Del. Danielle Walker introducing legislation to end hunger in W.V.

Del. Walker's House joint resolution will aim to amend the Constitution of West Virginia to ensure food as a human right for everyone in the state

By DOUGLAS J HARDING

“We’re here tonight because we firmly believe that all people should live free from the fear and indignity of food insecurity and hunger, that food is a human right and that it should be protected and legislated as such. Today, we start to build the power necessary to move the West Virginia Legislature to introduce and debate a constitutional amendment for the right to food and open an avenue for the people of West Virginia to vote to enshrine this most basic of human rights into their constitution. The right to food does not mean the right to be fed. It would not infringe upon any other rights, nor would it place undue burdens on existing state resources. It does mean that the state should do everything within its power to ensure West Virginians can access adequate food, have a voice in the future direction of their food systems and creating sustainable food ways for future generations. While the idea is bold and may seem overly aspirational, it represents the cries of hundreds of thousands of people and the ideals enshrined in our state motto: Mountaineers are Always Free. Yet, West Virginians cannot be free until we are all free from hunger and free to collectively participate in building the institutions that do everything in their power to eliminate it. Our state constitution already enshrines many rights: the right to due process, the right to vote, the right to education, the right to speech, the right to private property, the right to religious freedom and the right to bear arms. Our state invests a large amount of resources and has built institutions to protect and guarantee these rights—so why not food? It’s time to guarantee the right to food, to move the conversation about food insecurity and hunger forward from our lived experiences, from the brokenness of our existing systems, and to lead our country by being the first state in the union to demand and enact a pathway for food for all.“

After Joshua Lohnes, food policy research director at WVU Center for Resilient Communities, read the above statement during a meeting last month with 25 W.V. delegates, “You could hear a pen drop,” he said. “No delegates responded—except for the one who’s here with us tonight.”

That delegate was Del. Danielle Walker (D- Monongalia, 51), who also attended Wednesday night’s Voices of Hunger virtual meeting, where she announced that she soon will introduce a resolution aiming to make W.V. the first state in the country to guarantee food to all people as a human right.

Walker said the resolution, which will seek to amend the state constitution and permanently end hunger across the state, currently is signed by Dels. Cody Thompson (D- Randolph, 43), Mike Pushkin (D- Kanawha, 37), Ed Evans (D- McDowell, 26), Ric Griffith (D- Wayne, 19), Lisa Zukoff (D- Marshall, 04), Joey Garcia (D- Marion, 50), Kayla Young (D- Kanawha, 35), Chad Lovejoy (D- Cabell, 17), Larry Rowe (D- Kanawha, 36) and Mick Bates (D - Raleigh, 30).

“This is a House joint resolution, and these are the only names I can get on this piece of paper, but I need all 100 delegates to know this is coming,” Walker said to meeting attendees. “[Thursday], I will proudly walk into bill drafting so we can have a number attached to this resolution. My ask of you is, starting tonight or starting tomorrow—and never ending—contact all 100 delegates. You can use my name and my story. You can share mine. Let them know: Hunger is a trap. Stop measuring our success by the number of pounds delivered, because we are still missing people because of so many disparities. Stop forcing working people to make a choice between paying their bills or feeding their stomachs. Stop forcing unhealthy diets on the people of West Virginia.”

The imminent resolution, in full, currently reads:

“All people have a natural, inherent and unalienable right to food, including the right to acquire, produce, process, prepare, preserve and consume the food of their own choosing by hunting, gathering, foraging, farming, fishing, gardening and saving and exchanging seeds or by barter, trade or purchase from sources of their own choosing, for their nourishment, sustenance, bodily health and well-being, as long as an individual does not commit trespassing, theft, poaching or other abuses of private property rights, public lands or natural resources in the acquisition of food; furthermore, all people have a fundamental right to be free from hunger, malnutrition, starvation and the endangerment of life from the scarcity of or lack of access to nourishing food.”

Throughout the meeting, W.V. residents, including Del. Walker herself, took turns sharing and listening to each other’s experiences with food insecurity and their ideas about the proposed resolution and amendment. Below are some of their stories:

Del. Danielle Walker

Del. Walker began the meeting saying she is very passionate about solving the issue of hunger in W.V., in part, because she knows first-hand what it is like to struggle with feeding one’s own family.

“This is so near and dear to my heart [because] I faced hunger in 2013-2014,” Walker said.

Walker said both her children and her mother were experiencing health issues. She struggled to care for them using only her own source of income, and available governmental assistance only helped some—but not enough.

“Even with the SNAP benefits, the amount we were getting wasn’t enough to make sure we had an adequate amount of food to feed my family,” Walker said. “And due to economic and transportation issues, even though the food pantries were available, I wasn’t available to get to some of them.”

Walker said she was forced to make drastic, life-altering decisions and to sacrifice her own wellbeing to help her family members stay healthy.

“I sacrificed myself, and I survived off sugar-water for three months,” Walker said. “I didn’t complain. My desire was to keep my mother alive by any means necessary and to make sure that my sons had three meals and snacks. I kicked instantaneously into survival mode.”

Listen to Del. Walker tell her own story here:

Angi Kerns

Angi Kerns, of Charleston, said she and her family also have experienced food insecurity in the past.

“About six years ago, I was on every program there was; I was on West Virginia Works (West Virginia's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, Program); I was on food stamps,” Kerns said. “I was also the general manager of a restaurant and working 90 hours-a-week—And I still could not afford to feed my family.”

Kerns said she often had to spend the little time she had off from work going to food pantries for extra assistance. She said she has since dedicated her life to combatting the existing systems which fail to protect people from falling into similar circumstances.

“This is about so much more than feeding people,” Kerns said. “This is acknowledging that every human being is worthy. Period.”

Kerns said she believes the U.S. Constitution guarantees people the right to food because “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are unattainable without it.

“I don’t know if y’all have ever been hungry, but it’s real, real hard to feel happy,” she said. “You’re not pursuing anything if you are starving.”

Listen to Kerns tell her own story here:

Martec Washington

Martec Washington, of Charleston, said existing programs to combat hunger often leave behind people with average salaries in the wake of disasters because their income prevents them from qualifying for assistance.

Washington said there are many ways that existing systems are set up to prevent economically insecure individuals—whether short- or long-term—from accessing food.

“I’ve seen people around here whose homes have burnt down, and they don’t have access to food because they make too much money,” Washington said. “But you just lost everything. That’s not fair.”

Washington said he knows parents who are unable to eat for long periods of time because they can only afford enough food to feed their children.

“I’ve seen parents go without [food] for weeks to feed their children because they don’t have a way to get food for themselves,” he said. “It’s not fair that we are holding food hostage that we are growing on the ground for free.”

Washington said there is no reason not to ensure food as a human right when many places already provide public housing and other life necessities for those in need.

“If we’re going to put people in these public housing situations, why are we not giving them access to food?” Washington said. “If I’m going to give you shelter […] because you can barely afford to live, why wouldn’t I also give you access to food? Why wouldn’t I instantaneously give you a garden?”

Washington said the issue of hunger is senseless and avoidable in a country as exceptionally wealthy as the U.S.

“There is no need for this in America,” he said. “There is no need in a country [where] we have spaceships, we have submarines that are untraceable […] There is no reason children and mothers should be hungry.”

Listen to Washington tell his own story here:

Amber Roy

Amber Roy, of St. Albans, is a 41-year-old mother of two children. She also has two step-children who live in Columbus, Ohio. Roy’s family, too, has experienced food insecurity.

Roy said her oldest son was diagnosed with leukemia in 2011, when he was just 5-years-old. Her husband, she said, has a traumatic brain injury and is unable to work.

While seeking treatment for her oldest son, Roy said she and her husband were forced to postpone a court date which was set to decide whether they would receive custody of her two step-children.

“We ended up having to forfeit custody to their grandmother […] because we couldn’t afford to take on two extra mouths to feed while my son was in treatment,” she said.

Roy said she lost her job while her son was in treatment.

“We survived on SSI benefits,” she said “But that doesn’t mean that we didn’t go hungry, because $1,200-a-month isn’t much when you have a family of four, two of which are staying at a hospital.”

Roy said that at one point during that period, the grandmother of a student at her son’s pre-school attended church with Randy Moss, where she told Moss about Roy’s family’s struggles.

“[Moss] left the church, and went and bought three boxes of food and brought them back to us,” Roy said. “He didn’t want people to know at the time, but I am forever grateful for him, because we had Christmas dinner that year.”

Roy said she makes $13-an-hour at her current job, and her family still struggles with food insecurity.

“Right now I’m sitting here in my house, and my kids just came in and said, ‘Mom what are we having for dinner, because I’m hungry,’” she said. “But there’s nothing in my kitchen to eat, and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to make it through the next two weeks with just $40 to feed my family—and this is not an unusual circumstance. This is every pay-day.”

Listen to Roy tell her own story here:

Brian Butcher

Brian Butcher, of Morgantown, said he was homeless for two years when he lived in Huntington.

“Every day was trying to find where my next meal was going to come from,” Butcher said.

Butcher said an under-acknowledged aspect of homelessness is the mental damage and resulting trauma it forces upon individuals who experience it.

“When you spend every day [wondering] if you’re going to go to bed hungry—if you’re going to wake up at three in the morning wondering where that next meal’s coming from—it destroys you mentally. It causes a lot of post-traumatic stress […] It causes you to feel like there is no escape from what you’re experiencing.”

Butcher said experiencing extreme poverty begins to feel like a trap in which all one’s time and effort is spent on finding food, so other life responsibilities become impossible to accomplish and to maintain.

“You end up spending so much money just trying to find food for yourself and the people around you […] that you let your driver’s license expire, so now you’ve got to pay that, and then you can’t get a job because your driver’s license is expired,” Butcher said. “It perpetuates itself.”

Butcher said viewing the issues of hunger and poverty as failures of personal responsibility is a mistake which prevents lawmakers from implementing their true solutions, such as guaranteed direct aid to everyone in need.

“We talk so much about […] how people need to take responsibility, [but] we don’t take into account how hard it is for these people to get to where they need to be to have any kind of personal responsibility,” he said. “We live in the richest country in the world, but we have people on the street who can’t feed their families and can’t feed themselves—trapped in this loop of poverty—and it’s unacceptable […] We throw all this food away at night, and then there’s people on the street starving.”

Listen to Butcher tell his own story here:

Joanna DiStefano

Joanna DiStefano, of Morgantown, said she grew up in a poor community where everyone helped each other to make ends meet.

“Some of my greatest memories are of the care and the compassion of neighbors,” DiStefano said. “I don’t ever remember being hungry as a kid—I remember not having a lot of money and not a lot of excess, but there was a lot of love in the community. There was a lot of love among our neighbors, and everybody looked out for everybody.”

DiStefano said guaranteeing hunger as a right to all people should be seen as the logical extension of those same West Virginia community values.

Listen to DiStefano tell her own story here:

Amy Jo Hutchison

Amy Jo Hutchison—who famously went viral for testifying to the U.S. House Oversight Committee about the struggles of living in poverty—is an organizer with Our Future West Virginia, and she is challenging people to get angry about hunger and food insecurity across the state.

Hutchison has experienced food insecurity herself and said she knows a mother who lost her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and now is struggling to feed herself and her family.

The mother and her family, facing eviction, were forced to move homes and make various other life sacrifices after losing her source of income.

“She said, ‘Never before have I had to tell my kids ‘We don’t have money for that’ and mean a box of cereal,’” Hutchison said.

Hutchison said she knows other people who have told her that, “[They] didn’t realize how food insecure [they] and their children were—until they weren’t.”

Hutchison was on the phone call last month with Lohnes, Del. Walker and 24 other state delegates when Lohnes read the statement declaring their intent to build a movement demanding that legislators support a resolution guaranteeing food as a human right. Now, she is challenging all West Virginians to make 100 phone calls to legislators encouraging them to support Del. Walker’s resolution to guarantee food as a human right in the state constitution.

“None of the delegates except [Del. Walker] spoke up,” she said. “They had nothing to say after hearing about food insecurity and food access problems and bills and legislation we were looking forward to. They all just sat in silence […] We have to come together and demand that they do better.”

Listen to Hutchison’s call-to-action here:

Visit the West Virginia Legislature website here to find your state delegate and his/her contact information: http://www.wvlegislature.gov/house/roster.cfm.

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