In my community in East Austin, people are starving. There are single mothers with eight kids, who don’t make enough income each week to buy groceries. There are young adults sending all their money back home for their parents or siblings to survive; an act which comes at great cost to their own health. We live side by side with the homeless and the mass incarcerated. Our neighbors are men and women who have been denied jobs or who are being paid far less than they deserve (either because they are undocumented or don’t understand English well) and the result is always the same: not enough money and not enough food.
I remember hearing about “these people” growing up and, in my predominantly white and middle-class circles, I was taught that they brought these kinds of situations upon themselves; that the only cause for poverty and starvation was laziness and a lack of personal motivation to do something better with one’s life. If you couldn’t feed yourself, then there was something wrong with you. But the more I read about God’s discussions of food and justice throughout Scripture, the more I’m learning that this sort of thinking about the hungry is just not true.
Food Justice
In the Old Testament, the word mishpat, meaning “justice,” appears over two hundred times. Its most basic meaning is to treat people fairly, honestly and equitably. For example, Leviticus 24:22 warns Israel to “have the same mishpat [rule of law] for the foreigner as the native.” But, as Pastor Tim Keller argues in Generous Justice, mishpat also means “to give people their rights” (4). In both Deuteronomy 18 and Proverbs 31, we see God commanding his people to defend the rights of the poor and the needy, which among other things includes the right to eat.
We must care about the vulnerable’s right to eat because God does. Deuteronomy 10:17-18 states, “The Lord your God…defends the cause [mishpat] of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the immigrant, giving him food and clothing.” Anyone can go hungry, but verses like this also highlight the fact that the lower classes, and the foreigner in particular, are disproportionately vulnerable to this sort of injustice. Injustice is not equally distributed. Our current political debates focus so much on how much refugees and the undocumented are draining our system and taking our resources, when instead we should be concerned about how to shelter and feed them.
Another example of food justice in the Old Testament is found in the Mosaic Law, which required farmers not to harvest their field twice, so that the poor, the widows and the sojourner could have access to food. We see this explicitly mapped out in the Book of Ruth. Ruth, a foreigner, along with other vulnerable women still had to harvest the food themselves, but it was theirs as a right, as a due. God cared so much for the justice of the hungry that he didn’t want them to ever have to beg for food. Can you imagine if we thought about the hungry like this today?
A Growing Food Crisis
The issue of one’s right to food is a major problem in poor communities today in large part because of our lack of grocery stores. In my entire district, there is only one grocery story, and it is in the singular, wealthy neighborhood of East Austin. The rest of us are expected to “shop” at convenience stores and the Dollar General. So, what are we eating? Pre-packaged foods that are high in sodium and high in sugar. And this problem then creates a health crisis.
Even worse, most poor people don’t have health insurance, or they have Medicaid, but the doctors in our area offer poor medical assistance fueled by problems of racial profiling and discrimination. I once had a doctor refuse to treat my son for bronchitis. He point blank told me that my son probably became sick because I fed him junk food and that he wouldn’t treat my son until I changed his diet first. I was horrified. Not only had I been the victim of mistaken identity (the doctor thought I was Latina), but my child was not given his right to good health. And this sort of experience feels mild compared to what many of our friends and neighbors experience. This is an injustice at a systemic level.
My husband and I are currently working on a health ministry in our church, which includes health education, resources, and access to good food (e.g., connections to the Central Texas Food Bank and setting up appointments with WIC). We are trying our best to connect people with organizations that can help during food shortages. Our church also allocates funds to buy groceries for the homeless and single mothers so that they can feed their children. When our church can’t buy groceries for the vulnerable, our own members step up and offer what they can. We also open our home to eat with the people of our community. We regularly have people over for dinner. These are just some of the ways we are trying to care for the vulnerable in our city.
Prayer & Food Activism
But we also recognize that these steps alone are not enough. The greater systemic reality is that things like healthy grocery stores are not profitable in poor communities. My husband and I have been talking to representatives to incentivize grocery stores here. We need tax break incentives to bring these companies to our area. Please pray for us as we try to bring this larger change to East Austin.
If I’ve communicated anything in this post, it is this: justice for all means food for all. To love our neighbor means to care for their right to eat. What can you do today to care for the hungry in your community?
God cared so much for the justice of the hungry that he didn’t want them to ever have to beg for food. Can you imagine if we thought about the hungry like this today? Click To Tweet
