An hour with Mariana Chilton was a breath of existential air into a trip that has taken me far from the academic world to street corners, soup kitchens and the shining marble corridors of Congress. Walking into Philadelphia’s Drexel University-based Center for Hunger Free Communities (CHFC), offices, I was grateful for that time- she has a big team, and they all know they have a lot of work to do. I first knew of Mariana as the Public Health academic who took bus loads of women to the state Capitol in the film ‘A Place at the Table’ (which also features Janet Poppendieck, whose name has become a bit of a go-to in this blog). This was clearly someone who saw her work as relevant far beyond institutional walls. As I discussed at length during my descriptions of Wacquant’s work and the AAG sessions on activist-scholarship, I have remained ambivalent over the link between the two. If the two were ever separate.

In the halls of power, it might be easy to forget that the work of government is not simply to cull numbers, hone rhetoric and balance budgets, but to work for the good of a people. In academia, it might be easy to forget that the goal of our work is not just to chase research grants and expand publications lists, but to do intellect: inte-lect- read between, make connections, make people see things differently. And the work of an activist? To draw out the power structures underlying the manifestations of unjust situations and arrangements that we might wish to change? To draw out the unseen? Make people see things differently? Sketch out imagined possibilities? Perhaps the two are not so different.

Just a note on the value of social sciences, indulge me (or skip). I find this an important ethical undressing, given the complicity of the birth of many research disciplines in the colonial racism they now claim to disavow. Who is the object and who the subject and how does power operate in the research encounter? Ethnographers have thought much about this, and have perhaps fore grounded power and value as the fault lines of their work. Qualitative, about the qualities of life, the values we ascribe to people and their circumstances. Rather than waste time in trying to prove its validity as a ‘science’, ‘social science’ holds claim to a different kind of explanatory power, that of bringing matters of value to the surface in order to contribute to collective decision-making: what Aristotle taught as ‘phronesis’, the proficiencies of a social actor in deciding matters than cannot be decided by technical or scientific/analytical means.

I felt today in the company of someone who has gained such skills. Mariana Chilton does not only apply her epidemiological research skills to build the evidence base around hunger, school performance, health care costs, violence, mental health and so on, but she applies her energy and compassion to widen the research web to embrace those being ‘studied’ into the research community as co-creators of movements, panels, talks and the plethora of ‘academic products’ that can sometimes appear the ends, rather than the means, of our work. And shouldn’t.

But the means are really important. As social scientists talking about human values, our methodologies must recognise the power dynamics of the research encounter itself. Brandishing my informed consent form, it was interesting to hear Chilton’s reflections on my own practices. Why would I want to record her speak? Will she have a say over how I represent her? How much control do I give to the informants that are, on some level, helping me gain a PhD? What do they get in return? Do they care about my thesis? Do I care that they care? Who sets the standards of ethical research or, in reality, is this a great big work of progress requiring personal integrity and skill to navigate each situation?

There is a yawning chasm in the research I’ve done here in the US. Aside from snatched conversations in the street and in soup kitchens and the group discussions in Toronto with Put Food in the Budget and Voices for Change, I’ve not sat down properly to listen to people who are food insecure in the different places I’ve been to. I’ve talked to a rich swathe of community activists, non-profit workers, government employees and…well, people who hold reins. There’s nothing wrong with holding reins (most of the time!). But many of them are speaking on behalf of, working on behalf of, serving and interacting with and researching people in poverty. How far the goals of these bifurcated groups (academic/informant, volunteer/recipient) collide is a really Good Question. Or how far the structures of charity, welfare and class maintain and reify and challenge those bifurcations. But I felt Mariana standing alongside the women who share their lives to further a collective cause: hunger-free communities. She frequently spoke of individual women who’ve spoken to senators and showed me pictures of the stunts, statements and exhibitions that the team has employed in trying to get the message across. To change hearts and budgets of those with the reins over the budgets and programs that prevent, to an extent, destitution, depression, suicidal thoughts, family breakup, violence: the friends of hunger and poverty. Witnesses to Hunger, they are called. Witnesses. The accused? So many things.

From my point of view (Mariana may disagree), there were three key themes in our chat. One. Her journey. A relentless energy that has taken different forms, and iteration, and time, and a degree of serendipity and necessity, to get to the position of running a research team, a wall of newspaper articles and recognition as the national leader in community involvement in America’s fighting-hunger world. I resonated with her recollections- realising she could do better addressing human rights in her own country than in the ‘third world’ (I had this realisation upon meeting ATD Fourth World), engaging with the temptations of living in the moment, everyday, in the new age vision of a better world (my back-to-the-land attempt ended with a broken relationship, allergy to certain soil and realising that the grit of the city was where the camel’s back might be broken and need healing). I was touched by her telling of time in New Mexico with Cheyenne and Lakota people who taught her the deep ritual and moral significance of food and its sharing and eating, even as she witnessed the diet-related illnesses exploding the waistlines and imploding the mortality rates of people around her, denied the land and resources with which they might have retained sovereignty over their food system, hydrated by named-so-unjustly-it-makes-me-cry-and-laugh Mountain Dew (on this, I really wanna see Michael Moore’s Who To Invade Next, in which he attempts to feed coke to a dismayed ?Scandinavian kid).

Two. Slavery. I’d watched Chilton’s Tedx talk, entitled ‘Why food is not the solution to hunger‘, co-delivered with Joanna, one of the Witnesses to Hunger, and she’d mentioned that being unable to feed one’s kids because of inadequate wages is akin to slavery. I asked her about this- without necessarily wanting to go into the semantics and histories of slavery, I was curious about using a term that few would go for (like comparisons to the Holocaust, slavery retains an aura of exclusivity; a don’t-go-there…perhaps this is part of our desire to believe in the ultimate justice of our ‘free’ societies, although Giorgio Agamben’s work employs the metaphor of the concentration camp in explaining ongoing and often mundane processes of boundary-making and exclusion). I had mentioned my visit to Angola prison, a node in a system that legalises slavery for felons. Those men are “disappeared” from their communities, she agreed (at an excellent exhibition on contemporary incarceration at now-ruined Eastern State Penitentiary, I’d read about “million dollar blocks”- the cost of incarcerating people from particular blocks of streets that could, otherwise imagined, be reinvested in those often disregarded communities). In answering how slavery applies to her research, Chilton again referred to the women who documented bits of their lives with cameras as part of the research process. Their pictures- one woman photographed a chain, confirm their descriptions of cash welfare as a form of slavery, a trap whereby you do training in return for your welfare, “graduate to the same poor wages” and risk losing your tax credits and Medicare assistance should you earn just above the threshold. One mother told her “welfare gives you just enough to hang yourself”. Zygmunt Bauman has written so poignantly about the changed world of welfare, a system unsuited to the changed world context of globalised labour where one’s capacity to consume in the market is more of a marker of one’s citizenship than one’s job… so while most hunger advocates, food banks included, chip away at the powers that be to protect or win back margins of cuts to nutrition programs such as supplementary groceries for elders and babies, lunch clubs and food stamps, Chilton sits in a place of awareness, borne out by the testimony and lived documentation of destitution- mums struggling to feed their babies, that convinces her that it is not enough simply to strive for those minor wins- she’s seen the eyes of policy makers glaze over at the evidence she hoped would win their hearts, if not the full munificence of budgetary support.

3. Hope? So she is trying new things, including a program called Building Weath and Health, which recognises the long-term, trauma-rooted, complex nature of poverty and change, so aims to build peoples’ assets and match savings they make- but it is fragile and subject to the naysay of policy makers and funders. She and community partners are opening a café called EAT (Everyone At the Table), which sounds similar to the ‘pay as you feel’ concept of the Real Junk Food Project but without the emphasis on food waste- this is a place for people to eat, talk and just be together. She continues to work with allies in government, academia and the community. It is a multi-pronged approach (she does not use this cliché, this is me)- an eye on the structural roots of poverty and hunger, committed care of individuals in this community and those that Witnesses of Hunger has spread to, and a continually enriched evidence base of qualitative and quantitative research teasing out the links mentioned above- gender, violence, mental and physical health, community asset-building, child development, the impacts of interventions- see the research page of CHFC.

I ask a question that, in retrospect, appears naïve, especially given recent electoral history: what gives her hope? “Hope is cheap”, she replies. Do not future-confine your work. Untold suffering continues daily. Starvation finds a form in health-robbing diet-related illness and damaged bodies. The reason for struggle remains. She’d love to sit in a yurt and look at the sky, she laughs- “but I can’t!” (I was reminded here of Alistair McIntosh’s metaphor of the cross as the ‘heavy burden’ of the world’s ills in his article ‘Theology of Spiritual Activism’. http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/2006-3rd-firebones.htm So she continues to add words and pictures and actions to the places and discussions where decisions that affect millions are made. She insists that “hunger is man-made- you have to deal with the politics”, however relentlessly disappointing this must feel at times as a self-described “flea in the wind” (I wish I’d asked her about the language of ‘hunger’- how this can be seen both to depoliticise and radicalise through its use by the “hunger industrial complex” that includes food charity and yet is perhaps problematically excluded from USDA descriptions of food insecurity from 2006- David Himmelgreen has written about this).

Mariana Chilton teased out a conflicting thread that I feel weaves through my own life and many others, I’m sure: the conviction that one’s work must address injustice and face ugliness, but also respect the beauty of life: of love for one’s children and fellows, of

peoples’ capacity for poetry and political articulacy, of standing in solidarity. That thread must dart between the levels of inner work, community presence and a hawk’s eye and shadow over the bigger picture. While my trip here is finite and I must write a big old essay in a year’s time, this work far precedes the formality of ‘doing a PhD’- it starts with asking my mum whether we could take a tin of beans to the man under the footbridge in Norwich with the ‘homeless and hungry’ sign and crumpled paper cup that haunted me then and now, every time I see those cups, signs, feet-sticking-out. An unending spiral of learning that is never in the same place but that takes place in stained historical continuances of misogyny, racism, colonialism…there’s so much to do, how could one not be an activist? From women with babies who hug Senators, to the adventurous corner-store owner who thinks about the healthfulness and affordability of their stock, to academics juggling inspiration for nosy foreigners with hard-nosed calls to policy makers to defend programs, to the politicians and money-makers with power to bend historical trajectories. Maybe she could smell my self-doubt, the little voice of anxiety that makes me wonder whether I’m just wasting people’s time as I proffer that informed consent form. But in her telling me of the withered self-love of young mothers raised on memories of rape, I was reminded that there isn’t really time for self-loathing; best to look for love.