Unplated: An Interview with Heather Hanus
How can farmers' markets help us envision a more just and equitable world?
This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.
Heather Hanus is a farmer’s market manager in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her recent research is an examination of the conditions that create stigma in food assistance spaces.
I first met Heather in Tallahassee during my doctoral program, through mutual friends. I was struck not only by her dedication to food justice, but by her creative and broad-reaching perspectives on how food equity might be implemented. Today, she embodies that work as a farmer's market manager. Here, we talk about her day-to-day work with the market, and how she sees this work with food connecting to community care writ large.
JS: First of all, can you start off by telling me a bit about your work now? What all is involved in managing the farmer's market?
HH: I’m a farmer’s market manager, so that means I coordinate all aspects of the Saturday market. This includes reviewing new vendor applications, handling vendor paperwork (such as insurance--each vendor is required to have insurance when they are at the market—or direct deposit forms) coordinating the Fresh Access token system, which makes it easier for customers with EBT to utilize the market, and making sure that the market is a safe place for everyone. It’s like spending all week planning a huge event, throwing the event, and then coming back on Monday to start planning it all over again.
I also am in charge of the market’s anti-racism initiatives. Pittsburgh has the lowest number of Black-owned businesses in the country, so there’s a lot to be done.
JS: I know you have a work background that encompasses several different fields, including food-related work but not exclusively. How did you come to manage the farmers' market? And how does your experience from spaces beyond culinary + hospitality help you in that work?
HH: The farmer’s market job opened up a few months after I finished school. I applied, sat for two interviews, and very excitedly accepted when they offered it to me.
As far as the other types of work I’ve been involved in, about a decade ago I volunteered with a community garden in my hometown, which was planted in a primarily Black neighborhood by a handful of White folks with the intention of feeding the neighborhood. It failed at doing so, which seems painfully inevitable to me now, but we didn’t do our due diligence back then. Learning about the reasons why that didn’t work and how white savior complexes show up in agriculture is ongoing work for me, and it informs how I run the market.
I’ve also worked in bars off and on for the last several years, and I think bartending prepares for you anything another human being can think to do. The inability to be shocked has turned out to be a valuable life skill. I’ve seen it all.
JS: In addition to working with food producers, you've also studied food in an academic context. Can you tell me a bit about that? What insights can we gain from studying food in research contexts, whether or not we're entrenched in the world of food?
HH: I got my Master’s degree is in Food Studies from Chatham University, and wrote my thesis on alleviating shame and stigma in food assistance spaces. One of my big takeaways from that research was that people tend to believe they are acting out their values just by thinking good thoughts towards oppressed individuals.
When I interviewed food assistance providers on how they worked to eliminate shame, they talked about things like “normalizing” the experience. When I asked what they did to normalize it, they said things like “be nice to people,” which if you think about it, is them not really doing anything at all.
Once I identified it, I started seeing this unwillingness to follow through on my values in any tangible way showing up in my own life and the lives of those around me. It’s similar to the conversation around anti-racism. It’s not enough to just be quietly not racist, when there are racist people who are VERY active in acting out their beliefs.
That said, I think that studying food in a research context is really a study of intersectionality. Food indignities—such as the current culture of food pantries—are tied to race. And when we talk about sustainable food systems, we have to ask ourselves who for whom it is sustainable—are we including the Black and Brown folks who likely harvested the food in that conversation?
JS: Your discussion of the culture of food pantries really resonated with my experiences, going to food pantries and having to jump through seemingly endless stigmatizing, demoralizing hoops just to try to get some groceries. How do we take an active role in destigmatizing food assistance? How do we move from "normalizing" and "being nice" and towards meaningfully feeding community members without the shame?
HH: The top three triggers for shame in food assistance spaces I found in my research are: 1) being given food that is rotting, moldy, out of date, or otherwise undesirable or inedible, 2) the fear of being seen waiting outside of a food pantry by someone the person knows, and 3) perceived disrespect by staff and volunteers.
When I began my research, I thought the solutions to these triggers would be operational, and it would be as simple as, for example, having clients make an appointment to visit the food pantry. That way, they can just walk right in and no one will see them waiting outside. But this, like so many solutions people proposed when I interviewed them, just reinforced shame, and doubled down on the idea that entering a food pantry is shameful. One food pantry volunteer I interviewed suggested people wear a hat and sunglasses to mitigate the shame of being seen there, and another said ideally they would deliver the food in unmarked boxes. All the solutions to stigma and shame were similar to that.
In reality, the root cause of shame and stigma in food assistance spaces is ignoring the input of food pantry clients. It’s become the norm to talk about people experiencing poverty without consulting them, the implication being that those people have nothing to offer and are not worthy of representation.
What that leaves us is enterprise after enterprise built primarily by White people with little to no experience of food insecurity, largely guessing at the needs and wants of their clients. To combat this, I proposed in my thesis that a paid committee of stakeholders be formed to steer the direction of a food pantry, and that that committee be made up of a) people who have experienced or are currently experiencing food insecurity, b) BIPOC people, c) women, and d) inclusive of the LGBTQIA community, who are disproportionately affected by food insecurity.
I also proposed that pantries’ actively work to break down the dominant narrative that poverty and food insecurity are the result of individual choices, and not imposed by structures and institutions. This conservative belief—which has been culturally pounded into us for most of our lives, and takes work to unlearn—is what allows pantry staff and volunteers to not think twice about giving clients rotten, moldy food. The implication, whether we realize it or not, is that they are getting what they deserve. Access to adequate food is a right, and pantries can posit themselves as sites of equity and justice.
JS: You also talked about turning a critical eye towards our concept of sustainability: I think when we talk about sustainable food systems, it can be easy to talk about reducing our carbon footprint or practicing more environmentally-friendly approaches to growing food. Like you said, to focus on the food itself and to disconnect it from the people doing the growing. How do we re-center and support growers, particularly marginalized community members who, especially in the case of Black farmers, own such a small proportion of land in this country?
HH: This is something we’re working through at the market. We prioritize BIPOC applicants and have a scholarship available to partially cover vendor fees, but at this time all of our Black vendors are makers—such as bakers or chefs--so we have no Black farmers. One person whose work on the subject has been helpful to me is Allinee “Shiny” Flanary, a queer Black farmer in Portland, Oregon who runs a Black and Indigenous incubator market and farmer training program. She wrote a handbook called “Anti-Racist Farmer’s Markets” that is available online. Also, Soul Fire Farm in the northeast has put out materials—such as the book “Farming While Black”—that are helpful in learning more about supporting BIPOC farmers.
JS: What does a sustainable, equitable food system truly look like? And how can our work shopping at, or running, farmers markets help us get there?
HH: Sustainability has become such a buzzword that I struggle with what it even really means. I think an equitable and sustainable food system ensures equal access to affordable, healthy, and culturally appropriate food, as well as economic opportunity with safe job opportunities and living wages, working within a regenerative agricultural system.
Shopping at farmers’ markets has the ability to affect change if White people regularly seek out BIPOC vendors to buy goods from. If markets don’t have BIPOC vendors, managers need to ask themselves why, and not stop with “because none applied.” Why are none applying? How can we remove those barriers?