Sabin is an interesting and diverse neighborhood full of talented residents. We hope to introduce some of those people in each addition of the newsletter. If you, or one or your neighbors, do interesting or unusual work send us a description to [email protected]. Let's get to know the people who live among us! This edition we introduce Andy Fisher. Andy and his family have lived in the Sabin neighborhood for over 10 years. A published author and nationally recognized authority on food insecurity, Andy challenges our ideas about some of our most traditional methods of serving those who suffer from food insecurity.
Andy Fisher
A few years back when my son Orion was a student at Access Academy, located in the trailers behind Sabin, he came home excited about a holiday food drive. The class that brought in the most pounds of donated food or raised the most money got a pizza party. As he was scouring the cupboards for the heaviest food we had, I realized that this food drive was a microcosm of the reasons why we haven’t solved hunger in this country. We’re using the wrong metrics and wrong approach. More pounds of food will keep families fed for now, but it cannot solve the problem in the long term.
Counterintuitively, hunger is not caused by a lack of food. It is a result of a lack of political power to change the policies that cause it. Charity is band aid on a societal cancer . Charity is not justice, but what we do when there is no justice. And justice is what is needed to begin to reduce the social inequalities that cause hunger: policies such as a national living wage, universal health care, free childcare, and affordable housing.
To help redirect the way we approach hunger away from charity to justice, I wrote a book entitled, “Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Anti-Hunger Groups and Corporate America.” It’s based on my near 30 years of work in the food security field, and was published in 2017. It exposes the ways in which companies like Walmart actually profit from their anti-hunger philanthropy,” as well as identifies models of change, including the Oregon Food Bank’s emphasis on racial justice and living wages. Currently, I’m the executive director of Ecological Farming Association, based in Santa Cruz, CA. EcoFarm promotes organic agriculture and just food systems, and for the past 40 years has run the largest sustainable agriculture conference west of the Mississippi.
Andy Fisher
A few years back when my son Orion was a student at Access Academy, located in the trailers behind Sabin, he came home excited about a holiday food drive. The class that brought in the most pounds of donated food or raised the most money got a pizza party. As he was scouring the cupboards for the heaviest food we had, I realized that this food drive was a microcosm of the reasons why we haven’t solved hunger in this country. We’re using the wrong metrics and wrong approach. More pounds of food will keep families fed for now, but it cannot solve the problem in the long term.
Counterintuitively, hunger is not caused by a lack of food. It is a result of a lack of political power to change the policies that cause it. Charity is band aid on a societal cancer . Charity is not justice, but what we do when there is no justice. And justice is what is needed to begin to reduce the social inequalities that cause hunger: policies such as a national living wage, universal health care, free childcare, and affordable housing.
To help redirect the way we approach hunger away from charity to justice, I wrote a book entitled, “Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Anti-Hunger Groups and Corporate America.” It’s based on my near 30 years of work in the food security field, and was published in 2017. It exposes the ways in which companies like Walmart actually profit from their anti-hunger philanthropy,” as well as identifies models of change, including the Oregon Food Bank’s emphasis on racial justice and living wages. Currently, I’m the executive director of Ecological Farming Association, based in Santa Cruz, CA. EcoFarm promotes organic agriculture and just food systems, and for the past 40 years has run the largest sustainable agriculture conference west of the Mississippi.
