If there's anyone in America who knows more about the politics of hunger than Joel Berg, they're well hidden. First as a top staffer in the Agriculture Department under Bill Clinton, and currently as director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Berg has been a tireless advocate for ensuring that all people have enough to eat.
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The population of Americans that goes short of adequate food is divided into two categories, explains Berg. About 11 million people, as of 2006, officially suffered from "hunger" at some point during the year, defined as having at least one stretch where they didn't have enough to eat. The "food insecure," numbering more than 35 million, may have been free of outright hunger pangs, but reported skimping on portions, substituting cheaper but less nutritious options, or otherwise showing signs of uncertainty about where their next meal was coming from. (To make matters still more confusing, the Bush Administration dropped the word "hunger" from the USDA's vocabulary, substituting "very low food security.") And the actual numbers are likely even higher, since the USDA's hunger surveys omit, among others, homeless people.
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While Berg finds these numbers unacceptable, he notes that two-thirds of the nation's poor avoid food insecurity thanks to the federal food-stamp program, plus the nation's network of soup kitchens and food pantries. But though Berg may be director of a coalition of emergency food providers, he seems like he'd be happy enough to see them put out of business by an expansion of federal programs. "Trying to end hunger with food drives," he concludes, "is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon."
Yet 45 percent of the nation's hungry get no federal food aid, in most cases either because they are ineligible or because they believe they are. Berg rails against the "Kafkaesque nightmare" of a food stamp system that, in New York, allows someone to be denied benefits for, among other things, owning more than one funeral plot. Getting USDA farm subsidies, he notes, generally requires less paperwork than getting USDA food stamps. Yet apparently no one has suggested subjecting farmers to "finger imaging," as food stamp applicants are to root out fraud.
"All You Can Eat" also delves into the history of hunger programs, from the first establishment of a Food Stamp Program under FDR in 1938, to campaigns of the 1960s such as the Poor People's March that Martin Luther King, Jr. was helping organize at the time of his death to, crucially, the 1968 CBS documentary "Hunger in America," which eventually led to President Nixon establishing the modern food stamp and WIC (Women, Infants and Children) nutrition programs. The book tackles broader issues of poverty as well, assessing the results of welfare reform (not so hot, though Berg agrees with his old boss that on balance it was worthwhile to get more poor people into the workforce), and surveying New York's role as the "shrinking middle-class capital of America." Oil magnate David Koch, for example, the city's richest resident, gets called out for having a net worth that's five times the combined income of all 1.7 million New Yorkers below the official poverty line.
