How to focus Anti-Hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality.
It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it..
He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the Anti-Hunger sector.
Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy.
They have become part of a "hunger industrial complex" that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex.
Reliant on Corporate donations of food and money, Anti-Hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases.
But Anti-Hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages.
Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed.
From one perspective, Anti-Hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective.
In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the Anti-Hunger movement.
This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the "emergency food system" became an industry.
The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity.
Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency.
How to focus Anti-Hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality
