Our guest today is Joshua Lohnes, food policy research director at the West Virginia University Center for Resilient Communities. He's a scholar activist who writes and organizes alongside members of the West Virginia Food For All coalition. Josh will help us shed light on whether and how food charity can be seen as political, why that is a problem for us all, and what those working on the ground can do about it. Interview Summary I'm Charlie Spring, your host for today, I'm a researcher at the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems. I've been researching the growth of charitable food networks, particularly in the UK, where one thing I've noticed is food banking organizations lobbying national government for funding or for favorable regulatory environments for the redistribution of surplus food as charity. Meanwhile, some UK food charities have become vocal critics of government policy that they see as driving food insecurity. It's clear that the link between charity and state is a complicated and shifting one. My first question is, most people working and volunteering in food charities wouldn't think of their work as political. What's hunger and food charity got to do with politics? Food charity work is absolutely political. Anytime we intervene to assist someone on the brink of food access failure, we're shaping and even reinforcing the everyday realities of the politics that structure our entire food system. While charities may not want to contend with this reality, they are, by default, acting within a set of policies that govern society's response to household food insecurity. Those working in food charity, they know that they're working within an extremely complex food system. They witness this complexity every day, more than most. Charitable food workers are also often aware that this system is driven by profit logics shaped by powerful actors in the food system, including the state and large corporations. Even if individual charities tend to operate on a logic of care over a logic of profit, the fact that they exist as a critical part of our contemporary food supply chains is a testament to the way in which specific interests in society have shaped the laws that govern food charity and the expansion of these food assistance networks over time. Free, volunteer or even low cost labor that charitable food work provides to this system is very much a part of a broader calculation. From that optic, anybody engaged in food charity is really, intimately engaged in a political project around what the future of our food system will be. Thanks for bringing in some of those questions around logics of care over logics of profits and the question of labor in food charity work. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this expansion of food charity happened? How did politics fit into that? I study emergency food networks in a US context from here in West Virginia, one of the places with the highest food and security rates in the country. I've observed this expansion unfold here over the past eight years. I've taken more and more of an interest in the global expansion of food charity. If we look at the US case, specifically, food charity and politics really began to intersect in the 1980s, shortly after the Reagan administration came into power. There was this concerted effort to trim down social services provided by the state like housing, cash and food assistance programs. They were all cut pretty drastically. As a result, people began lining up at churches and other organizations that had previously provided ad hoc intermittent food aid. Those cuts, they were part of a political project, one that's typically branded as trickledown economics. It left many people vulnerable to hunger. As feeding lines expanded and became a regular part of everyday food sourcing strategies for some people, a word got out that there was all of this excess cheese and other surplus food commodities in government storehouses all across the country. Political pressure was put on the Reagan administration to release this public food to local feeding programs. That initiated a process of integrating food charities directly into federal food policy. 40 years on this response has evolved into a multi-billion dollar program we now know as the Emergency Food Assistance program or TEFAP. On the private side, the good Samaritan food donation laws were also written and shaped by corporate donors over the same period to benefit their bottom-line interests. Then we've seen this massive expansion over the past 18 months, as feeding lines expanded once again in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. Here, states, private corporations, philanthropies have all invested heavily in charitable food networks. This doesn't just happen. Decisions are made in corporate boardrooms and in government committees to leverage charitable food labor and the infrastructure there, to resolve a major crisis in our food system. One, that simultaneously produces...
