Food Reform Movements: Welfare, Charity, or Self-Sufficiency? Hunger Relief, Community Food Security, and the Transformations of Social Provision

Whereas Rodale’s Cornucopia Project, the World Health Organization Healthy Cities, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation all helped to unite concerns for sustainable agriculture with health promotion, the social problems of hunger and poverty also needed to be reframed in accordance with the sustainability and healthy living agenda for the movement to gain social legitimacy. We have already seen that the first municipal efforts aimed at reforming the food system in Hartford and Knoxville were related to the framing of the problem of low-income access to food; what was defined as a problem of financial access to a necessity was to be aptly reframed as a problem of physical access to healthy, locally grown foods over the following years, turning a right to the satisfaction of a basic human need into a duty to manage risks for health and the environment. How did this framing come to be?