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A radical and urgent new approach to how we can solve the problems of hunger and poverty in the US. Most people think hunger has to do with food: researchers, policy makers, and advocates focus on promoting government-funded nutrition assistance; well-meaning organizations try to get expired or wasted food to marginalized communities; and, philanthropists donate their money to the cause and congratulate themselves for doing so. But few people ask about the structural issues undergirding hunger, such as, who benefits from keeping people in such a state of precarity? In Drawing on 25 years of research, programming, and advocacy efforts, Chilton powerfully demonstrates that food insecurity is created and maintained by people in power. Taking the reader back to the original wounds in the United States caused by its history of colonization, genocide, and enslavement, she forces us to reckon with hard questions about why people in the US allow hunger to persist. Drawing upon intimate interviews she conducted with many Black and brown women, the author reveals that the experience of hunger is rooted in trauma and gender-based violence--violence in our relationships with one another, with the natural world, and with ourselves--and that, if we want to fix hunger, we must transform our society through compassion, love, and connection. Especially relevant for young people charting new paths toward abolition, mutual aid, and meaningful livelihoods,
List of contents
Series Foreword
Notes on Reading This Book
Prologue
Introduction
Part I: The Trauma of Hunger
1 When You Can’t Lay with Yourself Comfortable
2 Hunger in Mind and Body
3 Knowing and Not Knowing
4 Breaking the Chain
Part II: Reconsider Everything
Preamble
5 Public Assistance as Divide and Conquer
6 Welfare to Work Makes You Free?
7 Nutrition Assistance as Corporate Welfare
8 Pounds of Food Does Not Feed America
Part III: Nourishing our World
Preamble
9 The Personal—Undoing Racism and Sexism
10 The Political—Solutions from Reparations to Abolition
11 The Political—Human Rights and Rights of Nature
12 The Spiritual—On Becoming a Loving Living Ancestor
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: USDA/ERS Definitions of Food Security as Measured by the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM)
Appendix 2: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Questions and Scoring
Appendix 3: Example of Adversity over Multiple Generations as Explained by Keisha (Interviewed for Child Hunger Study)
Appendix 4: Index of Acronyms
Works Cited
Notes
About the author
Mariana Chilton is Professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She founded the Center for Hunger-Free Communities, where she launched Witnesses to Hunger, a movement to increase women’s participation in the national dialogue on hunger and poverty, and the Building Wealth and Health Network to promote healing and economic security. She has testified on solutions to hunger before the US Senate and US House of Representatives.
