‘Got Food?’ traces the history of hunger
Photographs illustrate Worcester County’s efforts to cope
When the exhibition “Got Food? Creating a Hunger-Free Community” was about to open at the Worcester Historical Museum, the planners decided to engage in a little reverse psychology. Each of the first 1,000 visitors would be given a can of soup. Yes, just as if the visitor could not afford to buy his or her own canned goods.
“We put them in that role for the moment of going through the exhibit,” said Kenneth C. Crater, a member of the board of the Worcester County Food Bank. “They didn’t get a chance to choose what kind of soup they wanted. They were hesitant to take the can.”
It was Crater who proposed the soup giveaway, as well as the idea of an exhibition to mark the food bank’s 25th anniversary. “Got Food?” traces the origins of hunger through three centuries. It takes a look at who suffers from hunger and society’s evolving methods of providing relief.
“We felt there would be value in giving historical perspective,” Crater said. “It’s been such an amazing experience to find out attitudes through the centuries.”
Mindful of the fact that providing food for the hungry is a collaborative undertaking, a seven-member committee — with representatives from the museum, Worcester State College and the Food Bank — planned the exhibition. The committee’s two professional historians Thomas E. Conroy, the museum’s director of programs, and Steven H. Corey, a professor of urban studies at Worcester State College, conducted the research and wrote the exhibit labels. Told largely through compelling photographs, the display brings home the faces of hunger in Worcester County over the decades.
At first, Conroy and Corey were concerned about the broad scope of the exhibition. It starts with an explanation of 16th-century Elizabethan Poor Laws. But the historians decided to let the story play out and provide a context for what has occurred in Central Massachusetts. “We wanted to tell the bigger tale,” Conroy said.
Jean McMurray, the executive director of the food bank, was surprised to learn that in an earlier time, officials in Worcester auctioned off poor people for indentured servitude to save the community money. “I was not aware of that local history,” McMurray, who sat on the planning committee, said.
Despite Conroy’s knowledge of the past, questions had lingered in his mind.
He wondered, for instance, what had happened to Worcester’s poor farm. Opened in 1840, the farm came to occupy 600 acres of land on Lincoln Street. “Known later as the Home Farm, it was a working farm where ‘inmates’ earned room and board by growing vegetable and raising livestock,” the exhibit label notes.
“It turned out the tornado of 1953 took it out,” Conroy said. “The federal government came in and created different systems to deal with hunger.”
The exhibition shows how responses to hunger have changed with prevailing social attitudes.
“Some solutions now look Draconian that were viewed as progressive in their time,” Crater remarked. “We have to think hard about what we’re doing now. Is it an enlightened and appropriate approach?”
One section focuses on the founding of the food bank movement, explaining that a Phoenix businessman, John van Hengel, got things started when he solicited donations of nonperishable food that was going to waste at grocery stores. The response was so positive that van Hengel established St. Mary’s Food Bank in 1967 to collect, store and distribute donated food to local charities that fed hungry people in his city, thereby revolutionizing the way hunger relief would be handled across the U.S.
The exhibition is intended to inform visitors about the past while prompting them to ask questions about the future, committee members said. The food bank, a distribution center, is at the hub of a network of more than 200 agencies that serve those in need — soup kitchens, women’s shelters, pantries, veterans shelters, senior centers and group homes to name a few. Each year, the food bank distributes 5 million pounds of goods through these agencies to more than 71,000 people in Central Massachusetts.
Many of the agencies are small. They are operated largely by volunteers and have inadequate budgets. The food bank is in the process of creating an endowment fund to help the entire network and new initiatives that may be developed.
In the view of McMurray and Crater, part of the value of the exhibition is its ability to prompt thought about how best to provide relief and even bring hunger to an end.
“It leads people to think, ‘Can we end this?’ It’s a jumping-off point,” McMurray said. “We provide a point where they know what they can do and how to get involved.”
Conroy added that visitors often leave the exhibition asking, “How can I help?”
“For a museum to have people walking out asking that question, it’s great,” he said, smiling.
When: through April 12; museum hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tues., Wed., Fri., Sat.; 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thurs. Where: Worcester Historical Museum, 30 Elm St., Worcester How much: Adults $5; museum members and under 18 free.