Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: Community service and the difference between the changes charities can make and the changes policy can make.
I’ve been working with an organization called the Farmer Foodshare for about nine years now. Is that right? Eight years. Eight and a half. Something like that. The Farmer Foodshare is a charity organization that is committed to fighting food insecurity and hunger in our local community by connecting farmers directly with people in need. For those of you who aren’t from around here, I live in a very agriculture-focused region with a thriving farming community. To put it in perspective, on collection and distribution days, my team will take food donations directly from farmers and put it in the hands of people in our community struggling with food insecurity within the day, often within a few hours. I mention this because a lot of hunger-focused organizations, like food pantries, often end up with food sitting on shelves for days or weeks, and fresh produce is hard to come by. Farmer Foodshare can take a bit of a different approach because of how rich the farming community is where I live.
I used the phrase “food-insecurity” a bit just now, so I wanted to quickly define it for you, because it’s not quite the same as hunger. Food insecurity is defined as “the state of being without reliable access to nutritious food.” A person could be food-insecure without being malnourished. Access to food may be inconsistent, and especially access to fresh, nutritious food is very limited. If a single-parent teacher gets paid once a month, they and their children may experience food insecurity at the end of the month, but maybe not after the teacher is paid. A lot of college students are food-insecure. A lot of children are food-insecure. In my state, 1 in 5. One thing I like to tell kids, especially in public schools, when I’m giving an educational program is to look around at their classmates in school and remember that they definitely know somebody, probably many people, who experience food insecurity, and you might not be able to tell just by looking at them.
You might not be able to tell just by looking at them! Food insecurity especially is hard to spot, because you can’t just look around and say, “oh, look, that child is literally skin and bones, they definitely don’t get enough to eat.” Often, people will only have access to convenience foods, which have calories and can keep you going for another day, but are definitely not enough to sustain health. Maybe a family doesn’t have a working kitchen, or reliable transportation to and from a well-stocked, affordable grocery store. Maybe parents have long shifts or inconsistent hours, so the only food kids have available at home are cheap snacks that keep a long time and don’t require cooking. Maybe all the kid eats in a day is school lunch, maybe breakfast if they can get to school early enough. And I don’t care what the government tries to say, that food is not nutritionally complete.
I got sidetracked in my research trying to find an example school menu and got super disillusioned with the idea of making literal small children pay for lunch and publicly humiliating them by sending them to administrators to get vouchers and a cold meal if they ran out of money in their account or forgot money at home. And also? The policy changes as kids get older? Just because a kid is in high school doesn’t mean they don’t need food anymore. My school district’s policy is to publicly humiliate the elementary and middle school kids, but for high schoolers they just say, “No alternative meal for you. No charging your account. You don’t get to eat today.” Hate it. No justification. People deserve to eat.
ANYWAY I was talking about food insecurity. Right. So the Farmer Foodshare’s method of combating food insecurity is to set up stations at local Farmers Markets so they can collect both food and financial donations from passersby, and then at the end of the day, pack up all the food they’ve been donated and that they’ve purchased, and bring it to a place where it can be distributed to the community. My station has been partnered directly with several local elementary and middle schools over the years, but other stations connect with separate organizations that do food delivery. I think there’s a few that work with church food pantries. It’s different for each one, because each one functions to serve its direct community. Farmer Foodshare also has a coalition of large-scale farms that it works with directly, so in the winter months when pickings are slim at my little market, we can put in an order to Farmer Foodshare and they’ll come deliver us boxes full of winter greens and root vegetables so nobody has to go hungry just because it’s winter.
The work we do definitely makes a big impact. Working with schools, it’s easy to see the direct effects that getting enough food has on a child’s life. We talk about child nutrition a lot, but always through the lens of preventing child obesity, not in the interest of promoting actual health and quality of life. When a kid suddenly gains access to fresh food, it’s like the fog has been lifted from them. They get along better with others, they can focus and sit still, they become more curious and can get excited about learning, and most importantly, they’re happier. I’ve seen this happen with small children, but I see it all the time in high school, and I’m sure it’s true for adults as well. I remember a time when one of my friends complained to me that he felt exhausted and irritable but didn’t know what was wrong, and so I asked him, “When was the last time you got to eat?” He thought for a moment and said, “yesterday at lunch.” And that was the problem. I got into the habit of bringing extra fruit and trail mix to school, and every day I was reminded why that was a good idea, because I saw the difference it could make.
I could give you the numbers that describe my work with the Farmer Foodshare – hours worked, pounds of food distributed, number of people fed – but first of all, I didn’t keep track, and second of all, you wouldn’t believe me, so I’ll just say that numbers-wise, the impact was huge. So from the outside looking in, and even from my position, it’s really easy to think, “wow, all we need to fix society’s issues are really dedicated charities!” And while community service and charitable donations are really important, there’s a lot more to the story that we don’t ever talk about.
Charities do good work, but they’re mostly focused on short-term relief. This is why organizations like the Red Cross are really good and necessary and effective – they provide short-term disaster relief and provide training and certifications so other people can aid in emergencies as well. Once the emergency is over, though, they mostly step back because the community in need has recovered. Their main goal is survival – get in, bail the water, keep the ship afloat for another day until it gets rebuilt, get out. This is how charity organizations function. I’m referring to non-governmental organizations that are either nonprofits or not-for-profit, which are slightly different things but the essentials are the same. They rely on donations and volunteer work. Because donations and volunteer availability fluctuates over the course of a year, charities that try to provide long-term support really struggle.
The Farmer Foodshare, like most charities, is really effective for making sure people survive another day. In the case of hunger and food insecurity, that’s the most immediate goal. Of course, the long-term goal is to help people not struggle with food insecurity anymore, and that’s where charities can struggle. My station has worked with some families for many years in a row, because we’re really good at helping them survive the week, but at the end of the day, they’re still in the same position. Without the charity, they still would face food insecurity. It’s helpful, obviously, the work we do makes an impact, but it doesn’t take away the problem. Food pantries and distribution services treat symptoms, but they can’t fix the disease. Food insecurity is caused by poverty and food deserts, and as long as a family stays in a food desert and stays in poverty, they’ll have to rely on the charity.
I have more to say about this, but I’ll quickly define the phrase “food desert” for you. A food desert is a region without access to a well-stocked, well-maintained grocery store with affordable, fresh food. Food deserts don’t have to be out in the sticks, too. They’re fairly common within very large urban areas because there just isn’t fresh food nearby. Within North Carolina, there are food deserts in sections of Charlotte, Raleigh, and Greensboro, all major cities. I’ll post a link on my transcripts page, www.fastfactsforgenz.wordpress.com, to the USDA Food Environment Atlas. They have maps of data about food deserts, food insecurity rates, food taxes, and assistance rates for every county in the nation, and you can break it down by age, race, socioeconomic status, lots of stuff. It’s good data, I recommend it, though it hasn’t been updated for pandemic-times.
So as long as poverty rates are high and food deserts are difficult to escape, food insecurity will exist. What decreases poverty rates and shrinks food deserts? Not charity work, I’ll tell you that much. Policy helps with these issues. Well, I suppose I should say that good policy helps with these issues. Food deserts need infrastructure like better public transportation, support for agriculture, and community gardens within urban areas. North Carolina has a program that creates what are called Voluntary Agricultural Districts, where farmland and working forestland are somewhat more protected and agriculture is given a voice in government in the form of a county Agricultural Advisory Board. Counties can also establish Enhanced Voluntary Agricultural Districts, which protect farmland from development and allow small farmers to hold onto their land without threats of being pushed out by commercial operations. Most counties have VAD programs, but not many have implemented the Enhanced versions, so encouraging the introduction of this program would be a significant step towards shrinking food deserts in the state.
Poverty is another issue entirely and if there were an easy solution for it, it wouldn’t be such a big problem. Poverty itself is rooted in so many other complex issues. Systemic racism, exploitation of employees, poor health infrastructure, increasing cost of living, an economy designed so the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, lack of access to education, poor accessibility services. I could go on. Eliminating poverty involves eliminating systems that allow it to thrive, but that’s not always favorable to the industries that fund the most influential politicians. Some potential improvements to these systems have entered mainstream political dialogue, like increasing the minimum wage and forgiving student loans. Anti-homeless architecture, like benches divided by armrests and spikes covering the ground underneath bridges, is being noticed and documented more than before, but removing it hasn’t yet entered governmental conversation. Other systems have been allowed to thrive. The stock market has recovered and risen well above pre-pandemic levels, even as the unemployment rate is still twice as high as it was in February of 2020. I’ve seen crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe bitterly nicknamed “America’s Healthcare System” as more and more people turn to the kindness of internet strangers to pay for medical expenses, but if conservative politicians have anything to say about it, and boy do they, free healthcare is a long, long way down the road.
My goal here is not to undermine the importance of community service. It’s vital that we have organizations built for short-term relief, especially in systems that we can’t trust to support our communities. My goal is to point out that charities, while good, are a survival tactic for a damaged society. We can’t fix a broken system by donating to go GoFundMe pages and bringing boxes of Hamburger Helper to the food bank. You can’t throw sandbags at a tsunami and expect it to stop. I want to live in a world where organizations like the Farmer Foodshare aren’t necessary. I want to live in a world where people in my community don’t have to rely on me and the other volunteers to bring them the only vegetables they’ll see all week. I want to live in a world where the kindness of strangers is for things like paying for someone else’s drink or stopping to help someone change a tire, not for whether or not you can afford your life-saving emergency C-section. Maybe worlds like this aren’t possible, or are at least beyond my lifetime, but that doesn’t mean we get to pretend that there aren’t ways to improve. That doesn’t mean we get to ignore the work that needs to be done.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. The transcript of this episode is available at www.fastfactsforgenz.wordpress.com, along with that data map I talked about earlier, and the transcripts of all the other episodes. This is Callie, signing off.
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