This article is the fifteenth in CPJ’s Ink & Impact series featuring young writers from across the country. In today’s political climate, often marked by cynicism and despair, CPJ’s annual Ink & Impact conference helps Christian young people become messengers of hope. In a world dominated by digital distractions, Ink & Impact develops writers who can articulate complex political topics in an approachable, nuanced way to inform the public. The views and opinions reflected in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of CPJ.
Just Citizens and the Politics of Food
Why Food Justice is a Civic Responsibility, Not Just a Lifestyle Choice
When I think about food and justice, two realities converge: politics and community. Food gathers us. We share it when we grieve and when we celebrate, and at the Lord’s Table it becomes the visible symbol of grace. Yet for many of my neighbors in Philadelphia, food is not always a given but a question—and a matter of survival.
On a Saturday at Clark Park Farmers Market in West Philadelphia, you can witness public policy unfolding without anyone saying the word. At the market tables, shoppers paying with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits earn Food Bucks with their purchase, coupons that stretch their dollars so they can buy fresh fruit and vegetables. It is a convivial scene, and it is also an anomaly: across the city, fresh food is often farther away than the corner store.
Like the Israelites laboring on Pharaoh’s store cities (Exodus 1:11), who had no claim to the grain stored inside, many of our neighbors built, stocked, and staffed a food system that was never designed to feed them. I call this a store city economy: one that depends on the labor of people it does not nourish. 10.6 million working adults, many of whom are food system workers, depend on SNAP, and nearly a third of food system workers have low or marginal food security. In comparison, the Israelites manufactured storehouses but had no claim to the grain. Christ, who not only teaches the crowds but feeds them (Matthew 14:13-21), calls us to love our neighbors not just with words, but with tangible provision.
Organizations like The Food Trust have spent decades laboring to redress that reality. Founded in 1992 with a single produce stand at a South Philadelphia public housing development, The Food Trust partnered with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health in 2010 to launch Philly Food Bucks, which gives SNAP shoppers $2 for every $5 they spend. This spring, the shoppers temporarily received $2 in Food Bucks for every $1 spent to meet the increasing need for relief on grocery bills for Philadelphia families. SNAP sales at The Food Trust markets have since grown more than 300%, revenue that flows directly to regional farmers. Food justice is already woven into public institutions. The question is whether the rest of us will treat it that way.
The scale of the need lends urgency to this question. According to the USDA, 13.7% of U.S. households, or 47.9 million people, experienced food insecurity in 2024, the highest level since 2014. In Philadelphia, the child food insecurity rate reached 30.5% in 2023, the highest of any county in Pennsylvania. Hunger is not only a problem of joblessness. Nearly half of food-insecure people, roughly 25 million, earn too much to qualify for federal nutrition assistance and too little to afford a healthy diet. Even families who qualify still have to navigate the thicket of applications, interviews, and recertification paperwork, often while working shifts or parenting alone. I call this administrative hunger: produced not by scarcity but by the design of the systems meant to relieve it, a spiritual failure as much as a bureaucratic one.
Behind every number is a person made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). A creation designed for abundance (Psalm 145:16) should not produce a city where nearly one in three children are unsure where their next meal will come from. Those closest to this system know it best, and a just food policy treats their experience as evidence, not anecdote.
Food justice is public justice, and that makes it a civic responsibility. The Center for Public Justice describes public justice as having two interdependent parts: much of what contributes to human flourishing is not government’s task, and much of it is, because government is authorized by God to promote the common good. Food access sits exactly where those responsibilities meet. The biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption shows how we arrived here and where we might go.
A Vision of Shared Provision
From the beginning, food is a gift before it is a commodity (Genesis 1:29). When Israel settled, God did not leave the hungry to the benevolence of landowners. The gleaning laws required farmers to leave the edges of their fields and the fallen grain for the poor and the sojourner (Leviticus 19:9-10). If ancient Israel had a zoning code, it zoned for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. Ruth, an immigrant, and Naomi, a widow, survived because of it, and from Ruth’s gleaning came the line of David. Provision for the vulnerable was not charity left to whim. It was law, inscribed into the field itself.
I call this civic gleaning — writing provision for the vulnerable into the ordinary rules of public life, so that access does not depend on anyone’s generosity. A just food system is one where families can reach affordable, nutritious food near where they live, where workers earn wages that sustain life, and where land and labor are stewarded for the flourishing of the whole community.
How Policy Fractures Food Access
The problem has never been a shortage of food. It is who gets access to land and capital, and who gets to pass them down. Zoning often makes it hard to build grocery stores in lower-income neighborhoods while fast-food chains proliferate. Philadelphia learned this in 2001, when a Food Trust report found that the city’s lower-income neighborhoods had the fewest supermarkets and the highest rates of diet-related death.
Even in places where food is close, it is not always affordable, and public support is eroding. Farmers Market Nutrition Program food bucks for families in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) at The Food Trust’s markets fell to $30 per season in 2025, down from $50. No farmer chose that, and no mother did either. Since the July 2025 federal budget law, roughly 98,000 Pennsylvanians have lost SNAP benefits. This month, states began covering 75% of SNAP administrative costs, up from 50%, and beginning in October 2027, they will pay a share of benefits that could cost Pennsylvania roughly $400 million.
We are also losing the ability to see the problem at all. In September 2025, the USDA announced it would end its annual Household Food Security report, the nation’s primary measure of hunger. The 2024 edition was its last. A government that ceases to measure hunger has not ended it. It has only made it harder for citizens to hold anyone accountable.
Yet public conversation still relegates hunger to charity. The math does not allow it. SNAP provides nine meals for every one distributed by Feeding America’s food banks. When food justice is privatized, responsibility is offloaded onto volunteers, pantries, and struggling households, offering the veneer of compassion without accountability.
Civic Responsibility and Institutional Renewal
Black churches and faith leaders have long understood that food is a matter of freedom, and that redemption is embodied in institutions. When Fannie Lou Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Mississippi in 1969, she treated land and food as instruments of civic power, observing that a family with a pig in the backyard and a garden could feed itself, and that “nobody can push you around” when you have the resources you need to provide. Public justice calls all citizens to join God’s restorative work in that spirit, through both government and civil society.
In Pennsylvania, the state never ran a grocery store; it lowered the risk so businesses and lenders could do their part. That is civic gleaning in modern form. Some neighbors in the community are participating in civic gleaning by transforming local corner stores. The Community Grocer, opening this fall on South 60th Street, will keep the footprint of a typical corner store but stock it with fresh ingredients and accept SNAP.
But for all the incredible work that neighbors and business owners are able to do, city legislation still plays a crucial role. Budgets are moral documents. They reveal whom a society believes is worth investing in. Having supported City Council budget hearings in Philadelphia, I have seen how a single line item decides whose needs are safeguarded and whose are deferred.
At City Council’s request, The Food Trust, along with other partners, convened a task force to identify barriers to opening supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods. That work, championed by then-State Representative Dwight Evans, produced the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative: a $30 million state investment that supported 88 projects and roughly 5,000 jobs.
Today, the City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force has recommended a permanent Office of Food and Nutrition Security, and Council President Kenyatta Johnson has committed to introducing legislation this fall. Enduring food access needs a structure that outlasts any single budget cycle.
Alongside the City Council, civil society has its own distinct vocation, and houses of worship serve as sanctuaries of spiritual refuge. Through my work with The Food Trust, I mapped faith communities near three of its markets and identified eight congregations within a ten-minute walk. One building near Clark Park, the Calvary Center for Culture and Community, houses Methodist, Jewish, Pentecostal, and Mennonite congregations under a single roof. Each is a potential partner: a place to promote Food Bucks, host SNAP enrollment help, or organize members to testify when the budget is written.
Nearly all Headhouse Farmers Market shoppers surveyed this spring said the market made them feel more welcome or engaged in their neighborhood. That belonging also raises a harder question: who are these markets for? In neighborhoods where rising rents and new development have changed who can afford to live there, a market can become a gathering place for newer, wealthier neighbors while the families it was built for feel less at home. Public justice asks whom the table is set for, and who has yet to be invited.
So what does just citizenship ask of us now? Show up when budgets are written, and read them as the moral documents they are. Ask for funding that protects healthy food financing, SNAP outreach, and nutrition checks for WIC families and seniors. Invite congregations to become partners in access, not only providers of emergency relief. And insist that hunger remain measured, because we cannot fix what we refuse to count.
Food justice is about how a society organizes access to what life requires: providence, provision, and steadfast love that nourishes body, mind, and spirit. When we pray “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11), we pray in the plural. Daily bread should never depend on luck, location, or goodwill alone, but on a shared commitment to the common good.
Kennedy Elise Perry is a social impact strategist and the founder and president of Kennedy Elise Advocates Consulting LLC, a consulting practice focused on equity-centered policy design and organizational capacity building. She holds a Master of Public Administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government and a Wharton Public Policy Certificate from the Penn Wharton Budget Model. She previously served as a Policy Fellow in the Office of Philadelphia City Council President Kenyatta Johnson and as an Innovation Fellow at The Food Trust, where she mapped faith institutions near Philadelphia farmers’ markets. A South Carolina native, she cherishes discovering new foods, staying in Christ-filled community, reading, running, and crafting.
Graphic by Center for Public Justice
