Food Insecurity Cannot be Solved with Food Charity

Food insecurity is experienced when a household does not have enough money to buy adequate and appropriate food.  How this looks can differ from household to household.  Some may worry about the rising cost of food, the ability to offer a balanced diet, or the ability to offer a meal at all.

While the result may give the appearance of a food issue, it is in fact, an issue of income.

No amount of food available in the system will change one’s ability to provide for their family.  Even when offered in the form of charity, one continues to experience food insecurity and its effects until they reclaim the ability to provide on their own.

Yet, food charity continues to be the response to this issue.

“Food charity has become so normalized; it’s deeply embedded in our cultural and social values.  But charity doesn’t address the root causes of food insecurity, rather, it perpetuates it,” says Alison Cohen, senior director of programs at WhyHunger, a global nonprofit working to end hunger and advance the human right to nutritious food. 

The movement towards neoliberalism in the 1980s saw a shift away from social policies to tackle systemic problems such as poverty and hunger, and promoted an era of deregulation, individual responsibility, and market solutions.  Food charity was promoted within this change – taking the pressure off governments and offering a corporate solution that looked good from a distance.

From a political perspective, charitable food assistance is popular because it doesn’t rock the boat: the left likes it because it feeds the poor, and the right likes it because it helps big business.  Corporations can donate unsaleable foods, receive tax write-offs, save on landfill fees, and forge images of corporate citizenship (de Souza, 2019).

Food charity depoliticizes the issues of hunger, making it a personal and private issue, rather than a public one (Chilton and Rose, 2009).  It sidesteps conversations of guaranteed basic rights and speaks in the name of gratitude.

It acts as a band-aid and a mirage for bigger questions.  How is it legal to pay wages that people cannot survive on?  Why are food and shelter not considered basic human rights?

While we still need it to keep people alive in the broken system we live in, let’s start tackling the real issues, and making food charity just one solution rather than the solution.  www.WeAllDeserveToEat.ca