Photographing the faces of American hunger
Issue 198: Plus, what it takes for a restaurant to be actively anti-gentrification, and how California's new home restaurant licenses could transform their food industry.
Hello! Welcome to Nosh Box, a food solutions newsletter. On Mondays, I send a reading guide of food system fix news, and on Thursdays, I dig deeper with an original essay you can only get here.
Check out last Thursday’s essay: A brief inquiry into the names of various meats. Yes, boneless wings aren't truly wings. But Impossible meat isn't biologically meat, either. So do we need to rename them?
Several big projects on food insecurity this week, the most ambitious of which is by photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally at the New York Times Magazine. Starting in May, she took a 92-day trip from New York to California, documenting families struggling with hunger.
The sprawling (and well-produced) photo essay documents hunger in dozens of families, in 9 states, in nearly 100 photos — how people get by, or don’t. For many words as I’ve read about hunger and food insecurity in America, it’s always so striking to see it visually, too.
Absolutely worth taking time to make your way through it. Here are some of the photos in the series, all by Brenda Ann Kenneally at the NYTimes Magazine. In the actual article, she shares the stories behind the folks in these images, too.
The larger photo essay is tied to a couple stories that dive deeper into a particular topic:
>>Minivans at the Food Pantry: Meet America’s New Needy
“When historians look back on our pandemic-stricken times, there will perhaps be one indelible image that captures the attention of future generations: the endless lines of cars across the country filled with hungry Americans.
“I call it the Great Depression with minivans,” said Terry McNamara, who on a recent morning was behind the wheel in a line of cars, their trunks opened as they wound through the parking lot of Parma Senior High School in a working-class suburb of Cleveland that was once America’s fastest-growing city.
Before the pandemic, she worked as a contractor with the military. Her husband, Mike, is a machinist at a box factory, and together they earned a little less than $100,000 a year.
“We had nothing to worry about,” she said. “We had savings. We were saving up to put a down payment on a house. We took a couple vacations a year. The kids got whatever they wanted.”
After losing her job, and after her husband’s hours were cut, they were soon staring at an eviction notice. They were unable to make the $1,100 rent payment. The Chevy Suburban was one of the first things to go. Every day she awoke to a feeling of “impending doom.”
And >>How Hunger Persists in a Rich Country Like America
Journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who has worked with Kenneally for almost two decades, wrote about some of the families she photographed on her journey. She also discusses more broadly the phenomenon of American politicians and media repeatedly “discovering” hunger — whether through the photographs of Dorothea Lange, or the 1960s TV documentary Hunger in America, or in response to Reagan-era cuts to food benefits — and then proceeding to treat it as an isolated emergency, rather than a result of long-standing systemic inequalities.
>>In an interview with the NYTimes, Kenneally explained that she wants to go beyond simply making photos and start focusing on the next steps of discussion and change.
First, a brief tangent: She says that this is why she doesn’t consider herself a photojournalist, and I don’t love when people make comments like this. Her implicit suggestion seems to be that nobody who calls themself a photojournalist is concerned with sparking broader social conversations, only clicking the shutter. I think this ignores the current and historical photojournalists who do and did undertake this kind of work — including Dorothea Lange, whose photography travels in the ‘30s and ‘40s have been compared to Kenneally’s recent trip. My perception is, why disavow yourself from photojournalism and implicitly denigrate the profession instead of being a ‘new’ type of photojournalist who calls on the discipline to move forward?
Anyway. I do think her subsequent answer is on-point:
What are the discussions you hope people have?
What we have in this country largely is a distribution problem of wealth and resources. The systems of distribution have been shut down or altered, but not because of the pandemic — disastrous events like Covid-19 only exposed the flaws of those systems. So for a while now, it’s been very difficult to even get food to where it needs to be. We have enough resources to assist our fellows in ways to create lives of greater possibility, certainly sustainability, and some kind of security. But the wealth is controlled by a very small percentage of individuals, and systems are put in place to perpetuate that. There’s no better example than food. The people who are bringing us food make the smallest wage, and the system is designed to keep people fed just enough so they can keep working to make the folks on top wealthier. That kind of discussion, you can start it with a meal on the table and the food as a symbol of inequity and insecurity.
Very cool illustration by Michelle Pereira for The Correspondent
>>Workers Keeping Americans Fed Are Going Hungry in the Heartland
And it’s farmworkers, too, who are struggling to make ends meet. It’s a sadly ironic indictment of the U.S. food system that not even those who produce our food are paid enough to be able to buy it. And as the article rightly points out, women and girls often go hungrier than men and boys — both around the world and in the U.S. — due to social pressures to serve others first or eat last.
Every farm story, every food production story, every food consumption story has to be a labor story!!! (Today’s Labor Day, after all.) And it’s articles like these that remind us of the precariousness of many people’s finances and food security — and how dangerous it can be for our country to tie basic social provisions, like the ability to access food and health care, to a person’s employment status. (See: SNAP work requirements.)
>>How to fix this? Co-ops are back at it again!
In Minneapolis, Em Cassel profiles six different cooperative initiatives working to provide all sorts of essential services, from food provisioning to car repair to laundry. Imagine what our society could be capable of if we all used our skills and resources to help one another!
>>The key question remains, though: How do you make it long-lasting?
Eater’s “Now What” series on the future of restaurants has included some really interesting articles lately, including these two about worker-owned restaurants and co-ops:
>>What Is an Anti-Gentrification Restaurant?
Another story from Eater’s series asks what it looks like for a restaurant to actively avoid gentrification and displacement and to actually serve the neighborhood, rather than exclusively being a destination for nonresidents.
Restaurateurs haven’t paid enough attention to gentrification, and restaurants that otherwise espouse liberal philosophies, like fair wages and ethical sourcing, are often less cognizant of how they may contribute to displacement.
Restaurateurs need to understand who lives in a community in order to serve it, and this takes work. Kamau Franklin, founder of the Atlanta-based Community Movement Builders collective, encourages restaurateurs to dialogue with neighborhood associations and community groups about what the restaurant’s role should be. Restaurateurs and restaurant organizations should be “looking at what those neighborhoods continually look like, talking to the leadership of folks in those neighborhoods, and trying to figure out what those folks are saying they need.”
>>Riverside’s Newly Legal Home Restaurants Look to Revolutionize California’s Food Scene
AB-626 may seem like a small adjustment to the state’s vast body of food regulations, but in reality it’s something much more: The new law could unleash a dining revolution in California, precisely when it’s needed most. Between stay-at-home mandates, high unemployment, and the still-raging coronavirus pandemic, the entrepreneurial opportunities presented by AB-626 could mean tens of thousands of dollars in the hands of local chefs who feed their communities the food they most want to eat. And while Riverside is the state’s only county to fully implement AB-626, the dozens of restaurants that have come online since January 2020 are proving that a path forward for legal home cooking is not only possible, it’s needed.
