Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice

Reviewed by Nevin Cohen

It is impossible to read Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice in the midst of the 2020 Democratic primaries without drawing comparisons between the tensions faced by the food justice pioneers profiled in Lana Dee Povitz’s history and the very different visions of social change articulated by the two candidates. Bernie Sanders’s case for the radical transformation of an unequal and unjust economic and political system seems diametrically opposed to Joe Biden’s more conservative approach, emphasizing incremental change within existing institutions. Their ideologies seem irreconcilable. But as the organizations profiled in Lana Dee Povitz’s compelling history of food activism illustrate, on the ground social change is more nuanced and complex than the Sanders/Biden schism suggests.

Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice
By Lana Dee Povitz
University of North Carolina Press, 2019
360 pages

Povitz’s book profiles a group of activists and social entrepreneurs at the forefront of the food justice movement in New York City during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. It begins with the story of one, Evelina Antonetty, a Puerto Rican immigrant who grew up in East Harlem and then moved to the South Bronx. In 1965, Antonetty helped launch United Bronx Parents (UBP) to address racial disparities and economic inequality in the New York City Public School system. UBP trained parents to advocate for more resources in Bronx schools city officials had neglected. One strategy was to launch a sustained grassroots campaign, one of the first in the country, to improve public school lunches.

Low-income parents whose children depended on the program led UBP’s lunch campaign. And UBP treated them as experts in feeding their families. They also engaged them in research about the program’s inadequacies and inequities. But the campaign was about more than school lunches. UBP used the fight to help parents understand a city government that had allowed the Board of Education to ignore the nutritional needs of children. They used a range of political theatrics to get media coverage and the attention of elected officials, such as depositing trash bags at Federal Plaza full of school lunches so distasteful that they were discarded by Bronx schoolchildren, and press events with model (healthy and culturally familiar) lunches mothers knew their children would eat.

UBP also provided direct services. When officials chose not to launch a summer meals program, funded by the national government, UBP elected to run the program itself, serving 150,000 meals each day in the first summer alone. The program not only ensured that children of low-income families would not go hungry when school was not in session, but involved community groups that served lunches throughout the city, and built the legitimacy and cultural power of these organizations. UBP demonstrated that a non-profit could both challenge and collaborate with public agencies to deliver high-quality meals to public school children. Their efforts showed how a government program could be designed to meet community needs, and illustrated the ability of direct service provision to mobilize citizens to fight for change and not merely placate those demanding social justice.

Stirrings next presents the history of a very different organization. In contrast to UBP, whose mission was based on securing power and influence for low-income, mostly black and Latinx parents in the Bronx, the Park Slope Food Cooperative was founded in 1973 by 10 young, white, upwardly mobile leftists. Nearly all of its founders had protested Vietnam, and like other anti-war activists were quite disillusioned with the political establishment. They established the Co-op to make their economic and political values tangible, creating a food retailer based on the values of participatory democracy instead of profit. Parents in the Bronx were faced with stale bread and sour milk. Co-op founders wanted to provide so-called health food – tofu, brown rice, whole wheat bread – at affordable prices for working members. Yet the Co-op became more than just a low-cost food retailer for the privileged. It grew into a community hub for leftist activities and enabled its activist-members to test their vision for a more egalitarian society by building a non-hierarchical, labor-managed cooperative business. Povitz points out that while the Co-op was committed to democratic decision-making, the socioeconomic and ethnic homogeneity of its members paradoxically “replicated patterns of race and class dominance that its members opposed.”

God’s Love We Deliver did not. Founded at the height of the AIDS epidemic, in 1986, the organization had a simple mission: to provide healthy, high-quality meals at no cost to those who were ill and homebound. In 2020, it is hard to imagine that feeding people with AIDS would be considered a radical act, but in the 1980s people with AIDS had been abandoned by family and friends, ostracized by their churches and workplaces, and ignored by governments. While activist groups like Act-Up were staging die-ins at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and occupying the Centers for Disease Control, God’s Love enrolled a broader range of people who wanted donate their time, skills, and resources to fill a basic human need. Its founder viewed this work as a spiritual calling, to minister to the dying, rather than political activism. But God’s Love played an important role in engaging the volunteers in ways that enabled them to express their empathy for people with AIDS. In the process, it shifted the narrative about those infected with HIV. Although not explicitly a social justice organization, God’s Love offered a different notion of what it meant to be involved in AIDS activism. By doing so, it involved people who might not otherwise have been engaged.

The last organization Stirrings profiles is the Community Food Resource Center (CFRC), an anti-hunger organization founded in 1980 that combined advocacy with direct services. CFRC started out by helping New York City government improve children’s access to federal food programs. As budget cuts under the Reagan administration exacerbated the effects of the city’s fiscal crisis, CFRC moved into direct service work. Its leadership understood the social determinants of hunger; that those in poverty needed not only food stamps but health care, housing assistance, and tax filing help to receive benefits for which they were eligible. CFRC founded the Food Bank for New York City, started a model soup kitchen, and moved into related areas like eviction prevention, tax preparation, and meal programs for seniors. Unlike many other food groups, CFRC combined advocacy with direct service in ways that reinforced each. When the Clinton administration’s “welfare reform” further reduced resources available to low-income people, its advocacy for systemic political change grew.

In her conclusion, Povitz explores the links between these seemingly disparate organizations. An obvious connection is the focus on increasing access to healthy, good quality food, a goal that united low-income Puerto Rican women in the South Bronx, affluent young, white leftists in Park Slope, evangelicals feeding New York City’s AIDS population, and the CFRC alike. Ideology and day-to-day strategies differed. And different economic or social crises across the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s influenced these four organizations’ work. Yet feeding the city’s needy enabled each group to address the social and political determinants of food access. Another theme is the complexity of white, middle-class leadership serving the needs of low-income people of color. While an explicit emphasis on antiracist politics enabled CFRC to remain focused on empowerment for Puerto Rican and African American residents, the lack of an overt political vision prevented God’s Love from more directly addressing the AIDS crisis through more controversial, confrontational strategies. The leaders of the groups profiled in Stirrings were motivated by diverse political traditions, from Communism to Puerto Rican nationalism to antiwar leftism, influences that informed the nature and leadership of these organizations. But many of the people who ignited the food movement in New York were interconnected, providing each other with mentorship and friendship, and facilitating the diffusion of core values and organizational strategies. To anyone involved in social justice activism, it is not surprising that even in a large city like New York activists are closely intertwined.

One of the criticisms often leveled at programs that feed the needy, from urban farms to soup kitchens, is that they inadvertently help maintain the status quo by staving off hunger and, by doing so, undermine more radical efforts to address the underlying causes of food insecurity, like economic injustice, racism, homophobia, gender inequality, and other forms of oppression. Stirrings is important because it challenges this notion by showing how service provision and activism co-existed in the organizations examined. The founders of each were quite radical, yet their activities were designed to take advantage of government and philanthropic funding streams, as well as internal agency resources, to more conventionally empower the disenfranchised, and increase awareness of the power imbalance. They advanced social justice even as they were not explicitly about social and political change. At a moment when political strategies are often reduced to caricatures in the media, Stirrings makes an important contribution; illuminating these dimensions of social justice work.

The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers: those who study social movements, food studies scholars, practitioners in food justice organizations, and anyone interested in the origins of food activism in New York City.

Nevin Cohen is Associate Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health, and Research Director of CUNY’s Urban Food Policy Institute. He is the co-author of a recently published book, Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City (University of GA Press) that examines the potential of urban farms and gardens to address racial, gender, and class oppression.