Jenique Jones: Hunger and Poverty Are Policy Choices

Food with Mark Bittman

Sweetness and Light

Nutrition, Arts, Food, Culture, Cooking, Health & Fitness, Society & Culture

4.9 • 947 Ratings

🗓️ 16 July 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Executive Director of WhyHunger talks to Mark and Kate about how her grandmother’s values and being raised by Civil Rights-era elders shaped her beliefs; how she made the move from charity work to structural change—and why we need both; what it's like being a hopeless optimist; and the most inspirational things she's seen in 16 years of working with marginalized communities.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to food. I'm Kate Bitman, and we are so glad that you're here with us. If you want more,
0:08.3	remember to check us out online at bitmanproject.com. We've got more than 1,500 recipes with new ones
0:14.5	added daily, plus some really wonderful food writing from some really wonderful food writers,
0:20.1	and recommendations for products and more.
0:23.0	bitmanproject.com and as always email us with any questions or feedback at food at markbitman.com In this episode, Kate and I chat with Janique Jones, who's the executive director of
0:52.2	Why Hunger, a global nonprofit advancing the
0:55.1	human right to nutritious food. Jones has a terrific story, and under her guidance,
1:00.0	Y hunger has continued to progress from an emergency hunger organization to one that supports
1:05.7	food sovereignty, food justice, and the universal right to good food. Why hunger has connected more than 3.5 million people to nutritious local food and invested
1:15.7	$6.8 million globally to support sustainable agriculture and effective hunger solutions.
1:22.0	It also supports numerous smaller organizations carrying on food justice work.
1:29.7	It's a great conversation between me,
1:37.3	Kate, and Janique. So let's get to it. Janique, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. Well, I'm excited, too. I want to say I was already inclined to like you for reasons you know and we're aligned on a lot of
1:47.2	stuff and we have friends in common and all of that. But when I read this line, Hunger is a policy
1:53.2	choice, I just thought that woman is spot on. That's a great one-liner. It's a really good
2:00.3	one-liner. So thank you for that. Well, I appreciate it. I'm pretty great one-liner. It's a really good one-liner. So, thank you for that.
2:02.9	Well, I appreciate. I think, pretty sure I stole it from somewhere, but it's also just very true.
2:07.2	No doubt. I mean, it's very. It's good. You know, it's, we have poverty and hunger because in some
2:14.1	ways we want to have poverty and hunger. So. Yeah. All the people who are poor and hungry don't want to buy money hunger, but yeah, the people
2:21.3	in control do.
2:22.6	Exactly.
2:23.6	Let's just start for the beginning.
	...

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