Better to Light a Candle

This chapter shows how an ideology of service was essential to the success of God’s Love We Deliver, a home meal delivery program founded in 1986 for people with AIDS. Under the charismatic leadership of Executive Director Ganga Stone, God’s Love deployed a rhetoric of service to speak to individuals’ private search for meaning during the AIDS crisis. God’s Love was premised upon the uncontroversial notion that food was love, a tangible offering of nourishment and care. The program offered New Yorkers a means of registering their concern for those suffering with AIDS regardless of their spiritual or political views (or lack thereof). For Stone, God’s Love was not about finding structural solutions, but about helping ordinary people to be of service and thus to bring joy and purpose into their lives. This strategic approach enabled the organization to redefine what it meant to “care” about AIDS and to amass a broad set of supporters and considerable resources. By proffering the image of the suffering, hungry person who needed help in the most immediate way possible, the ideology of service made AIDS more approachable even as it may have obscured other kinds of relationships based on solidarity or empowerment.

A Taste of What It Takes

In the late 1960s, at the peak of the Puerto Rican- and Black-led community control movement, United Bronx Parents, an organization of mostly immigrant mothers, launched the city’s first sustained grassroots campaign to improve school lunch. This chapter explores the tenets of community control and the related movement of welfare rights to show how both informed the approach of parent organizers who staged the campaign and challenged New York City’s Board of Education to improve services to school-aged children. The chapter also shows how food became a tool of empowerment: the campaign helped parents move from blaming themselves to having a systemic understanding of their children’s disenfranchisement within a racist public school system. The campaign gave parent organizers the knowledge that they could solve problems more effectively than could school administrators.

Introduction

Using the conceptual lens of terroir, this chapter provides an overview of hunger and poverty in the United States, starting with the urban liberalism of the 1960s and tracing the onset of austerity politics from mid-1970s through the early 2000s. It shows how New York City food activism was connected to an array of apparently unrelated social movements, including American Communism, community control, the countercultural New Left, feminism, Black Power, and AIDS activism. As governments reduced spending on social programs, leaders from these movements formed nonprofit organizations geared toward providing services, such as emergency meals and low-cost groceries. This chapter offers an overview of why and how service provision came to absorb the attention of late-twentieth century activists and shows how nonprofit kitchens and offices became sites of mentorship. As charismatic, overwhelmingly female leaders passed on values and strategies forged in earlier eras, they enacted activist genealogies that helped sustain political involvement over decades. Powerful interpersonal bonds and people’s own sense of being transformed by their activism illuminate the underappreciated role of emotion in the history of left-progressive movements.

If You Know Somebody, Call Them Up

The Community Food Resource Center, founded in 1980 by Kathy Goldman, was a nonprofit anti-hunger agency that, unusually, combined direct service with advocacy. This chapter examines the nonprofit within a longer tradition of successful grassroots food activism, including, most significantly, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program for Children. The chapter shows how, building on a set of connections forged over decades, Goldman, her staff, and grassroots allies built productive partnerships with city officials to improve New Yorkers’ access to food by harnessing the economic power of federal food programs to bring money into the city through job creation. This chapter also illustrates the web of activist relationships upon which the organization was founded. Examining food advocates’ policy and legislative work around school breakfast in particular sheds light on the entrepreneurial side of social politics: the fact that much of what gets codified publicly depends upon the personalities and leadership of key individuals working behind the scenes.

Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation

In 1971, United Bronx Parents administered New York City’s first free summer meals program after the municipal government refused to take on the responsibility. Under the leadership of Executive Director Evelina Antonetty and coordinator Kathy Goldman, the grassroots antipoverty agency transformed a new and largely theoretical federal entitlement program into much-needed meals for children while school was out of session. Antonetty and Goldman’s activist backgrounds, including their experiences of American Communism and anticommunism, Puerto Rican independence, and Alinskyism, had a significant impact on how they carried out the citywide initiative: interracial cooperation, job creation, economic development, cultural nationalism, and creative, attention-grabbing tactics were just some of the legacies bequeathed to the two leaders by their prior movement work. Working in partnership with a private food service company, United Bronx Parents’ sponsorship of free summer meals shows that public-private collaborations predated the neoliberal policies of the later 1970s and since. Their work also shows how direct service provision could build the legitimacy of a grassroots organization citywide and serve as a model for improved public services.

Epilogue

This epilogue explores the development of a self-conscious, twenty-first century movement for food justice. It compares the food systems approach of some activists, with its focus on quality, with the anti-poverty advocates who appeared more focused on the question of access. It concludes by suggesting that in the twenty-first century, access and quality need not be treated as mutually exclusive. Finally, it challenges today’s food activists to ground any movement for food justice in the fight against poverty.

Perhaps Our Brightness Blinds

As the impact of federal budget cuts initiated by President Ronald Reagan converged with New York City’s post-1975 austerity politics, social crises such as homelessness and unemployment dramatically compounded the scale of hunger. The Community Food Resource Center found itself increasingly drawn into direct service work relating to emergency food provision, eviction prevention, and even tax preparation services. This chapter shows that even as such programs absorbed the organization’s time and money, staff managed to weld direct service and advocacy work together so that each reinforced the other. This chapter catches the shift from Executive Director Kathy Goldman’s expansive vision of eradicating hunger to a defensive practice of damage control, as budget cuts and welfare reform ushered in a new common sense that increasingly sought to punish poor people out of poverty. The chapter also highlights the role of the office as a progressive space and a site of mentorship amidst dawning austerity.

Life Is with People

This chapter uses Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop as a case study of community building from a place of privilege. In contrast to food activists who grounded their work in citizens’ rights and government responsibility, the Coop anchored its work in the theory and practice of cooperation and participatory democracy. Established in 1973 as a self-help effort by upwardly mobile, young, white people, the Coop’s high-quality, low-cost, mostly organic health food was a strong draw. At the same time, the Coop provided substantial social nourishment and an opportunity to participate actively in something that affected people on a daily basis. Yet, as satisfying as this community was for many members, the homogeneity of its leadership meant that it unintentionally replicated patterns of white and middle-class dominance that many of its members professed to oppose.