Book Project

Food insecurity is often a silent issue – hidden in the cracks and crevices of a person’s life. People struggling with finding enough food – or enough nutritious food – to eat, often look just like the rest of us. They are workers, moms, college students, teachers, parents, people with disabilities, and school children. They show up to work or school or life every day and make difficult decisions or sacrifices about when, what, and how they will eat. Parents skip meals or eat less so that they can feed their children, people with chronic illness debate spending their meager earnings on medicine or food, college students opt for ultra-processed, salt-laden packaged meals because they can’t afford fresh ingredients (and worse is that our society considers this a rite of passage).

My book explores how this has happened by merging two perspectives—the voice of the historian and the voice of the nonprofit activist—to discern the politics and consequences of food insecurity. I will show the historical legacies and pervasiveness of the politics of food access in America by arguing that the 1964 FSP marked a moment where citizenship and civic identity were unintentionally reimagined or reconstituted based on food rights. A disconnect between policy formation and the interpretation of that policy in poor communities continues to exist today. In more cases than not, policy formation excluded the perspectives and needs of those people with lived experience. A historical misstep that hunger advocates today are working hard to correct.