Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement [Paperback]

Janet Poppendieck (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 1, 1999

In this era of eroding commitment to government sponsored welfare programs, voluntarism and private charity have become the popular, optimistic solutions to poverty and hunger. The resurgence of charity has to be a good thing, doesn't it? No, says sociologist Janet Poppendieck, not when stopgap charitable efforts replace consistent public policy, and poverty continues to grow. In Sweet Charity?, Poppendieck travels the country to work in soup kitchens and "gleaning" centers, reporting from the frontlines of America's hunger relief programs to assess the effectiveness of these homegrown efforts. We hear from the "clients" who receive meals too small to feed their families; from the enthusiastic volunteers; and from the directors, who wonder if their "successful" programs are in some way perpetuating the problem they are struggling to solve. Hailed as the most significant book on hunger to appear in decades, Sweet Charity? shows how the drive to end poverty has taken a wrong turn with thousands of well-meaning volunteers on board.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Tens of thousands of programs across the U.S. distribute free food to the hungry, a type of charity, according to the author, that "comes with a price tag." In a hard-hitting, radical analysis of a national crisis, Poppendieck, director of Hunter College's Center for the Study of Family Policy in New York City, calls the food programs a Band-Aid approach to deepening poverty, which counterproductively relieves pressure for more fundamental solutions by enabling government to shed its responsibility for the poor. Poppendieck, who has participated in or observed food distribution programs in nine states across the country, meticulously investigates the factors she cites as driving people to the soup kitchen or food pantry: low wages, unemployment, high housing costs, homelessness, disability and shrinking public-assistance benefits. She calls for a nationwide political movement to pursue an antipoverty, antihunger agenda vigorously through a reformed tax system, affordable housing, a stronger federal safety net and vastly improved public education and training. This is a book to prick the nation's conscience.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Poppendieck (director of the Ctr. for the Study of Family Policy, Hunter Coll., CUNY) examines whether volunteerism, food pantries, and soup lines do more harm than good in this thought-provoking work. (Poppendieck dealt earlier with hunger during the Great Depression in Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat, LJ 3/1/86.) Here she explores the bitterness and frustration on both sides of the charity business of keeping people fed. During a bad economy, people "did the right thing" by pulling together to help each other. In the current strong economic times, she reports, people question the number of homeless and hungry and wonder why things haven't improved. The author investigates whether our present system of volunteerism?however charitable?is actually contributing to the problem instead of solving it by letting the government off the hook. This timely book is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.?Sandra Isaacson, U.S. EPA Region VII Lib., Las Vegas
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (August 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140245561
• ISBN-13: 978-0140245561
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #589,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Offers much for thinkers, carers and activists alike November 12, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Ever felt that you want to help out in the world? Ever felt that you didn't know how? Ever felt you did know how, but it still didn't feel right? Anyone who has experienced these dilemmas should read Poppendieck's stream of thoughts and conversations, collected together in `Sweet Charity.' Subtitled `Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement,' it takes us through the practicalities and realities, and the rights and the wrongs of the movement to feed hungry people in the United States. A country of abundance and plenty, the apparent paradox of hunger is not lost on most of us. Poppendieck takes us into this contradiction and pushes hard to understand it. Take the introduction. The Good King Wenceslas carol is used to present a movement, a movement to feed the poor and hungry of America. But soon enough we find ourselves faced with a question: do these food banks and food pantries, these rescue operations, these places known collectively as `the emergency food system,' make our society kinder but less just? Does the kindness of Wenceslas betray those who believe in a long-term vision of economic justice? Poppendieck, Professor of Sociology at Hunter College in New York, has worked in charitable organizations herself, helping those who have problems accessing food. This is not an anti-charity book. Rather, it is a book that questions what charity should be, what we should do, and, most of all, what the government must understand. "Charity for all" opens the book with a picture of charity as recreation, down in New Jersey, the Boy Scouts of America sorting through food. It's early Thursday morning in chapter two, this time in Yorkville, NYC, where the newly unemployed jam into a food pantry. Then it's onto Cleveland, Ohio, in chapter three, where unemployment has transformed steel into rust. Then later, to Maine and California, Texas and Illinois, Pennsylvania and Kansas, all images of helping the hungry. So it goes. Poppendieck has been around in her attempts to unravel the `second tier' of food distribution in the USA. And this is what her travels told. That emergency food has seven deadly `ins': insufficiency, inappropriateness, nutritional inadequacy, instability, inaccessibility, inefficiency and indignity. This septet is used as a framework to clarify the problems of the emergency food system. At the core is the belief that hunger should not exist in America and that dealing with it through ad hoc private sector schemes, however well-meaning, is simply not good enough. But through this comes the author's sometimes disorienting perception that those who work with emergency food are as much confused as the rest of us. And that, in the main, these people are good people. Janet Poppendieck's great strength is to place the individual in a moral dilemma while at the same time pushing us into a community, a society, wherein the solution lies: "a powerful movement for justice and equality." And she allows us to reflect upon what many might have thought but never said: that "emergency food actually contributes to the problem it tries to solve." Readable and sympathetic, `Sweet charity' allows us all the freedom to reflect on society, justice, and the politics of hunger. This book offers much for thinkers, carers and activists alike.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Balanced Diet, Food for Thought. May 8, 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

This book treats the emergency food system with fairness and offeres a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of the national shift toward in-kind food relief. The author does a wonderful job of exposing the problems with institutionalizing "emergency" food programs, while governmental agencies weaken the safety net for the poor. In addition to excellent ethnographic work, the author adds a number of nuggets of historical data to build context and meaning. A must read for those hungry for explainations as to why government had abandoned the needy and ignored the structural problems that produce what the author terms "food insecurity."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for anyone who ever gave a can to a food drive. November 16, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

The author truly educated me about a topic I thought I was knowledgeable about. She managed to weave in her personal experiences working in a soup kitchen, her concern for those who are hungry, a profound respect for the other pantry and soup kitchen volunteers and donors with a cutting analysis of the politics and economics of hunger. That's a mightly long sentence that says this is a well-written, full and balanced report on a subject of great national concern. Before you give that jar of spaghetti sauce to the food drive or rush down to ladle beef stew onto the plates of the poor, take five minutes and skim this book. I am convinced that you will decide you must read the entire book and then rethink what you should be doing to help eliminate hunger here in the richest country in the world.