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“What Sweet Charity? demonstrates is that when you have food pantries and food banks growing in number, it is a direct indication of the loss of democracy, of public programs, and the cutting away of public assistance programs. So back in the 70s, after the time of the Welfare Rights Movement and Jimmy Carter, you had a lot of fantastic programs that were coming up and hunger was going way down. It was phenomenal. But then Ronald Reagan came into power and started cutting all of these assistance programs…Wages started getting very stagnant, and so in order to make up for the loss of investment by government, churches and community organizations started running food pantries. So there’s a direct correlation between what the government stopped doing for its people and what different churches started to do. Ronald Reagan and many others encouraged the idea that all of a sudden basic needs should be met with charity. So what Jan Poppendieck does in this book is she problematizes charity.” Read more...
