Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, spotlights domestic poverty and hunger in this book that has sharp words for politicians, charities and religious denominations. The author reveals how consistently the federal government has ignored the fact that 35.5 million Americans, including 12.6 million children, don’t have enough to eat. Although local governments cared for hungry and poverty-stricken citizens in the pre-Depression years, contemporary politicos in Washington have alternately denied that hunger is a problem, then admitted its existence, then tried to eradicate it with programs that rarely last. Whether he is reasoning why the word hunger is better and more to-the-point than the government’s term food insecure, pillorying hunger surveys that don’t count the homeless or demonstrating how even well-meaning social services contribute to the problem, Berg is a passionate and articulate advocate. This book provides a range of practical solutions, but gets bogged down by an overwhelming amount of hard data and statistics, which may deter some readers from wanting to take a good-sized bite of it.

While the current economic crash has inspired numerous Jim Cramer Mad Money freak-outs and fears of another Depression, at least we haven’t reached the point where soup kitchens and apple sellers line the streets. But according to Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, the U.S. is experiencing a serious hunger problem. In his new book All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, the former Clinton administration official takes our luxury-addled culture to task, arguing that despite past political indifference and gridlock, America can solve the hunger situation that affects millions.

How can a country as rich as ours allow so many to starve? It’s a somber question that sets the stage for Berg’s book, but his answer is far from bleeding heart bromide. He outlines in detail how the long-standing cultural belief in self-reliance and past political developments led to our country’s hunger-relief policies, which he calls a “functioning, albeit imperfect, safety net” riddled with holes. The path leads from Depression- and Great Society-era programs to welfare reform and some of the more parodied conservative “responses” to the problem (classifying ketchup as a vegetable, using the term “very low food security” to describe the hungry in official documents).  While Berg wears his biases on his sleeve, he also points out the failings of liberal politicians (patronizing towards the poor, discounting personal responsibility), the media’s scattershot coverage and charitable organizations too inefficient and small to solve the problem. He notes that centralized distribution of resources via the food stamp program is more efficient than the parallel system of charitable distribution, which involves more layers of transportation and some government funding. And he clearly links hunger to poverty, advocating a more comprehensive response that includes job development and higher wages.

Berg can be a bit of a policy wonk, but his well-considered proposals and optimism are refreshing. America just elected a president with more than passing familiarity with food stamps and poor communities. Here’s hoping he can address the issue with Berg’s balance of rationality and passion. By Patrick Sisson

YES WE CAN END HUNGER — In his new book, activist Joel Berg says everyone can have enough to eat.

If there’s anyone in America who knows more about the politics of hunger than Joel Berg, they’re well hidden. First as a top staffer in the Agriculture Department under Bill Clinton, and currently as director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, Berg has been a tireless advocate for ensuring that all people have enough to eat.

After years of lecturing mostly to an audience of perplexed city officials, Berg has now set down his knowledge in book form with “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?” Though dense with useful statistics, Berg’s trademark good-natured snarkiness makes this an eminently readable book that lays out the dimensions of the growing hunger epidemic, and what can be done about it.

The population of Americans that goes short of adequate food is divided into two categories, explains Berg. About 11 million people, as of 2006, officially suffered from “hunger” at some point during the year, defined as having at least one stretch where they didn’t have enough to eat. The “food insecure,” numbering more than 35 million, may have been free of outright hunger pangs, but reported skimping on portions, substituting cheaper but less nutritious options, or otherwise showing signs of uncertainty about where their next meal was coming from. (To make matters still more confusing, the Bush Administration dropped the word “hunger” from the USDA’s vocabulary, substituting “very low food security.”) And the actual numbers are likely even higher, since the USDA’s hunger surveys omit, among others, homeless people.

While Berg finds these numbers unacceptable, he notes that two-thirds of the nation’s poor avoid food insecurity thanks to the federal food-stamp program, plus the nation’s network of soup kitchens and food pantries. But though Berg may be director of a coalition of emergency food providers, he seems like he’d be happy enough to see them put out of business by an expansion of federal programs. “Trying to end hunger with food drives,” he concludes, “is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon.”

Yet 45 percent of the nation’s hungry get no federal food aid, in most cases either because they are ineligible or because they believe they are. Berg rails against the “Kafkaesque nightmare” of a food stamp system that, in New York, allows someone to be denied benefits for, among other things, owning more than one funeral plot. Getting USDA farm subsidies, he notes, generally requires less paperwork than getting USDA food stamps. Yet apparently no one has suggested subjecting farmers to “finger imaging,” as food stamp applicants are to root out fraud.

“All You Can Eat” also delves into the history of hunger programs, from the first establishment of a Food Stamp Program under FDR in 1938, to campaigns of the 1960s such as the Poor People’s March that Martin Luther King, Jr. was helping organize at the time of his death to, crucially, the 1968 CBS documentary “Hunger in America,” which eventually led to President Nixon establishing the modern food stamp and WIC (Women, Infants and Children) nutrition programs. The book tackles broader issues of poverty as well, assessing the results of welfare reform (not so hot, though Berg agrees with his old boss that on balance it was worthwhile to get more poor people into the workforce), and surveying New York’s role as the “shrinking middle-class capital of America.” Oil magnate David Koch, for example, the city’s richest resident, gets called out for having a net worth that’s five times the combined income of all 1.7 million New Yorkers below the official poverty line.

All this is a problem, Berg argues, not just for the poor themselves, but for the nation as a whole. “Poverty in America hurts everyone,” he asserts, presenting data showing that hunger erodes economic productivity and leads to poor health and mental illness, with resulting costs for the greater society. One study he cites estimated that the average U.S. citizen’s annual “hunger bill” is about $300.

Berg is unparalleled when it comes to marshalling statistics, but “All You Can Eat” is notably skimpy on first-hand reports of hunger. While there’s a chapter on Berg’s participation in a campaign to get elected officials and advocates to live on a food stamp budget – “The week of the experiment, I felt like Godzilla. I was ready to eat chunks of concrete,” he says – there’s precious little from those who are actually hungry day in and day out. The best firsthand quote might be from Daily News reporter Heidi Evans, who after her own attempts at living on a minimum-wage income concluded, “It is impossible to live on $206 a week, or $892 a month, if you like living indoors.”

Following the book’s first part, “The Problem,” comes part two, “The Solution,” which lays out a panoply of policy ideas to end hunger and at least put a dent in poverty as well: a “nutrition safety net” to eliminate hunger, which Berg estimates could be accomplished for one-quarter the ongoing cost of the Iraq War; free school breakfasts and lunches to all, including in summer; equipping food pantries to provide social services to their customers (because that’s where the need is; Berg cites Willie Sutton’s explanation that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is”); and a higher minimum wage and better access to education to ensure that more people can feed themselves without government help. These 351 pages – including appendices, notes and an index – certainly don’t lack for ambition. Any book that includes a section called “Here It Is: The Plan to End Domestic Hunger” deserves points for chutzpah.

Berg has a quandary here, though. As he says at the book’s outset: “Hunger is a no-brainer. … Everyone is against hunger in America. Actually, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in America who says they’re ‘for’ hunger.” If so, though, how come it’s so persistent, even after close to a century of hunger-fighting campaigns?

There’s no real answer to be found here, save for swipes at “politics” and certain politicians, not to mention folks like famed chef and “slow food” advocate Alice Waters, who earns Berg’s wrath for suggesting that if people can’t afford organic meals, they forgo that “third pair of Nike shoes.” Larger questions go unanswered: Is it really in the self-interest of large employers to ensure food benefits to those who they’re simultaneously trying to lure into low-paying jobs? If a food safety net was provided to all those living in or near poverty, what would be the effect of the “benefit cliff” that families would hit once they earned enough income to no longer be eligible? And, perhaps most important, even if Americans deplore hunger, do they have ideological objections to providing free food to everyone in need? For someone who was privy to the inner workings of a presidential administration’s hunger policies for eight years, Berg seems curiously unable to provide analysis about why his solutions aren’t being implemented.

Though maybe, at this particular political moment, we don’t need analysis so much as a sales pitch. Berg begins his solutions section by declaring: “A very good president put the U.S. on a trajectory to the moon. A truly great president would end hunger in America.” While “All You Can Eat” went to press before the results of the presidential election were recorded, it’s no secret whose potential he was invoking when he wrote that. By Neil deMause

Confronting Hunger in the Land of Plenty: Joel Berg’s All You Can Eat — When it comes to the matter of hunger in America, writes Joel Berg, executive director of New York City Coalition Against Hunger, “only government has the size, scope, and resources — and yes, the legitimacy — to take the lead in actually solving the problem.”

Mr. Berg says hunger is “America’s dirty little secret,” and gives statistics to show that the number of Americans without enough food is growing: There are now 35.5 million people who don’t have enough to eat, an increase of more than four million from 1999.

Behind that increase, he says is the shrinking of the middle class, inadequate news-media coverage, and a reduction in welfare benefits.

He also examines the numerous ways hunger manifests itself. In one chapter, entitled “Are Americans Hungry — or Fat?,” he writes that malnutrition and obesity can exist in the same household, because balanced, nutritious meals are more expensive and less available to poor people than cheaper processed or fast food.

Mr. Berg also offers solutions to the problem. In the chapter “Here It Is: The Plan to End Domestic Hunger,” he calls for several policy changes, including reinventing the federal nutrition “safety net” by combining disparate programs into one efficient entity. He demonstrates how such a move would be relatively cheap. He also calls for universal, in-classroom school breakfasts for children, a reward program for states that do the best job in reducing hunger rates, and increased aid from businesses. by Cassie J. Moore

JUST DO IT — More than 36 million Americans are hungry. Joel Berg answers the big question —why? — in his new book, All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? The thought-provoking investigation delves into the political and economic impact of food insecurity, including what causes it and how we can realistically eradicate it.

Berg, a former Clinton administration official and executive director of New York’s Coalition Against Hunger, is passionate about what he sees as government failure on behalf of millions of Americans who may not know where their next meal’s coming from, and for communities who rely on charitable agencies to shoulder the responsibility. “If the Ben Franklin Bridge fell down,” Berg says, “you wouldn’t expect a bake sale to fix it.” The same rule applies to food, he says, especially as food pantries and soup kitchens are forced to turn people away for lack of resources.

Fortunately, Berg is adept at balancing facts with reflection, and humor with the seriousness of such a widespread concern among both the poor and middle classes in cities, small towns and rural communities. “People expect hunger books to be maudlin,” admits Berg, from his office near Battery Park. Instead the book is more of a cross between Super Size Me and Nickel and Dimed in the way he honestly confronts social malfunction.

“Politics have changed considerably since I started writing the book,” says Berg, who credits President Barack Obama’s campaign with shedding light on the serious, often ignored problem of hunger. “He’s the first president in history to grow up in a family who received food stamp benefits.” Berg, who’ll be speaking at Penn, believes this administration is aware of the dire consequences of choosing between food, medicine and shelter, making a case that hunger is a political and economic problem, not a personal one. By Natalie Hope McDonald

According to activist Joel Berg, ten percent of US households, or 35.5 million people, were “food insecure” — that’s Bush-speak for hungry — in 2006. As the Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and a short-term Department of Agriculture bigwig under Bill Clinton, Berg understands the positive role government can play in ameliorating poverty. His excellent, if statistic-heavy, analysis of 50 years of domestic food policies, All You Can Eat, slams the demonization of the poor as malingerers and lambastes the racism and sexism that underscore this media-reinforced stereotype.

Berg is critical of food stamp requirements that make applicants feel like criminals, and he’s outraged that food banks and soup kitchens have been expected to pick up the slack for federal inaction. “Trying to end hunger with food drives is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon,” he quips.

Instead of relying on private philanthropy to stem need, Berg posits government shifts to help America’s poor. “For a community to have good nutrition, three things need to happen,” he writes. “Food must be affordable; food must be available; and individuals and families must have enough education to know how to eat better.”

He recommends serving breakfast and lunch to every child in every public school, regardless of income; streamlining the food stamp application process and ending the fingerprinting of applicants; upping eligibility for benefits to include those living at 185 percent of federal poverty guidelines, or $32,500 for a household of three; and urges the business community to pay living wages to employees so that full-time workers are not impoverished. He further supports consolidating state, local and federal antipoverty programs to avoid overlap and minimize bureaucracy.

“We can end food insecurity for the cost of what the government spends on a year of agribusiness subsidies, three months of war in Iraq, or six percent of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts,” Berg concludes. The pricetag, $24 billion, is hefty, but national security demands nothing less. By Eleanor J. Bader

How Hungry is America? VERY… — Prospect Heights resident Joel Berg, the executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and author of the recently released All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?, got his start as an activist in 1978 at the age of 14. “I wrote an article on student drug use for the Spring Valley High School newspaper and the administration tried to censor it,” he recounts. “They said I was being sensationalist.”

Berg refused to be silenced, contacting the local newspaper, The Rockland County Journal, which ran a front page story entitled “School Censors Student Article.” Within days, the issue was a local controversy and Berg was catapulted into prominence.

Photo of Joel Berg courtesy of Seven Stories Press.By the time he was 18 he was actively involved in Democratic politics, running for his town’s school board and winning 40 percent of the vote. At 21, fresh out of Columbia University, he waged a losing campaign for New York State Senate against an 18-year-incumbent, Rockefeller Republican Gene Levy. Berg worked on the campaign staffs of Bruce Babbitt, Gary Hart, and Alaska Congressional candidate Peter Gruenstein before becoming Kansas Press Secretary for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential race. Under Clinton, Berg served in several appointments within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including a post in the Communications Office.

His eight years at the USDA brought him in contact with America’s poorest—and hungriest—residents. The experience reinforced his belief that government is responsible for feeding, sheltering, and educating those within its borders.

“The food issue has the potential to unite Right and Left,” Berg says. “Even very conservative people agree that it is unacceptable to have hunger in America.”

Yet we do. In his book, Berg points out that 35.5 million U.S. residents—including more than 12 million school-aged children—live in households that can’t afford enough food. Twenty-five million of these rely on pantries and soup kitchens to survive. Statistics for New York City are equally shocking: one in six adults and one in five kids lack an adequate supply of produce, protein, and grain. Emergency food programs regularly help 1.3 million residents of the five boroughs.

Berg shakes his head at the injustice: the richest country in the world having such rampant want. “There are 400 billionaires in the U.S. and millions of millionaires. No society in history has had this much inequality of wealth and survived,” he quips. “We could end hunger with an additional $24 billion per year; which just about equals the cost of three months of war in Iraq, six percent of Bush’s tax cuts, or about one percent of the Wall Street bailout.”

Calling himself a “radical centrist,” Berg argues that a national commitment to ending poverty is both necessary and possible. He challenges elected officials to stop acting as if charities and religious groups can solve the crisis. “Trying to end hunger with food drives is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon,” he writes in All You Can Eat. “Local charities cannot possibly feed 35.5 million people adequately. This belief that charity does it better than government only ensures that hunger will persist in America.”

Berg uses an example from the mid-1800s to illustrate his point. At the time, private water brigades were the main fire prevention in cities and towns throughout the country. Despite their best efforts, the 60 gallons a minute hauled by workers barely made a dent and resulted in wide-scale property losses; in some cases fast-moving flames destroyed entire towns. After a few decades of this, government stepped in and professionalized the system, replacing buckets with trucks and hiring skilled firefighters to replace volunteers. The upshot is that the damage from today’s conflagrations is rarely as extensive as it was 150 years ago.

What’s more, he notes that the U.S. public health service eradicated cholera, malaria, and yellow fever domestically and programs like Social Security and Medicare provide a measure of economic surety to the disabled and elderly.

And the agenda is relatively straightforward. Berg believes that a new War on Poverty should be undertaken. He suggests measures like: boosting the minimum wage, upping monthly per-person food stamp allocations from $95.64 to an amount that reflects skyrocketing food costs, raising eligibility for entitlement programs, and revising the tax code so that the rich pay their fair share. What’s more, he calls for making low-cost food more readily available and streamlining the food stamp application and recertification processes to make them user-friendly.

As it stands, Berg writes, the food stamp bureaucracy deters new applicants. A recent New York City Coalition Against Hunger study found that only 65 percent of eligible people are receiving benefits, one of the lowest rates in the country. Berg blames cumbersome requirements, including a multiple-page application form and mandatory fingerprinting for applicants that he describes as inefficient and degrading. Worse, he continues, the $800,000 spent for finger-imaging in 2006 unearthed only 31 cases of suspected fraud out of the 1.1 million people enrolled in the program.

“It’s absurd,” he thunders with obvious annoyance.

“We’re at a great historical moment. First, we have a leader in the White House. Second, we have a budding social movement. The question is whether the temporary coalition Obama built can be harnessed into a political force. We know what works and we can get it done if we rid ourselves of the charity mindset. A White House conference on hunger could make food insecurity a top priority and end child hunger by 2015. Plus, if we had universal healthcare and affordable housing we’d fix seventy percent of the poverty in the U.S.”

Berg’s faith in the state is ironclad: “Government can solve the major problems in the country.” For him, hunger is a major problem that could be decisively solved if the federal government showed political will. by Eleanor J. Bader