A radical and urgent new approach to how we can solve the problems of hunger and poverty in the US. Most people think hunger has to do with food: researchers, policymakers, and advocates focus on promoting government-funded nutrition assistance; well-meaning organizations try to get expired or wasted food to marginalized communities; and philanthropists donate their money to the cause and congratulate themselves for doing so. But few people ask about the structural issues undergirding hunger, such as, Who benefits from keeping people in such a state of precarity? In The Painful Truth about Hunger in America, Mariana Chilton shows that the solution to food insecurity lies far beyond food and must incorporate personal, political, and spiritual approaches if we are serious about fixing the crisis. Drawing on 25 years of research, programming, and advocacy efforts, Chilton compellingly demonstrates that food insecurity is created and maintained by people in power. Taking the reader back to the original wounds in the United States caused by its history of colonization, genocide, and enslavement, she forces us to reckon with hard questions about why people in the US allow hunger to persist. Drawing on intimate interviews she conducted with many Black and Brown women, the author reveals that the experience of hunger is rooted in trauma and gender-based violence—violence in our relationships with one another, with the natural world, and with ourselves—and that if we want to fix hunger, we must transform our society through compassion, love, and connection. Especially relevant for young people charting new paths toward abolition, mutual aid, and meaningful livelihoods, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America reinvigorates our commitment to uprooting the causes of poverty and discrimination, and points to a more generative and humane world where everyone can be nourished.

The United States is viewed by the world as a country with plenty of food, yet not all households in America are food secure, meaning access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. A proportion of the population experiences food insecurity at some time in a given year because of food deprivation and lack of access to food due to economic resource constraints. Still, food insecurity in the United States is not of the same intensity as in some developing countries. Since 1995 the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has annually published statistics on the extent of food insecurity and food insecurity with hunger in U.S. households. These estimates are based on a survey measure developed by the U.S. Food Security Measurement Project, an ongoing collaboration among federal agencies, academic researchers, and private organizations. USDA requested the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies to convene a panel of experts to undertake a two-year study in two phases to review at this 10-year mark the concepts and methodology for measuring food insecurity and hunger and the uses of the measure. In Phase 2 of the study the panel was to consider in more depth the issues raised in Phase 1 relating to the concepts and methods used to measure food security and make recommendations as appropriate. The Committee on National Statistics appointed a panel of 10 experts to examine the above issues. In order to provide timely guidance to USDA, the panel issued an interim Phase 1 report, Measuring Food Insecurity and Hunger: Phase 1 Report. That report presented the panel's preliminary assessments of the food security concepts and definitions; the appropriateness of identifying hunger as a severe range of food insecurity in such a survey-based measurement method; questions for measuring these concepts; and the appropriateness of a household survey for regularly monitoring food security in the U.S. population. It provided interim guidance for the continued production of the food security estimates. This final report primarily focuses on the Phase 2 charge. The major findings and conclusions based on the panel's review and deliberations are summarized.

"Even though I looked alive and vital, the hourglass measuring the aliveness of my soul was swiftly draining to the bottom. I was losing my battle to be myself. I was in my prime. My career was taking off; I was surrounded by loving friends and family. Yet it felt like time was running out." Dr. Robin L. Smith, noted psychologist, ordained minister, motivational speaker, and best-selling author of Lies at the Altar, seemed to have the perfect life, but underneath it all, she felt empty. In this powerful new work, Dr. Robin painstakingly chronicles a time when she felt at the end of her rope, unable to truly see herself or escape the unrelenting craving in her heart. Throughout her life, she had always focused on living up to everyone else’s expectations, doing everything they asked – everything they recommended – in the hopes that by pleasing others she would find fulfillment and success. Instead she found herself spiritually and emotionally starved with a hungry soul begging for change. Through vivid descriptions of the symptoms of her hunger, the gnawing emptiness in her soul, and her courageous journey to discovering herself, Dr. Robin opens a window into her own experiences in order to provide insight into yours. With clarity and empathy she starts you on a path to uncovering the real you – the you that lays beneath all the doubt, superficiality, and life crises. Dr. Robin honestly bares her soul and shares her story – plus stories of other hungry souls including her friends, clients from her psychology practice, family, and celebrities – and in the process, teaches you to recognize, survive, embrace, and conquer your own hunger. She teaches you to step into your own story so you can listen to and learn from the wisdom within.

How to focus anti-hunger efforts not on charity but on the root causes of food insecurity, improving public health, and reducing income inequality. Food banks and food pantries have proliferated in response to an economic emergency. The loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the recession of the early 1980s and Reagan administration cutbacks in federal programs led to an explosion in the growth of food charity. This was meant to be a stopgap measure, but the jobs never came back, and the “emergency food system” became an industry. In Big Hunger, Andrew Fisher takes a critical look at the business of hunger and offers a new vision for the anti-hunger movement. From one perspective, anti-hunger leaders have been extraordinarily effective. Food charity is embedded in American civil society, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed. But anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential element of the problem: economic inequality driven by low wages. Reliant on corporate donations of food and money, anti-hunger organizations have failed to hold business accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases. They have become part of a “hunger industrial complex” that seems as self-perpetuating as the more famous military-industrial complex. Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.

With the biting wit of Supersize Me and the passion of a lifelong activist, Joel Berg has his eye on the growing number of people who are forced to wait on lines at food pantries across the nation—the modern breadline. All You Can Eat reveals that hunger is a problem as American as apple pie, and shows what it is like when your income is not enough to cover rising housing and living costs and put food on the table. Berg takes to task politicians who remain inactive; the media, which ignores hunger except during holidays and hurricanes; and the food industry, which makes fattening, artery-clogging fast food more accessible to the nation's poor than healthy fare. He challenges the new president to confront the most unthinkable result of US poverty—hunger—and offers a simple and affordable plan to end it for good. A spirited call to action, All You Can Eat shows how practical solutions for hungry Americans will ultimately benefit America's economy and all of its citizens.

Hailed as “invaluable…a substantial work of political thought,” (New Statesman) in a groundbreaking report, based on years of reporting, David Rieff assesses whether ending extreme poverty and widespread hunger is truly within our reach, as is increasingly promised. Can we provide enough food for nine billion people in 2050, especially the bottom poorest in the Global South? Some of the most brilliant scientists, world politicians, and aid and development experts forecast an end to the crisis of massive malnutrition in the next decades. The World Bank, IMF, and Western governments look to public-private partnerships to solve the problems of access and the cost of food. “Philanthrocapitalists” Bill Gates and Warren Buffett spend billions to solve the problem, relying on technology. And the international development “Establishment” gets publicity from stars Bob Geldorf, George Clooney, and Bono. “Hunger, [David Rieff] writes, is a political problem, and fighting it means rejecting the fashionable consensus that only the private sector can act efficiently” (The New Yorker). Rieff, who has been studying and reporting on humanitarian aid and development for thirty years, takes a careful look. He cites climate change, unstable governments that receive aid, the cozy relationship between the philanthropic sector and giants like Monsanto, that are often glossed over in the race to solve the crisis. “This is a stellar addition to the canon of development policy literature” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Reproach of Hunger is the most complete and informed description of the world’s most fundamental question: Can we feed the world’s population? Rieff answers a careful “Yes” and charts the path by showing how it will take seizing all opportunities; technological, cultural, and political to wipe out famine and malnutrition.

This important book “weaves lyrical storytelling and fascinating research into a compelling narrative” (San Francisco Chronicle) to look at dietary differences along class lines and nutritional disparities in America, illuminating exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family. ​ Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself. Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you’ve taken a seat at tables across America, you’ll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again.