SLO County food bank employee critiques agency, gets fired

January 6, 2022

OPINION by KODY CAVA

The open letter that got me fired, and why “anti-hunger” organizations have become part of the problem.

The following is an open letter I wrote to my (now previous) employer, the SLO Food Bank. Four hours after this letter was sent, I was fired from the company for making “political” statements.

Because this letter is specifically addressed to the SLO Food Bank, many of the arguments are bolstered with examples that are local to San Luis Obispo County. However, all of these same critiques apply to the broader food bank industry. Please share this letter with those who can make a difference. Hint: we all can.

Food banks in the U.S. have become institutions and the people that work at them have become institutionalized.

Since at least 1980, as our social services and public institutions have been inexorably whittled away, privatized for profit, and defunded; as workers’ wages and labor protections have been systematically gutted; and as entire communities have been blighted by deindustrialization with no social safety net to fall back on, food banks have continued to expand their operations and funding to meet the needs of an increasingly precarious populace. This massive shift in resources – away from the control of the public and our laws and instead towards the non-profit industry – is undemocratic, untenable, bad policy, and damaging to society.

It is tempting to view food banks as some of the most laudable and altruistic non-profit organizations, if not at least the most benign and unoffending. Who could take issue with giving free food to people who need it? But this simple mission, free food with no questions asked, when unattended by a broader critique of the ills that necessitate a food bank’s existence in the first place, comes with a steep price.

It comes at the price of our vision, the ability to see and recognize the realities of food insecurity and how it is connected with our entire food system. It comes at the price of our bravery, the courage it takes to recognize our standing in the community as a respected anti-hunger organization and to use that immense clout to change the status quo and to take on the difficult task of refusing to play into the systems that shuttle people to our doors in the first place. And it comes, finally, at the price of our souls, as we show up for work in our community, day in and day out, passing out food to a never ending, and in fact growing line of people, as we continue to fill our investment account and garner raises and bonuses, all the while never questioning why it is we are doing what we are doing, but with the gnawing feeling that there must be a better way.

There are millions of impoverished people in this country and each one of them exposes the malignant lie of our morally bankrupt economic and governmental systems. The crime of poverty is a communal crime for which we all bear responsibility. Every day, hour after hour, we bear the colossal failure of being the richest nation in the world which yet refuses to provide for its people, as we languish under the grip of a deeply inequitable system that identifies what ought to be public goods – healthcare, education, housing, employment in meaningful work, food, mailing, and banking services – as mere glittering potentials for privatization and profit at the expense of our collective health, well-being, and human solidarity.

Amongst these injustices, we put our faith in the misguided belief in charity and philanthropy – which are at best benign ways for disempowered individuals to feel good about themselves, and at worse are ways for the rich and powerful to launder their dirty money – rather than putting our faith in a system of real collective justice.

If we as food bank workers are beholden to private donations, grants, and scant government funding for our non-profits, then we are utterly reliant on the whims of a donor base that is not guaranteed to be there for us nor is mandated by any democratic body of law. And if our very same non-profit organizations that are reliant upon this private funding remain completely devoid of explicit language that identifies the underlying systems that cause food insecurity in the first place, out of fear of alienating our donor base, then we have a system that is completely beyond democratic control due to its private structure, is utterly reliant upon the status quo out of fear of losing revenue streams, and is therefore unable to affect any meaningful change in the community that could actually reduce food insecurity. And the more I work in this field, the more that outcome seems to be exactly the point of the entire endeavor.

I hope that food banks would have the wherewithal to understand that their success must not be measured by how many people they serve or how much money they can raise. If your primary concern is to continue finding revenue streams for your organization, and finding more abject people to place in fundraising campaigns to appeal to the pathos of your donors, then the cycle will never end, indeed, your organization will depend on it. It will depend on everlasting hunger to perpetuate its business model. It then begs the question, if hunger actually did reduce or disappear from our community – and therefore also our reason for fundraising – would our food banks rejoice in having found themselves to be put out of business just like we always say we are trying to do? Or would we find that that maxim was a shallow platitude that merely kept us from asking ourselves: “What would it really mean to work to put ourselves out of business?”

For a start, it would mean adopting a stance that says we will not accept any money from a corporation that is known to engage in anti-labor or anti-consumer practices such as union busting, price-fixing, monopolization, labor trafficking, or lobbying for criminalization of protests against their business practices, all of which contribute to wage depression, industry consolidation, and food insecurity.

Most important for this stance of not accepting money from corporate bad actors to succeed, it must be done in accordance with other anti-hunger organizations. One single food bank adopting an internal donation policy of this sort will accomplish nothing except to cut off revenue streams to that one organization. In order to have maximum impact, these policies must be organized across the entire food bank industry, and they must be adopted in tandem with robust public relations campaigns that speak directly to our communities, the people that we serve, and to the corporations that we put on our hit list, in order to clearly express the reasons for such a donation policy and how it would directly affect the systems that exacerbate food insecurity. To adopt such a policy at only one organization without an accompanying PR campaign would be masturbatory.

There is a line of thinking that says that food banks should remain politically neutral in order to maintain their donor base and to avoid “mission creep”. This argument has many problems. Firstly, it presumes that the narrow focus of handing out food to people is itself politically neutral. This is false. The narrow circumscribing of a food bank’s mission in this way is in fact a political stance which says that engaging our community on a grassroots level and using explicit language to explain the root causes of food insecurity are either not worthwhile endeavors or are beyond the prim and proper functions of a respectable organization. It identifies hunger as a temporary problem that can be alleviated by throwing food at people, instead of as a cancerous social, economic, and political failure where powerless people are subjugated by the powerful. It says that the solutions will come from private donations to the non-profit sector, instead of from changes in government policy and from mass, sustained organizing that opens up democracy and places localized control in the hands of the people. What one person may describe pejoratively as “political” language, I would simply describe as clear and explicit language which serves to enlighten us to the realities of food insecurity, not to obfuscate those realities. One person’s politically neutral stance is another person’s poverty.

Secondly, this argument presumes that engaging your community and donor base with more explicit language – language designed to spur them to action, not simply to tug on their heartstrings and make them open their wallets – will necessarily cause you to lose money precipitously. What evidence is there for this? Engaging your donor base politically can drive them to feel far more connected and invested in a project. This is already being done successfully at Oregon Food Bank, where, since the onset of the pandemic, they have mailed fliers to their donors detailing the root causes of hunger and have reoriented their entire development team to measure their success not by money earned but by their levels of engagement with the community and with each other. And any development team worth their salt would be able to effectively craft and message out a PR campaign that speaks to the root causes of hunger and then use that campaign to increase donations, not cause them to dry up. Imagine if our relationship with donors was not one of simply begging them for money, but of engaging them on a deeper political level in order to encourage action beyond simple monetary support.

Thirdly, this argument puts fundraising first, and the anti-hunger cause second. It places maintaining fundraising over and above other programmatic considerations that ought to have equal footing if not take precedent to donation collections. It gives undue influence to donors over the structure and programming of the organization. It makes us try to divine what our donors’ political stances may be when we should instead be focusing on solidifying what our own stances are as an organization. If food bank leaders are always acting out of fear for the bottom line, then we have ceased to be an anti-hunger organization, if we ever were one in anything but name only. This persistent fear keeps us from instituting changes that would transform the ways we combat food insecurity. Fundraising efforts must not be at odds with the mission of anti-hunger, and to ensure this, we must not be afraid of being explicit about what our community faces.

Food banks must organize themselves, their supporters, and the people they serve into a collective group to advocate for policies that will address the root causes of hunger. Calling for more government funding for food stamps and school meals is not enough. We must organize for taxation of the wealthy, universal social services, enforcement of antitrust legislation to break up our monopolized food system, free higher education, and raising of the minimum wage. So long as food banks view their role as a narrow mission of simply passing boxes of food to people, over and over again, nothing will ever change, in fact it will only get worse, because our nonprofits will be built around a steady stream of “clients,” and those clients better keep coming or else we won’t be getting our paychecks anymore.

Imagine if every food bank refused to be complicit in the corporatized food system and engaged in an aggressive campaign that specifically called out the corporations and the government policies that contribute to food insecurity. Food banks would be a national force to reckon with, instead of what they currently are by and large – milquetoast non-profits that keep their blinders on and keep the gears of the system running as smoothly as possible.

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic, Feeding America, the largest and most prominent organization dedicated to hunger relief, accepted $100 million from Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world, and prostrated themselves before his magnanimity and thanked him effusively for being so kind and generous. This is despite the fact that that money mostly belongs to the Amazon workers who create that wealth and are prevented from unionizing and are fired if they even think about uttering the words “living wage.” This is despite the fact that vendors who sell on Amazon have upwards of 30% of their sales stolen from them and are forced to not sell on any other platform. This is despite the fact that Amazon avoids billions of dollars in taxes and instead gets subsidized by the US government. Bezos stole that $100 million from the American people and we say thank you when he gives it to food banks when it should have been put directly into our bank accounts and our collective public services in the first place. It is embarrassingly irresponsible for any anti-hunger organization to accept that money, let alone accept it without a mumbling word in opposition to the structures that brought it forth.

Going beyond the issue of funding, food banks must recognize that they have become an integral part of the broader food system. We fill in the gaps where capitalism has left us to perish. We work closely with vendors across the state and with gleaners within the county. We foster relationships with fellow, local non-profits. We strive to offer healthful foods that are culturally appropriate and locally sourced when available. Doors open for people when they say they are with the food bank. Given our important standing in the community, we have a responsibility to use our voice to call attention to the injustices of our local food economy, not only in our poorly attended and tepid online monthly committee meetings, but in person to the broadest audience possible. To not use our standing to ensure that those who come to us in need won’t be coming to us every month and every week and every day would be an act of feckless complicity to the very forces that trap people in food insecurity.

Food banks have extensive community ties through their broad base of volunteers, clients, vendors, partner non-profits, and government connections. There is tremendous opportunity in that network of people. We ought to be using our position in the community to foster deeper connections between these entities and to organize people to advocate for government policies and engage in grassroots actions that will reduce food insecurity. These things are already being done by smaller, scrappier mutual aid projects in our own community, why should every food bank not be doing so as well? We are being put to shame.

We must invite the community and those who are suffering from food insecurity to have a say in determining the policies that affect them the most. This is an essential way to remain accountable to those we serve. The current relationship of the food bank to those we serve is inherently unequal. We must remain honest and deeply connected to our community by constantly interfacing with those who experience food insecurity and by inviting them to express both their needs and their proposed solutions in the capacity of a consultant, and then we must compensate them accordingly for contributing to the food bank’s operations and mission.

But even if wages increased in our community, housing prices improved, and our social safety net was expanded, we would still be presented with the problem of a highly consolidated, monopolized, globalized, corporatized food system that disempowers farmers, subjects farmworkers to wage theft and pesticide exposure, forces food service workers into precarious gig jobs, and narrowly limits the choices of anyone who purchases food. We must emphasize the importance of local sustainability and local control of our food system.

Within our food system, it is worth pointing out why “locally sourced” and “sustainable” and “organic” food is more expensive. It is often because the labor that is put into the food, the people behind it, are being paid a living wage, or at least better than what is found at larger operations. It is because the food is not coming from a large monopolistic agribusiness that drives wages down, inordinately determines prices across the market, buys protection from lawmakers, and values profit above safe and nutritional food. Food banks should do all they can to support small local agriculture through their food sourcing and by being explicit about why large agribusinesses are harmful to our local economy and our health.

Food banks must support the farmworkers and food industry workers who are responsible for bringing our food to our plates. This must involve amplifying farmworker voices as well as calling attention to local businesses that treat their workers poorly. What kind of an organization are we if we give food to farmworkers that was sourced from a farm that drives down those same workers’ wages and prevents them from unionizing? We should not source food or funding from bad actors and we must call out their anti-labor practices, especially if they are local.

And it is important to remove the “ethical consumer” talking point from discussions of supporting local sustainability. A single consumer, making an ethical purchase choice that is not attended by an explicit reason for doing so, and which is not communicated to the entities that need to hear it, is utterly ineffectual. And what’s more, it is a tactic that is inaccessible to the poor and working-class. If housing prices are high, wages are low, and people have limited or no access to healthcare, child care, and other basic services, then people will be shuttled into the very limited choices of mostly cheap, unhealthy, unsustainable food products. If purchasing power and personal choices are our main avenue for supporting local, sustainable food systems, then poor and working-class people are going to be consistently locked out of that process. Instead, we must encourage political action. We must build well-organized grassroots movements that democratically incorporate the voices of impoverished and marginalized people so that everyone has a say in creating solutions and so that we can create a broad-based, mass movement that can push back against the globalized and corporatized food system.

Our current food system also contributes to the destruction of our environment through the cultivation of monocrops and through the expansive, immoral livestock industry that emits immense amounts of greenhouse gasses, poisons groundwater supplies, tortures animals by treating them as unfeeling objects for profit, and breeds new viruses and antibiotic resistant bacteria. Not only must we support hyper-localized food systems, we must also engage in explicit direct action against agribusinesses and the companies that purchase from them, such as Wal-Mart, in order to shut down their operations from functioning. (Wal-Mart is one of the leading funders of food banks, by the way.)

Given the legalized bribery of our legislators and regulators with Big Ag lobbying money, seeking meaningful change through electoral politics, or through personal spending habits, or through simply giving food to people standing in line, is a dead-end game. People in power will only listen when they are made to fear for themselves in the same way that poor and working-class people fear for themselves every day, which requires mass, sustained acts of civil disobedience against the instruments of corporate control and predation.

Some would argue that these actions are well beyond the scope of a food bank. But this again fails to recognize the immense opportunities we have with our relationships in the community and the immense obstacles we face in combating hunger. Hunger is not simply a lack of food. It is every aspect of the systems that force people to choose between food and shelter. We must recognize the responsibility we have to the people we serve to not bury our heads in the sand and thus perpetuate the problems. We get to choose our own priorities.

Another argument that keeps our anti-hunger organizations bogged down in distraction is one that says we need to conduct “needs assessments” and studies and reports and surveys of the local food system in order to determine how to best tailor our services. While there is nothing wrong with analyzing our food system in a systematic way in order to produce data and to more clearly understand our local problems, these efforts must not get in the way of immediate action and they cannot simply be producing data for data’s sake. What is the impact of yet another study if we just use the data to determine how much more food to throw at the problem? What is the impact of yet another study when every assessment identifies the same problems over and over again going back decades? There have been plenty of previous studies and reports done on our local food system, and those reports sit on shelves or are buried in digital file folders to be forgotten, and all the while our problems keep getting worse.

The SLO County Food System Coalition produced the Paradox of Plenty Report in 2012. Here’s some highlights: “With an economy driven by agriculture and tourism, many of the jobs in the county pay low wages. Furthermore, San Luis Obispo County has one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the nation.” Here, the report specifically links low wage jobs and the high cost of housing with food insecurity. The numbers in the report are grim, and mind you this is from pre-pandemic times. “The Census reports that 36% of renters in the County have severe housing cost burden (U.S. Census, 2010). This is a higher percentage than Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco and New York City. According to a 2010 survey, almost one quarter of SLO County residents are paying more than half of their income on housing.”

The report goes on to emphasize the importance of coordinating community organizations to educate the public on the root causes of food insecurity to illustrate “the interconnectedness of jobs, housing, health care, and hunger.” Some of the explicit goals identified in the report include: “Educate the community about the state of hunger and malnutrition in SLO County through a multi-agency PR Campaign to explain interconnectedness of poverty, hunger and jobs” [emphasis mine.] Another goal is to “[c]ollaborate with other organizations combating poverty, homelessness, hunger, and lack of health care to advocate for economic and social justice.” Be careful, these goals sound quite too political and difficult for our respectable food banks to wade in to. Maybe we should just keep our heads down and keep begging people for money. (The SLO Food Bank’s coffers have never been doing better, by the way. Thank god for the pandemic, it’s been great for business.)

The Paradox of Plenty report used survey data compiled by Cal Poly professor Aydin Nazmi and his research team which was published in the Hunger Free Communities report in 2011. Most of the people surveyed were living at or below the poverty level. 52% of respondents said they had to choose between paying rent and paying for food. The study also found that significantly more people utilized the food bank than they did SNAP benefits, an underfunded government program that gives people money for food so that they can make their own buying choices.

This is yet another example of how non-profits are taking over providing essential services from the more proper entity, the public state. Here’s a revealing quote from one of the survey respondents: “Healthy foods are too expensive. With the little money I have to spend on groceries I have to buy whatever is cheapest.” Another response: “If people in the community could get better paying jobs then they would be able to buy better food for their family.” When respondents were asked what would help alleviate hunger, top responses included “more jobs,” “higher wages,” and “community gardens.” Here we have people experiencing hunger who are clear about hunger’s economic connection, know that better wages would alleviate the issue, and who understand the importance of local food sovereignty. What is another study going to recommend to us about alleviating hunger that our community doesn’t already know?

A 2016 report called Vital Signs: Understanding San Luis Obispo County, compiled by ACTION for Healthy Communities noted that food service workers and “those in the farming, fishing, and forestry fields […] have some of the lowest median hourly wages of all jobs in the [San Luis Obispo County] labor market.” The workers who are most responsible for feeding all of us are also some of the most likely to experience food insecurity. And food insecurity often goes hand-in-hand with obesity, since cheaper foods are often the most unhealthy, processed, and calorie-packed. The report noted that in 2015, 60% of San Luis Obispo County adults were overweight or obese. In that same year, over half of San Luis Obispo County residents whose income was less than double the Federal Poverty Level stated that they were not able to afford enough food.

Additionally, SLO County has some of the worst enrollment for SNAP benefits among residents who would otherwise qualify for the food assistance program. “The county ranks at the bottom of all California counties,” the report notes, sitting at 39th place out of 40, with 60% of eligible residents not enrolled. And California as a whole ranked second to last in the nation for SNAP enrollment. This means that federal money that could otherwise be injected into the community through these benefits is being left on the table. This is yet another sign that underfunded, bureaucratic, labyrinthine public services need to be made universal and simplified. Enrollment in the SNAP program should be automatic. When a family files their taxes and they are found to be eligible for the program based on their income, they should automatically get access to the funds, no application required. And the SNAP benefits should be expanded to increase the benefit itself and to increase the income threshold so more people can be eligible. Food banks should be organizing to press lawmakers to make social services such as SNAP universal.

In regards to farming in San Luis Obispo County, the Vital Signs report found that in 2012, 2.8 million pounds of pesticides were used on crops in the county. A survey conducted of Santa Barbara County farmworkers in 2015 reported that workers were pressured to pick faster with a pesticide sprayer coming up behind them. And because many farmworkers only speak indigenous languages, warning workers about the dangers of pesticides only in Spanish has limited efficacy. Our farmworkers bear the brunt of these poisons, we ingest them with our produce, and our local environment suffers continued pollution.

A more recent report from 2019 called the Food Systems Atlas, done by Cal Poly professor Ellen Burke and her team, found that local awareness and understanding of the food system was low and it therefore recommended increasing “awareness of local food systems through magazines, publications, events, education campaigns and other marketing methods.” It also highlighted the problem of potential agricultural land being developed instead of preserved, thus limiting the space for small local farmers to have access to affordable land. The report also looks at the negative environmental impact our food system has on the community. Because so much produce that is grown locally is shipped beyond county lines and just as much outside produce is trucked into the county, the shipping vehicles and refrigeration required contribute to increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Shifting to looking specifically at farmworkers, The Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) produced the Raising Up Farmworkers report in 2015. They write,

Throughout California’s history, the agricultural industry relied on a cheap labor force that feared asking for their basic rights which greatly impacted their ability to integrate into society. Seen as outsiders and non-citizens, each wave of workers were tossed aside once they sought basic rights and replaced by a new group of exploitable workers.
This history has not changed. The Supreme Court recently clawed back the right for unionizers to enter onto farm property in order to organize workers, a key protection that had been fought hard for and won by Cesar Chavez and the UFW.

The CAUSE report notes that 73% of farmworkers surveyed in Santa Barbara County were noncitizens, most had not progressed past the eighth grade, and 52% had children at home, thus putting them in very precarious economic positions. Wage theft and overwork are rampant on farms. The report notes that growers in California are not required to pay overtime until after 60 hours per week or 10 hours a day. “Yes I have felt that some of my paychecks have been short,” the report quotes one worker as saying, “but then I am told by co-workers that it’s only a few cents difference and that I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it because I can get fired over a few cents, better not risk losing the job.” When asked what changes could be made to improve the conditions for their work, respondents identified “better pay, sick time, vacation time, overtime pay, breaks, and benefits as areas that they would prioritize.”

The next time someone says we need to conduct another involved study about the food system before we make any confident statements or changes to our programming, I’d be happy to point them in the direction of the wealth of knowledge on these subjects that already exists, or advise them to simply talk to one of the people standing in their growing lines for food. We cannot claim ignorance anymore, only sheepishness.

This is but a cursory glance at the many problems we face. And any proposed solution is but a stepping stone towards the broader goal of developing a society where we do not rely upon the non-profit industrial complex for what ought to be our collective public services and our human rights. Food banks increasing their numbers, locations, funding, and scope are all indicators of failures by our government and society to properly place the locus of control of public services in the hands of the people, namely through socialism. For any food bank not to acknowledge this fact and not actively work to shorten their lines for food is a failure to be a true anti-hunger organization.

Our commodified capitalist society is in terminal decline and it has failed the least of us most of all. And I have come to the conclusion that food banks share the responsibility for these failures. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that we are doing right by the people we serve by having the courage to name and be explicit about the forces that drive people to desperation in the first place. We have a responsibility to ensure that our anti-hunger organizations are doing everything they can to keep people from relying on our services. Anything less than that is a dereliction of our duty, a capitulation to the powers that be and the status quo, thus ensuring the perpetuation of the iniquities that bring people to our doors, ensuring the continued and endless expansion of food banks as an integral column propping up the bloated, shambling corpse of corporate capitalism and all of its attendant radical evils as we all stumble blindly towards our collective immiseration.

If we do not array ourselves against the institutions that force people into poverty and food insecurity, then what are we as organizations but a lame excuse for the worst offenders in our society to continue their depredations upon us? Let the people have their food banks, we say. We need not pay our workers a living wage, let them have food banks. We need not get out of the way of labor organizing, let them have food banks. We need not build social, not-for-profit, public housing, let them have food banks. We need not prioritize education – an inherent good for society that is worth far more than what a student’s potential wage earnings will be – over the funding of militarism and Wall Street greed, let the people have food banks. We need not cancel student debt, enforce antitrust laws to break up monopolistic agribusinesses, fund universal healthcare, tax corporations and the rich, punish white-collar crime, fund mental health and homeless services, and treat drug addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue, let all the people everywhere have their food banks. Preferably food banks that don’t ask questions.

Drip feeding the masses a bare minimum of resources so that they can continue to function as little more than commodities to be mined for profit as we all slowly starve or burn to death – whichever comes first – is the logical conclusion of unrestricted, avaricious capitalism. The situation we find ourselves in is not the result of simple neglect. It is not incompetence. It is not even policy failure. It is murder. It is murder because it is designed. It is murder by degrees, because a choice was made by the ruling class to extinguish life rather than sanctify it. It is murder, finally, because profit is considered more important than our lives and our survival. Until this reality is reckoned with by the organizations that should ostensibly concern themselves with food insecurity and its root causes, until these odious forces are named for what they are – forces of control and social death – and until anti-hunger organizations grow a backbone and stand up against this gargantuan and reckless madness that is pushing each and every one of us to the brink, our food banks will continue to be a part of the problem, not the solution.

Kody Cava was the SLO Food Banks community programs coordinator, until he sent out his opinion letter to the media.