There is No One Face of Hunger Photographs by David Bacon Addison Street Windows 2018 Addison Street in Berkeley, CA, between Shattuck and Milvia
November 1 - December 15 This gallery is in windows on the sidewalk, so the photographs can be seen 24 hours a day Hunger is faced by people in every neighborhood in our community, every day -- young and old, working and unemployed. Today 16% of Californians struggle with how they'll afford their next meal. Meanwhile Congress debates and passes bills that make massive cuts in nutrition programs. These photographs document a social fact that many would rather not see -- that people in this richest of all countries go hungry. But these photographs also document what we as a community can do to care for each other and ensure that everyone can eat, while we struggle for a society and world in which no one will go hungry. This show is a cooperative project between documentary photographer David Bacon and the Alameda County Community Food Bank and shown with the support of the Civic Arts Program of the City of Berkeley, Greg Morozumi, curator. Cornerstone Baptist Church, Oakland Families line up on the sidewalk outside a storefront where church members bag food, and then distribute the bags. Davis Street Family Resource Center, San Leandro As she reaches out her hand to that of an older man who volunteers every week bagging food, a woman shows that often getting food means more than just not going hungry. Across lines of race and age, providing and receiving food shows we care for each other. Mary Katherine, Oakland Mary Katherine lives with her son in a single room occupancy hotel in downtown Oakland. The room where she lives has no kitchen or refrigerator to store food, and often has to choose between buying food and buying medicine. She depends for meals on St. Mary's Center. Project Help, Oakland In this East Oakland neighborhood, the line for food stretches around the edge of the parking lot of a laundromat, and on down the block. Good Samaritan, Oakland Chinese women and children come from this neighborhood of East Oakland where people need food. More than 60% of the people getting food from local food distributions in the county are children and seniors. Hope for the Heart, Hayward While their parents line up for food, the children from immigrant Mexican families watch a volunteer in a clown costume try to entertain them. Davis Street Family Resource Center, San Leandro Beverly Cherkoff in front of the van where she lives. She makes meals in her van from the food she gets in the distribution, and serves it to other hungry people in the area where she parks it. Columbian Gardens, Oakland Mexican immigrants in Oakland and the East Bay make up a big percentage of families who don't have enough food. Many single mothers especially work fulltime and earn so little that they need food programs. Nnekia, Oakland Nnekia was an on-call worker for several years at the NUMMI auto assembly plant in Fremont. When it closed, even though she was working another job as well, she had to move in with her mother. Both depend on the Cornerstone Baptist Church food distribution. Hope for the Heart, Hayward So many people need food in this working class neighborhood that they line up the night before the food distribution and sleep on the sidewalk. A young woman wakes up after spending the night in line. _____________ HUNGER BY THE NUMBERS Some 16% of all families are food insecure -- they don't have the money to buy enough food at some point duirng the year. That amounts to 49 million people, including over 16 million children, almost a quarter of all the children in the United States. About a third of those families simply didn't get enough food to eat - these families went hungry. That includes 12 million adults, and 5 million kids. Hunger isn't really spread evenly, as is obvious when you think about it. More in Oakland. Less in Lafayette. Over a quarter of all Black and Latino households are food insecure - compared to 16% in general. And over 13% of all familes made up of single moms and their children are not just food insecure, but outright hungry. Some 42.2% of food insecure households hav incomes below the official poverty line-$21,834 for a family of four. So over half of all hungry families actually have incomes OVER the poverty line. Millions of families not officially "in poverty" still don't have enough money to buy the food they need. Breadwinners in hundreds of thousands of California families have lost their jobs. Families that formerly had no trouble feeding themselves, and even went out to eat in restaurants, can't put enough food on the table at home at some point to keep everyone from getting up hungry. So people go to food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens to try to make up for what they can no longer buy. Across the country, almost five million people went to food pantries last year. About 625,000 ate in soup kitchens. Alameda County, with a population of 1.5 million, has probably a quarter of a million food insecure people. Contra Costa 160,000. Oakland 64,000. Berkeley and Richmond 16,000 each. Hayward over 22,000 and Alameda over 11,000. There are over 20,000 hungry children in Oakland alone. Do the math for your own neighborhood or city. These are the numbers. The real question is, in your neighborhood? On your street? In the house down your block, or next door? Or could we be talking about you? Coming in 2013 from Beacon Press: The Right to Stay Home: Ending Forced Migration and the Criminalization of Immigrants See also Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press, 2008) Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008 http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002 See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575 See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the U.S./Mexico Border (University of California, 2004) http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html Entrevista de David Bacon con activistas de #yosoy132 en UNAM Interview of David Bacon by activists of #yosoy132 at UNAM (in Spanish) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyF6AJQa9po&feature=relmfu Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org -- __________________________________ David Bacon, Photographs and Stories http://dbacon.igc.org __________________________________ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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