Claire Strom, Rollins College - History of Hunger

How has our society’s view of hunger and response to it changed over time?

Claire Strom, professor of history at Rollins College, explores the history.

Faculty Bio:

An agricultural historian, Claire Strom is a history professor and the Rapetti-Trunzo Chair of History at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Her areas of specialization include: Agricultural history; the American South; and the progressive era.

She is co-author of the 2024 book Empty Plates: A History of Hunger Relief covering a worldwide review of hunger relief over the centuries until the 1960s, then delving deeper into U.S. domestic hunger relief and the national food bank movement through to present day.

Strom earned her PhD from Iowa State University. For more than a decade, she served as editor of the Journal of Agricultural History.

Her Professional Organizations include:

Southern Association of Women’s Historians

Southern Historical Association

Agricultural History Society

Among her Awards and Honors: The Gladys Baker Lifetime Achievement Award, Agricultural History Society, 2021.

Transcript:

A deep dive into the history of hunger reveals that the lack of adequate food is ubiquitous in human history. No society has existed without hungry people. Methods of addressing hunger are equally old and have varied greatly over time.
In England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, relief became a governmental responsibility with little sympathy for the able-bodied poor. This notion migrated from England to Colonial America, where some communities paid families to take in paupers, even auctioning them off to the lowest bidder. The Enlightenment and social Darwinism of the 18th and 19th centuries heightened beliefs that poverty was a moral failing, leading to the incarceration of many paupers in workhouses.
The intense poverty and hunger of the Great Depression muted condemnation of the poor and increased governmental social programs. The years after World War II continued this expansion of governments’ involvement in their citizens’ welfare, with the development of the idea of universal human rights, in which food figured significantly. In the US, this culminated in reforms of the Great Society, including the Food Stamp Act of 1964.
In 1967 businessman John Van Hengel opened the first food bank, relying on surplus food from fields and packing sheds. Food banks spread throughout North America and the world in the subsequent decades. And, by the 1980s, with the retreat of government from social justice, food banks and their corporate donors became increasingly important in combating hunger.
Second Harvest, renamed Feeding America, has surveyed hunger in the United States since 1993, offering longitudinal data. The agency’s studies show that the problem of hunger is worsening, not improving. Such findings leave many food bank employees conflicted, stating that they recognize the need to feed the hungry but hope that government and corporate interests would devote more attention and resources to ending poverty itself.

[Rollins] - Strom Receives Lifetime Achievement Award from the Agricultural History Society