Illustration by Andrés Guzmán
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When Jalilia Abdul-Brown was 12, she noticed something: The lunches some of her friends brought to school were very different from her own. They had fresh fruit; she had potato chips. Their peanut butter was sandwiched between wheat bread; hers was on white.
But her observations didn’t stop there. She also noticed a connection beyond the realm of most middle school thinking: There appeared to be a correlation between the types of food people ate and their actions.
From her own experience, she knew what hunger could drive someone to do. On the many days that there was no food in her house, she and some of her nine siblings would often get so hungry that they’d walk over to the corner store and steal something to eat. “Not because we wanted to but because of the lack,” she says.
As she grew up and saw violence in her neighborhood of East Phillips in Minneapolis, she kept thinking about the impact of food on that behavior. So, she started asking people involved in violence what they typically ate. “A lot of it was potato chips, McDonald’s, Popeyes. There was always a fried food,” she says.
In the people she knew with access to healthier food, she noticed different decisions. “They wanted to go to school and get an education,” she says.
In 2016, her sister was shot while she was waiting at the bus stop. Abdul-Brown responded by starting a nonprofit called Change Starts with Community, with the goal of using food to prevent gun violence. The organization’s food shelf, Shiloh Cares, now feeds more than 8,000 people per month out of its home on West Broadway in north Minneapolis.
Evidence-based
Abdul-Brown, who previously worked as a violence prevention specialist and case manager for Hennepin Healthcare’s Next Step program, says she might have been a data scientist in another life. She’s a sucker for metrics, scorecards, reports of any sort. “I like data,” she says.
So, she makes sure that every intervention and program she dreams up—and there are a lot under the umbrella of Change Starts with Community, including gun buyback programs and immunization clinics—is evaluated. She knows how many packs of Narcan they give out, how many funerals they’ve assisted, how many guns they’ve collected.
Otherwise, she says, how would they know if it worked? When the data show something isn’t effective, like the first version of her gun buyback program, she switches gears. In that case, she swapped out the buyback program for a program that let people drop guns they wanted to get rid of in a bucket anonymously, and more people started participating.
“I think we kind of know it at a gut level. Our lived experiences can often guide us almost better than the data.”
–Abigail M. Hatcher
There is not yet a plethora of research and data on the connection that 12-year-old Jalilia noticed. But the evidence that does exist supports her intuition: “I think we kind of know it at a gut level,” says Abigail M. Hatcher, assistant professor of health behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has been involved in the research. “Our lived experience can often guide us almost better than the data.”
While the study of violence prevention is “young and underfunded,” there is strong evidence of a relationship between food insecurity and violence against women and girls, according to a review paper coauthored by Hatcher. And there is some emerging evidence that suggests hunger may lead to later violence, she says.
Early research also shows that a lack of food can worsen violence—both as a perpetrator and as a victim, Hatcher says. If you’ve ever been “hangry,” it’s easy to understand why, she points out. “Your body doesn’t have the resources it needs to slow down and think carefully and make good decisions,” she says, summarizing the takeaway of the research.
Hunger also impacts mental health and can promote symptoms of anxiety, stress, and depression. “Food insecurity is also about feeling shamed and distressed and worried about not having food,” she explains. “For perpetration of violence, this makes sense because anxiety can be tied to unhelpful reactions, reactions that are more violent, so the conflict escalates more quickly.”
When Hatcher looked into the role food might play in intimate partner violence, she found that food can both promote and erode connection between partners. “There are a lot of gendered expectations around getting food on the table,” she says. “Especially with hetero men, when they can’t get food on the table, conflict usually rises in the partnership. The way food is obtained and the expectations around it are rife for conflict.”
Hatcher has also been involved in some very preliminary research that suggests that food insecurity might cause violence. Establishing a causal link to a health determinant is extremely challenging and can’t always be extrapolated beyond the initial setting. This study, for example, was conducted in South Africa, but Hatcher believes the location has a lot in common with urban environments in the United States.
Shopping at Shiloh Cares
On a Wednesday morning in May, 45-year-old Julius Jackson is one of the shoppers at Shiloh Cares Food Shelf. Jackson takes the bus from Uptown almost every Wednesday for access to foods he can’t afford near his home.
After checking in on an online system, Jackson enters Shiloh Cares, on this day staffed with volunteers from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. He is ushered through two rooms stocked with food. The first room has breads and packaged treats, items with short shelf lives donated from grocery stores with surpluses. Today there are baguettes and fruit cobbler from Whole Foods.
Next, he’s guided into a room with floor-to-ceiling shelving stocked with nonperishables, including culturally specific canned and boxed foods ranging from grits to masa flour to a variety of hot sauces and spices.
A refrigerated wall contains some of the most sought-after items: eggs, cheese, milk, butter, fresh veggie juices, meat, arugula, lettuce, mushrooms. More fresh produce—which today includes potatoes, oranges, limes, grapefruit, and apples—is stacked in bags at the checkout.
Jackson fills a backpack with chicken, turkey, sardines, garlic, mushrooms. Because he has diabetes, he tries to eat healthy, but he says salads, fresh vegetables, and healthy meats have grown increasingly out of his budget.
“This has helped out a lot,” he says.
He’s planning a mini barbecue, with plenty left over for sandwiches for the week ahead.
Photo by Sheila Mulrooney Eldred
shiloh-cares-volunteers
Volunteers from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s office were pitching in at Shiloh Cares in May.
Recognition
Of course, there are also plenty of other upsides to providing people with healthy food. Hatcher calls Abdul-Brown’s program a “win-win-win.” Others have recognized this as well: Abdul-Brown was designated a Hometown Hero by the Minnesota Vikings, a Health Equity Champion by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, and a 2023 Local Public Health Hero by the Minneapolis Health Department.
“I always say it’s more than food and it’s bigger than violence,” Abdul-Brown says. “One person can start a movement, but it takes a community to make change.”
Hatcher says programs like Abdul-Brown’s are doing the hardest work in health research, which usually comes after the papers are published. “They’re figuring out the last mile in health research early,” she says. Those efforts should be applauded, she says. There’s no reason to wait to change lives; the understanding can come later.
