Around 40 million Americans don’t have enough food to eat, and Jeremy Everett is on a mission to make that number zero. Everett, who has served on the National Commission on Hunger, is the founder and executive director of the Texas Hunger Initiative, based at Baylor University. In his new book, I Was Hungry: Cultivating Common Ground to End an American Crisis, Everett argues that hunger in the United States can be eliminated in our lifetime. Drawing upon the experience and expertise gained from decades of anti-hunger advocacy, Everett outlines why a collective and coordinated response to hunger is needed—and why, as Christians, this is a call we can’t ignore. Katie Thompson of the Center for Public Justice spoke with Everett about the causes of and solutions to hunger in America.
When most Americans think about the current crises facing our nation, I’d wager that food insecurity isn’t at the top of the list. Why do you describe it as a crisis?
Approximately 40 million Americans experience food insecurity. My view is that this particular group bears the weight of all the brokenness in our social systems. Often, we look at Americans experiencing hunger or food insecurity and place them in different categories than Americans who, say, lack access to healthcare, live in poverty, or struggle to find good jobs. But the reality, on the local level, is that these groups are all part of the same family. Their struggles are interconnected.
In my book, I refer to the “trade-offs” people confront each month. “Do I pay rent? Do I buy food? Do I pay for medication? Do I pay my car payment? Do I pay the electric bill?” They have to decide to prioritize specific expenses, because they don’t have enough money to pay for everything. Many sacrifice food, thinking that even if they experience hunger, at least they won’t get kicked out of their home or have their car repossessed.
It’s important to point out that hunger and food insecurity aren’t exactly the same thing. The US Department of Agriculture defines food security as having enough food to live an active, healthy lifestyle. But in either case, people’s eating habits are disrupted and they’re not getting regular meals on a daily basis. And when that describes 40 million people, to me you’re at a crisis point, particularly when that number is mostly steady. We’ll need to significantly strengthen our social systems before we see it decline.
What are the main reasons that hunger exists in America?
Underemployment is the biggest factor. If you’re employed but only making minimum wage, there’s no place in America where you’ll be able to pay for all your expenses. And underemployment is chronic, meaning that typically families have experienced some measure of unemployment for generations.
Educational attainment is another major factor. Beyond a high school diploma, in most cases you need an additional two-year degree or a technical degree to escape hunger and poverty. But if you’re living in hunger and poverty, you’re much less likely to get the education you need.
A third factor is family structure. Common sense—and simple math—says that two gainfully employed adults are going to be better than one. My wife and I have three kids. We both have graduate degrees, we are Anglo, and we grew up in middle-class households. We’ve had every advantage that anyone could have, outside of inheriting large sums of money. But despite all these advantages, raising kids was still difficult, and it’s difficult to pay the bills. Imagine being a single parent trying to work, take care of your kids, and make sure everybody gets to school on time and gets fed on a regular basis. You have to be superhuman to pull that off while getting an additional degree.
You begin the book with a story about Hurricane Katrina and its impact on your thinking about responding to hunger. You note the structural problem of a lack of communication between different sectors of society with a role to play—government, nonprofits, and churches, for example. Texas Hunger Initiative was designed to coordinate a collective response. Why is this collective response so important?
If we’re really going to make systemic changes in areas like hunger, poverty, healthcare access, or employment opportunities, the local, state, and federal levels all need to work in concert with each other. The nonprofit sector, the public sector, and the private sector all need to work together strategically, because these problems are too big for any one government agency, nonprofit, or church to address on its own. There are thousands of organizations doing good things, in Texas and around the country. It’s just not a very coordinated effort. So naturally, sometimes you end up with gaps in resources and services, and sometimes you end up with duplications. We have to get everybody working together.
The call to feed the hungry is found throughout Scripture. Christians have responded to this call, and there are countless churches and faith-based nonprofits devoted to this work. Why is a governmental response, through programs like SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], also essential to eliminating hunger?
My job is to come up with a cure (or cures) for hunger and poverty. And so I really can’t be too ideological. I come at this from a more pragmatic standpoint. I’m glad that we have strong nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, and that corporations, even if they don’t always pay the wages that I wish they paid, oftentimes set up foundations that contribute to this cause.
Can they do more? Certainly. Can all of us do more? Absolutely. The church needs to play a leading role in this, but we can’t do it without government. Government is the single largest entity that funds anti-hunger and anti-poverty work. I believe public education, for example, is probably the best anti-poverty program that we have. Why would we dilute something that creates opportunity for so many people that wouldn’t otherwise have it?
In the book, you provide some examples of how “faith communities have stepped up and moved beyond food pantries to engage parishioners to serve the poor.” What does this look like?
In the book I tell the story of Mary and Carol, two Sunday school teachers in San Angelo, Texas. After three manufacturing plants closed, they recognized that they had a hunger epidemic on their hands, and they knew that it was beyond the capacity of a food pantry.
So they ended up leading a collaborative effort in response. They were part of the fabric of the community, and they used the trust that they’d built over decades to pull all the other churches from the community together. They pulled together the nonprofit organizations, the school district, community-based organizations, and businesses to address the hunger problem comprehensively. As a result, churches that had commercial kitchens said, “Hey, we’ll make meals for kids when they’re out of school.” And churches located in low-income neighborhoods said, “We’ll provide the summer meal sites.” Meanwhile, the business community and other church volunteers stepped up and said, “We’ll volunteer with the kids at these meal sites. We’ll do academic activities to keep their minds engaged. We’ll play games to help them stay physically healthy.” Eventually, these partnerships led to a community garden initiative and a drive to sign up more eligible families for SNAP benefits and other available assistance.
They did this in a highly conservative area of West Texas. They did it because they loved each other. They recognized their love for neighbor was core to their faith, and they wanted to deal with the issue comprehensively. As Christians, Matthew 25 sums it up well. It’s not just an option for us to care for the hungry, the poor, the naked, the migrant, or those who are sick and in prison. We are judged based on what we do to further their cause.
Throughout the book, you describe a “cultural problem” wherein our nation blames the hungry and poor for their situation rather than walking alongside them to find solutions. How can people of faith help change this narrative?
First, by doing our homework and making sure we understand the facts. Most people have experienced being at the grocery store and waiting behind somebody using a SNAP card to buy food they don’t believe should be purchased with government assistance. We have to avoid painting with a broad brush when we hear stories like that. It doesn’t get us anywhere to scapegoat an entire class of people based upon anecdotal experiences.
Second, we need to better understand what Scripture says to us. As people of faith, we love to talk about Jesus’ death and resurrection—and obviously, our faith doesn’t exist without that. But it’s also crucial to remember that Jesus lived among us, and he spent much of his time with people on society’s margins, people who suffer under various disadvantages. In Matthew 25, it’s the ones who neglected to feed the hungry or provide shelter for the migrant who were the accused, not the other way around. The better we understand who the poor are in our communities, the more we’ll be able to love God and neighbor with our whole being.
Which populations experiencing hunger today in the United States are the most overlooked?
Ten years ago, there was a concerted effort across a number of sectors to try to strengthen our approach to addressing childhood hunger. There have been some significant improvements in terms of access to food and even healthier food for kids across the US. We’re not done, but it helped everybody begin to move in a similar direction.
Unfortunately, we haven’t yet seen a similar shift for the elderly population. There’s been a decline in federal resources for food programs for the elderly, and so you’re seeing organizations like Meals on Wheels at work in many parts of the country, especially in places where budgets are stretched thin while the population of seniors is dramatically increasing. Once we’re older and unable to contribute to society the way we once were, it’s like we’re put on the shelf and forgotten. If you’ve ever dropped food off with a Meals on Wheels program, you often see the squalor and isolation many seniors live in. It’s such a raw, absolutely heartbreaking experience.
Native American tribal communities are also experiencing hunger that is often overlooked. These communities are so isolated in many places, so rural and far away from economic opportunity. It seems like almost every intervention we come up with as a nation with our tribal communities just makes the situation worse. Every one of my visits has been both heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time, just to observe how they still take care of each other in spite of difficult circumstances.
Toward the end of the book, you argue that, in our lifetime, we should work to end the idea that hunger and poverty are acceptable socioeconomic conditions. What do you mean?
This might be one of the most important aspects of the book. I use the example of William Wilberforce, who I call the patron saint of collaboration and common ground. He was able to pull together a kind of unholy alliance that was pivotal in passing legislation in Parliament to end the British slave trade. He literally committed his public life to the cause of ending slavery.
One of his biographers noted that although this was a huge accomplishment, his greatest accomplishment was ending the idea that slavery was an acceptable form of commerce. Prior to that point, slavery had been an economic reality for thousands of years. And finally, in the late 1700s, you have somebody who is taking that idea on and saying, “You know what? This is unjust, and we shouldn’t have it.”
Likewise, we have to end the idea that hunger and poverty are acceptable economic conditions. Once this happens, our systems will adapt and adjust. But until that day, it’ll always be a push and pull of trying to make slight improvements to public policy or trying to make slight improvements in the budgets of local churches and charities. We have to mentally determine that hunger is no longer socially acceptable.
What gives you hope that this dream can become a reality?
As Martin Luther King Jr. was fond of saying, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This is the lens through which I read Scripture and see history. As a nation, we have these moments of historical significance where we move toward justice. The civil rights movement of the 20th century was one shining example. So history proves that we can make some significant changes. In more recent times, we’ve basically cut global hunger in half. Over a 20-year period, we went from about a billion and a half people experiencing hunger and malnutrition worldwide to about 800 million.
Across the world, people produce enough food for everybody to have three meals a day. Much of the problem is logistical. With the global population on the rise and migration patterns unstable, we’ll need to make continual improvements to address food insecurity. But ultimately, I believe this is a solvable problem.
Learn something new from this interview? Did we miss something? Let us know here.
