Our Hunger Is Political: How Food Insecurity and Mutual Aid are Changing the Political Landscape on the Ground.
Issue No. 6: Food, Nutrition, and Access in Our Communities
Words - Nicole Grennan
Having needs is part of being alive. We need to sleep, to breathe, to eat. Our needs make us vulnerable; if we spend too long without having our basic needs met, we will die. This urgency makes our needs political. They reflect a power relation between the person with needs and their ability to access necessary resources. We need to consider the implications of putting food into our bellies.
Wondering what’s for dinner? Ask the USDA!
In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the politicization of hunger looks like long lines at the food pantry. The number of food insecure households has more than doubled, with at least 22% of families deemed food insecure as of April 2020 compared to 11% in 2018. Despite this, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has directed aid to food banks rather than strengthen the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This puts food banks in competition with grocery stores. It also places pressure on food banks to receive and distribute massive amounts of food to crowds more than double the size they normally are. Plus, they are generally run by volunteers out of spaces with minimal storage and freezer space, making it difficult to feed one in four hungry families.
Additionally, the way food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens are generally run robs food insecure people of their agency. Instead of empowering people to make choices, the USDA is given full control over what nourishes our families. This feeds a false narrative of dependency and shame: food insecurity is an individual failure and food insecure people cannot be trusted to make “the right” decisions for themselves and their families. In some communities, food access organizations are shifting to “client choice” programs, giving power back to individuals to make choices about foods and products for themselves.
The myth of food insecurity as an individual’s failure speaks to a critical piece of America: race. It is well-documented that white wealth can be chalked up to governmental programs that provide access to housing loans, higher quality education, higher paying jobs, and more healthy food options. The USDA’s authority over what food insecure people can eat for dinner—even if that person is food insecure because of government policies and circumstances they can’t control—spreads negative ideas about the reason for our poverty. We end up depending on systems that were intentionally put in place to exploit us.
Reclaiming our hunger
The politicization of hunger also looks a lot like people helping people in the form of mutual aid. According to Big Door Brigade, mutual aid is a “form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.” In other words, mutual aid exists to take the power out of the state’s hand and back into the people’s.
What is the difference between mutual aid and food banks? Andrew Fisher’s book Big Hunger examines the partnerships between food banks and big corporations which make it impossible for food banks to address the root of food insecurity: poverty. Food banks cannot combat hunger because they don’t challenge the systems that create it. In contrast, mutual aid addresses survival needs as plainly political and is therefore approached with long-term, transformative solutions.
Mutual aid is a more productive means to address hunger. While current USDA programs aim to humiliate, mutual aid moves to empower. The things we put into our body—the food, the energy, the love—all impact what we are able to put out. This is why it is so crucial that we cultivate our liberation by reclaiming our hunger, one community-sourced meal at a time. As our communities move towards self-sufficiency through redistribution projects, we move, together, to a world of equitably full tummies.
Mutual aid resources for battling food insecurity:
Food Not Bombs recovers food that would otherwise be discarded to share vegan and vegetarian meals in over 1,000 cities in 65 countries. If you are food insecure or if you would like to start your own chapter, you can call their Hunger Hotline at 1-800-884-1136.
The Okra Project brings home cooked, healthy, and culturally-specific meals and resources to Black Trans People.
This non-comprehensive list of mutual aid funds across the US compiled by Taylor Aldridge and Jessica Lynne of Arts.Black.
POOR Magazine’s ebook, Po' People's Survival Guide thru COVID-19 and the Virus of Poverty.
