It has become increasingly difficult to work at small-town food banks because often one knows the client not as a beggar from beneath the bridge, but as a neighbor or colleague.  Food banks today cater increasingly -- and a sociologist’s survey of our town bore this out -- to people who are employed, the class we now call the working poor.

These people earn so little they barely get by.  Catastrophic medical bills or Missoula’s escalating housing costs can chew up their inadequate paychecks so that by the end of the month there is no money left for food.

If we are to really do anything about the shameful matter of hunger in our town, we must address these larger issues.  What at first looked like a little hole to plug now appears to be a bottomless chasm, ever widening.

There is something fundamental buried in all of this: where these people work. Many of them, report the food bank people, work full time for minimum wage and no health insurance at the ring of chain stores that has suburbanized this once unique mountain town.  The big-box retail business has exploded in Missoula, making us a regional market center, part of the cause of our prosperity.  That is, hunger is increasing in our town not in spite of our healthy economy, but because of it.

Hunger in America is no longer a matter of falling through the cracks, of happenstance and misfortune. Hunger has been institutionalized as a part of the economic fabric, including especially the business of selling food.

For those who "fell through the cracks," of course, hunger was never a happenstance matter.  A system in which a few have a lot and the many have little requires that some go without anything to maintain hierarchy and discipline.

Manning goes on to mention supermarket chains  across Latin America, often owned by the same corporations that own U.S., Canadian, and European supermarkets, which are shutting out small farms destroying the local markets that used to sell the farmers’ products.

(Two of my big hopes for the not-yet-existent organization People Who Give a Damn are to argue economic issues from the perspective of fairness, including the unfair advantages bestowed on large corporations that have nothing to do with skill or service or quality or any legitimate competitive edge, and to redirect our donated social-welfare resources to radical service organizations where a bag of groceries comes with a critique of the economic system that's got you going to a food pantry and a plan of action to change it.)