In Humble Pie, longtime anti-poverty activist and journalist Pat LaMarche reports that nine million people throughout the world die of starvation each year. The United States is not exempt. While most people in this country do not starve to death, LaMarche writes that an estimated 40 million people — one in eight U.S. residents — do not have enough healthy food to sustain them.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Worse, although nearly 100,000 food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters try to plug the gaps, the gargantuan task of filling every empty belly is beyond their abilities. Moreover, burdensome regulations and bureaucratic restrictions — locating food distribution sites and shelters in far-flung places, limited service hours, long lines and reams of documents that have to be completed — complicate access to aid.
Humble Pie tracks these obstacles and zeroes in on hunger’s impact on both individuals and families. The result is both moving and infuriating. As someone with hands-on experience working in numerous shelters, LaMarche shares a multitude of experiences, all of them meant to humanize a population that is typically smeared as lazy and undeserving.
There’s Christy, a married mother of young children, who was evicted after her home was condemned following a septic-tank explosion. Nonetheless, she prepared food for other shelter residents. “It makes me feel better to cook,” Christy told LaMarche.
This was also true for Geralyn, a former stand-up comedian who’d once sold jokes to George Carlin and Robin Williams. Now down on her luck, when she and LaMarche met she was unhoused. Like others referenced in the book, Geralyn eased her sorrows by cooking, using whatever ingredients she found in the kitchen of the temporary shelter she called home.
Similarly, Tonya was a single mother of two who struggled to make meals even when neither a stove nor running water were available.
Despite considerable roadblocks, most of the people LaMarche introduces find cooking therapeutic, and Humble Pie includes dozens of recipes for the meals they made to sustain themselves and their kids. This makes the book an unusual pastiche: part memoir about working in a shelter, part cookbook and part testimonial about the redemptive power of meal-making. In addition, budget-friendly recipes from British Chef Archie Pie give the book a hint of gourmet flare.
Chefs and wanna-be chefs will find inspiration here. So will lawmakers, policy wonks and social service providers. “Food is more than sustenance,” LaMarche writes. “It’s a form of communication, an expression of love.”
The diverse recipes in Humble Pie include everything from Passover charoset to tuna casserole, to moose stew, to Cajun red beans and rice and vegetarian Irish-French pies. Indeed, the beautifully illustrated book provides something for virtually every palate.
While the book does not suggest a game plan for ending hunger or homelessness, its contents are sure to make life on the edge a bit easier for those perched there. And it certainly encourages empathy from those of us lucky enough to be able to eat when we’re hungry.
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Humble Pie
By Pat LaMarche; Illustrated by Jeremy Ruby
Charles Bruce Foundation; $20; 206 pages
