Welcome to Rumble Strip, this is Erica Heilman.

They're helping people because they're like there, but for the grace of God, go I, and I'm going to help people as long as I can.

If they weren't doing that, who would be feeding people?

Like if everybody that's working in a food pantry that's a volunteer not being paid said,

I'm going home, you're on your own, how would we feed the people that don't have enough food?

That was Lisa Pitcher who runs Our Place, the community food shelf in Bellows Falls, Vermont.

Last year I made a show called Too Much Month at the End of the Money.

It was a show about what it's like to live with chronic food insecurity, or hunger if you want to be more explicit about it.

I interviewed people at food shelves and at community meal sites and I meant to follow up with

a show about how the charitable food system works or how it's working here in Vermont.

But there's something really hard about the subject of hunger.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that hunger is just not a very exciting topic.

In fact, it's kind of boring.

Maybe it's boring because it's hard to care about a problem that shouldn't be a problem, and because it shouldn't be a problem.

And because it shouldn't be a problem,

I sort of assume it's not a problem.

Or not really?

Or maybe since there's enough food to feed everyone in this country

ten times over.

Maybe since hunger is so obviously a systems problem,

a distribution problem, I just figure it'll get solved any day now

by systems people. But it's not and according to all of the people

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