By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
Hunger lives in every zip code. It often hides in places you don’t expect it, said Clancy Harrison, opening speaker for the 2023 Ohio Hunger Dialogues hosted for the first time at Bowling Green State University.
Harrison, a registered dietician, former food pantry director and founder of Food Dignity, a food equity movement, challenged the attendees to think differently about healthy food access.
“Food is a human right,” she said, but too often judgment and stigma get in the way of people being able to access nourishing and healthy food.
She admitted her own assumptions and biases got in the way of serving the people she was tasked to help as a dietician and food pantry operator.
She recalled as a dietician, she projected her life experiences onto other people by accepting misconceptions as a truth and judging others based on her assumptions. She was working on diabetes care with a person. When it was time to meal plan, she visualized driving her car, going to her grocery store and seeing what was in the grocery store.
“I never once asked if the person had access to broccoli. I never asked if they could afford it. I never asked what they wanted to eat. That’s how I projected what they should eat because I was the ‘expert dietician,’” Harrison said.
She learned to put her degree and expertise aside and ask herself, “What am I here to learn today?”
Before she accepted a job with a food pantry, she had never stepped foot in a food pantry, despite growing up in a family wrought with poverty, and drug and alcohol addiction. She automatically assumed she would see generational poverty and addiction.
The reality was the people she met were working or looking for work. Their situations were not what she had imagined.
One day, a clean-shaven, well-dressed man came into the pantry. “I just knew he was there to give me a check” for the refrigeration that the pantry so desperately needed. He put his head down and said he had been looking for a job. He had three kids and couldn’t go home empty handed.
“Here I was judging someone based on what they looked like,” Harrison said, embarrassed of her assumptions. They filled his trunk with food and six months later she got a card and a check from him, thanking her for saving him during a difficult time.
“Everything I thought was wrong; I had to take a step back and question where I learned that,” she said.
It is important to respect life experiences, she said. “We all have different perspectives. It’s important to understand that your perspective matters even when you think it doesn’t. Even if you’re talking to someone who you might not agree with, you still need to be willing to listen.”
Often it is unconscious bias that decides who is at the table, she said. “We seek out people who have the same experiences because they understand our struggle and they agree with us. We feel seen, heard and validated,” she explained.
Harrison said understanding the scope of hunger is important to recognizing the various levels of food security that ranges from high and marginal to low and very low. One of the building blocks for ensuring food security is empowerment, including the individuals running food programs and partners with other organizations. However, she said, it is most important to empower the people that are being served every day, “because the solutions to food insecurity live in their hearts, their minds and their souls. How often is their voice at the table?”
Take time to go to a grocery store and listen to what people are saying, she said. “You will hear people say, ‘I don’t know how I can afford this or continue this (healthy eating).’ You can hear the stress in their comments, and that stress increases their risk to 10 chronic diseases.”
Though the stress exists, they still are not able to change their eating habits and the severity of food insecurity increases, as does the risk of the chronic diseases.
Individuals whose food security is very low are often considered by the general population to be starving, skipping meals, dumpster diving or going to food pantries. Hunger looks different for different people, Harrison pointed out. She talked about existing on affordable ramen noodles as a college student. “That was not a rite of passage; that was hunger,” she said. “I might have been full, but I wasn’t getting the nutrients I needed.”
Understanding barriers to access is another area that requires people to be open-minded. Barriers can be in places many people don’t think about. Barriers can be the stigma associated with food assistance, transportation, location of food retailers, types of food retailers, food cost and cooking equipment.
Harrison’s eyes were opened to barriers she hadn’t thought about one time when she was handing out fresh produce during a food distribution. One of her regulars, a veteran who was missing a leg, said he couldn’t eat the produce because he was homeless and didn’t have a way to cook the fresh foods.
“OK, don’t worry about that,” she told him after taking out the butternut squash, potatoes and cabbage. “But let me give you the apples”
“Clancy, I can’t eat the apples. I don’t have teeth,” he said. “What did you do with my applesauce?”
“Here I was making decisions without having him come to the table,” she said. “It’s important as a diverse group of professionals here, to remember to take into account all of the barriers that people have,” she stressed.
Harrison relayed a conversation with a dietician colleague who couldn’t understand why her client was eating noodles and chips after they had extensive conversations about healthy foods. The dietician assumed the woman didn’t care about her kids, that she was lazy and didn’t want to eat healthy.
Harrison told her, “It’s important to get to the ‘why’.”
It turned out the woman was a single mom with a young son and going to a grocery store that had fresh foods required a two-bus trip, a busy intersection and the need to have lightweight groceries in just a few bags that she could put on her lap. It was easier to go to the convenient store a block from her house and get the noodles and chips. And yet the mother was being judged.
Harrison relayed another story about a mother who fed her children soda before bed, despite many conversations stressing the importance of drinking milk and water. By asking a few nonjudgmental questions to get to the why, she learned that the combination of sugar and carbonation allowed the mother to put her children to bed “with a full belly, a sense of fullness.”
Harrison’s goal after learning that was to connect the mother with resources and to find out what success looks like to her. “It’s a completely different conversation than telling her yet again they should be drinking milk or water,” she said.
“We need to honor the fact that hunger probably lives in this room regularly. We need to have those conversations, because at the end of the day, people are going to make choices based on what’s accessible and what’s affordable,” Harrison said.
“There’s a misconception that poor people don’t want to eat healthy. If we continue to perpetuate that, we will never have dignified food access,” she said.
In her new role at Food Dignity, Harrison said they have gotten away from the traditional food pantry model. Instead, they work with nonprofits on site. One example was working at a career technology school with student focus groups and the concept of a food pantry at the school to address food insecurity issues.
The students were asked what they would do if they could rescue a pallet of boxed macaroni and cheese. They talked about environmental sustainability and decided they wanted to share the goods with their friends. However, they didn’t want to deal with traditional food pantry forms to prove they needed the food. That was a barrier for them because they thought by filling out the forms, officials would be alerted there was not enough food in their homes and consider it abuse or neglect.
The process with the high schoolers led Harrison to question the need for forms to keep proving they were hungry. “You deserve food, and if the school is already a free and reduced fee lunch, why do we need to continue to ask people why they are hungry?”
Judgment of volunteers and people who donate to food pantries also comes into play with the stigma of food assistance, Harrison said. Volunteers were quitting because people were showing up in nicer cars than the volunteers had. She tried to help the volunteers flip the script to the positive rather than the negative, suggesting that maybe their only transportation that day was to borrow a vehicle from a relative.
Another concern is when people use the call for donated food as an opportunity to clean out their cupboards, only to send opened spice jars or foods that are past their stamped expiration dates with the notion that people should be grateful for the donated food.
Harrison tried to point out the obvious by displaying a “prized can” of the oldest donated canned good. In 2020, the oldest expiration date that has yet to be bested was on a can of nacho cheese from 1987. “Would you be grateful for that?” she asked.
Among their most recent successes have been partnering with local farmers to provide meat and dairy events and to have very specific, themed food drives, like a peanut butter and jelly event, or pasta and sauce drive.
The themed food drives have worked. “People thought they must really need those items, so they gained a different mindset that became an invitation to go out to buy the ingredients rather than an invitation to go into the cupboard and grab anything they aren’t going to use” she said.
“If you find yourself in a situation where you’re spinning wheels, you’re wasting energy and you’re perpetuating hunger, it’s time to think differently,” she said.
By asking the people they serve to become leaders in the organization, they create immediate trust with others. “We need to make sure we elevate their voices, their ideas, their solutions and center them,” Harrison said.
