This blog was written by Saadhana Deshpande. Deshpande was a part of the 4th class of Zero Hunger Interns with the Congressional Hunger Center and was placed with the Chicago Food Policy Action Council. They are originally from the East Bay and have previously worked in a food pantry at U.C. Berkeley.

Dreaming big is a huge component of mobilizing folks and moving towards actionable change. As activists and dreamers, we simply can’t settle for the smaller victories; rather, we should be constantly questioning, challenging, and disrupting the cultural norms and dominant narrative that make up the status quo. In fact, the smaller “victories” that we might believe are progress may just be poorly-veiled attempts at maintaining and perpetuating systemic injustice. This holds true in the food justice space, as well. Eliminating immediate hunger and food security disparities that exist can only really happen when we shift away from the conditions that create them in the first place. We can’t settle for anything less than that.

The term “food justice” is a nebulous concept, and the ways in which we strive towards that concept are inherently complex. What further complicates things is the ambiguity of certain goals when it comes to re-imagining a more just and equitable food system. What does it mean to dismantle racism and white supremacy in the context of food justice? How do we actualize these dreams, and what does it take to create the paradigm shift that we need to do those things? These questions are crucial to understanding what sorts of efforts need to be initiated in our current food system to align structures and actors that already exist with the dreams and aspirations of the food justice movement. It is for that reason that we should be critically evaluating the food pantry space - a structure that is already present within our food system – and pushing for it to further the goals of food justice and food sovereignty.

There is a lot of tension in the idea of the food pantry being a space where food justice can be actualized. While the idea of free food that is accessible and culturally appropriate may be a radical thought that food justice activists are pushing for, the way that this dream is currently being manifested in pantries is not as equitable or transformative as it could be. The concept of food sovereignty, coined by La Via Campesina, is the “peoples’, Countries’ or State Unions’ right to define their agricultural and food policy, without any dumping vis-a-vis third countries”. This community ownership of food production, distribution, and management is a key part of a more equitable vision of the food pantry model. I dream of a pantry being an access point for fresh, delicious produce, meat, dairy, and bread, with plentiful options that are sourced locally and through fair labor practices. I dream of a pantry being a space where people connect with their food system and actively participate within it, as well as one where relationships are built and sustained between members of a community. There are already efforts to bridge the gap between farms and schools, as well as farms and restaurants. Why is it that food pantries cannot be afforded that right? Why is it that food pantry users are not prioritized when it comes down to who gets to access nutritionally dense, culturally appropriate, and ecologically regenerative food?

Photo by Saadhana Deshpande at U.C. Berkeley Food Pantry

These questions are ones that I was able to investigate through sitting in meetings with CFPAC’s Good Food Purchasing Project Manager, Marlie Wilson. Institutions purchasing less than $1 million worth of food or those that cannot fully lend themselves to the Good Food Purchasing Program can make the Good Food Purchasing Pledge in order to adopt the goals of Good Food Purchasing. The values behind this pledge include Local Economies, Environmental Sustainability, Valued Workforce, Animal Welfare, and Nutrition. Being able to listen to the potential challenges behind the local procurement process (such as the constraints of food pantry budgets) was enlightening, and gave me a lot of insight into how creative the problem-solving strategy has to be in order to circumvent these challenges.

The other aspect of pushing for food justice in food pantry spaces includes acknowledging the inherently political nature of food distribution. I was able to sit down with Dr. Rebecca De Souza, who recently wrote Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma, to better understand the role that food pantries can play in doing this. Feeding the Other is an in-depth exploration of the racial power dynamics that manifest within food pantries in Duluth, Minnesota. Anecdotes from pantry users as well as from the individuals responsible for managing pantry spaces are interwoven within De Souza’s analysis of these dynamics. Some of the most important takeaways from my time with Dr. De Souza related to how pantries could take actionable steps towards a food system that could incorporate principles of food sovereignty. The following script is a shortened version of the interview and includes many of these suggestions.

What is your vision for a utopic food pantry?

Thinking about utopia, I want to start off with what I and what a lot of scholars talk about, which is a rights-based approach to food. That is our utopic vision - that everybody has the right to food. The right to food was set in place around the 1940s with the United Nations Charter of Human Rights. That was reinforced in the 1980s and 1990s, with many instruments created to outline and detail what the right to food is, and how we can implement it in different countries. The United States has not signed off or ratified that right to food. The right to food is the idea that food must be available, accessible, and adequate - those are the three ways in which it is defined. It states that food is necessary for achieving just basic, minimum standard-of-living conditions. That you need food before you can even work – that food is connected to all these other rights. The other thing that it says is that the right to food is not the right to be fed, but the right to feed one’s self in dignity. That’s really key because it’s in direct contrast to anything we do in the food charity world, or food distributive services… There are two options in this charter to do that. One is that people have to have enough resources – land, soil, water, seeds, money to grow, and the agricultural knowledge to grow and produce food for themselves… and the other is to provide people with enough money to buy food in the marketplace. Right away, there are two options, and there are no charities. Either you grow food to consume, or you have enough money to purchase it. The third piece, which is very key, is that governments are responsible for creating environments where people are able to do one or both of these things. Unfortunately, in the United States, we do not have an enabling environment for people to grow their own food. We’re also not giving people money – through livable wages, employment, or benefits to actually buy food in the marketplace. So really, we’re not even close to meeting the bar for the right to food. What we do have is giving people SNAP benefits, but that is not adequate to meet people’s needs. We also need to question the resources you can buy

with SNAP – it’s not exactly the best quality food. When I think about a utopic vision for food or food access, the food pantry is not a part of that picture at all. Utopia and the food pantry are not on the same page. It’s the right to food, either through growing your own food or having enough money to purchase it in the marketplace. Governments have to be responsible for making that happen, not charities. That’s my view. I don’t really care if people want to grow their own food or purchase it in the marketplace. There are a lot of people who would like to grow their own food and have connections to agriculture. I see those two as viable options, in terms of a utopia – when you do that, then people have food that is available, accessible, and adequate.

If we were to reimagine food pantries as a space for transformation, how could food pantries fight for food sovereignty?

A lot of food pantries do want to do better and recognize the current inequities within the food system. They are on board to change these issues through food justice. Recognizing the transition from where they are currently at, and where they want to be, it is a very tricky and hard space to navigate. Sometimes, [it is difficult] ideologically, due to how people think; but also, just structurally – they are in a system that is set up around them, how do [they] get out of that? One of the things that I want to start off by saying is that yes, food pantries were never meant to be subversive, but they were also never meant to remain in existence. Historically, [referencing] Janet Poppendieck’s book or other anti-hunger literature, food pantries were created during the 1980s because of the Recession. Reagan dismantled the welfare safety nets and pushed for charities to be the ones filling the gaps. That was responsible for this exponential rise in food pantries, at that time. This is why they were called “emergency food providers” – they were expected to fill in the gap for a year, or a couple of years, and then disappear. But that didn’t happen. They stayed on the scene, and why? Because people were still hungry, and food insecure because Reaganomics didn’t work. The wealth, the economic prosperity that was promised, did not trickle down. People did not get the benefits that they were supposed to get from this new way of thinking about markets and the political economy. Food pantries didn’t have much of a choice but to keep going. In 30, 40, 50 years, they have become completely institutionalized, and part of the fabric of food banking or food charity at some level. Two-thirds of the country, by some estimates, have something to do with food charity. It’s become a stable part of the structure. So yes, they were not meant to be subversive, but they were also not meant to be permanent fixtures. Anybody involved in food banking needs to learn that history. To recognize that this is not the way that it was meant to be. If we want to get back to a place where we are offering people the right to food, then food banks need to be a part of that process, and they need to be allies in that, and to say, “we need an exit strategy. We were never meant to be here, and we need to figure out a way to secure people the right to food, in ways that are dignifying”. Food charity is an extremely undignified and humiliating way to receive food, and none of us should be getting food in that way. But what should food pantries do in the meanwhile? I’ve come up with three things that I’ve been thinking about, that I’m basing on what people have told me on the receiving end of those services. There’s a lot of policy behind this, but then there are people’s needs, and what people immediately need, and I’m trying to come to some sort of a medium while prioritizing the voices of the people who are at the receiving end of those services. One of the things that I think food pantries should right away, immediately start to do is to make high-quality food available. This is the thing that is their business, and they should do that really well. No substandard, or low-quality food, but high-quality food, and high quality can mean a variety of different things. But typically when you speak to people, it means fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats, proteins, you know, dairy – stuff that kids like, because that's what a lot of the people I spoke to said. But for the most part, that's what people are looking for. I know that many food pantries are trying to go that way. But it's difficult, you know…. Because a lot of that industrially processed food is cheap food. There's not a whole lot of high-quality food being given out for free. So that means the shifting of organizational focus – no longer thinking just in terms of logistics and poundage and how many meals and how many people are served, but actually thinking about the quality of what is being served. The safety of food, the healthfulness of food… Keeping in mind dietary restrictions, and those are all immediate sorts of needs. And this is something that food pantries should work on. The other thing I talk about is providing high-quality services. And I think this is something also that food pantries that are trying to make that move to be more progressive and more food justice-oriented can try to do. I use that word service very broadly, but I mean very specific things. Specifically, I mean they've got to figure out ways in which to eliminate all forms of surveillance and suspicion that sort of lingers in food pantry settings. You've got welfare stigma, stigmas of poverty, stigma, race, the stigma of what you're eating. You’ve just got to audit all of those practices, all of your procedures, all interactions with clients, especially between staff and clients and volunteers and clients to make sure you're not doing any of that. Because you're saying, “I'm not having any part in those stigmatizing beliefs and assumptions”. And then, of course, you know, intervening proactively, right? I would love to go into food pantries and see huge signs saying, “hunger is not your fault”.

What are your thoughts on faith-based organizations (FBOs) running food pantries?

The overarching thing I would say is that religion is incredibly beneficial and it's useful and can inspire us to do a lot of things and a lot of good things, but it's not a substitute for state power. Oftentimes what I see, especially in this country, [these] two things get really intertwined… because that's the way the system has been set up. In 1996, you had President Clinton who signed into law the [Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act], completely dismantled the social safety nets in this country, and dropped millions of people into poverty. That was really based on this idea that we should have less government and people need to step in more to take care of themselves. And that's when you saw this exponential rise in charity, right? Because that's what they said. Like, “we are going to drop the role of government so that you all can take care of yourselves”. Legislations like the charitable choice act in 2002 [passed] to support that. And what that did was it allowed charities and religious charities to apply for government funding to support that work. So there's this a really tricky intertwining of religion and charity, the charity that we see from faith-based organizations [is not quite charity] – it's governance because it comes out of policy decisions. You know, that's how people have the money to do the work that they are doing because they applying for government funding and all those sorts of things. So it's really tricky. [The] problem is not with religion, but it's with a substitution of state with religion that [makes] the right to food is hard to secure because charity can never [do that]. Even though we've got upwards of 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, that's not enough to meet the need and charities on just a small scale… You've got all of these patchworks of [food sovereignty] program and projects… little things here and here and there, but they're not at the scale that we would need for 50 million people who have experienced hunger and food insecurity, which has symptoms of poverty [and] wealth inequality. They cannot fix problems on that large scale. And that's sort of one of the huge problems with religion and faith-based organizations, right – [them] thinking they can do that. They can do a little, but they cannot do it all. And they certainly cannot take on the role of the government, even though that's the position they've been put in. The second point is [with] religion – once you introduce faith and religion into something that should be a human right, there's a very tricky dynamic that comes out. Right. Charity has an absolutely devastating effect on people's genuine democratic engagement. I was really surprised that people on the receiving end found it so hard to critique what they were getting. And they always prefaced it with, “No, but they're good people, you know, they could be anywhere, but they're doing this and they're here… It's free, you know, so what can we expect – beggars can’t be choosers.” So it creates a dynamic where people on the receiving end cannot critique what they're given, even though that's part of governance. Because they feel they're getting it out of the kindness of somebody else's heart… That's a serious problem because there are like 50 million people who are receiving substandard goods and services and unable to say anything about it because charity has silenced them. That’s what happens at the interpersonal level, but then it's scaled up to a spiral of silence around this. So I think the role of faith-based organizations should be to mobilize the state and to hold governments accountable for securing the right to food.

This interview has been edited for length and brevity. You can download Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries at this link for free.

Transforming the Food Pantry Space: A Conversation with Dr. Rebecca De Souza