Big Hunger Needs a Big Solution

Featuring a dramatic black cover with blood-red font, Andrew Fisher’s 2017 book, Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups, grabs your attention from the start, and runs with it. Big Hunger is an eye-opening exposé, densely researched academic publication, and progressive anti-hunger manifesto all in one. Fisher hasn’t just written a book; he has laid the foundation for a movement.

The book builds on itself, each chapter exploring a distinct facet of America’s relationship with hunger. In one chapter, Fisher calls into question what kinds of food we feed hungry people and why. In another, he investigates exactly who sits in boardroom and legislative meetings, holding the real power in anti-hunger work. Fisher also gives space in his book to the voices of activists silenced by the mainstream anti-hunger movement. He celebrates innovation within the anti-hunger community and highlights innovative models from other fields too. He ends his book with a vision for the beginning of a new anti-hunger movement that eradicates, rather than perpetuates, the problem of hunger in America.

Fisher’s boldest claim is that mainstream American anti-hunger groups are in the pocket of big business. America’s donation-based food assistance system – or, the “charity trap,” as he less-than-affectionately refers to it – has a long history that Fisher refuses to ignore. He begins his story in the Great Depression, nearly 60 years earlier than what most scholars point to as the birth of the modern donation-based food assistance system. At this time, the food industry threw away its surplus crops and food in an attempt to keep farm prices high. Indignant at the thought of so much food being wasted at a time when hunger plagued America, people criticized the food industry for its heartlessness and started questioning their own commitments to capitalism.

Fisher uses this historical context to set the stage for the 1980’s. Reagan’s vast cuts to social services left hungry people in need of more support, and this time the food industry readily offered its “waste” to feed the needy. Tax cuts and strategic corporate giving developed in tandem, allowing the food industry to dump its excess food on the poor and look good doing so. The American anti-hunger system is entirely based on donating food to “feed the hungry” but ignores – even perpetuates, as Fisher argues – root causes of hunger such as poverty, debt, and underemployment, and thus fails to “shorten the line” of hungry people.

In “The Politics of Corporate Giving”, Fisher describes an economic cycle where rural farmers are forced into debt and poverty. Our current food system makes it much easier for farmers to connect with consumers if they “contract” for a larger company. For instance, chicken farmers might contract with Tyson to guarantee that they have a market for their product. But Tyson requires farmers to buy the latest, most expensive equipment and to reach extremely high monthly production quotas. Many farmers struggle to keep up with such demands, and lose their farm and livelihood. Those who manage often do so by running up debt, which strains family budgets and leads farmers to seek out cheaper sources of food for their families.

Rural communities then have both a high demand for new jobs and a high demand for cheap commodities and foods. Enter Walmart. Unemployed ex-farmers are hired to work minimum wage retail jobs, but Walmart refuses to give them full-time hours to avoid paying their benefits. Desperate for any job at all, rural community members work odd shifts at subpar pay, but they still can’t make ends meet. Their family often wonders how they’ll pay for their next meal.

Feeding America comes to the rescue, establishing a new Food Bank in town and providing free food to the now hungry community. Fisher actually went undercover as a recipient at one of these food banks, and offers a heart-wrenching discussion of the humiliation of waiting in long lines to get food you can’t afford to buy. But even after community members get home from the food bank, there’s more shame. The products they brought home seem oddly familiar, because they are the rejects from Walmart down the street – sometimes the same Walmart where they work. Dented cans and stale bread comprise Walmart’s $2 billion dollar “anti-hunger” effort, but actually just function to keep underpaid employees and farmers working below living wage for yet another week, generating massive profit for a company determined to keep its costs low and profits high.

If one of these rural community members became inspired and wanted work with the food bank to better their practices, they’d likely get an icy reception. It turns out that most food bank boards are staffed by Walmart, Tyson, and Pepsi executives whose interests lie in profit maximization, not ending hunger. Community members and food bank recipients aren’t welcome in the decision making process.

Big Hunger exposes a disturbing and heartbreaking system of perpetual poverty through stories like this. While chapters end with bullet-pointed suggestions for how academics, activists, and the general public can help make a change, Fisher refuses to give readers the answer or to solve the problem all on his own. He directs readers to a supplemental website (bighunger.org) where we can learn more about the book and the movement, and he encourages us to connect with each other. Big Hunger left me craving a big solution, and gave me the tools to join the movement fighting for it.

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