Transcript
Iowa This Week · Sat Oct 24, 2026
Welcome to Iowa This Week.
I'm Tim Harwood.
Author Roger Thurow has a new book, and it's a book of interest to the Northeast Iowa Food Bank.
We're joined by the author this morning, as well as Barb Prather, executive director of the Northeast Iowa Food Bank.
Roger, thanks for being with us.
Thanks
for having us.
Great to be back in Iowa.
And Barb, good to have you here as well again too.
Thanks, Tim.
I appreciate it.
The new book is called abiding hunger and it examines a variety of topics in hunger when it comes to the United States and around the world abiding hunger and American paradox Roger tell us a little bit about this book and the topic in general which I think has been described this morning amongst ourselves as Frustrating to say the least
yeah, absolutely when you consider that of all places in the world and I was a foreign correspondent with the Wall Street Journal for
20 years, writing about hunger in some of the poorest places in the world.
And yeah, the frustrating and sad and horrible thing about it is that this is the one country in the world where there shouldn't be any hunger.
And so abiding hunger, kind of two meanings of abiding, one, it's abided.
throughout our history, all the way back to the time of Jamestown and the first English settlement.
They had starvation, almost ended the American experiment before it started, then cannibalism there.
And then obviously throughout our history through COVID, as we saw the huge epic line, so it's abided.
And the other meaning of abiding is we abide it as Americans.
You know, we tolerate it.
We seemingly have grown comfortable with it since it's here.
And, you know, despite all the pleas and the efforts of Barb and all the other magnificent, you know, people at the food banks and the food pantries around the country, it continues to abide and persist.
I'm sure Barbara has, you know, updated numbers on the situation in Iowa and across the country.
And the American paradox is the subtitle that.
This hunger exists and abides in the world's wealthiest mightiest most abundant country at one time I thought about having a subtitle as what's wrong with us But figured that would even be more frustrating or depressing So an American paradox is like hey, what's going on here?
So that's what the books about
where do you see some through lines that
take this story from the 17th century to today because we can imagine, you know, Jamestown you made reference to, not easy for colonists and settlers to arrive and create a viable food situation, but obviously things look a lot different today.
Right.
Well, and certainly for me, even before the settlers arrived or the colonists arrived, then certainly the Native Americans would have had, you know, struggled with hunger, depending on the weather and their crop situation and, you know, conflict and all sorts of things.
And so.
You know, when the settlers, when they came here, they thought this was a land of, you know, great riches.
And I think John Smith, you know, writes at one stage, one of the early, you know, leaders of the settlement.
Hardly any conversation went on without, you know, the repetition of the word gold, gold, gold.
That's what they were looking at for repressive metals.
So then they find tobacco and kind of other things.
So those were the dreams and the ambitions.
And then kind of this hunger then.
persists throughout our history and is exacerbated and then is is manifest still today so the legacy of all these events so the forced removal of the Native Americans you know the Trail of Tears the destruction of all their agricultural Practices and methods that we now call kind of regenerative agriculture and sustainable agriculture while they were practicing that back then and then we kind of you know Moved them all you know, west of the Mississippi to what was then called Indian territory and the government
Vocabulary at the time so we still see the legacy of that You know and Bob knows this some of the the most food insecure the hungriest communities in the United States still are in Native American communities Certainly slavery the rise of the cotton economy on those stolen lands on the last
backs of the impounded and slave labor from from Africa and it created then this this huge economic disparity so it gives rise to this cotton economy and I'm now based in Auburn Alabama which was kind of fortunately unfortunately kind of an ideal place to kind of write this book because of the the history all kind of runs through Alabama and particularly through the through the deep south.
And this cotton economy that rises up that really starts causing or creating this system of capitalism in this country, really sharp elbowed capitalism, which, you know, has evolved into this huge wealth gap between those with a lot of money in this country and those with very little.
So between the haves and the have nots.
And it's this ever widening wealth gap that's here.
That is behind a lot of the poverty that then causes the food insecurity and the hunger and in most recently still kind of ongoing the discrimination by the government lending policies through the county lending aid USDA lending agencies just systemic discrimination against black farmers
So, like at one stage in 1910, there were maybe a million black farmers in the United States by the end of that century, so maybe by the year 2000 or so, it was down to maybe 18,000 or 20,000.
In Alabama, it, you know, shrunk from maybe 100,000 black farmers to less than 3,000 at a time.
When you look in their communities and those counties where they were concentrated and a lot of that farming activity by the black farmers were taking place, a lot of those counties are now food deserts.
So one of the other areas of great poverty and hunger in this country.
So you can see kind of the through line and the legacy of all this history then is still manifest today in a lot of the patterns of food insecurity and hunger in the United States.
Roger Thoreau is the author of Abiding Hunger and American Paradox.
We also have Barb Prather, executive director of the Northeast Iowa Food Bank in studio with us.
And Barb, before we started, you said that you opened this book, you started reading, you had to put it down at one point, which I don't know if I would call that necessarily an endorsement, but obviously a book that had some impact on you who is very familiar with this information in one regard or another.
Yeah, correct.
I started reading it and it got to the point where, okay, I need to either keep reading this or I need to put it down because I was getting very frustrated.
As you read the first part of it, it goes in depth into how black farmers were treated, especially in the South by USDA.
These people wanted to grow crops, make a living, they had a vision, and basically because they couldn't get financing, they...
had to stop farming for the most part.
And you know, we think of America as the land of opportunity.
And when you think of it as the land of opportunity, why is it that way and why did that happen?
I'm gonna eventually finish this book, but I think hunger is similar.
With hunger, you know, for 45,000 people in Northeast Iowa who are food insecure, one in five kids right here in Blackhawk County are food insecure.
I met Roger 20 years ago when he came to study hunger in America Right here and took him to show some programs and whatever and so we've known each other for a long time But then to come full circle 20 years later Read the book that he has researched for all these years of why that happens and now you know our goal Really is to make sure people have access to food and if we look at this book it really
explain some of the things that have happened in our country that have caused food insecurity that much more.
And so for me, I have to keep fighting, right?
We need to make sure people have access to food so they can go to school, so they can have good jobs, so they can make ends meet.
And this just heightens the awareness in our country of things that are happening.
Thank you, Barbara.
frustrating, and the reason that I wanted to write the book and continue with this, and Barbara asked me, right, this was one of the first stops after all my time reporting on hunger in some of the poorest places in the world, and when I started writing about it here in America, I was based in the Chicago Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, I'm from Northern Illinois, and figured I'd have to come to Iowa and look at the hunger and the food insecurity here because of any place in the United States.
You know, when I went to the University of Iowa, you know, so you drive along I-80, it's corn, corn, corn, soybean, soybean, soybeans, you know, you exit Dubuque Street, there's Iowa City.
And it's like, surrounded by all of this, surely, how can there be hunger and food insecurity in Iowa?
So that's why the reasons...
you know, they came here and why kind of in now kind of promoting the book and wanted to make Waterloo one of the first stops to say, yeah, so the circle, you know, comes full.
And the frustrating nature, I think it's a lot of people who then donate to food banks and food pantries who may volunteer there who are concerned about this issue.
That's the frustrating question.
How does it continue to abide and persist?
And I think everybody recognizes these are great actions by the food banks and the food pantries, but they're kind of you know Band-Aids that they take care of the problem as it exists, but how do you deal with it?
And so that's why kind of in to get to the root of that
to write this book.
And the second half of the book, so if you keep with the book,
everybody starts
reading the book and it's like, wow, you know, kind of a sadness or a frustration that how has this persisted and abided in this country?
The second half of the book then starts looking at, you know, COVID should have been the time of reckoning in this country for our hunger.
We saw
the epic
food lines and we knew the demand.
That's out and we couldn't deny it anymore.
It's in front of us that there's no hiding hunger.
So it came certainly really out into the open and into our faces.
So the second half of the book then, here's kind of all the innovations, different kind of public policies, entrepreneurs coming up, students getting involved, kind of across the sector that here's the potential and promise that we can actually do something about this.
And so the second half of the book then kind of picks up the pace with more optimism,
more optimism,
and bringing hunger out of the darkness in this country, out of the hidden nature of it into the full light.
What's the practical way that this book is going to help the Northeast Iowa Food Bank?
I understand that there's a connection there.
Yeah.
So we'll have books on sale.
And for a $20 donation to the Food Bank, you can get a copy of the book.
But really, for me, it's about how do we continue to raise awareness?
How do we continue to show people that hunger is an issue and there's ways to get involved?
Because for a lot of people, they don't need us that often.
They need us when there's, you know, time of needs.
Four of our six program focus on kids.
So if we can help kids when they're young or through their college years, then they can get a good job and hopefully not be food insecure in the long run.
And so, but for the practical nature for today, for $20 donation to the food bank, you can get a copy of the book and educate yourself more on hunger and like the history of it in our country.
And I'll say, let's go to the food bank.
Well, Roger, I know that you alluded to having some more optimistic chapters as we get deeper into the book Give us a thought on something that can change this picture that again that you draw a line to going all the way back into the some of the earliest settlements of North America,
right?
You know, I think it would be really important and great and advantageous and basically take us perhaps to to finally end our abiding hunger if we have this, you know national
Certainly a conversation of this that's been going on, but then also a determination to finally let's do something about this, for goodness sakes.
I mean, we are the wealthiest, mightiest, most abundant country in the world.
I mean, we sing about it, right?
It's the amber waves of grain on the fruited plains from sea to shining sea.
Again, we can do something about it.
It doesn't have to be this way.
And so kind of finally in the epilogue, I figure, okay, this is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in this country.
And that Declaration of Independence was against the tyranny and oppression of rule by foreign powers, right?
To shed and throw off the rule of the British in this country and in the other kind of foreign powers through the years preceding that.
And I figure it's time for a new Declaration of Independence.
And that would be a Declaration of Independence from the tyranny and oppression of hunger.
And for all these families that Barbara talks about, and that you see on a daily basis with the work here, and not only in Northeast Iowa, but throughout the country, of these families, there's like 14% of American families.
And these are government statistics.
who, yeah, at some stage during the year, don't know where their next meal is coming from, but then also face this very sad, troubling, perplexing decision regularly on a monthly basis of do we spend more money on food?
to feed our family, do we pay our rent bills, our utility bills, our overdue medical bills, and to shed and have a declaration of independence from the tyranny of having to face that awful decision for all these American families.
And so kind of this unity and this...
you know, coming together and say, this is one issue that we have the answers for.
We have the abundance and the wealth in this country to do.
Why do we tolerate?
Why does it continue to abide?
And we can actually do something about it and we can do better.
Roger Thoreau is the author of a new book, Abiding Hunger and American Paradox.
Thanks for being with us this morning.
Thanks for having us.
It's great to be here.
And thanks for shedding light on this.
And as I say, raising the clamor.
It's what we can do as journalists and raise the clamor and say, hey, what's going on here?
And Barb Prather is executive director of the Northeast Iowa Food Bank, which has copies of the book available for a $20 donation.
Barb, thank you for your time this morning.
Thank you.
We really appreciate being on today.
And that's all for this edition of Iowa This Week.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Tim Harwood.
