> In her 1998 book Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement, sociologist Janet Poppendieck controversially argued that, rather than seriously a

> In her 1998 book Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement, sociologist Janet Poppendieck controversially argued that, rather than seriously addressing the problem of hunger, food shelves and other nodes of the charity-based “emergency food system” unintentionally served to perpetuate it in their feeble attempts to mend the holes in the social safety net wrought by Reagan-era bootstrapping and Clinton-era welfare reform. Rather than focus more structurally on workers’ rights and economic justice issues, organizations and institutions coalescing around fighting hunger concerned themselves with addressing immediate needs in ways that did not rock the boat politically. If bad building and furniture regulations were causing home fires, we would of course want to focus on improving those. But we would still need fire fighters.