot of the folks that come to us didn’t have those privileges. For that reason, we meet people where they are. In the old charity model in America, there’s one group—typically the wealthier, white group— saying, “Thank goodness that we’re here for you poor, uneducated, and formerly incarcerated people. Now we’re going to save you. Now we’re going to help you.”

In contrast, we really try to create this environment where we’re all around this same table. [It] will only work if we work together, regardless of whether a person is a felon, an addict, or homeless. We’re all cutting the same carrots, and we’re all learning how to do this together.

Alyssa: Does DCCK do a lot of advocacy in D.C.? Were you involved in the Ban the Box fight, for example?

Mike Curtin: We were. We are not an advocacy organization per se, [but] we work very closely with other organizations in town that are advocacy organizations.

Ban the Box was a big thing for us. We’ve been banging that drum for at least ten years. We know that the majority of people who get out of prison reoffend and go back again mostly because they can’t get a job. At DCCK, our recidivism rate is less than 2.5% because people get jobs, and they feel like they’re part of something bigger. They want to be part of the community. Nobody wants to be in prison, [and] nobody wants to live in the shelter.

Alyssa: It seems like your business model differs markedly from companies that don’t necessarily share your purpose. Why do you pay good wages and benefits as a company?

Mike Curtin: I don’t think we can expect other employers to provide benefits and pay living wages if we don’t do it ourselves. What we want to do is act as a model for what’s possible.

We start everyone at a living wage. We paid 100% of health insurance long before the ACA [(Affordable Care Act)] was ever around. Everyone has short-term and long-term disability insurance and a life insurance policy. We make a 50% match to every dollar that someone contributes to our 401k plan. We have a very liberal, very generous paid vacation and time off policy. Everyone who works here…from the newest hourly employer to myself has the exact same benefits.

However, in many ways we have an advantage. We are a mission-motivated business. We’re in business not to make dollars, but to make change in both senses of that word. We’re okay if we run our businesses, and we break even because the act of running that impact-oriented business has accomplished many of our goals.

We want business in general and others to think more like we do. A lot of people are saying now that non-profits need to think and act more like businesses. To a certain degree, yes. We have payroll to make just like everyone else. We have bills to pay, gas to put in our trucks, uniforms to buy, and food to purchase. But I think the role of non-profits—particularly non-profits who are operating social enterprises—is to get businesses to think more like non-profits and to recognize the value of these multiple bottom lines.

Because hunger is an ongoing problem in America, our nation has steadfastly supported a federal nutrition assistance program that feeds hungry families as it boosts local economies. Though some politicians disingenuously argue otherwise, it still does both of those things very well.

SNAP reduces food insecurity and, in 2012 alone, lifted more than 4 million Americans out of poverty. More than half of those individuals—2.1 million—were children, who are potentially the most devastated by hunger due to increased risk of poor health, hospitalizations, developmental delays, behavioral problems and low academic achievement. Of course, food insecurity causes harm at every age, and SNAP is effective as well for millions of seniors and working-age adults in blunting the harshest impacts of hunger and poverty.

In terms of economic benefits, SNAP creates markets, and spurs economic growth and jobs in both rural and urban communities, at grocers, farmers’ markets, military commissaries, manufacturers and farms. In addition, because SNAP beneficiaries spend 97 percent of their allotments in the month they are issued, the economy as a whole benefits. Research conducted by Moody’s Analytics and USDA estimate that there is between $1.73 to $1.79 in economic growth per $1 of SNAP benefits.

With so many proven advantages—not to mention a historically recognized moral and bipartisan responsibility to care for our nation’s most vulnerable citizens—why do so many leaders attempt to justify cutting the program, or trot out tired reform proposals we know won’t work?

For example, the recent Farm Bill cut SNAP benefits and access to the program in several ways, hurting low-income, hungry people as well as our economy.

Most recently, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan doubled-down on a warmed over bad idea when he proposed to take 11 safety net programs, including SNAP, and convert them into a single block grant for states, with few minimum standards other than the kinds of harsh conditions for beneficiaries that Rep. Ryan favors.

Ironically, the weaknesses of programs converted into block grants—how they lose support over time as their goals are watered down, funds are diverted to more politically powerful constituents, and the grant become less effective and more vulnerable to attack—are highlighted by Rep. Ryan’s companion proposal. He would expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to childless workers—a good step—but pay for it by eliminating the Title XX Social Services Block Grant, as well as other low-income programs, including the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program for children and the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program.

Such proposals are a waste of policymakers’ time and focus. Our nation would be much better served by implementing thoughtful solutions to hunger that focus on expanding opportunity and reducing poverty, rather than weakening programs that support working and unemployed adults, children and seniors.

First and foremost, we need to improve economic outcomes for families in the workforce through better wages, benefits, and supports like the EITC and the refundable Child Tax Credit. We need to strengthen child nutrition programs so children have access to food both in and out of school. We also need to improve SNAP so people have more resources to purchase a healthy diet. The current, woefully inadequate monthly allotments are based on the outmoded Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), a descendant of a diet developed for emergency use in the 1930s.

A recent Institute of Medicine report found that SNAP benefits are not enough for most beneficiary households—and don’t do enough for food security and food purchasing power. Other research—including USDA’s own analysis of a recent (temporary and now eliminated) benefit increase provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—has shown the powerful effect of a healthier allotment.

Fifty years after our nation’s legislators took on the fight against hunger, today’s leaders need to put politics aside.  It’s time to acknowledge SNAP’s necessity and value; correct its shortcomings and build on its strengths; and celebrate its historic contribution to the well‐being of America and its people.

Many low-income students rely on school meals as a primary source of nutrition. While Congress hasn’t been able to agree on much these days, it was able to unite around the issue of improving the diets of children in America.  Why? Because of the overwhelming scientific evidence that the diets of our children are setting them up for a lifetime struggling with disease.  One in 3 children in the U.S. are obese.  A 2012 study by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation predicted that obesity rates in the U.S. could exceed 44 percent by 2030, costing our country an additional $66 billion per year in medical expenses. Poor eating patterns are major contributors to childhood obesity and other chronic diseases that begin in childhood, such as Type 2 Diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

But instead of allowing the implementation of these new well-founded nutrition standards, the House Appropriations Committee passed a 2015 funding bill in May that weakened standards.  That’s when the outcry began; eighty-five organizations  spoke out against the gutting of the new standards in a joint letter:

“ We… strongly oppose efforts… to change or weaken federal child nutrition programs, including potential efforts to require the inclusion of white potatoes in the WIC Program, to alter or delay implementation of meal standards in the National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program, or to weaken or delay rules to limit sugary beverages and unhealthy snack foods in our nation’s schools. For decades, Congress has wisely ensured that federal child nutrition programs have been guided by science. Science-based decisions have served our children and our nation well. Accordingly, we strongly urge you to oppose efforts to intervene in science-based rules regarding the federal child nutrition programs.”

The new standards for school lunches and snacks set forth in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act were written in collaboration with the School Nutrition Association (SNA), which represents 55,000 “school nutrition professionals.” But SNA has now withdrawn their support for the very rules they helped to create.  Last week, SNA CEO Patti Montague asked First Lady Michelle Obama to support the House bill and its weaker nutrition standards.

“Our members simply want relief from some of the onerous regulations slated to take effect this summer,” Montague said. “[They] will lead to fewer students receiving healthy school meals, more food being thrown away and many school meal programs in financial straits”.

In a letter to the First Lady and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, SNA also requested that the USDA or Congress act to prevent raising the standard for whole grains; maintain the current standard for permissible sodium levels, rather than improving it; and eliminate the requirement that students take a fruit or vegetable with their meals.

SNA justifies its new position in part by claiming that the new standards have led to more plate waste and decreased participation in the school lunch program. But the USDA points to a recent study by the Harvard School of Public health indicating that the new standards have not led to increased plate waste, and that data shows participation has actually been on the decline since 2006.

So what’s really behind this new plea from SNA?

According to writer Bettina Elias Siegel of TheLunchTray.com, we need to look at SNA’s corporate ties.  The organization receives significant funding from companies like Kraft, ConAgra and PepsiCo.  These corporate sponsors would surely benefit from the loosening of school lunch standards because they would not have to reformulate popular brands in order to sell to school districts.   Also, huge food service corporations like Aramark, Sodexo and Chartwell (Compass)—which operate approximately one-fourth of school lunch programs in the US—get a lot of their business from these same major food corporations.  As noted in a New York Times editorial, “An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market – fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.”

So are there legitimate concerns raised by SNA in regard to budgets, food waste and student acceptance of healthier foods?  Sure.  But maybe its response to these issues would be quite different if SNA were not financially hitched to Big Food.

The good news is that the First Lady is not backing down.  She came to her meeting with SNA accompanied by Dr. James Perrin, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Perrin reminded the group that children consume up to half of their daily calories in school, so it’s important that those calories are high-quality. He called the rollback of standards “the wrong choice for children”—one that would “put politics ahead of science.”

Or perhaps, more accurately, it’s a choice that puts money and profits ahead of science and children.

The House bill also restricts funding for a summer food pilot program to rural counties in Appalachia. While this language would not, as some media reports have erroneously implied, end all summer meals programs for children in cities, it is still troubling.

The pilot program in question is the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children (SEBTC), which the USDA initially piloted in 2011 as an alternative approach to providing food assistance to children during the summer. It was designed to address a major barrier in the current Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) – namely, that children must eat meals onsite at community locations. For families with limited access to transportation, and for parents who work, taking children to a meal site in the middle of the day can be a challenge. Instead, SEBTC provides low-income families with an Electronic Benefits Transfer card (like a pre-paid debit card) that contains $60 per child per month – about the same amount the federal government spends per child on school meals – that can be used to buy groceries.

In its first two years, SEBTC was tested in rural and urban areas in eight states and two tribal nations in different regions of the U.S., and was effective in reducing child hunger. Nine out of ten families issued SEBTC benefits used them, and the program eliminated very low food security for one-third of the children who would otherwise have experienced it. Children in participating households also ate more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and drank fewer sugary beverages. And with increasing child hunger during the summer when school’s out, but stubbornly low participation in SFSP nationally, it is promising that USDA is testing innovative strategies that work in communities across the country – urban, suburban, and rural. These results are so promising that Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) is sponsoring the Stop Child Summer Hunger Act, which would expand SEBTC nationwide beginning in 2016.

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While the House Appropriations bill  would leave intact the larger summer meals program in urban, rural, and suburban areas, it would limit the successful SEBTC pilot program only to Appalachian counties.  That would mean the program would reach only a fraction of children living in poverty and experiencing food insecurity across the country, and it would also have deeply racialized outcomes – primarily benefiting White children. It is true that Appalachia has high rates of poverty and has for generations. However, only 7 of the 50 counties with the highest child poverty rates in the nation are in Appalachia; most of the others are in the Mississippi Delta and neighboring areas in Alabama and Georgia. And the counties with the largest numbers of children living in poverty are urban. In fact, pilot programs in just four counties – Los Angeles County, CA; Harris County, TX (Houston); Cook County, IL (Chicago); and Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix) – would reach more children below the poverty line than pilot programs in all 418 Appalachian counties.

Likewise, limiting SEBTC to Appalachia in essence restricts participation in the program to majority White communities, excluding counties – both urban and rural – with high percentages of people of color. The Appalachian Regional Commission reports that Appalachia is 83.5% White, a much larger majority than the country overall, which is 63.7% White. Additionally, only 13 of the 50 counties with the highest child poverty rates are majority White – though 49 of those counties are rural. MSNBC reported earlier this year that the county with the highest overall food insecurity in the nation (Humphreys County, MS), and the one with the highest child food insecurity in the nation (Zavala County, TX), are similar in a few ways: “Both are in poor, rural areas of the South, [and] have socially and economically isolated populations.” They are both majority people of color, as well. But they are not in Appalachia.

These facts are not surprising when you consider how poverty disproportionately impacts people of color in both urban and rural areas. The national poverty rate is 14.3%; however, nearly one in four people who identify as Native American, Black, or Latino live below the poverty line. The poverty rate for Whites, on the other hand, is well below that of other racial groups and the nation overall, at 9.9%.

Geography, poverty, and race intersect in the U.S. in profound ways, and have for centuries, due to countless policies that have restricted access to economic and geographic resources by race. With its current proposal, the House continues the common practice of building policies that perpetuate racial inequities without actually naming race. If we want to ensure that all hungry children are fed—and all families have access to the most convenient and effective ways of feeding their children—then we have to make sure that our policies are truly inclusive of every child, considering both where they live and their racial identity.

Ending child hunger and ending racial inequities are not mutually exclusive. They must go hand in hand.

We think we know what poverty is, but when pushed, it really isn’t easy to define. Poverty seems to be about not having enough, about deprivation. But sometimes it’s not easy to know how much is enough.

Poverty can be considered, and measured, as absolute—based on an agreed upon minimum level of resources that no one should be allowed to sink below, usually connected to a minimum level of basic needs. Or it can be considered as relative—based on some “standards of the community.” It can also be measured as “subjective”—based on levels of resources that individuals believe and report that they need in order to be healthy, satisfied, or happy.

In the US we use a “quasi-absolute” measure of poverty. It is historically based on an estimate of the cost of a minimally nutritious diet. So it is connected to a floor, or minimum level of resources that no one should be allowed to sink below, but a floor that supposedly supports a healthy life. This “official” poverty measurement emerged in the early 1960s based on the work and insights of Mollie Orshansky.

Working for the Social Security Administration , Orshansky was tasked with developing a response to a Congress member’s question about how much it costs a retired couple to live. Orshansky examined USDA data and found that in 1955 the average household of three or more people in the US spent about one-third of its annual income on food, which implied that it spent two-thirds on everything else it needed. So, if you knew how much a healthy diet cost, you could multiply that amount by 3 to arrive at the amount needed to meet basic needs, or the poverty threshold.

And it worked very well. Since she knew the cost of the USDA’s economy food plan (now known as the “Thrifty Food Plan”)—which was supposed to be the lowest cost, minimally nutritious diet—Orshansky multiplied its cost by 3, and she had the basic poverty threshold. Simple but elegant, and quite accurate in the 1960s.  It’s still the basis of the official poverty thresholds today.

But there is a problem with this approach: if the average proportion of income spent on food changes, then the multiplier would need to change, and so would the poverty threshold. And the proportion of income spent on food has indeed changed, as housing and health care costs have absorbed an ever-growing percentage of our annual incomes. In 2012, for example, the average share of expenditures spent on food for all consumer units was just 12.8%—far below the 33% in Orshansky’s day. Using her elegant logic, we would therefore need to multiply the cost of the minimally nutritious diet by 7.8—instead of 3—to accurately arrive at the basic 2012 poverty thresholds.

Using 2012 costs, if you multiply the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan for a family of four people by 3, you get $22,604—very close to the Census Bureau’s poverty threshold of $23,283 for a family of four. But if you instead multiply the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan by 7.8, the poverty threshold would be $58,771 per year for that same family.

While that may seem high, it is actually very close to the “Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard” that Diana Pearce estimated was $59,027 for a family of four in Albany County, NY in 2010. And it is a little more than the economic self-sufficiency income level of $54,636 for that same family in Allegheny County, PA in 2012. So Mollie Orshansky’s logic still seems to work reasonably well, it just hasn’t been adjusted to reflect the higher costs of basic necessities for contemporary families.

It is clear that if we accurately applied Mollie Orshansky’s approach to measuring poverty, much higher thresholds would result, and many more households and people would be categorized as living in poverty. In 2012, the median income level for all US households was $51,017.  If $58,771 (7.8 times the Thrifty Food Plan for a family of four in 2012) were the basic poverty threshold, more than half the households in the US would be classified as being in poverty. And that would probably be accurate in terms of the number of families that are unable to afford basic necessities.

Changing how we measure poverty would force a change in the narrative we tell ourselves as a nation.  When something affects half of the nation’s households, it becomes the problem of many more leaders, at all levels of government and society, forcing a recognition that poverty really was never about “them”, it is truly about “us”.  As it is, our measurement of poverty vastly understates the problem, allowing us to continue onward without effectively addressing it.

I frequently hear the argument that we can’t afford to reduce or eliminate poverty, and without doubt it would not be an inexpensive undertaking. But the unstated question this implies is “how much are we willing to pay not to eliminate poverty?” In 2007, four of the best poverty researchers in the country estimated that child poverty alone costs the US in excess of $500 billion per year. This estimate only includes costs arising from foregone earnings, crime, and health care, and is surely an underestimate of the actual total costs of poverty.

So the question we seem to be facing these days is this: “Do we value poverty more than not having poverty?” Are we as a country willing to pay more to have poverty than we are to eliminate poverty? It is an open question, but the answer is emerging rapidly.

So you may be surprised to learn that lately I’ve been asking myself this question:

Is there actually a Food Movement?

25 years ago, as a fledgling chef, I didn’t ask these sorts of questions. I started purchasing fresh food for my restaurant from farmer’s markets because it tasted better. Back then I could actually back my truck up into the market at Union Square and load up on root vegetables and fresh herbs from Guy Jones and the other early farmers who sold vegetables there.  I was buying local and organic — not because I was concerned about the environment or farm workers — but because it simply tasted better and my goal at the time was to be the best chef I could be. It was higher quality food, period.

Around the same time, I was invited to cook at a Share Our Strength Taste of the Nation Fundraiser. I was happy to support SOS’s mission to combat hunger, but frankly, I agreed because it meant I was invited to cook alongside the country’s most elite chefs that night, and I was flattered to be included.

What I learned that evening really made me start to think about hunger in this country.  At the same time, issues pertaining to our food supply and our fisheries became more important to me and I educated myself about them too, with the dawning understanding that my success as a chef rested on the viability of the ingredients at my disposal.

Around this time I started to feel uneasy about the great schism between the variety and quality of what I could offer my guests at restaurants, and the food available to millions of other Americans for whom a meal at Craft or Colicchio & Sons was not an option.  As a chef, it’s my job to feed people, and given my own humble roots, it didn’t feel right to only feed the luckiest few. That was the impulse behind ‘wichcraft – I wanted to offer great, high quality food at a more democratic price point. But that wasn’t enough to quiet my growing discomfort. A $10 artisanal sandwich wasn’t the answer to unequal food access.

Over the years I continued to cook for any group that was tackling hunger. I saw my role as a fundraiser, plain and simple.  When asked, I also lent my voice to groups who were pushing for more sustainable ways of farming the land, and to environmental groups bent on protecting our food and fisheries.

Then, about six years ago, my wife Lori began working on a movie that examined our nation’s hunger crisis.  She was determined to ask some hard questions about how the world’s wealthiest nation could have a massive hunger crisis – a crisis virtually unknown in other wealthy, developed nations.

Making A Place at the Table changed my thinking radically, because I learned a remarkable truth: hunger in the U.S. is solvable. We actually can end it, if we resolve to look honestly and critically at the policies that contribute to the issue.  Other nations have done that, and they are not faced with the same hunger crisis. We, on the other hand, comfort ourselves with charitable work that barely makes a dent in the problem. I was so used to raising money, I thought the answer was food banking. Food banks do really excellent, needed work, but they’re not getting us any closer to ending hunger.

To put it in perspective: The most successful fundraising gala I’ve ever attended raised $2 million dollars to support the food banks of New York City. Earlier this year, Congress voted to slash $8.8 BILLION dollars from SNAP. To make up for $8.8 billion dollars in cuts to food for hungry people, we would need to replicate the success of that fundraiser every single night.  For the next 12 years.

The truth is that the great work of charities is being undermined by really bad policy, and until we face that truth, we’re deluding ourselves. If bad policies — like cruel cuts to food stamps or a minimum wage so low that working people can’t afford food — are creating the problem, then it will take good policies to fix them.  And where do policies get written, decided and voted on? Washington, DC.

Marion Nestle once described a meeting she had on Capitol Hill where she used the term “The Food Movement.” The Congressman chuckled and said, “The food movement? What food movement?” As he saw it there was no food movement because Congress wasn’t hearing from them and they weren’t voting people in and out of office on the basis of these values.

Plain and simple, his point was: you might think you’re a movement, but if you’re not getting anyone elected, then your issues don’t matter here. Sorry.

So far, the food movement has been no match for the food industry, especially on Election Day. And, that’s why so many of our food policies benefit industrial agriculture and giant food processors at the expense of struggling families.

Unfortunately, the Americans most affected by policies that lead to hunger haven’t been able to move the needle on influencing our leaders for obvious reasons – when you’re struggling just to get enough food together for your kids each day, you’re unlikely to be able to focus on organizing a political movement.

For years now, food advocates and hunger advocates have been in silos – so focused on making modest gains that many times we are faced with bargaining between good food policy and reducing hunger.

The key to our success is impossible to ignore – we have to get out of our silos and work together as a political movement.  When that starts to happen, we won’t be in the kind of situation we were in during this last Farm Bill debate, which split people who care about hunger from people who care about healthy diets and organic farmers. We all share the same food values, but we were too divided to deliver the food system Americans overwhelmingly want.

That’s why I worked with food leaders from across the country to help create Food Policy Action.  Finally, we are uniting food leaders from across the country, and are holding legislators accountable. We can see whether or not they share our values. Because that’s what this is about. This is about creating a system that works for everyone. It’s about more than just food: it’s about justice.
Every year, Food Policy Action issues a scorecard that tracks how legislators are voting on the issues we all care about, issues like hunger, nutrition, food access, food and farm workers, food safety, local food and farming, animal welfare, and reforming farm subsidies.

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This kind of accountability is crucial to our ability – as a movement – to promote the policies that will change the way we eat and how our food is grown.  Right now, we have a Gun Rights Movement that votes expressly on Second Amendment Rights.  We have a Pro-Life movement that votes entirely based on Reproductive Rights. It’s time we have a Food Movement that votes on a good fair food system for all.

Now is the time for us to band together with people working on all food issues to make food matter in elections. We can work together to introduce tax incentives that promote the right kind of behavior from industry. We can raise Americans’ awareness of how their leaders are voting on issues that directly impact the quality and availability of their food. We can call out our leaders who show disdain for American eaters by voting for bad food policies and force them to defend those votes in primaries, talk to SNAP recipients, and stare down the 17 million kids who routinely go hungry through no fault of their own.  We can start to vote for good food not with our dollars, but with our votes.

As soon as one legislator loses their job over the way they vote on food issues, it will send a clear message to Congress: We are organized. We’re strong.  Yes, we have a food movement, and it’s coming for you.

Join me, #VOTEFOOD.