Charis welcomes Mariana Chilton in conversation with food justice advocate and activist, Karen Washington for a discussion of The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again, a radical and urgent new approach to how we can solve the problems of hunger and poverty in the US.

Most people think hunger has to do with food: researchers, policymakers, and advocates focus on promoting government-funded nutrition assistance; well-meaning organizations try to get expired or wasted food to marginalized communities; and philanthropists donate their money to the cause and congratulate themselves for doing so. But few people ask about the structural issues undergirding hunger, such as, Who benefits from keeping people in such a state of precarity? In The Painful Truth about Hunger in America, Mariana Chilton shows that the solution to food insecurity lies far beyond food and must incorporate personal, political, and spiritual approaches if we are serious about fixing the crisis.

Drawing on 25 years of research, programming, and advocacy efforts, Chilton compellingly demonstrates that food insecurity is created and maintained by people in power. Taking the reader back to the original wounds in the United States caused by its history of colonization, genocide, and enslavement, she forces us to reckon with hard questions about why people in the US allow hunger to persist. Drawing on intimate interviews she conducted with many Black and Brown women, the author reveals that the experience of hunger is rooted in trauma and gender-based violence—violence in our relationships with one another, with the natural world, and with ourselves—and that if we want to fix hunger, we must transform our society through compassion, love, and connection. Especially relevant for young people charting new paths toward abolition, mutual aid, and meaningful livelihoods, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America reinvigorates our commitment to uprooting the causes of poverty and discrimination, and points to a more generative and humane world where everyone can be nourished.

Mariana Chilton is Professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives on the importance of childhood nutrition and served as an adviser to the Institute of Medicine and Sesame Street. She founded Witnesses to Hunger to ensure that people who know hunger firsthand can inform the national dialogue on poverty, and she served as the Co-Chair of the Bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger, meant to advise Congress on how to end hunger in America. Her new book is The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again (October 2024, the MIT Press).

Karen Washington is co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS), an organization supporting Black growers in both urban and rural settings. She is a former board member of Why Hunger, a grassroots support organization, and Farm School NYC, which leads workshops on growing food and food justice across the country. She is also board president of Greenworker Cooperatives, which builds and sustains worker-owned green businesses to create a strong, local, and democratic economy rooted in racial and gender equity. Additionally, she is on the Board of Directors of Soul Fire Farm, the Black Farmer Fund, and the Mary Mitchell Family & Youth Center.

As a community gardener and board member of the New York Botanical Gardens, she worked with Bronx neighborhoods to turn empty lots into community gardens. As an advocate and former president of the New York City Community Garden Coalition, she stood up and spoke out for garden protection and preservation. And as a co-founder of the La Familia Verde Garden Coalition, she helped launch a City Farms Market, bringing fresh vegetables to the Bronx community.

Since retiring from physical therapy in 2014, she has been a co-owner and organic grower at Rise & Root Farm in Chester, New York. She stands on the shoulders of her ancestors and sows seeds of love, healing, and liberation for future generations.

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The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again--Mariana Chilton in conversation with Karen Washington