The Right to Choose Your Own Food
How Pantries, Food Banks + Politicians Can Do Better for Nevadans.
By Kim Foster
I was making a Confit Byaldi. Better known as the ratatouille Remy makes in the movie Ratatouille.
I made a piperade, a Basque-style stew of onions, green peppers, tomatoes, and garlic. The stew was flecked with piment d’Espelette, a fruity, briny, low-heat chili pepper that tasted subtle and round in this sauce. I sautéed it all in beef tallow. I sliced the zucchini into micro slices. I trained myself to cut them all by hand, without a mandolin, because I was an absolute blood-gushing lunatic with that contraption.
I arranged the slices of zucchini and eggplant so that they formed tight circles inside my paella pan. Purple. Red. Light and dark green. And yellow. With slices of the Romas in there, too. I doused it all with good olive oil, salt and pepper, handfuls of torn herbs, and garlic confit. A hit or three of black vinegar gave it some tang. Then it was into the oven for a couple hours on low.
And because it was during the pandemic and because I was running a small community fridge and pantry on my front lawn, I made three: one for the family, a small one without beef tallow for my vegan daughter, Lucy, and another for the pantry fridge. For this last ratatouille, I cut the dish into portions and arranged them in microwavable containers, with a label naming the dish and its ingredients. I put them in the community fridge for anyone looking for an immediate dish to eat.
All three versions were gone in under an hour. COVID was raging then, the federal government was in denial about the disease, checks still hadn’t gone out, and people here in our Vegas community, like in communities all over the world, were exhausted, stressed out, worried about food and where and how they would access it. Many were actually, literally, hungry. Many came, and instead of being paycheck-to-paycheck were, what I called, breakfast-to-lunch.
It took running a free pantry to help me understand that millions of people in our country do not get to do this very simple thing—choose what they eat.
And this is true for many of our fellow Nevadans.
Choosing your own food ought to be a basic right. There are going to be some people reading this thinking: “Who doesn’t choose their own food?”
Many Nevadans rely on pantries and food banks to get them through. Often, those pantries hand people pre-prepared boxes of food to take home. The family with the box is left to figure out how to cook it, often with bare cupboards at home and limited pantry supplies. How do you cook burgers without oil? Or a working stove? Eggs without butter? What if you live in your car? How do you eat vegetables without salt? What if your apartment building is infested with roaches?
And food pantries tend to get a lot of the same food products over and over, like bags of walnuts or raisins or beans. This happened this week with a family in Las Vegas. The mom of two, a relative of the children, took in four more children that had been housed in Child Haven, the shelter for kids in Las Vegas. She asked DFS for groceries to tide them over before EBT could be put in place.
The photo below is what she received:
“What am I going to do with that?” she asked at 4 pm, surrounded by a tiny apartment of hungry kids. How was she supposed to soak and cook that bag of beans for dinner?
The food bank system is designed to do one thing very well—get food to people who need it. The system excels at this. Our food bank, Three Square, supported by Feeding America, is a literal lifesaver for communities across Nevada. They supply pantries, churches, and non-profits with food for those who need it, including backpack programs, after-school kids’ meals, and meal delivery for the elderly. They are quite literally filling in gaps for people who are struggling with hunger.
But these food banks and their subsidiaries were only ever conceived to be stopgaps, temporary setups to keep people fed through disasters and economic downturns. They were never meant to be permanent. The longer they stick around, the more they can be generally engaged in maintaining hunger. They can serve as a kind of enabler for the federal government to not take care of our most vulnerable people.
Food banks are one of the things both Republicans and Democrats can get behind together. Republicans like providing money to corporations that will get their foods to low-income people, bolstering businesses that provide that food and allowing these companies a place to dump their excess product, which is how there can be a surplus of particular ingredients. Democrats love helping poor people. Everyone benefits, except the struggling families who will continue to struggle and depend on handouts.
What we know is that pantries and food banks can do better for Nevadans.
Right now, their job is to feed hungry people. But we can help more people by having our food banks and pantries engaged in raising people out of poverty. Not just feeding them.
Three Square and subsidiary food banks, for instance, around Nevada should be powerful and vocal proponents of programs like universal school meals, which Governor Lombardo vetoed in the last session. The universal school meals program is not a perfect program, but studies show it helps kids get fed, provides a safety net for parents, especially those who can slip out of reach.
I would love to see our food banks and pantries become a powerful lobbying block, committed to tackling the root causes of poverty and not simply trying to get more capital to build more infrastructure to give out more food boxes. Instead, I want anti-hunger folks— myself included—to become anti-poverty activists. In the trenches loudly advocating for living wages and strong social safety nets for every Nevadan.
Even on the ground, pantries and food banks can be so much more.
They can be a hub for folks to get a leg up, sign up for benefits, get interview training, nutrition advocacy, cooking demos, tutoring for school, unemployment support. They can hire people who have been their customers, so they can benefit from their lived experience. They can let those people help create policy and inspire their community by giving people hope that their circumstances can change.
In a better world, a pantry won’t monitor how much you can take, or when you are allowed to visit again, or open only when it’s convenient for the operators and not a variety of work schedules. You won’t need a complex gauntlet of paperwork and identification. Or a car. People won’t yell at you or admonish you for behaving in ways that are indicative of your stressed out, worried, consumed poverty-brain.
It would feel good. No shame. Just support.
Connection.
If we are going to change the system, we will have to decide that we are no longer okay that other Nevadans are down and out. We need to:
1. Hold rich corporations and billionaires accountable and make them pay their fair share.
2. Empower the IRS to keep the rich from using loopholes to get out of paying their taxes
3. Tax doctors differently than factory workers.
4. Accept that the middle and upper classes get all kinds of “welfare” (educational, pension and homeowner subsidies) and welfare for the poor is no different.
5. Invest in the construction of affordable housing and incentivize builders to do it.
6. Increase food stamps for folks above, but close to the poverty line.
7. Encourage collective bargaining and unions.
8. Increase rental assistance programs
9. Create communities with low, middle and upper income folks in master plan communities, so that everyone can have good amenities.
10. Give women full decision-making about their reproduction.
11. Encourage supported housing inside our communities for people struggling with addiction, mental illness and disabilities.
I expect anti-hunger advocates and the people in the food bank system to lead the charge for these policies for Nevadans. People are struggling because we allow it. We all play a part. And so we all must fix it.
The answer isn’t to donate more food to pantries.
It’s to finally make pantries and food banks obsolete.
Kim Foster and her book, The Meth Lunches: Fear + Longing in an American City, will be representing Nevada as its adult Great Reads from Great Places selection at the 2024 National Book Festival in Washington, DC. Kim will also be participating the 2024 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl on Saturday, October 12, 2024, in Reno as well as in other northern Nevada events that promote food and healthy communities leading up to this year’s Literary Crawl.
Kim Foster is a James Beard Award-winning food writer. Her book, The Meth Lunches: Fear + Longing in an American City with St. Martin’s Press is out now. You can read more of her work at her weekly newsletter KimFoster.Substack.com and on Instagram @KimintheWest. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with her husband, David, their four kids, and many animals.
All photos courtesy of Kim Foster.