Food is not the hunger-ending hero we think it is
The world has enough food. It's who controls the food that's the problem.
Food has a role to play in ending hunger. But it’s not the hero people think it is. The main cause of modern hunger is not lack of food. Rather, hunger is caused by greed and hate.
This cruelty is not hard to pinpoint. Israel and the United States are giving us a master class in how greed and hate make people go hungry, get sick, and die early. After stealing land, destroying crops, and restricting fishing rights, the Israeli government is causing mass starvation by restricting food on offer from the global community from entering Gaza and using farcical food aid as a trap to, at best, humiliate Palestinians or, at worst, to murder them. In the United States, the Republican Party cruelly cut Medicaid and food benefits, which will force young, old, and disabled people to scramble for health care and food. Early death is a guarantee in both cases. So is torture and disappearance, now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can use billions of dollars originally meant for food aid and heath care to grab people off the streets and detain or disappear them.
Hunger bears the fingerprints of despots. Those who control the purse strings and occupy lands are the ones who control who goes hungry and dies and who survives. Most urgently, the public needs to get in control of the food system. Former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who is most remembered for a long series of alleged war crimes, was known to riff off the saying that “if you control the food, you control the people.” This is not just a warning to us, it’s stating a reality we must face head on: a small number of giant corporations have outsize control of the global food supply, our grocery stores, and our political leaders. It’s time to build a just and equitable food system without relying on big corporations, the ultra-wealthy, and tyrants.
To prevent hunger requires us to resist greed and hate and magnify values of care and mutuality through everyday acts of kindness. As we support the Global Sumud Flotilla on its way to try, yet again, to break Israel’s siege, and as we try to protect food assistance in the United States, or as we try to get food to our homebound neighbors, we can also jump into action in our own home towns to create the kind of world where no one goes hungry. We can immediately expand our ability to make food available to each other through solidarity and respect for the common good.
Some of us might claim we don’t know where to begin. But we already know the answer in our guts: to be and feel human is to be able to share our food. When people come to our homes, we usually offer food to our guests. In almost every culture, if you are a guest, it’s rude to refuse. So, we can start with our innate reflex to feed each other, to acknowledge our human kinship. These are baseline values of care and mutuality. If we ground ourselves in these values, all else flows from there.
As an example, some mutual aid organizations have created small-scale, community-run refrigerators that stock fresh food and other essentials. This can help people in a pinch, but if not coordinated well, the help can be scattershot. More well-known examples are community supported agriculture and cooperative food businesses. These sharing techniques are now mostly accessible to people who are wealthy, but with some tweaking and public support, they can be made more broadly available to people with low incomes. Other examples are cooperative farms, such as the historic, though short-lived, Freedom Farm, founded by Fanny Lou Hamer. We can bring such vision and heart back into the mainstream. It’s the kind of action that counteracts the meanness and greed ready to swallow our hope of survival.
These sharing models spring from values of solidarity, not charity. They build community connection. They are categorically different than the large food banks that accept leftovers from big business (so they can take the tax write-off) and then brag about giving it away to the poor. A charity does nothing to disrupt corporate greed, but it can humiliate people with low incomes while elevating the social status of the rich.
To counter the Trump administration’s cuts to food benefits, we can find ways to help people whose wages are low. First, if you are a business owner, you can raise wages so people can afford to feed their families. This means, perhaps, less profit for your business. But in the age of rampant inequality decimating our democracy and fraying our social fabric, you can safely bet that living wages contribute to the common good and contribute to a future without food insecurity. Secondly, you can get involved in supporting alternative grocery stores with public money—again, for the common good. As part of his campaign for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani promised to create public grocery stores in New York city to keep grocery prices low and make New York more affordable for everyone.
A more transformative example of contributing to solidarity and community control over our food is the food sovereignty movement, made popular by the people of Via Campesina. Food sovereignty is when people in a shared region build their food systems to be resilient in times of global struggle and resist takeover by private profiteers. This requires promoting family and cooperative farms, protecting lands and waterways from privatization, and ensuring protection of the ecosystem. It also includes commitment to the people working throughout the food system—from landowner, to farmer, to food packer, to trucker, to grocer, food server, to eater—are paid meaningful wages. And when that’s not possible, helping all people who need food to get it.
Ultimately, food sovereignty relies on the understanding that food is a fundamental human right. This is not far-fetched. Maine changed its constitution to ensure the right to food; West Virginia has considered the same. A growing community of advocates are making this happen. Many countries have enshrined the right to food in their national constitutions. Food as a right is already in the global psyche, parlance, and legal frameworks. In 2021, almost all countries around the world agreed to work toward food as a human right. The exceptions? Israel and the United States.
If we revolutionize our local food system through mutuality and community care, we can counteract early death and, on the far end of the spectrum, we can prevent genocide. A place to begin is in joining the global and local solidarity movements that seek to create conditions where you, too, have the right to be nourished simply because you are human, you are alive. As you join in, you’ll remember what you knew all along: that to share our food is to show reverence for the common good. It is how we regenerate life, how we stay alive.
Mariana Chilton is author of “The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why we Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know and Start Again,” published by MIT Press in October 2024.
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Community gardens are another way to nourish low income people. Planting seasonal vegetables and fruits and distributing them to the people who are elderly or home bound, low income or simply not eligible for other public services ensures they have access to fresh nutritious foods. People who have access to fresh produce and minimally processed foods in general have better health outcomes than those who don’t. This is especially important now that people may have less access to quality health care. So yes it’s important that we ensure our neighbors have enough food but it’s also important that we ensure they have quality access to food.
An excellent summary that should alter the way we look at food in the United States. Not just as the product of a company for those who can afford it, but as a necessary resource for all people that was created by public as well as private investment and therefore is a human right.