Pittsburgh EcoSoc Food Pantry
More than a year ago, in a meeting of the Pittsburgh DSA Socialist Feminist Committee, my comrade Emma proposed the idea of building a Little Free Pantry for mutual aid in her community.
During a breakout planning session at that same meeting, we started to draw up a plan. Being anarcho-communists by nature, we then kind of just went out and did it, surprising the rest of the Soc Fem Committee with a fully operational pantry at the next meeting when all they were expecting was a status report. The resource we used for the actual building plans was Little Free Pantry.org, and we built it with about $60 in supplies and labor donated by some other comrades. Emma found its first home, and we started asking friends and comrades for donations to stock it with food.
This was actually the birth of the Pittsburgh DSA Ecosocialist Committee. We see food justice as being intimately tied to larger ecological concerns. Wendell Berry says that we must save the land and the people—we cannot save one without saving the other. As Marx made clear, capitalism treats the natural world as a “free gift”: an infinite source of raw materials for the production of commodities and the generation of surplus value. Fields of industrially farmed corn and warehouses of mechanistically tortured pigs deplete the soil, saturate it with toxic chemicals, poison the water with runoff, fill the air with greenhouse gasses, and produce food mostly devoid of nutrients--all while exploiting and marginalizing labor and stripping communities of agency to feed themselves. At the intersection of capitalist exploitation and white supremacy, it is particularly the most impoverished and communities of color that suffer.
We must destroy capitalism if we are ever to achieve even a semblance of ecological balance and universal, healthful food security. But in the meantime, we believe that mutual aid can at least help to alleviate some of its pressures on our communities. And so from each according to their ability, to each according to their need! Our free pantry is available 24 hours a day to anyone who needs it, stocked with donations from those who can sometimes afford to help their neighbors. One of the most gratifying things about maintaining the pantry is checking it and discovering food in it that we didn’t put there; the community has become part of the mutual aid process our chapter started.
***
It hasn’t necessarily been easy. The first acute difficulty was securing a home for the pantry. We needed a spot that was publicly accessible 24 hours a day in a community that needed this kind of aid, and where the owners would allow a socialist pantry. Our pantry is actually now in its third location, having been ejected from its first two for political reasons; if you want to replicate our project, plan to talk to a lot of people and attend a lot of meetings. At our second location, we were told we could leave the pantry if we were willing to take the DSA name off of it. We refused: our project isn’t just feeding people, it’s spreading socialist principles of mutual aid through direct action in the community, and the pantry is meant to serve as an invitation to come to our chapter.
The second challenge of the pantry project is keeping it reliably stocked. We use a few methods: one, we are constantly reminding our membership, prior to meetings, to consider bringing a contribution along with them, either in the form of nonperishable groceries, hygiene products, pet food, or money. We also have collection boxes in sympathetic local businesses; I check in on two in my neighborhood. Finally, I take donations through a Venmo account, and reply with pictures of receipts, which I also post to our chapter’s Slack account; I chiefly reach people who contribute this way through Twitter. So you need to have a good system of communication within the chapter and on social media.
Another consideration is that you have to be ready to store groceries somewhere -- Pittsburgh DSA is fortunate now to have permanent office space, but before that, supplies were stacked up in comrades’ living rooms. That’s not necessarily ideal. Additionally, you have to plan to handle money in a transparent way: understandably, many people would rather give monetary donations than haul soup cans around to meetings, so you need to have a system of reasonable accountability. And of course, you need comrades willing to do the work of regularly shopping for and stocking the pantry.
You also have to keep an eye on the weather. The pantry must be pretty watertight, and heat and cold become important considerations; even canned goods can begin to spoil in too-intense heat, and freezing temperatures break safety seals and shatter glass. In the wintertime we had to shift towards dry goods and be careful not to put any glass jars in the pantry, although we can leave some hardy fresh items there, like onions and potatoes and apples. In the summertime, anything fresh will spoil, and it’s a good idea to make sure the pantry’s transparent door is well shaded. (We put an extra-long roof overhang on ours.)
Another issue we’ve faced is vandalism. We’ve found no good solution to this problem -- installing security cameras or calling the cops violates our principles -- so we’ve just turned the other cheek and persisted with the work. One thing I will advise: make a good sturdy door! That seems to be the easiest part of the pantry to wreck, and the one we’ve had to repair and eventually replace most frequently.
Our next steps are working on community engagement -- we’re preparing a survey to place in the pantry to get better community feedback -- and enlarging our food justice project by growing vegetables in a local community garden. Our hope is that come summer, we’ll be able to share fresh vegetables and herbs periodically at the pantry’s site, and provide healthier, fresher food as part of its offerings.
If anyone would like to talk more, please feel free to reach out to Pittsburgh DSA.
Save the Land and People!
To learn more about Pittsburg DSA’s work, contact the chapter at info@pghdsa.org. You can also follow them on Twitter @pghDSA.
