Episodes

  • U.S. Food Banks Supporting Migrant Justice

    U.S. Food Banks Supporting Migrant Justice
    May 10 2022
    In today's episode, we'll talk about why our food justice movement including food banks should work in solidarity with the movement for migrant justice. I recently saw a meme that showed a picture of a man holding a sign that read, "Do you know what an accent is? It's a sign of bravery." Truly, the migrant story is one of bravery. You must be brave to leave family and the only homeland you've known, embrace potentially treacherous travel and come to a new country where you know that not all will welcome you. But you do it for the potential to work, you do it for the potential for safety, you do it for a better future. Migrants make up the backbone of our American food system. They work our fields and in our restaurant kitchens yet they are among our most vulnerable for food security. They pay taxes, but immigration status is a bar to important federal food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The charitable food bank system is one resource, but it's not a sustainable one and also can be fraught with access issues. We're talking with Claudio Rodriguez and Robert Ojeda of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. Claudio is the environmental and social justice manager and Robert is the chief program officer. Interview Summary Christina - Claudio, before we look at migration in particular, you as the environmental and social justice manager, you have the privilege of facilitating change in communities at the intersections of food justice and community organizing. Could you tell us a little bit more please about what community organizing has to do with food and food banking?   Claudio - Yes, yes. I love this. Thank you for the question. I feel like community organizing is one of the key foundations that drives changes in our community because we've seen it throughout time through movements that change the condition of farm workers. That change policies and practices for the protection of workers, no matter where they find themselves. And when we bring community organizing into the space of food banking, what we are bringing is the building of relationships, using those relationships to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish on our own. In the case of food banking, it is to address the root causes of food insecurity. Christina - Claudio, could you please share an example for our listeners? Claudio - Our organizing work has actually helped change school menus to include local fresh produce. It has also created access to vacant land across our community to turn them into green spaces. Communities that often find themselves ignored, marginalized, or even just disinvested. And the purpose and mission of community organizing within food banking is to build power. To build power with our participants because without power we aren't able to change the conditions of our communities. And to break it down a little bit more for our listeners, is that when we talk about power, we're not talking about empowerment. Power is the ability to impact and affect the conditions of our own lives and the lives of others. And empowerment is more of a feel good about yourself and self-esteem. So our goal is to build power within the food banking movement so people can really change what the community looks like, feels like and their experiences. Christina - That is a really important distinction and I appreciate that so much. Because when you talk about building power, I also think about what that means for building leadership. And Robert, as the chief program officer, you develop programs that are building leadership opportunities for people from Latin America. In your anti-hunger work, what relationship have you identified between food insecurity and migration? Robert - Thank you, Christina, for the question. I think there are a few things that to me are really important. One is like a deep reflection and exploration around why we have folks coming to the US. One of the reasons from my perspective has to do with economic justice, lack of opportunities for folks. And it's very much connected to issues that we see within the food system. For example, food banks depend on donations from corporations, from companies, from growers that do have an impact on the workers that work within these companies. And so a question that I would ask and that we do ask is: what are the unintended consequences of our business model as food banks? So what is happening with the rights of those workers who are growing the food that we are able to distribute then to community members? And so in the case of us as an organization that's based at the border, having Mexico as a neighboring country, it's a really important question. Why are folks or brothers and sisters from Latin America coming to Southern Arizona? And can we do something also if we are actually getting resources, for example produce from Northern Mexico to be able to also do something so that it's not an extractive practice but rather a ...
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    10 mins
  • Is Food Charity Political? If so, how do we organize?

    Is Food Charity Political? If so, how do we organize?
    Mar 10 2022
    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...
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    12 mins
  • Rooting the right to food in racial justice

    Rooting the right to food in racial justice
    Feb 3 2022
    Multiculturalism is central to Canada's national identity. It is how Canadians like to distinguish themselves on the international stage. But this mythology obscures the realities of Black, Indigenous and people of color otherwise known as BIPOC who experienced ongoing colonialism and racism. These forces have led to fast social inequities, including the prevalence of food insecurity in one in every two first nations households, and nearly one in every three black households compared to one in 10 white Canadian households. In addition, migrant workers who produce food for Canadians, but who are not recognized as citizens or rights holders are among the groups that are most vulnerable to food insecurity and other social consequences of the pandemic. In today's episode, we examine patterns of dietary inequity and struggles for food justice that challenge Canada's multicultural facade. Welcome to Rights not Charity. This podcast series is about a big idea, ensuring everyone has enough food not as a charitable gift, but as a fundamental human right. My name is Audrey Tung, and I'm a PhD student at the University of Victoria. Our guest today's Jade Guthrie. She's an expert on issues of food justice and food sovereignty in both theory and practice. She's a community food programs lead at FoodShare Toronto and a community organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers. Drawing from her background in social work, Jade applies an intersectional and anti-oppressive approach to advocacy for the right to food. Interview Summary So Jade in your most recent article in the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch report, you highlighted the distinction between structural and superficial responses to hunger. And you also demonstrated that the pandemic has exacerbated longstanding and long overlooked social inequities in Canada. Can you tell us a bit about why black and indigenous communities are disproportionately vulnerable to food insecurity? So I think first off, it's really important to recognize that Canada's food system as a whole is very much built on foundation of systems and structures of oppression. So things like settler colonialism and capitalism, systemic racism and structural poverty. So, it's no mistake then that certain communities, mainly BIPOC communities are bearing the brunt of the violence of our food system. I think we often hear kind of mainstream narratives that reinforce this idea that our system is failing or it's broken. But the fact of the matter is that it's not failing or broken, it's working exactly how it was built to. It was built on the backs of these folks. Canada's economic and social structures are low road, capitalists, colonial ones. So, our entire system as a country began on the backs of enslaved people, enslaved BIPOC folks. And today those systems continue to disproportionally impact these communities really violently. And then we see this play out in people's lives in terms of levels to access to food. Like you mentioned, black families are more than three and a half times more likely to experience food insecurity than white families here in Canada. So we see it playing out in the number of systemic barriers people face in trying to access the food they need to thrive. We might ask questions like why is it so hard to find affordable fresh produce in mainly black and indigenous and lower income neighborhoods? And it's not a coincidence, but it's a result of planning and policy processes that systematically under-resource certain communities. We also see this disproportionate impact playing out in terms of policing and food. So, why do certain grocery stores have police officers or security guards or metal detectors while others don't? Or why is baby food locked up in certain neighborhoods? So the question comes up of how many young, black and indigenous folks first encounter with the carceral system comes out of inequitable access to food. There's a lot of connections to be made here between policing and food insecurity that I think are really important to think about. And then, also it is super important to recognize and think about the ways in which our state's policies have historically and continue to attempt to destroy indigenous food ways and practices and traditions. So, if you could look back in time to something like the banning of potlatch ceremony and the Indian Act, or today you could look to the struggle for traditional fishing rights on the East Coast for the Mi'kmaq fisher folk. So when we look at the ways that our state's policies have enacted and continue to enact so much violence on these communities, it's no surprise that the relationships that indigenous and black folks have with food are often fraught and quite violent. I think lastly, it's also really important to recognize how these broader systems of oppression intersect to, for example, folks who work in frontline positions, which are often underpaid and quite exploded of in nature are disproportionally BIPOC ...
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    20 mins
  • How Non-Profits Can Support Food Justice

    How Non-Profits Can Support Food Justice
    Jan 13 2022
    Given the urgency of responding to climate change, food movements have featured prominently in urban planning, food policy, and sustainability initiatives, over the past decade. However, mainstream frameworks, such as the Local Food Movement, have typically catered to privilege, namely, a white middle class. They tend to overlook food networks that racialized communities have relied upon to survive social marginalization. Many of these communities have come together to support one another during COVID-19, a time when they've experienced profound social and dietary inequities. While the pandemic has presented a parallel crisis to climate change, it has also presented an opportunity to build food movements that are more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive to diverse communities. In this episode, we will understand how we can do so using the framework of food justice. Interview Summary Welcome to Rights Not Charity. This podcast series is about a big idea, ensuring that everyone has enough food, not as a charitable gift, but as a fundamental human right. My name is Audrey Tung, and I'm a PhD student at the University of Victoria. Jade Guthrie, our guest today, is an expert on issues of food justice and food sovereignty, in both theory and practice. She is a Community Food Programs Lead at FoodShare Toronto, and a Community Organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers. Drawing from her background in social work, she applies an intersectional and anti-oppressive approach to your advocacy for the right to food. So what is food justice and how does it come up in your work? So for me, I think that food justice is a way of looking at the food systems that we have, and exploring and dissecting them through a really critical lens. It's really about identifying where and how broader systems of oppression are shaping our experiences and our relationships with food. And then food justice is working to dismantle those systems, to transform our food system into a more just and equitable one. You know, when we talk about food justice, I think it's really about recognizing that things like settler colonialism, and capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, these are some of the organizing principles that are very much embedded within our current food system. And, we see, and we feel, this play out every day in people's lives. So we see it in the ways that black and indigenous folks, disabled folks, poor folks, other groups of marginalized people, these are the folks who are disproportionally facing more barriers to accessing food. These are the same people who are policed within the food system, and the same folks who are exploited as workers along the food chain. So when we talk about food justice, it's really kind of acknowledging that we can't talk about these food issues, things like food insecurity, without talking about all of these broader systems that it's rooted in. You know, going back to this notion of Rights Not Charity, I think when we talk about food justice, what becomes clear is that any meaningful so-called solution to the problem of food insecurity, has to take into account these sites of oppression that breed the conditions for food insecurity, right? So we can't just continue looking to temporary Band-Aid solutions, but we need to be thinking about sustainability and long-term transformation. So it's not just about putting food on the table, but it's about things like anti-oppression, anti-racism, asking questions like, "How can we decolonize the entire food system?" I think it is Karen Washington who I heard say this, but that "food justice is an action word." So you've got to talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to food justice. So it means that we need to be working to transform these systems, to create a food system that's really built for the people, right? Not one that's built on the backs of marginalized folks, which is what we currently have. Thanks for teasing out the complexities of food justice so succinctly and eloquently. I particularly like how you mention that food insecurity can't be disentangled from wider systems of oppression, such as racism. So in your workshops, how do you harness the connective power of food towards social change? I think that food is really special, because our unique relationships with food are incredibly intimate and personal, but at the same time, this notion of having a relationship with food is very universal in the same way. Or like everyone has some sort of relationship with food, even if that relationship might be fraught. And I think also it's important to note that our relationships with food are very much inherently political too. Our experiences with food and the connections that we have with food, are rooted in notions of things like identity, and community, and culture, and race. The stories that we tell about the foods that we eat, or the foods that we love, or the foods that we want to cook, are very much stories about ourselves. So they ...
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    15 mins
  • Hunger, Historical Policies & Structural Racism in the U.S.

    Hunger, Historical Policies & Structural Racism in the U.S.
    Dec 16 2021
    The food system does not serve everyone equally. Hunger is rooted in systems of inequity, including systemic and structural racism. Structural racism is at the root of hunger and the health disparities we see in the US today. In this episode, we'll talk to Suzanne Babb about the impacts of historical policies on the food security of communities of color. Suzanne is co-director of US programs at WhyHunger.org, New York. She is also an urban farmer and founding member of Black Urban Growers. Interview Summary   So Suzanne, could you start out by explaining to us the meaning of the term structural racism and how it impacts black indigenous in communities of color today?   - Sure. So I'm going to use a definition from Dr. Camara Jones, a public health researcher who talks about the impacts of racism on health. So she starts out by defining institutional racism, which is the systems of policies, practices, norms, and values that result in differential access to goods, services, and opportunities in society by race. So how that shows up is inherited disadvantage, in this case, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and inherited advantage, and in this case, in the US it is white people who have that advantage. And the way that this gets manifested is in terms of material conditions and access to power. So we're looking at access to housing, education, employment opportunities, income inequality, different access to medical facilities, access to a clean environment, access to power through information, resources, and voice like in the media. So laying that out when we're talking about structural racism, structural racism is about how these policies and institutions act together to lead and produce barriers to opportunity and lead to racial disparity. So for example, we could take the mass incarceration of Black men and women. That is a relationship between the education system, the whole quote to prison pipeline between the criminal justice system and between the media that often perpetuates the myths about black people and criminality.   Thank you so much for laying that out for us so clearly. It's important to remember for us that the structures we have today are the result of our multitude of historical insults. What are some key historical flash points to keep in mind when we think about the relationship between hunger and the right to food?   I think there are two big ones that I can give in as an example as historical insults. The first one would be the dispossession and murder of Indigenous people in populations of their natural resources beginning in the 15th century. And then also the transatlantic slave trade where millions of West Africans were kidnapped, enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, sold as chattel to do backbreaking labor from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 19th century. And this is important because this is the beginning of where oppression and structural racism began for these groups of people, and that policies and practices have just been created and evolved to continue that oppression.   So over the last century there've been a number of policies or specific political acts that have shaped the US food system and negatively impacted the right to food for communities of color. I wonder if you can identify for us some of those key political actions.   Yes, so I'll identify three areas: the Social Security Act of 1935, several USDA farm policies with impact particularly on BIPOC farmers, and urban planning and neighborhoods; and the National Housing Act of 1934.   Let's now take each one of those policies one at a time, beginning with maybe the Social Security Act. Tell us a little bit about how that Social Security Act affected the food security of communities of color?   So the Social Security Act was created to protect Americans by providing folks in their old age, survivors and folks who have been disabled insurance; so payment in those times when they're no longer able to work. But what happened was during that time, it excluded domestic and agricultural workers. And 60% of the Black labor force were domestic and agricultural workers. That was completely intentional. Then domestic workers were included in 1950 and agricultural workers were included in 1954. But that left out a generation of people who couldn't accumulate family wealth or couldn't get their basic needs met during that time when they could no longer work because of age or disability. And so if they had hunger or food insecurity already because they probably weren't earning enough money, that was further perpetuated by not being able to access social security.   So the Social Security Act created into generational sort of oppression, increasing the combined food insecurity for communities of color. Now, I wonder how the USDA farm policies also operated as structures of racism?   If we look at the way in which the USDA gives out subsidies, for many decades, they have given out ...
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    12 mins
  • Why This Pediatricians Wants Us to Reenvision Poverty & Food

    Why This Pediatricians Wants Us to Reenvision Poverty & Food
    Nov 11 2021
    Lack of food or too much of the wrong kind of food can create a wealth of physical and mental health problems. Making matters even worse, society often blames individuals for making the wrong choices. But data shows us that diet related ill health goes hand in hand with inequality and poverty and occurs at disproportionately higher rates for communities of color. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Ben Danielson, a pediatrician with the University of Washington, about the parallels between food banking and healthcare. And, how both systems manage social problems and could benefit from addressing food insecurity systemically at the root causes level.     Host: Christina Wong, Northwest Harvest   Guest: Ben Danielson, University of Washington   Producer: Deborah Hill, Duke World Food Policy Center   Interview Summary   We know the benefits of healthy food and we see ongoing impacts on child health outcomes as a result of food insecurity and family reliance on food charity. In your opinion, what are the key issues that health and food providers need to address?   Well, I think this is an opportunity for us to be a little bit reflective and to step back. I want to ask us all: what is the narrative that we've created around food and food charity? What is the story that we're telling ourselves? Is it a narrative or a story about heroes who are philanthropically giving of themselves to put food in front of folks and the poor destitute who are somehow just waiting for this kind of charity to show up? Are we disempowering some populations and creating super powers in others? What is the story that we're telling ourselves about food charity? And if we think about that, what is the environment of food and the food and health system that we're talking about in that narrative?   So I wonder about charity because sometimes in our society, we allow folks with great resource to make their choices about charity in order to help support other parts of our society. When in fact, sometimes those great resources are attained because of avoiding a need to pay taxes, avoiding other parts of supporting our society's infrastructure. And we sort of pulled away one set of resources and then allowed a certain number of people to provide a small amount of resource in a separate way. And I feel like maybe that is a narrative, a story of heroes doing something heroic instead of a story of a society that everybody cares about each other, everybody has strengths, everybody is making sure that everyone else around them is strong and healthy because that's the way we all get so much better. So I wonder about this idea about charitable deferral, the avoidance of supporting infrastructure by providing a trickle of resources to other spaces. I wonder about that infrastructure and the wealthiest of wealthy nations shouldn't we have some basic idea of the components that we should all be should all have a right to, should all be entitled to make sure that we don't have to worry about? Because I will tell you beyond the caloric issues of food, the worry about food, the preoccupation with wondering about food is just as detrimental to the mind and the body and the soul of folks who deal with food insecurity every day. I wonder about this as a symbolic representation of poverty by creating this space where food is delivered in sometimes undignifying ways to folks whose food security is weak. How we create a strong picture of folks perhaps BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), in different communities being subjugated, being marginalized. And that marginalization kind of being represented by this delivery of food in this way that we do it. I wonder about what we are accountable to, each of us.   I see in my role as a pediatrician, I watch these amazing kids every day. These incredible kids with just a look in their eye that tells you they can change the world for the better, they have all the skills and tools and hopes and dreams and potential to do something incredible. And all they need from us is the right space, the right environment, the right cultivation to allow incredible things to happen. I wonder how our narrative could be about celebration and optimism and strength and brilliance. And how we are all so much better when every one of us including the people that we never meet have everything they need to do their best.   There has to be a better way. From what you're seeing from your experiences and what I'm seeing working at a food bank, that there's a real power imbalance that is being perpetuated by the system. A system that's designed to help people, but we're maybe not helping people live to their fullest potential. And I feel like this pandemic has really shed a lot of light on those inequities. During the COVID crisis, food bank providers focused on simply getting food to people. But it has also got us thinking about upstream solutions, such as enacting the right to food in Washington and in other states. What has ...
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    9 mins
  • The Connection Between Hunger and Health

    The Connection Between Hunger and Health
    Oct 14 2021
    In this episode, we’ll explore the connection between hunger and health. Welcome to Rights Not Charity. This podcast series is about a big idea, ensuring everyone has enough food, not as a charitable gift, but as a fundamental human right. My name is Christina Wong and I'm the director of Public Policy and Advocacy at Northwest Harvest, a food justice organization and statewide food bank based in Seattle, Washington. Our guest today is Dr. Ben Danielson, a pediatrician with the University of Washington.   Host: Christina Wong, Northwest Harvest   Guest: Ben Danielson, University of Washington   Producer: Deborah Hill, Duke World Food Policy Center   Interview Summary   So my first question for you is we all know that access to good food is a vital component of physical and mental health. Can you help us understand the links between diet and food access and how it affects health?   Well, I guess we have to just start with the basics. Not having enough food, or the right kind of nutrition, at least, leads to serious and often deadly health consequences for so many people across this country and other countries as well. When you don't have enough calories that just means you don't have the kind of energy you need for work. It means that if you're trying to learn, you don't have the potential to be able to learn effectively. If you don't have enough calories, you can't play, and you don't have life fulfilling activities that are important to you. But it's not just about not having quite enough calories, it's also about issues of making sure you have access to the healthiest foods and the right micronutrients.   There are ways in which hunger can be all around you, and you might not realize it, because people might not look like they are underweight or starving. In fact, a lot of people who have nutritional deficits can be overweight and malnourished at the same time. This is the paradox and the painful reality of not having enough food for too many people in North America and Europe. These problems are really linked to the way we think of economic inequality. When a parent is low income, they might struggle to afford fruits and vegetables, and they might go for the higher calorie foods per dollar. But that higher calorie content per dollar may be lower on the nutritional scale. It may not be the right kind of micronutrients. It could lead to someone actually feeling full, but not having a fulfilling diet. This means that again, young people, old people, children are filling their bodies with calories, but not with healthy foods.   If we are part of a nation, part of a continent, part of a globe that cares about making sure that each person can fulfill their potential in the way that they're supposed to, it really needs to be time for us to rethink the way we talk about food, about the right to food, about access to food. Because it's more than just nutrients. It's not enough for a food company, say, to add a few fortifications to their cereal. It's not enough for a particular product to be enhanced with certain micronutrients. What we need to be doing is really talking about food differently, and talking about body size, and body shape, and body weight differently. We need to have new conversations about access to healthy food, the rights of all of us to get food, the chance for young people to grow and fulfill their biggest dreams because they have healthy diets. And, the obligation that we all have to each other to making sure that we can live our fullest lives.   I just love everything about your answer. I feel like I can really hear the care that you have for your patients in that answer. And speaking of which that paradox about caloric intake, when you're hungry, that leads me to my next question, which is when it comes to food insecurity and particularly the obesity pandemic, people tend to focus on individual responsibility. We often hear this framed as an issue about people making the wrong choices when it comes to their dietary health. So what is the role of personal choice in the food and health relationship?   I think that's a really good question. It taps into some of the deeper emotions we might have as a society around issues of food, and weight, and body shape. And it's important, I think, for us to break down some of those concepts and get into this conversation more honestly and more authentically with each other. One thought that comes to mind for me around this topic is we don't often talk about access to choices. So we find sometimes that we're judging people for the way they make choices about food, about other purchases, about other options they make in their lives, when we don't fully understand what choices they actually have and what choices they don't have. Sometimes it's more about the access to choice that drives choices, even unhealthy ones, than it is about how we make personal decisions. And I think we need to step back from that moment of choice and look around ...
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    10 mins
  • UK - This is Rubbish - The Plenty to Share Campaign

    UK - This is Rubbish - The Plenty to Share Campaign
    Oct 7 2021
    Interview Summary So let's get started. As a seasoned food waste campaigner, what led you to this innovative, illustrated explainer video approach? What's important about this kind of visual messaging? What are you hoping to achieve by it? Well, we wanted to start telling a different story about how we can solve these problems, and the root causes of food waste and poverty. We show how inequalities of wealth and power in the industrial food system generate waste and hunger, more often than not. Waste and hunger will ultimately continue unless we fix these inequalities. Charities are only ‘sticking plaster’ or ‘band aid’ resolution to food insecurity. What we're really saying with this campaign is that the UK’s distribution of surplus food is also only a second class solution for food waste issues too. So to see what the more systemic solutions for food waste are, we need to look at the root causes. And to do this, we need to rewrite the dominant story of how our food system generates food waste. So, let's look back at the history of this. Food waste as an issue has taken off really over the last decade, in the UK and globally. A fairly standard story has begun to emerge: Food waste primarily happens at the retail and consumer level in rich, industrialized countries, and it's down to individual failings of consumers to be solved with educational campaigns to change that behavior. Now, on the other hand, we have food loss, which makes it sound unintentional. Like it's been sort of lost down the back of the sofa. But it's actually food wasted in supply chain problems, where lower income countries which lack infrastructure, like storage and refrigeration, and apparently, have inefficient supply chain. The problem with this narrative is, by accident or design, it falsely implies that industrialized food supply chains in rich countries are effectively efficient and low waste. And to solve food waste in these countries, it's enough to leave it to voluntary commitments by companies. In other words, market innovation will solve food waste, with some role for social enterprises and charities to hoover up the leftovers. So, in this system, we need to modernize the supply chain of countries in the Global South to make them more efficient and emulate these systems. This apparently de-political approach to food waste has become ascendant, and gone largely unchallenged. But it is, in fact, deeply neoliberal: the assumption that businesses in the free market are fundamentally efficient, and any problems are usually down to the personality failings of individual consumers or perhaps state intervention. With these films and other resources, we basically aim to rewrite this narrative by explaining how actually the inequalities of wealth and power that occur in the industrial food system generate waste. They generate overproduction, price crashes, inflexibility over seasonal variations, and rejecting food for being the wrong size and shape. But not only that, they also distribute wealth and foods extremely unequally. So generating mass hunger, despite there being no shortage of food or wealth to go round, and it creates underdevelopment. The lack of storage infrastructure in the Global South, is not a coincidence. It's the result of generations of colonial exploitation, which continues in a slightly different form today, with multinational corporations often extracting huge amounts of money and resources from the world's poorest countries. Understanding all this means, that we need more systemic solutions than just taking food waste and giving it to people in poverty or embracing voluntary commitments by businesses. We need to design food waste and poverty out of the system in the first place. Our videos sketch out some of these solutions. Now, all of this is a more complex story to tell then just spontaneously rescuing lots of food waste for people in need. What we've tried to do with these animations is make this new narrative more accessible and really create these videos out of wanting to help reframe this conversation and communicate about the root causes and the deeper solutions for food waste and poverty. Thank you so much, Martin, for showing so clearly that food waste is a product of a dysfunctional industrial food system and no guarantor of food security for the poor. In that context, what policy and practice successes has the UK Plenty to Share Campaign had to date in reducing food waste and food poverty? And what kind of challenges are you facing? What do you think are the lessons to be learned? We're a tiny organization, so we pretty quickly realized that, if we want to win the kind of change we want to see it's not going to be an overnight thing. So, we decided we need to take the time to build a strong movement behind the systemic solutions and involve whoever we can. Our focus has really been on getting people used to our new way of framing the problems of food waste and poverty, and building a ...
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    17 mins