The Real Campaign Hunger Games

In the madness that is the US presidential race, there’s been a lot of rancid talk about immigrants and food. The relentless Trump-Vance disinformation about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, which I wrote about last week, has now led to bomb threats, online hatred, and more negative attention than finding a finger in a box of french fries.

But something is missing. No one is talking about the obvious underlying issue here: hunger.

The thought occurred to me this week when I met chef Greg Silverman, CEO and executive director of New York based nonprofit West Side Campaign Against Hunger, or WSCAH, which has been giving out high-quality meals to low-income New Yorkers for more than 40 years.

Tall, bearded, and enveloped en papillote-style in a loosely tailored suit, Chef Greg has the natural charisma of a great restaurateur, but also the happily harried air of a dad raising two young kids while working his ass off on a passion project. He is both.

He is also something of an oddity in the world of chefs. Silverman studied politics and anthropology at Ithaca College in western New York, and did a stint in the Peace Corps after that. Drawn to the food scene, he opened three successful restaurants in Ithaca. But he soon realized that the people who really needed good meals were not the ones who could afford to come to a restaurant. That’s when he found his mission: get good food to people who need it most.

He got a Master’s degree in food policy in London, returned to the US as an activist working to end child hunger, and after a stint running Michelle Obama’s Chefs Move to Schools initiative, Silverman was tapped to lead WSCAH.

Founded in the basement of a church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 1979, WSCAH’s mission is to provide New Yorkers of all income levels with high-quality fresh food. When the organization first started it served about 900 people. Today it gives out some 5 million pounds of food annually to more than 25,000 families. And 50% of it is fresh, not canned!

I met Greg this week at a small gathering in New York where he was talking about WSCAH’s work. Having only moved here within the last few years, I had a general sense that food insecurity plagues America’s largest city, as it does my native stomping grounds of Ottawa and Toronto. But I didn’t realize just how severe the crisis was right now.

“The situation in NYC continues to get worse and worse,” Greg told me. “The pandemic was our greatest number of customers ever but the post pandemic has blown that away. With stagnating city and state dollars, ending of pandemic era supports like child tax credits and reduction of the SNAP allotments for seniors, it’s a horrifically perfect storm.” SNAP stands for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, what many used to call “food stamps.”

Silverman told me that rising food prices generally have forced WSCAH to spend a million more dollars on food this year, while the growing migrant crisis in New York – in which more than 150,000 people have arrived without access to long-term housing, work, or benefits like SNAP – has exacerbated the city’s food insecurity situation. More than 1 in 7 NYC residents are now food insecure, he said, a significant increase from previous years.

And it is not just the Big Apple. According to theUSDA, 13.5% of all US households, or about 18 million people, were “food insecure at some time during 2023.” That’s a million more than the year before. And of that group, nearly 7 million people suffer “very low food security,” meaning they actually go hungry at times. These are households where someone’s mom, dad, brother, or sister is not eating in order for another member of the household to get enough food.

Hunger, of course, is a cascading problem, particularly for kids. It is hard to focus on class if you’re hungry, and that can start a bad cycle of stunted learning, school dropouts, and derailed lives. If you think the cost of eating is high, try the costs of not eating.

But what can we do about it?

This is campaign season, which is the time when political leaders serve up all kinds of promises to fix stuff. But so far food insecurity has drawn as much political interest as a slab of tofu at a steakhouse. Greg wants to change that.

It turns out there are some basic policy solutions that could make a big difference to millions of hungry Americans, at substantially lower cost than, say, building a border wall or trying to federally manage grocery prices. And it can happen in a SNAP, literally.

Greg says there are two bills in Congress that would strengthen SNAP. The Closing the Meal Gap Act, which would boost benefits for all participants, and the Hot Foods Act of 2023, which would enable beneficiaries to purchase hot prepared foods from food retailers.

At the state level, Greg argues there is even more to do. “States could create a program that would fund food benefits for people currently ineligible for the federal SNAP program due to their citizenship status,” he says.

That would help to end surreal situations like the one where a migrant woman came to WSCAH, ineligible for SNAP support because she didn’t have a Social Security number. When she mentioned she was pregnant, WSCAH pointed out to her that when a child is born in the US, he or she automatically becomes eligible for SNAP, along with the mother.

In other words, in the United States in 2024, a pregnant migrant woman can’t get support to eat until her child is born. It makes no sense.

“By removing immigrant exclusions, we can ensure that every New Yorker has the food they urgently need,” Greg says. You wish a politician would talk so clearly.

Maybe making America great – in whatever way we imagine that – isn’t about riling people up or demonizing hungry, vulnerable people like the folks in Springfield.

Maybe it’s about restoring dignity to people who long ago were pushed to the floor, left to crawl around for political crumbs. After all, “dignity” is part of the core mandate of WSCAH, and it matters.

“Folks need to bring this back to communities and people,” Greg says. “It’s hard to hate people as individuals once we meet each other, when we break bread, when we help each other. We don't ask about politics, income, we just help each other and as the Ohio controversy shows, we forget the biggest thing: that hunger may be driving people to desperate ends.”