Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice

By Lana Dee Povitz

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, government cutbacks, stagnating wages, AIDS, and gentrification pushed ever more people into poverty, and hunger reached levels unseen since the Depression. In response, New Yorkers set the stage for a nationwide food justice movement. Whether organizing school lunch campaigns, establishing food co-ops, or lobbying city officials, citizen-activists made food a political issue, uniting communities across lines of difference. The charismatic, usually female leaders of these efforts were often products of earlier movements: American communism, civil rights activism, feminism, even Eastern mysticism. Situating food justice within these rich lineages, Lana Dee Povitz demonstrates how grassroots activism continued to thrive, even as it was transformed by unrelenting erosion of the country's already fragile social safety net.

Using dozens of new oral histories and archives, Povitz reveals the colorful characters who worked behind the scenes to build and sustain the movement, and illuminates how people worked together to overturn hierarchies rooted in class and race, reorienting the history of food activism as a community-based response to austerity. The first book-length history of food activism in a major American city, Stirrings highlights the emotional, intimate, and interpersonal aspects of social movement culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469653020

Lana Dee Povitz

Lana Dee Povitz is visiting assistant professor of history at Middlebury College.

Book preview

Stirrings

Justice, Power, and Politics

COEDITORS

Heather Ann Thompson

Rhonda Y. Williams

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Peniel E. Joseph

Daryl Maeda

Barbara Ransby

Vicki L. Ruiz

Marc Stein

The Justice, Power, and Politics series publishes new works in history that explore the myriad struggles for justice, battles for power, and shifts in politics that have shaped the United States over time. Through the lenses of justice, power, and politics, the series seeks to broaden scholarly debates about America’s past as well as to inform public discussions about its future.

More information on the series, including a complete list of books published, is available at http://justicepowerandpolitics.com/.

Stirrings

How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice

LANA DEE POVITZ

The University of North Carolina Press  Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2019 Lana Dee Povitz

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Povitz, Lana Dee, author.

Title: Stirrings : how activist New Yorkers ignited a movement for food justice / Lana Dee Povitz.

Other titles: Justice, power, and politics.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Series: Justice, power, and politics

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059438| ISBN 9781469653006 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469653013 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469653020 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Food security—New York (State)—New York. | Food supply—New York (State)—New York. | Community-based social services—New York (State)—New York. | Food cooperatives—New York (State)—New York. | Consumer movements—New York (State)—New York. | Social movements—New York (State)—New York. | United Bronx Parents (Organization). | Park Slope Food Coop. | God’s Love We Deliver (Organization). | Community Food Resource Center (New York, N.Y.).

Classification: LCC TX360.U63 N477 2019 | DDC 363.8/209747—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059438

Cover illustration: A young woman in the South Bronx unloads a box of orange juice. The Records of the United Bronx Parents, Inc., Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, CUNY.

Portions of chapters one and two were previously published in a different form as Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation: The Food Activism of United Bronx Parents, in Women’s Activism and Second Wave Feminism: Transnational Histories, eds. Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

For Kelly and Kathy

Contents

Abbreviations in the Text

Introduction

1 A Taste of What It Takes

United Bronx Parents, School Lunch, and the Struggle for Community Control

2 Hunger Doesn’t Take a Vacation

United Bronx Parents and New York City’s First Free Summer Meals Program

3 Life Is with People

Community and Cooperation in the Park Slope Food Coop

4 Better to Light a Candle

Ganga Stone and the Joy of Service at God’s Love We Deliver

5 If You Know Somebody, Call Them Up

Food Advocacy and the Beginning of the Community Food Resource Center

6 Perhaps Our Brightness Blinds

Service Provision and the Community Food Resource Center

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Methodological Note: On Deep Acquaintance

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Portrait of Evelina Antonetty, 34

UBP flyer advertising model lunch at Herman Ridder J.H.S. 98, 49

Evelina Antonetty and South Bronx mothers dump garbage bags of uneaten school lunch at Federal Plaza, 53

Mural of Evelina Antonetty by Tats Cru Inc., 2011, 68

UBP free summer meals feedback form, 76

United Bronx Parents administers the city’s first free Summer Meals Program, 1971, 84

The Park Slope Food Coop, 1978, 91

Allen Zimmerman, 104

Shopping Coop members waiting in line, 116

Jini Tanenhaus, circa 1979, 120

God’s Love We Deliver at the annual Pride march, 1992, 130

Ganga Stone at home with Cookie, 1994, 136

God’s Love We Deliver donation can, 158

Chef Amanda Lugg removing a tray of freshly baked brownies at the kitchen on 103rd Street, 163

Agnes Molnar, 1983, 185

Kathy Goldman and Fran Barrett at a joint CFRC/CRE staff party, 1980, 189

Kathy Goldman, 201

Cathy Bern of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Liz Krueger, and Kathy Goldman at the CFRC office on 17 Murray Street, 1987, 209

Agnes Molnar, Kathy Goldman, and Liz Accles, 2016, 235

Abbreviations in the Text

ACT UP

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power

AFDC

Aid to Families with Dependent Children

AIDS

acquired immune deficiency syndrome

BDS

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement

BSL

Bureau of School Lunches

BWMA

Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts

CETA

Comprehensive Employment and Training Act

CFRC

Community Food Resource Center

CHAT

Center Housing Assistance Team

CORE

Congress of Racial Equality

CRE

Community Resource Exchange

CSS

Community Services Society

DFTA

Department for the Aging

EFAP

Emergency Food Assistance Program

EITC

Earned Income Tax Credit

FBI

Federal Bureau of Investigation

FNS

Food and Nutrition Services

FRAC

Food Research and Action Center

HPNAP

Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program

HRA

Human Resources Administration

MTFA

Minority Task Force on AIDS

MUST

Minorities United to Save Themselves

NMU

National Maritime Union

OBRA

Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act

OEO

Office of Economic Opportunity

PRWORA

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act

PWAs

people with AIDS

SFSP

Summer Food Service Program

SNAP

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

SNCC

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

SROs

single-room occupancies

TANF

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families

TEFAP

Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program

UBP

United Bronx Parents

UFT

United Federation of Teachers

USDA

U.S. Department of Agriculture

WIC

Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children

WMAD

Welfare Made a Difference

Stirrings

Introduction

The complex of flavors in a fine wine or cheese unfolds from a certain dynamic engagement between people, time, and place, a connection forged between the natural and built environment and the knowledge of human producers.¹ The French word for this concept is terroir. Though difficult to translate precisely, it is used to express an economy rooted in, rather than imposed on, a landscape, and with the implication that all economies are the result of temporal, geographical, and social interplay.²

Food activism, too, relies on a kind of terroir. Whether a parent-led school lunch campaign, a fledgling food cooperative, or a nonprofit kitchen, each activist project emerges from a contingent and interdependent balance of environments (political, legal, economic, physical) and human action. The personal qualities of the people involved interact with available resources, transforming ideas into action and action into food. In turn, personal and group resources collide with political economy: the arrangements of governance and capital that cause rent to be cheap or expensive, that make welfare simpler or more difficult to access, that allow scores of people to die alone in their apartments of AIDS, and that push countless others to take matters into their own hands.³

Overlaying this matrix of environments and economies and people, there is also what is in the air, the collective anxieties and aspirations of people in a particular time and place. The taste of the wine depends upon the sandiness of the soil, how much rain fell, the density of planting that year. So too did it matter that some of the most defining food activist projects took place in the United States, in New York City, in particular neighborhoods, during particular years.

In the late 1960s, America, or at least the journalists and politicians with the power to bring the issue to national attention, discovered the prevalence of poverty-induced hunger amid postwar plenty. With the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, the federal government under President Lyndon B. Johnson had launched a War on Poverty and organized programs to address the needs of the poor, promising equality as a fact and a hand-up rather than a hand-out. Federal grants and programs like those covered by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) promoted the activism of poor people by funneling money into community organizations and providing job training and early childhood education.⁴ Welfare historian Premilla Nadasen characterizes the antipoverty activism that occurred during this period as being fueled by a perception of general widespread economic prosperity, steady urban migration, and a relatively optimistic ideological climate in which many believed material want and need could be eradicated.⁵

In this context, the fact that ten million Americans were suffering from hunger was a source of shame and embarrassment to the liberal political mainstream, especially since the United States had taken steps to address hunger internationally with the Food for Peace program it inaugurated in 1963. A one-hundred-page report titled Hunger, U.S.A. was released by the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry in 1968 following a fact-finding mission in the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta region the year before. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy had been part of the tour, bringing further media attention. Shortly after the report came out, CBS aired a documentary, Hunger in America, showcasing the extent of hunger nationwide.⁶ Together these exposés generated the momentum needed to activate liberal politicians. Galvanized, senators formed the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to investigate possible solutions to hunger.

The committee’s hearings brought together academics, nongovernmental organizations, educators, health and nutrition experts, school officials, the medical community, community organizers, and ordinary concerned citizens to weigh in on the state of the American diet. For almost a decade, from 1968 to 1977, the committee provided a crucial forum whose deliberations and decisions filtered down to the local, neighborhood levels in complex and varied ways. Chaired by Senator George McGovern, it was the impetus behind laws expanding food assistance for families, children, and the elderly with programs such as food stamps and meals for homebound seniors.⁷ Federal expenditures on food multiplied five hundredfold in the late 1960s and early 1970s, indicating an unprecedented investment of resources on the part of the federal government.⁸ Food stamps were an important step away from the sole reliance on surplus farm commodities because they allowed recipients to choose the foods they wanted, rather than having to accept whatever farmers could not sell. The expansion of the school lunch program, first started in 1946, and the development of school breakfast became two other major income supports for poor people across the country.

The poor and the marginalized already knew plenty about their own hunger and social abandonment. The discovery of hunger in the late 1960s tells us less about the actual incidence of hunger than it does about the new responsibility elites felt toward hungry people during this time. In 1969, Wilbur Cohen, the secretary of health, education, and welfare appointed by President Johnson, described the problem of hunger as one of poverty—a poverty of personal and family resources, and … a poverty of effective social concern. He referenced the tragically scandalous inadequacy of current welfare programs, and called for the problem of malnutrition to be looked at in a comprehensive, coordinated way … not just as a question of stuffing more food down people’s gullet.⁹

A mere six years later, as New York City was teetering on the brink of financial collapse, a shift away from state-sponsored liberalism was in the midst of taking place both nationally and locally. After President Ford refused to authorize a bailout, the Daily News published the decade’s most infamous headline in October 1975: Ford to City: Drop Dead. Local leaders felt compelled to take up the mantle of austerity: the social services that so many New Yorkers had come to accept as rights would be reduced or revoked in ways both sharp and gradual.¹⁰ Nationwide, the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 had been accompanied by a spike in food prices, stagnating wages, and a sharp decrease in productivity. These developments followed fast on the discovery of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that eroded public trust in government and the U.S. military defeat in Vietnam. The seventies have been described as a pivotal decade, a long and murky moment of confusion, malaise, and renewed economic disparity, a time of increasing privatization and fragmentation at all levels of social life.¹¹

The 1980 election furthered the shift away from neo-Keynesian economics and social liberalism, both rhetorically and at the policy level. Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory ushered in an era of finance, deregulation, free trade, low taxation, and weakened unions. His tenure began dramatically with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, passed in 1981, which slashed federal social spending. In this climate, politicians, media pundits, and activists alike increasingly defined the problem in terms of how to get people fed. As income disparity continued to rise over the next two decades, talk about poverty and inequality faded, to the point that neither Republicans nor Democrats would publicly support welfare programs lest they be perceived as bowing to special interests.¹² When it was discussed at all, the problem of poverty was framed as behavioral (a matter of poor people’s dependency on welfare) rather than structural (a matter of low wages, rising income inequality, and labor market decline); work and individual self-sufficiency were positioned as cures by liberals and conservatives alike.¹³ This position cohered most infamously in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Democratic president Bill Clinton’s successful effort to end welfare as we know it by eliminating guaranteed assistance for families with children and instituting stringent work requirements.

From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, national-level austerity politics intensified the daily struggles of poor people, producing food activism that skewed toward providing services. Nonprofit leaders understood that they could not talk meaningfully about revolution, reform, God, the good of the community, or any other social abstraction with people who had not eaten or who could not access the food they needed. Understanding this, the four nonprofit organizations examined here all provided social services at the same time as they advanced broader political messages. In some cases, they called for more and better state involvement; sometimes they pointed to the power of private initiative; sometimes they did both at once.

Though the transition had been under way for some time, there was a finality signaled by the 2003 resignation of activist Kathy Goldman from Community Food Resource Center, the advocacy organization she built to protect poor and hungry New Yorkers from the effects of budget cuts and welfare reform. While the organization and many of its programs continued to exist under different auspices, Goldman’s departure may be understood as the end of an era. The new executive director who replaced her banished all signs of the grassroots. Advocacy was out. Credentialed service was in. In place of an organization with an expansive political vision and a sprawling structure based on affinity and a commitment to both direct service and advocacy, there arose a different kind of nonprofit: sleek, brand-conscious, tightly hierarchical, corporate, and void of activist spirit. This is the nonprofit we are most likely to encounter today.

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As the urban liberalism that characterized New York City during the 1960s yielded to an era of fiscal conservatism and neoliberal social policies, solutions to hunger and poverty emerged from the grassroots, often spearheaded by nonprofit agencies. The chapters that follow examine four such community-based efforts: an antipoverty organization named United Bronx Parents that led a campaign to improve school lunch and sponsored the city’s first free summer meals program; Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop, now the largest worker-member food cooperative in the United States; the whimsically named God’s Love We Deliver, a volunteer-based meal service for homebound people with AIDS; and the Community Food Resource Center, an advocacy organization that also provided services as government reduced spending on social programs beginning in the 1980s. While each organization had distinct political and socioeconomic profiles, all sought to provide access to quality food. Taken together, they reveal how, in a context of retrenchment, direct service provision became a key form of food activism, contributing necessary sustenance to a range of New Yorkers while connecting people to broader reform efforts. Before a self-conscious food movement swept the nation in the twenty-first century, this service-oriented twentieth-century food activism both derived from and strengthened contemporary movements, such as the fight for community control in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, the post–Vietnam War New Left, AIDS activism, and resistance to austerity.

This book challenges the commonly held view of nonprofits as coopting grassroots activism. As grassroots efforts become institutionalized, the thinking goes, organizations respond increasingly to funders and bureaucratic needs rather than the people they were intended to serve.¹⁴ The four nonprofits examined here, however, all found ways to stay close to their original mission and base. Beyond this, their kitchens, offices, and storefronts provided physical and imaginative space for people to work toward systemic, material change, forge sustaining relationships, and experience personal transformation. Far from coopting grassroots social movement culture, these nonprofits extended and bolstered it by giving substance to movement ideas.

As a study of gendered leadership, largely but not exclusively dominated by strong women, this book reinterprets the phenomenon of charisma, which scholars have overwhelmingly attributed to men. It examines forms of charismatic leadership typically practiced by women that rested on building strong relationships as well as strong impressions, whether with community members, employees, volunteers, donors, or the media. Rather than being leaderless, many of the projects explored here are more accurately described as leaderful because of the emphasis that various founders, coordinators, and executive directors placed on skill building and consciousness raising within their organizations.

Stirrings situates late twentieth-century grassroots food activism within the deep lineages of New York City social movement history.¹⁵ How did ordinary people with names, attachments, ambitions, and aversions respond to broader problems in the city’s food landscape, such as poor-quality school lunch or shrinking food stamp budgets? How did their work as neighbors, parents, consumers, and citizens shape the social politics of the city and food movements we have today?¹⁶ How did their unnamed or less frequently acknowledged identities—queer, Communist, spiritual, or Jewish, for example—have an influence? In answering these questions, the following chapters provide historical context to the study of food politics and complement existing top-down studies focused on federal policy and agribusiness with richly textured case studies of local grassroots-built institutions.¹⁷ By emphasizing the historical circumstances that produced institutions and their leaders, I show how norms are created from contingencies, how the plot twists of individual lives have powerful impacts on the structures that leaders create.

Food activism has been defined as efforts to make the food system or parts of it more democratic, sustainable, healthy, ethical, culturally appropriate, and better in quality.¹⁸ I follow this expansive definition, with the added criteria that, to be considered activist, efforts must also be collective and not for profit (at the institutional level; I do not disqualify individuals who were financially compensated for their labor). Food, in these pages, acts as both a means and an end.

Food is an end in the most immediate, concrete sense: everybody must eat to live, which means that food provision is essential to the functioning of any community. Even though specific foods and eating practices are always culturally coded, loaded with meanings that depend on people’s subjective experiences as raced, classed, gendered beings, most people, regardless of identity, have some idea of what it is like to experience the absence of food.¹⁹ This visceral understanding of food’s necessity gave a moral high ground to food activists—by which I mean those who worked in a collective, coordinated way to improve people’s diets, access to food, or both. Although most actors in this study had left-wing politics and understood food as a human right that should be a public responsibility, efforts to fight hunger in the United States have often crossed political lines. They have enjoyed bipartisan cooperation in government because of the dovetailing interests of the anti-hunger and farm lobbies, and have had supporters in civil society of every conceivable political stripe, from anarchists to socially conservative churchgoers.²⁰ Of course, people’s different approaches to food activism reflected their particular political visions.

Because fighting hunger allowed them to claim a fairly undisputed moral high ground, food activists seldom faced overt resistance and were usually successful at meeting the goal of food provisioning. This was especially true when activists could take matters directly into their own hands, whether by establishing cooperatives to make available the foods they wanted, operating a meal delivery service for homebound people with AIDS, or setting up a food bank or soup kitchen. When activists were thwarted in achieving their ends, as happened with advocates’ failure to achieve higher rates of student participation in federally funded school breakfast programs, the major barrier was usually a lack of financial support or political will at various levels of government.²¹

State passivity and indifference nevertheless had harmful long-term consequences. For example, the lack of support for school breakfast from various mayor’s offices meant, among other things, that hundreds of thousands of children began each school day hungry, hampered in their ability to learn. Whether writing policy briefs, lobbying government, talking to journalists, or fund-raising, food activists evoked something akin to Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence in trying to characterize the damage done over time. Slow violence, which occurs gradually and out of sight … an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all, may be applied to going without adequate food.²² Unlike global hunger, often depicted in the form of emaciated, famine-stricken children, hunger in New York City was and is usually invisible.²³

Food also functioned as a means of organizing people to understand and build their sense of collective power, of making people feel included or excluded, of tracking shifts in the political economy of the city.²⁴ Aside from its material value as a commodity essential to human life, food acts as a lens through which we can understand dominant social values. How and by whom food is produced, which foods are government-subsidized, who is deemed eligible for food assistance, who becomes the gatekeepers for providing that food—such arrangements speak volumes about who and what is prioritized, especially by those with decision-making power. By extension, the history of food activism is important because it tracks how these priorities might be rearranged, how people can work to challenge or temporarily overturn established hierarchies, especially of class and race.

Just as often, the history of food activism sheds light on how inequalities and hierarchies are preserved, defended, even extended. Food activism has not always been a purely progressive force.²⁵ Some of its victories inadvertently propped up forms of inequality, as was somewhat the case with the left-wing Park Slope Food Coop. Even as it offered high-quality food at low prices to low-income people, it also attracted the upper-class liberals moving into the neighborhood in ever-greater numbers. Because of the cultural capital associated with consuming healthy and ethically produced food, a cachet that has only increased in the decades since the 1970s, the Coop ultimately did more to encourage than oppose neighborhood gentrification.²⁶

Food activism has also come with steep opportunity costs. For example, following severe cuts to the social safety net under President Reagan, activists who professed a primary commitment to advocacy pitched themselves into building an emergency food network. This network was enormously adept at feeding people, but it also diverted energy and resources away from challenging the structures that produced hunger in the first place. Furthermore, the direct services offered by nonprofit organizations proved themselves totally compatible with a political economy that allowed government to offload responsibilities onto the private sector and individuals. As one emergency food worker observed, Instead of highlighting the crisis of hunger, we seem to cover it up. By feeding those who are hungry, we allow the Government to do so little for them.²⁷

These push-and-pull dynamics characteristic of so much food activism—between citizens and the state, between direct service provision and the drive for more systemic change—provide a central drama of social politics and a through line within this book. By social politics, I mean the intricacies of managing inequality between individuals and groups with different, often competing, interests. It is a dynamic not limited to government, but government is often a central player because of its power to codify social policy. The examples of food activism I examine here were, for the most part, responses to government action—or, more accurately, inaction. Even if activists’ hearts were revolutionary, their projects were not. At their most successful, they achieved significant reforms that made the system better serve the disenfranchised or built themselves into effective service providers. Where they failed, activists allowed ruling elites to ignore or buy off challenges in such a way that appeared to acquiesce to popular demands without enacting substantive change, ensuring enforcement mechanisms, or bringing about a meaningful redistribution of power.

Where reform did occur, any gain wrested from the state had to be fought for and protected. Even when activists turned their focus inward, aiming to mobilize the resources of their own communities rather than those of the government, victories remained hard won. Projects were many times imperiled, particularly in their early years, sometimes by a lack of financial or human resources or a hostile political climate. And while nearly all the leaders discussed here had structural and/or personal advantages, whether this meant white skin, educational attainment, political training, and/or proximity to wealth, they were no less required to agitate, argue, compromise, imagine, and organize their projects into being.

In most cases, the social political regimes midwifed by food activists depended upon brokers and intermediaries whose own particular sets of resources made them possible. None of the leaders themselves ever experienced the full economic or social abandonment of those who counted among the hungry—those for whom most of these projects were envisioned.²⁸ With few exceptions, these leaders were middle class, although in some cases they achieved middle-class status just barely by dint of their employment in nonprofit organizations as salaried workers with benefits.²⁹ And yet, for a variety of personal reasons that I explore, they identified with those they wanted to help through the sometimes overlapping approaches of cooperation, solidarity, and charity. These approaches vary by the distance preserved within the relationship of helper and helped. In the case of cooperation, there is no difference: it is people working toward a common goal as in, for example, worker-members in a food cooperative who all put in three hours a month in exchange for shopping privileges. In solidarity relationships, people work for change in a way that recognizes their interdependence: it emphasizes the responsibilities, interests, or identity aspects that are shared, so as to erase or lighten differences. Charity, by contrast, emphasizes and preserves the differences between givers and receivers.³⁰

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Many of the social problems that plagued New York in the last thirty or so years of the twentieth century were felt throughout urban America. Homelessness, unemployment, the AIDS and crack cocaine epidemics, increased socioeconomic inequality, and the corresponding rise of emergency food programs were, unfortunately, not unique. But the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and New York’s strong and varied social movement responses to austerity collided to produce an especially rich and promising terroir for food activism.³¹ And yet, when discussing such a large and diverse city, one must carefully qualify statements about New York.³² This book, then, is about New York in the sense that the projects discussed had citywide repercussions: school lunches and summer meals potentially affected all schoolchildren (although not equally); food cooperatives were a citywide phenomenon; God’s Love We Deliver distributed meals to people with AIDS in all five boroughs; and food advocates lobbied a City Council and mayor’s office that were meant to serve everyone.

At the same time, the food-related projects that took root in specific neighborhoods were very much the products of the demographics, struggles, concerns, and resources of those places, not of a homogenous whole. For example, when the New York City Board of Education refused to administer the free summer meals program that had recently become a federal entitlement, it made some sense that United Bronx Parents, a grassroots organization from the nation’s poorest congressional district, would assume responsibility for administering the program’s first summer in 1971. Not only did the community desperately need the meals, but the organization’s leadership, already deeply enmeshed with the movement for community control and with a previous commitment to labor politics, took advantage of an opportunity to leverage the program into much-needed well-paying jobs.

As a further example, a food cooperative could reflect the crunchy, countercultural ethos of Park Slope. Here amenities such as Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum and cheap real estate combined to provide refuge for alienated but upwardly mobile, mostly white youth looking to build community, which they did not only through the food cooperative, but also by creating women’s softball leagues, a dojo for martial arts, communal houses, child care cooperatives, and an art collective.³³ In contrast, a food cooperative could equally be an expression of Black pride and community uplift, as the Harlem River Consumers Cooperative was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With its automatic doors, air conditioning, and soft music, it brought Harlemites quality food at a fair price while creating union jobs and vocational training in an area notorious for poor, dilapidated grocery stores and high unemployment. When the cooperative opened in 1968, Harlem was the national center of Black militancy, home to one of the earliest chapters of the Black Panther Party, the Black nationalist Yoruba Temple and Harlem People’s Parliament, and vigorous chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).³⁴ A first-class, financially independent grocery store was another, highly tangible manifestation of community power.

While food activist projects drew from larger community and social movement contexts, the concrete, measurable, immediately gratifying work of providing food simultaneously generated space for these social movements to exist.³⁵ The headquarters of nonprofit social service agencies created opportunities for movement ideas to find fuller expression and for people to engage one another, collaborating, mentoring, arguing, bonding, grieving, and finding their bearings, often coming together across lines of social difference.³⁶

Headquarters functioned as a glue that held people together within and across movements. Consider, for instance, the Lower Manhattan offices of the Community Food Resource Center, where allied organizations and coalitions hosted meetings after hours; where an underresourced AIDS activist from Morningside Heights rented desk space for free; and where a radical priest from Brooklyn turned up, year after year, for last-minute help with funding reports. Or United Bronx Parents’ storefront office on Prospect Avenue: in between the parent advocacy training sessions and day care hours, it was also a spot in the neighborhood where mothers at loose ends and the occasional distraught father could wander in, finding, if nothing else, a listening ear and a cup of coffee. These were not public spaces, but they often instantiated the public through their baseline insistence that all people, by grace of their humanity, were equal and deserved not to be hungry. These were not profit-driven commercial spaces, but the work carried out within them had a transactional quality: people traded their time, skills, and emotional labor for the sense that they were making a difference, that they were achieving something as a group that they could not accomplish alone.

To point out that these were nonprofits is to name some of their major constraints: the need to secure funding and be accountable to a variety of stakeholders, to maintain physical sites and oversee employees, and to develop a clear mission statement and a discernable chain of command. Arguably, these concerns could have limited projects’ radical potential. For example, they discouraged the pursuit of the extralegal or otherwise risky confrontational tactics beloved of short-term, protest-based mobilizations.³⁷ But mass protest was not the goal of these projects. Instead, activists built organizations that sought to embody or model their political desires.³⁸ As a basic necessity, food lent itself well to what social movement theorists call prefigurative politics: taking action around something as concrete as food created a way for activists to prefigure, or test out, their aspirations for a future society in the present.³⁹

Scholars have often focused on campaigns utilizing the tools of mass organizing as the bread and butter of progressive movements: strikes, demonstrations, boycotts, sit-ins. These event-based expressions are essential to understanding social politics. The quotidian, institutionalized, place-based work of providing services turns out to be no less important. To neglect service provision is to deprive social movement cultures of their fullness, to limit our understanding of how people live out their moral and political principles, and to turn away from what lies at the heart of so many progressive movements: strong social bonds and people’s own sense of being changed, even transformed, by their participation.

Clear victories for food activists were rare. Success was ephemeral or fleeting. Gains were often coopted or fell unevenly. Yet none of the forty-three people I interviewed for this project regretted their participation, even those for whom larger political ambitions were not realized. Historian Tamar Carroll sheds light on this phenomenon in her history of antipoverty activism in New York City, quoting a women’s health activist who explained that she and her comrades had more of an impact on ourselves than we did on the larger world.⁴⁰ Rather than read this as a denigration of their achievements as activists, I see this observation as an admission of an important current that runs through the case studies in this book: that the social life of institutions is central rather than peripheral to sustaining organizations narrowly and movement cultures broadly. The connections people forged, the feelings of belonging they developed, and the discoveries they made in the process about themselves and the world around them were not only personally significant; they buttressed outward political change. Movement cultures owe more than historians have acknowledged to the institutional settings in which these dynamics so often occur.

While this history of food activism certainly includes traditional forms of social protest, such as demonstrations and direct action, service provision was probably the most common way that these social and transformative opportunities were instantiated. Without claiming that service provision was progressive or transformative in itself, for many people it offered an accessible way into politics—that is, a means of engaging with the arrangements that dictated who held power over whom. In the case of poor Puerto Rican mothers in the South Bronx, United Bronx Parents’ mobilizations to improve school food provided a means of challenging a system that was not designed to include them or respond to their concerns. In the face of a brutal AIDS epidemic characterized by stigma, loss, and trauma, God’s Love We Deliver provided a way for ordinary New Yorkers, most of whom did not identify as AIDS activists, to register their concern. Sometimes people prepared and delivered meals as an extension to—or perhaps a break from—work in more emotionally and politically draining direct action groups such as ACT UP. In other cases, work in the kitchen and office was a good option for those who were unwilling to directly confront the suffering of people with AIDS. Almost anyone could volunteer: no risk of arrest or confrontation; no special knowledge or skill needed; no major time commitment necessary. Direct service offered many of the same satisfactions to those in paid leadership positions as it did to volunteers.

While service provision is often justifiably critiqued for maintaining rather than challenging unequal power relations, I am interested in the specific ways that highly involved community members—paid and unpaid—organized projects in the image of a world they wanted to see. The political visions behind each initiative were always different and variously radical. In fact, the most ostensibly radical visions were sometimes initially made possible through the quiet maintenance of traditional hierarchies based on race and class. For instance, the Park Slope Food Coop eschewed profit, relied on cooperation between members, and displayed a substantive commitment to horizontal group decision making; at the same time, its early leadership was entirely white and middle class and largely composed of men. The homogeneity facilitated a productive collaboration that, had leaders sought to also challenge basics such as white racial or middle-class dominance, would likely not have been possible. In contrast, the decision of United Bronx Parents to take charge of administering the city’s first free summer meal program for school-aged children in 1971 may not have seemed all that radical—and in fact, the offloading of what many New Yorkers expected to be a municipal agency’s job on to a nonprofit organization might be interpreted as a form of public-private collaboration or early neoliberalism.⁴¹ On the other hand, the program was adeptly administered: the organization arranged for high-quality meals to be served to the city’s poorest children, demanded that jobs benefit local people who needed them most, and democratically involved their communities in building support for the program and providing feedback on it. By showing how a government program might effectively respond to community needs, United Bronx Parents became a model of direct service provision.

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In a culture that has assigned the bulk of caregiving responsibilities to women rather than to men, it will surprise no one that it was usually the former who assumed lead roles in providing direct services and, in the case of United Bronx Parents in particular, made up the majority of volunteers. Caregiving work in the United States has offered women a mixed legacy.⁴² It has been a source of pride and satisfaction, and also a burden, particularly as cooking, cleaning, and child care have typically either gone unremunerated, with women working a double-day of paid and unpaid domestic work, or been notoriously low paid and lacking in benefits, with positions often filled by women of color, overwhelmingly poor and often immigrant.⁴³

Notwithstanding this legacy, and even perhaps because of it, food became an accessible medium for otherwise disenfranchised people, often parents, to engage larger systems of power, an argument that I make most explicitly in the first section of this book. As one mother from the South Bronx proclaimed, The principal may know more about reading and teaching, but when it comes to food I’m just as much of an expert as he is.⁴⁴ Kathy Goldman, whose fifty years as a food activist began while training parents to advocate for change in their children’s inner-city schools, recalled the overwhelming response to meetings about school lunch. Food was, as she put it, a comfort zone for women, who were consummate cooks but nevertheless depended on school lunch programs because of poverty.⁴⁵ Women new to the United States, with limited knowledge of English, who may not have received much formal education were able to summon their authority as caregivers to make demands on city government, holding school administrators accountable and proposing solutions to what they were told by those in power were insurmountable obstacles. Their mobilization underscores Annelise Orleck’s claim that motherhood can be the basis for inclusion in an activist community, the inspiration for and the foundation of visions of large-scale social change.⁴⁶

Although food provision remained overwhelmingly women’s work throughout the period of study, it would be a mistake to exclude men from food activism. It was not an accident that United Bronx Parents chose to name itself that and not United Bronx Mothers. In a predominantly Puerto Rican and African American community where people of all genders faced high rates of unemployment brought on by deindustrialization and compounded by racism, United Bronx Parents’ majority-women leadership made no moves to work separately from men, as frequently happened in predominantly white women’s liberation movement groups. As sociologist Maxine Baca Zinn has noted in the context of Chicano families, systemic oppression produced family structures that differed from white, middle-class norms, with men often taking on more active roles in the extended family and community.⁴⁷ Indeed, a handful of men played important roles as parent volunteers, junior staff, and board members, and worked comfortably under the organization’s women leaders.⁴⁸

At the Park Slope Food Coop, those who endured from the early leadership were usually men, such as general coordinator and cofounder Joe Holtz, and longtime, highly active members Allen Zimmerman, Donnie Rotkin, and Mike Eakin. Since its founding in 1973, most of those who lasted into the twenty-first century in leadership positions (sometimes paid, sometimes volunteer) were white, middle-class, cis-heterosexual men who came out of the New Left. Many considered themselves influenced by the women’s movement and were often partnered with feminist women. At the same time, certain dynamics did betray more traditionally gendered arrangements. For example, the mandatory labor requirement that was instituted for all members often broke down unevenly: people in the same household could work one another’s shifts, and, unsurprisingly, in many heterosexual couples the wife worked the shift for her husband, who often held a higher paying job with a less flexible schedule. Nevertheless, the great majority of my interviewees understood the Coop as an egalitarian place gender-wise; the more salient tensions were based on the Coop’s predominantly white and middle-class character.

Since gender is never separable from other identity categories, such as race and ethnicity, it seems important to acknowledge the cultural (not religious) Jewishness of so many white leaders. Six of ten of the Coop’s founding members were Jewish, and while no statistics are available to prove this, they appeared overrepresented in the membership at large in relation to their population in the neighborhood and city. The second and third in command at United Bronx Parents, Kathy Goldman and Ellen Lurie, were both Jewish (the executive director, Evelina Antonetty, was a Puerto Rican from a Catholic background, and the organization’s staff and membership was otherwise all non-Jewish Puerto Rican and Black), the founder of God’s Love We Deliver, Ganga Stone, was half-Jewish, and the majority of high-level employees at Community Food Resource Center were also Jewish women.⁴⁹ In many interviews, narrators mentioned the loss of family in the Holocaust, parental involvement in synagogues and other Jewish institutions, and first- or secondhand experiences of antisemitism as context for their involvement in progressive movements.

In three out of four case studies, projects rested to a large degree on the charismatic leadership of three individual women: Evelina Antonetty of United Bronx Parents, Ganga Stone of God’s Love We Deliver, and Kathy Goldman of Community Food Resource Center. Broadly, I define charisma as a person’s ability to inspire, motivate, and/or capture the imaginations of those around them. I view charisma in relational terms rather than as a collection of personal attributes: the charisma of these women helped them significantly, but only insofar as it enabled them to connect meaningfully with other people (and, through them, additional