Interview with Mariana Chilton, Author of The Painful Truth About Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know and Start Again
Ian Marcuse, Nov 21, 2024
Thank you for talking with me today. Your new book The Painful Truth About Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know and Start Again has helped clarify my thinking and is a critical call for us all to think and look much deeper into the systems that are driving hunger. Approximately 1 in 5 Canadians are food insecure, an astonishingly high number in a country as wealthy as Canada. Household food insecurity rates are trending upwards.
You say in your book that hunger is not about food and everything about power, which is a central message in your book. Can you talk about this?
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
First of all, I’m not the only one to say that hunger is about power and control. Many scholars have talked about how hunger is man-made, and hunger is about who has control over what. We all know that the Earth has much abundance and generates more than enough food for all humans and all other beings to live. But what happens is when you have big corporations or governments or even people in the family who are hoarding those resources, who are directing where all of that abundance goes – they create scarcity, scarcity of money, scarcity of time, scarcity of control in your life.
The women that I spoke with in Philadelphia would often talk about not having enough money for food because their wages were really low, or they just didn’t have enough time to be able to shop or to cook, or they didn’t have the knowledge. They don’t have a lot of control over their lives. And that’s because in our society we are viewing other people as somehow unworthy of having a good wage or getting the support that they need if they have a disability. If we just shared the earth’s abundance, we would have enough food for all to eat.
If we focus on food redistribution like food banking, we’re focusing on the very downstream. It doesn’t help people get more control in their own lives nor access to resources so they don’t have to return to foodbanks the next day. We have to think about who has the power in our society to control the resources.
And control is achieved though injustice, namely, racism, discrimination and oppressions that are driving inequality. And these are deeply cultural, ideological and political. This is something you speak a lot about in your book as well.
Yeah, so I was talking about power and control in a general way, but if you look down into it, who has the highest rates of hunger in the United States and in Canada…they are Indigenous people. What we’re seeing is the ongoing process of genocide and massive discrimination and land theft. And in the United States, we also see extremely high rates of food insecurity and hunger among African American families and immigrant families. If you think about it, they are the most discriminated against in our society. Also, women, or women headed households who often have lower wages than men.
Hunger lands among the people who have the least amount of power. So, we have to think way beyond food to get into issues of equity or equality. And when you think about equality and equity, those can be very abstract ideas. We have to go even deeper and think about discrimination, hatred, a sense that people who are different from us are somehow not a part of our human family, that allows us to think that they are unworthy of food, unworthy of sharing our food. That to me has been one of the most disturbing things to think about if we’re going to look at equity and equality.
Yes, absolutely and it manifests at the individual and household level in pain and trauma and which you talk about in your book.
We typically measure household food insecurity by such indicators as how often do you skip a meal or do you worry about having enough food. In your book, you describe another type of measurement called ACEs or adverse childhood experiences. Can you tell us how these are another important measurement of food insecurity because they also speak to injustice.
I started to ask questions about adverse childhood experiences because I would notice that when people would answer questions about food insecurity, they would start to tell me other kinds of stories, which invited me to ask them what was going on in your family when you when you were a kid and you didn’t have money for food. And that’s when the women I spoke to talked about sometimes being neglected or mistreated by their parents, or that their dad was in prison, or that they witnessed their mother getting beaten up. A lot of deep issues would start coming up when they would talk about not having enough money for food. Something very serious and upsetting is going on in the family.
ACES is a quantitative measure. It’s a measure like the food insecurity measures. And so I insisted on working with my staff to make sure that when we’re asking about food insecurity, we’re also asking about what happened during childhood with that ACEs measure, and so questions about abuse and neglect and family dysfunction.
When we started to put it up against our measures of food insecurity, we found that those who had reported the most severe forms of food insecurity were far more likely to also report that they had been neglected, physically abused or sexually abused as a child. They’re all upsetting, right? But the one that really threw me for a loop was the question about emotional neglect, where we asked, did you ever feel that your family didn’t love you or that they didn’t look out for each other. That was off the charts. Those who reported the highest rates of food insecurity or the deepest levels of hunger, also reported the highest levels of not being loved when they were a child. This forced me to start to reckon with this concept of love. How do we cherish each other. I’m not necessarily sure how to measure that, but the ACES measure invited us to start asking deeper questions.
I had not heard of ACEs before, so reading about this was important for me. The other finding, equally disturbing was that of gender violence and which also underlies food insecurity. What is going on here?
When we were doing the research, we put together food insecurity and experiences with intimate partner violence or having witnessed their mom being abused or other kinds of gender-based violence. It’s the propensity or the odds of the relationship that’s really important. It’s not like it’s a one-to-one relationship, however, what it also shows, and here I’m bringing us deeper into this concept of inequity, is a form of domination.
If you start adding in gender, you can see how gender intersects with race, ethnicity and class. It’s primarily black women, indigenous women, who have the highest rates of food insecurity and that exposure to violence certainly shows you, in a very visceral way, how domination happens, and how lack of control or power is so important to the relationship of hunger. It’s not only men who were violent. Women could be violent with each other as well, but it’s this gender-based violence that I think is extremely important. It shows how much in our society we really don’t like women, and we don’t like our kids either, because primarily it’s the women who are taking care of the children.
A woman who is experiencing intimate partner violence also can’t control the money in the household which creates a lot of economic violence in the household. That’s a mere fractal of what goes on in our society and in terms of our policy. If we cared for women and we cared for children, we would make sure that we would have free, high-quality childcare, that women would get paid equal wages, and that they would have the family supports necessary to keep them and their kids healthy. It’s not just something that’s happening only in the household. It’s a fractal of the larger forces that are at play in our country which is gender-based violence at the poverty and at the policy level.
Some of these policies like the SNAP program and the WIP program that you talk about in your book are meant to help lift people out of poverty. Many well-meaning people have advocated to build or maintain funding for these programs. But these programs, many of which support women and children, can also have a negative side to them right?
Very much. One of the programs I talk about in my book is called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF for short, and what’s known as cash welfare. It’s primarily for women and young children. While it’s supposed to help them to get into the workforce, if you actually look at the original goals of the TANF program, one of those goals is to encourage marriage. Another goal is to help women take care of their children in the home. So, you can already see this idea that a woman is not really considered a sovereign entity. And now, if she’s married, she will get less money, because then the father is supposed to be contributing financially. But most of the people who are on welfare or cash welfare are extremely poor. It often encourages women to not actually get married, to not report that they have a man living with them in the house or another partner in the household. It encourages people to lie because they are desperate for money. They’re desperate to feed their children, they’re desperate to get tokens to be able to get on the bus. They’re desperate for diapers, desperate for tampons. They need that extra cash.
The women who participate in that program feel humiliated but the one reason that they participate is because they’re desperate for the childcare, and it helps them to get subsidized childcare, which could cost about $40,000 a year. Otherwise, there’s no way they can make enough money to be able to go to work and pay for childcare.
That program also forces women to take the first job available, often into low paying jobs rather than to get an education, or to maybe be at home and rest with their child. They want off of that system, but that system becomes a form of entrapment, because once they lose that the cash welfare, then they don’t get subsidized childcare anymore, then they’re poorer than they were before.
I talk in my book about one woman from a program I started called Witnesses to Hunger. She went into the cash welfare system to get childcare. She found an okay paying job, not great. It paid $11 an hour, but it made her ineligible for cash welfare, and then they would cut her children off for daycare. She was trapped. She couldn’t then take the job at $11 an hour, because then she didn’t have childcare support for her kids. So, you see how it actively harms women and children.
Something that you mention in your book that I found appalling, maybe it was the SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) where if the program participant is not able to find a job, they’re forced to do volunteer unpaid community service, often very menial work like cleaning toilets. This is insidious, being forced into unpaid work in order to maintain their benefits. It is an example of the downside of social welfare programs.
Yes, it is horrible and it happens way too often. Something that’s important to remember is that not only are those women humiliated, remember that when they’re doing that supposed community service that it’s not the organization or company that’s paying them to do that community services, but our state tax dollars through the welfare system. It also increases the profits of the corporations who benefit from this supposed community service. It’s a really sick system.
Even the minimum wage in the United States is unbelievably low. How can anyone possibly survive on the minimum wage there. I don’t know what the numbers are in terms of the numbers of people in the US who are trying to survive on minimum wage, but there is no way you can eat on the minimum wage in the US, right?
So, the minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour, and it has not changed for 17 years. Our minimum wage is not even indexed to inflation. If it were indexed to inflation, if you think about back to 1973 when poverty rates were pretty low, the minimum if it were indexed to inflation in the US would be about $25 an hour.
Now, you can earn the minimum wage and be working full time, but because it keeps you at the poverty line you are still eligible for SNAP benefits and Medicaid. So, what’s happening is that the big corporations are then able to keep their wages low because our tax dollars are coming in to pay that, and they make huge profits off of that. It’s just unbearable. People may think, oh, it’s just teenagers who work for minimum wage. No, actually, that’s women of color, immigrant women, black women, indigenous women.
Our minimum wages in Canada aren’t that low, but they’re still well below the poverty line.
Going back to the Witnesses to Hunger program that you helped start many years ago, working with women of color, solo parents, women led households doing advocacy focused work, which is as you described, true involvement which is really important but not easy work to do. Can you tell us some of the experiences that the women are describing as it relates to food insecurity and how have you brought these experiences into your advocacy work?
We started Witnesses to Hunger in 2008 and I knew that the women would be really powerful advocates, because they’d be advocating for the health and well-being of their own children. One of the most important things that the members of Witnesses would talk about is how much they love their children and how much they want the help that they can get to help their children not experience poverty. So, it was also a celebration of their children, a celebration of family, a celebration of community. And we just love to celebrate their children and also celebrate the chutzpah and the intelligence and the brilliance of the women of Witnesses to Hunger. I don’t want us to forget that.
The other top issue they would talk about is lack of safety, and that again, is the flip side of the violence, intimate partner violence, violence in their communities, and that’s because they didn’t feel like their homes were safe, which brings us into housing. They could hardly afford to pay rent. And even the rents that they could afford were for houses that were dilapidated.
They also talked about how mean the case workers were in the government welfare assistance offices. Remember that the women are going to ask for help so that their kids can be healthy and even though the programs were meant to help them, they felt humiliated and they felt as if they were less with people constantly asking them questions.
We would advocate most especially on housing because that would be something that everybody could begin to understand. They could look at the pictures of the homes through our photo voice projects.
They also talked about the importance of SNAP benefits in order to buy groceries and healthy food for their kids. They were very effective in increasing the SNAP benefit amount that all families got across the United States, and that was in 2009. I wouldn’t say that Witnesses to Hunger were the only group that was advocating for that, but I know that when the women spoke directly to legislators in Washington, it was soon after that that they made a major increase to the SNAP benefits. So, members of Witnesses have had some successes, but I have to say that members of Witnesses also became very frustrated over the years because policy makers just couldn’t make the changes fast enough, or they would make some change and then go back on their word.
It’s good to hear that that you’ve had some advocacy success, because you’ve also said that no amount of systems change strategies in the current policy making arena can reach the depths of emotional and spiritual, spiritual associated with things like racial trauma and gender violence. I think many of us feel that tackling systems change or upstream causes of food insecurity can feel insurmountable. And so aside from policy work, can you offer any advice to those of us working in systems change as a more effective means of dismantling these entrenched systems of violence.
Well, I’ll try my best. One of the other things that came up with Witnesses to Hunger was extremely low self-esteem, the sense of not feeling worthy. Members of Witnesses would often say, I can’t believe that people listened to me. I’ve never had anybody hear me out. I’ve never had anybody take an interest in my life, and I didn’t think that what I had to say was even worth other people hearing. So that forced me to go deeper into this low self-esteem, and again, that is as a result of gender-based violence. It’s a result of racialized trauma.
So, yes, dismantling systems can sound like a very good intellectual strategy, but it has to go deeper than that, because if we are really going to dismantle the systems, we have to remember that it’s people who make the systems. We inherited these systems throughout history and so we have to look into our history. We have to look into the history of enslavement, the history of colonization, and start to understand where does this culture of domination come from, and how can we counteract the culture of domination.
That’s why I talk in the book about three different types of strategies. One is a very political strategy, but the other two are really deep personal work. How is it that we are harnessing violence in the sense of domination in ourselves? In other words, how does white supremacy culture show up in us? What is it about human beings, or what is it about us, or maybe me, that allows these systems to continue? How can I make sure that I don’t create a system or a program that simply follows the pathway of racism and discrimination?
In order to do that, we have to do some deep spiritual work. And that’s where I bring in the importance of courage and love. If we don’t have any courage to face the hardship ahead of us, we don’t have the courage to face our own demons, then we’re never going to be able to transform the systems. In order to build that courage, we have to have a sense of love for ourselves and love for each other and love for the planet. That kind of love that we can generate from within can give us courage. I’ve never seen the power of the conviction that I’ve seen in the members of Witnesses, and that power and conviction comes from the deep love they have for their children and the love that they’ve developed for each other. That’s what has allowed me to figure out that we’ve got to tap into a sense of love.
You talk about trauma a lot, which is so important to healing. Those of us working in systems change understand the importance of centering lived experience in this work but this is not always easy to do. It requires decent funding and skills. But I am thinking that a trauma informed food system is a powerful model for change. I think this really forces those of us doing this work to reckon with this core truth as we strive for justice and equity.
That’s where a lot of the personal and spiritual work needs to come in. At the Center for Hunger Free communities that I founded 20 years ago, we recognized how difficult it was going to be to work with members of Witnesses who have experienced a lot of traumas. That’s why we became what’s called trauma informed. In other words, it changed the way that we did our meetings. It changed the way that we made decisions. It changed the way that we worked as a team with each other, meaning that we needed to bring in our own emotions to our colleagues at work. It means that we needed to learn how to ask each other for help and to admit that we didn’t know an answer or that we needed some support. It also forced us to be able to state very explicitly, I can help you. Those are some trauma informed tools that we constantly used, but I think the most important one is acknowledging that we have an emotional life and sometimes we’re not at our best.
We need to undo the white supremacy that we have going on in order to get things done today. Well, it doesn’t really work when you have people who may have just gotten beaten up the night before or evicted, or their child just got in trouble at school for hitting someone, that forced us to take into account what’s going on in people’s lives.
We had to build up a team of social workers. We had to make sure that we had money to help people get out of their tough situations sometimes. We had to create an infrastructure around it, so that people wouldn’t feel re traumatized by the work, and also so that they had a sense of solidarity. We had to make sure that there were enough people always, at any given time, to be able to speak to an issue, never just one person by themselves.
Lastly, I haven’t talked about a program called the building wealth and health network. That is a program where we bring people together to talk about their emotions and to be able to build a sense of community with each other, and then we help them set up bank accounts, helped them put in small amounts of money into their bank accounts. Every time they got paid, they would save money, and we would encourage that by trying to match their savings and giving them other kinds of incentives. We were able to reduce food insecurity and depression, which go together, and we did it without food, and we did it without pills. I’d say it’s also without therapy, the bringing people together in mutual aid solidarity.
The economic independence is important. People are struggling trying to pay the rent, and they’re working multiple jobs, and everyone’s stressed as hell so engaging in advocacy work does require a fair bit of money. We’re talking a team of that includes social workers and people with skills to work with trauma, being able to pay women for their time to engage in advocacy work. Yeah, if we are taken seriously and if we really care about centering lived experiences, we’re going to need resources.
Moving from the personal to the global political, I want to get to this because it’s very front of mind. You recently wrote a very powerful article about the genocide in Gaza, describing the destructive legacy of militarization and violence in the US. We see the weaponization of food by the Israeli government and the military happening in Gaza. How do you see that as related to our own legacy here in Canada and in the US?
Sure. Whenever there’s hunger, you know that food is getting weaponized. Food and money are getting weaponized, and it’s on a spectrum, right? There’s genocide that happens through mass starvation, which is what’s happening in Gaza and what happened in the United States and in Canada during colonization. What’s happening in Israel is unconscionable. The mass murder of over 40,000 people, and we know it’s actually many more. It’s over 100,000 people have who have been dying because of the bombing and also because of the loss of hospitals, schools, any kind of infrastructure. So that has a lot of a lot of impacts, like waves of impact, beyond the actual bombs and the people who are dying.
The fact that Israel has restricted any kind of humanitarian aid or made it almost impossible to get that humanitarian aid into Gaza tells you that they want people to die. Not only are people hungry and emaciated, but it also means they can’t fight off illness, so they’re going to die earlier, and also that they don’t have energy to fight or to flee. It is a major tactic of stealing land.
In my piece, I’d say that we all learned how to do this in third grade in the US because we learned about mass starvation of native people in the United States and in Canada. The military would force native people onto smaller and smaller plots of land where people couldn’t hunt, they couldn’t fish, they couldn’t grow their own food. Then they became very dependent on commodities that the US government would send to them, often rancid meat or flour that had bugs in it and all kinds of things which kept people at the level of starvation. It’s a tactic that every American kid knows about. So, what they’re doing in Israel is taught in America. We can also relate this to the famine in Ireland. We can relate this to the Bengal famines.
I think this same process of weaponization is seen here locally where for example we see low quality food dumped in the Downtown Eastside, high illness and deathrates, and immense poverty. If you go to the food bank, you feel humiliated, because you don’t want to get free food. It keeps recipients poorly nourished.
Yes, it’s a form of domination and control. It’s a way of keeping people poor, humiliated, not feeling well, and allows you to control them more. In other words, they’re more willing to work for low wages. In the US, people don’t want to take a higher paying job because they don’t want to lose their SNAP benefits. They don’t want to hit that benefit cliff. So, it keeps people at lower wages, and that increases the profits of the big corporations. So that’s a way that access to food can become weaponized. It can be from SNAP and then go all the way to mass starvation. It’s that same culture. It’s the same energy of domination and of social violence that we have towards each other.
