Food and Poverty: Food Insecurity and Food Sovereignty Among America's Poor - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826522041 ISBN 13: 9780826522047

Verlag: Vanderbilt University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Food insecurity rates, which skyrocketed with the Great Recession, have yet to fall to pre-recession levels. Food pantries are stretched thin, and states are imposing new restrictions on programs like SNAP that are preventing people from getting crucial government assistance. At the same time, we see an increase in obesity that results from lack of access to healthy foods. The poor face a daily choice between paying bills and paying for food.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

E. Brooke Kelly is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

Julia Waity is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

Leslie Hossfeld, Professor of Sociology, Mississippi State University, is current director of the Mississippi Food Insecurity Project.

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Food And Poverty

Food Insecurity and Food Sovereignty among America's Poor

By Leslie H. Hossfeld, E. Brooke Kelly, Julia F. Waity

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2018 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8265-2204-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, ix, 
INTRODUCTION, 1, 
PART ONE: CONCEPTS, 
1. Security via Sovereignty: Lessons from the Global South Myriam Paredes and Mark Edwards, 5, 
2. Can You Put Food on the Table? Redefining Poverty in America Maureen Berner and Alexander Vazquez, 17, 
3. Food, Poverty, and Lifestyle Patterns: How Diversity Matters Michael Jindra and Nicolas Larchet, 30, 
PART TWO: PROBLEMS, 
4. Food Spending Profiles for White, Black, and Hispanic Households Living in Poverty Raphaël Charron-Chénier, 47, 
5. The Geography of Risk: A Case Study of Food Insecurity, Poverty, and Food Assistance between the Urban and the Rural Michael D. Gillespie, 63, 
6. Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Health among Youth Don Willis and Kevin M. Fitzpatrick, 79, 
7. The Role of Coupons in Exacerbating Food Insecurity and Obesity Kaitland M. Byrd, W. Carson Byrd, and Samuel R. Cook, 92, 
8. The Rise and Falter of Emergency Food Assistance Jennifer W. Bouek, 104, 
9. The Complex Challenges to Participation in Federal Nutrition Programs Rachel Wilkerson, Kathy Krey, and Linda English, 114, 
10. Access to Food Assistance for Food Insecure Seniors Marie C. Gualtieri, 128, 
11. Food Deserts and Injustice: Poverty, Food Insecurity, and Food Sovereignty in Three Rust Belt Cities Stephen J. Scanlan and Sam Regas, 142, 
12. Shifting Access to Food: Food Deserts in Atlanta, 1980–2010 Gloria Ross and Bill Winders, 162, 
PART THREE: SOLUTIONS, 
13. Together at the Table: The Power of Public-Private Partnerships to Alleviate Hunger Erin Nolen, Jeremy Everett, Doug McDurham, and Kathy Krey, 179, 
14. Race, Class, Privilege, and Bias in South Florida Food Movements Marina Karides and Patricia Widener, 191, 
15. Food Insecurity in Southeast Grand Rapids, Michigan: How Our Kitchen Table Is Building Food Justice in the Face of Profiteering and Exclusionary Practices Christy Mello, 204, 
16. Community Leadership and Participation to Increase Food Access and Quality: Notes from the Field Ameena Batada and Olufemi Lewis, 216, 
17. Hunger in the Land of Plenty: Local Responses to Food Insecurity in Iowa Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, Jacqueline Nester, Andrea Basche, Eric Christianson, and Emily Zimmerman, 230, 
18. Food Pantries on College and University Campuses: An Emerging Solution to Food Insecurity Carmel E. Price and Natalie R. Sampson, 245, 
CONTRIBUTORS, 259, 
INDEX, 261, 

CHAPTER 1

Security via Sovereignty

Lessons from the Global South

MYRIAM PAREDES AND MARK EDWARDS

The American shopper walking down a grocery store aisle naively participates in a food system full of ironies and unintended consequences. If asked to interpret the contrast between great volumes of food on the shelves and the request at the cash register for contributions to the food bank, a thoughtful person will quickly recognize the most blatant of ironies — a country that produces mass quantities of food and pays farmers to stop producing too much is also a country with 17.4 million food insecure households (Coleman-Jensen, Rabbitt, Gregory, and Singh 2015). But beyond this glaring contradiction, the complexities and frequent dysfunctions of the country's provisioning remain a mystery. One reason for shoppers' naiveté is the dominance of food security "thinking" about the feeding of populations and the lack of awareness of an alternative food sovereignty theoretical framework. In this chapter we highlight the distinctions, connections, and implications of these frameworks, advocating for a more thoughtful approach to understanding the feeding of the United States by incorporating the strengths of food sovereignty, a concept embraced by South Americans in their constitutions.

Consider another apparent contradiction. From a food security point of view, high rates of obesity and diabetes among poor Americans are nonintuitive, especially given that in other countries poverty can lead to stunted growth and gaunt faces. But a food sovereignty lens brings into focus the fact that powerful interests arrange for government-subsidized commodities that keep prices low on calorie-intensive, nutrition-poor diets, while healthy fruits and vegetables remain unsubsidized, more expensive, and therefore more accessible to middle and upper classes.

The sovereignty lens also reveals ironies inherent in the production and delivery components of the food system. For example, sometimes, the same trucks that transport organic produce from the rural "salad-bowl" areas to the cities are the same ones that bring back from port cities the less expensive canned produce gathered and processed elsewhere, at times from halfway around the world. So, rural farmworkers in the United States use their meager wages not to purchase the food they cultivated and harvested, but instead to buy food that other farmworkers produced more cheaply elsewhere. Even stranger, low-income workers and the unemployed, both in remote rural and in densely urban places, often find themselves in the midst of food deserts; that is, they live in places that lack a wide variety of affordable, quality foods and instead are full of cheap, highly processed foods. Supermarkets may choose to avoid urban ghettos, or not stock their stores with the same quality produce owing to economic and transportation obstacles, while little country stores are often so remote that food distribution companies decide not to deliver fresh dairy, bread, or produce to such small markets.

Further ironies appear when a sovereignty lens is used to consider the food access concerns of low-wage, working Americans. For example, many of the low-income inhabitants of these urban food deserts work in "food service" while low-income workers in rural places are often engaged in cultivating, harvesting, and packing food. In both rural and urban areas of the northwestern United States, food service workers have been among the highest represented workers among food insecure households (Grussing and Edwards 2006). Meanwhile, at the end of the food chain, consumers who work in retail (such as Walmart) often earn wages so low that they must turn to federal assistance (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP), providing them modest funds to purchase food, often from the very employers who pay them low wages.

The computer-precise and remarkably organized food-delivery system that daily feeds multitudes with safe, if not always healthy, food also displays occasional unintended consequences that achieve notoriety in the media. For example, the same amazingly efficient industrial food complex that distributes massive quantities to most parts of the country and the world also produces large outbreaks of food-borne illnesses when food safety is compromised. One bad crop of cantaloupes or batch of ice cream contaminated with Listeria (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2015b) or one side of beef infected with "mad cow disease" (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2015a) can put at risk thousands of consumers because indeed millions of consumers partake of the rationalized system that so widely distributes cantaloupes, ice cream, and hamburger from and to all parts of the country. From a food security point of view, such problems may be...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Vanderbilt University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826522041
• ISBN 13: 9780826522047
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 270
• Herausgeber: Hossfeld Leslie H., Kelly E. Brooke, Waity Julia F.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar