Food & Solidarity: Leveling Up the Fight Against Hunger.

Food & Solidarity: Leveling Up the Fight Against Hunger.

Marcus Hill | August 2018

Fighting Hunger with the Right Energy.

The fight against hunger embraces the idea that food is a human right. While acute hunger is an unfortunate though unavoidable occurrence (through cases of extreme poverty and other disasters necessitating temporary emergency relief), chronic hunger is a pernicious symptom of inequitable and inadequate food distribution and access. Too often in the fight against hunger, responses to chronic situations are indistinguishable from responses to acute situations, yet they’re not identical challenges so the outcomes are predictably far from identical. While acute hunger can be relieved through access to emergency food, fighting chronic hunger necessitates systemic (political, economic, and cultural) change if we embrace that core belief that everyone has a right to food coupled with a core understanding that hunger isn’t a symptom of food scarcity but rather affordability.

To this end, it seems that the food movement is beginning to more fully acknowledge its mission. Granted, pockets persist that believe the gears and levers to food access begin and end with charity, at its core, the food movement’s mission runs far deeper than peppering the landscape with food pantries or even community gardens and promoting organic. The real food movement — one intrepidly dedicated to health, access, equity, dignity, accountability, sustainability, resilience, and community participation, ownership, and investment — is in all ambitiousness the food justice movement. And as a justice movement, it’s forced to recognize its shared DNA with other social, economic, and environmental justice genealogies and aspirations. Like internal biological systems coming together to form a functional animal, all of these justice efforts intersect interdependently to produce systems necessary for a functional community.

Intersectional Awareness: Connections Galore.

A food, agriculture, and healthcare symposium took place this past spring at UNC-Chapel Hill featuring an overview of food-related policy impacts and illuminating this idea of intersectional development. Rooting our current realities of health and food access disparities deep within our national soil of pervasive economic inequality (long-standing consequences of intentional policies), Dr. Ricardo Salvador (Union of Concerned Scientists) offered a number of counterpower/“resist and build” efforts worth considering (paraphrasing some of my takeaways):

1. Promote institutional purchasing of healthy, just, sustainable local food (signing on to the Good Food Purchasing program).
2. Urging hospitals to reinvest in the local community.
3. Promote the “Harvesting Health” Local FARMS Act incentives (the Food is Medicine program as an example).
4. Engage with and support local food policy councils.
5. Invest in each other as opposed to continuing to concentrate wealth.

These progressive, intersectional approaches don’t stop at mitigating chronic hunger charitably but persist in connecting food, health, economics, and policy in ways that seek to challenge the status quo and shift power systemically for the necessary improvement of community and the future as a whole.

Better Values, Better Social Determinants.

At the core of Ricardo’s provisions is an effort to counter dominant institutional values and logics that continue to overwhelmingly influence policy (historically capitalist, neoliberal, patriarchal, white supremacist policy). Such policies shape the climate of social determinants that continue to hemorrhage the critical disparities that ultimately concern us. By “social determinants,” I’m speaking of:

…the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power and resources at global, national and local levels. — World Health Organization

Digging deeper still, a question from the symposium audience was posed asking what methods exist that serve to counter core cultural determinants (particularly within institutions) that underlie, accommodate, reproduce, and reinforce dominant social determinants.

Alternatives Exist.

To this, I suspect the food movement’s mission is both more intrepid and rooted in existing practice than it acknowledges. I say this because there is a foundation of institutional practice that already exists for what Dr. Ricardo provisioned, and I think building bridges with it may avail real kinetic energy and direction for this food movement, galvanize efforts, boost more progressive social determinants, and produce tangible partnerships and wins.

To unpack this institutional potential, it should be acknowledged that while problematic dominant logics steer core social institutions among us to overwhelming degrees, not all institutions are driven by such, and simply by highlighting exceptions, we highlight the possibility that alternatives can exist and therefore dominant culture isn’t an all-encompassing totality. Some of these counter-institutions that exist in the midst of dominant culture are those pursuing triple bottom lines, cooperatively-owned ventures, philanthropies implementing regenerative, non-extractive, community impact investing, “living wage” policies, and so on. I’m not arguing that they are ideal in their operational forms, but simply that they do host some progressive values that are not completely in step with (and in certain ways run counter to) dominant (neoliberal, capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist) economic culture.

Solidarity Economics & Tangible Collaboration. Connecting Dots.

The ecosystem of these alternative logics is perhaps best encapsulated by what’s increasingly known as the “solidarity economy.” This rather clunky term points to an economic situation where communities are meeting their wants and needs in ways that collectively promote access, equity, sustainability, dignity, health, accountability, resilience, and community participation, ownership, and investment. Co-ops (cooperatively-owned enterprises) are a part of this situation, but only a part. Time banks, credit unions and other financial co-ops, community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs) where people sign on as seasonal harvest shareholders, participatory budgeting, alternative social currencies, people’s assemblies, living/self-sufficiency wages, community land trusts, local purchasing agreements, value-chain sourcing, accessible community health clinics, and so on are all part of this solidarity economy ecosystem and are real-world institutional practices that run counter in key cultural ways to problematic dominant economic logics.

Solidarity economy as an ecosystem is not a blueprint, but rather a “big tent” concept promoting a few key values:

• Solidarity, cooperation, mutualism
• Participatory democracy
• Equity in all dimensions
• Sustainability
• Pluralism (it’s not a one-size-fits-all model)

As such, the solidarity economy concept paints a picture of community through practices that exist in the world aligned with and amplifying these values — some old practices, some new, some mainstream, some innovative, some monetized and non-monetized, etc. The more these practices step out of isolation and connect interdependently through these values, the more formidable this progressive ecosystem becomes.

The Economic, Political, and Cultural Shifts of Winning a Fight Against Hunger.

So, economic alternatives exist, but with an intrepid food movement dedicated to winning this fight against hunger, economic alternatives alone aren’t enough. Solidarity economics is a practical response to organizing against dominant cultural determinants, but the fight against hunger fans out across a full economic, political, and cultural spectrum — an outlook with which the food movement should kick off its shoes and get supremely comfortable. Here are just a few rough thoughts on each front:

• Economics: Simply, those supporting the food movement should invest in the ecosystem of practice that is the solidarity economy. They should work to connect the dots and develop working relationships between food and these other essential community elements and progressive practices. As a small example, the food policy council where I serve as lead coordinator (Forsyth Foodworks) joined the board of the US Solidarity Economy Network in 2015 in order to invest more in solidarity economy organizing and better bridge our work with that ecosystem. We, as a food policy council, have structured ourselves as a cooperative offering food system education, policy advocacy, community leadership development, project facilitation, and network building services as our current deliverables. We’re also actively promoting community land trusts in our community and working on getting other entities like our credit unions more directly involved in local food efforts.
• Politics: Infiltrate, engage, and (re)claim. We can’t give up the space of direct political engagement and thrive on apolitical, market-based strategies alone. Even if we direct all of our efforts toward building up community food systems, we’re still ultimately defining ourselves against a dominant culture that runs counter to our core values and lacks accountability the more we disengage from it. To begin to affect logics at the level of political institutions, we should act simultaneously on both the level of grassroots organizing and policy-making (food policy councils are an ideal resource for this). While fairly safe to say we can’t compete with lobbying dollars, we can infiltrate politics from where our levels of influence are generally most effective (locally in the municipalist sense) and invest there. In terms of accountability, it’s worth noting what Alkon and Guthman point out: apolitical strategies that tend to promote replacing traditional areas of state power with NGOs and markets essentially “help relieve the state of its responsibility to provide environmental protection and a social safety net” [The New Food Activism, 2017]. The responsibility of the state in terms of those social safety nets and upholding everyone’s right to food, to be clear, is not about food handouts (outside of emergency situations), but rather ensuring institutions throughout our food system work in ways in which everyone has access to them [M. Jahi Chappell, Real Food Reads Podcast, 2018].
• Culture: We can’t confine emergent “social change” work to traditional “social service” paradigms (the iconic essay by Paul Kivel is worth a few reads). In my own work, I’m noticing incompatibilities between efforts dedicated to social change and more dominant, inflexible social service mindsets of the non-profit industrial complex (reflected particularly though not exclusively in the headaches endured while trying to route social service funding into social change work). This area needs more unpacking, but suffice to say for now these incompatibilities between the change/service universes seem to be reflected in different approaches to and levels of acceptance of complexity, fluidity, time, hierarchy, values and metrics, leadership development, manners of engagement and relationship building, and the radical uncertainty that often comes with systems change coupled with the flexibility to accommodate and promote it. The social service universe sets the bar alarmingly high in the necessity that change agents be savvy navigators (with a wealth of disposable time) of the non-profit funding world or have access to a gatekeeper that can walk them through it (raising a problematic condition of funding inequity where small, under-resourced, often marginalized-community-led projects compete for the same funding dollars of well-resourced, high-capacity organizations thereby ultimately perpetuating the status quo). Lastly, in terms of working with private foundations in particular, wrestling with being a fixture on the financial playground of concentrated wealth is certainly another nagging concern. All of this is to sloppily say that the first major step to moving beyond these hang-ups may simply be first recognizing incompatibilities so we can strategize more sensible alternatives and adaptive models rather than forcing round social change pegs into square social service holes.

Through each of these considerations, the food movement should be able to further shake off its lethargy in the face of challenging the status quo and nudge itself toward fulfilling its potential among justice-focused community efforts. A trajectory seeking to end hunger not by chronic charity but by systemic political, economic, and cultural change should be able to strengthen a host of complementary community efforts through solidarity, drum up even more allies, co-conspirators, and influence, and more deeply pursue a mission that’s broad-based, rooted, and necessarily ambitious.

[Marcus Hill is the lead coordinator for Forsyth County’s food policy council, Forsyth Foodworks (formerly known as the Forsyth Community Food Consortium), and entangled in a number of other food councils, networks, and community development efforts in Winston-Salem, NC and beyond. Social media: @ForsythFood].

Originally published at Forsyth Foodworks.