Hungry Oklahoma: Confronting Poverty and Food Insecurity

In Oklahoma, one out of every six residents is poor. One in five children lives in poverty and faces food insecurity. In Hungry Oklahoma, native son and sociologist Robert Lee Maril follows in the tradition of the national best-sellers Nickel and Dimed and Evicted to illuminate the lived experience of poverty and food insecurity in communities across the state.

Maril’s account is immediately personal. He begins with “guests,” as shoppers are called by volunteers, waiting in line in the sweltering heat one summer for “Thy Will Be Done,” a food pantry, to open. Unable to afford air conditioning, some guests don’t buy foods that would spoil on the counter. One woman, Norma, carefully places only canned vegetables in her cart. When she returns to her twenty-year-old pickup, in the truck bed are lawn chairs, blankets, and pans—everything she owns. “The landlord told us this morning we was homeless,” Norma says. “I’m not thinking straight.”

Drawing on interviews and participant-observation data from his volunteer work at a food pantry, as well as Census and sociological data, Maril documents in rich ethnographic detail the status of poverty and low-wage workers in the state today and within historical context. He explores how institutions—such as faith-based organizations, government, and food pantries—structure and shape experiences of poverty. While Maril celebrates the nonprofit and faith-based efforts that make a difference, this book also is critical of conditions and stereotypes that have entrenched poverty in the state.

Hungry Oklahoma ultimately suggests that persistent and pervasive poverty can be eliminated. Its moving accounts of real Oklahomans and their experiences make it a clarion call for not only those interested in policy issues but all Oklahomans who want a better today and tomorrow for those who call the state home.

About the Author :
Robert Lee Maril is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at East Carolina University. He is the author of Living on the Edge of America: At home on the Texas-Mexico Border and The Bay Shrimpers of Texas: Rural Fishermen in a Global Economy.

Review :
“Using data from participant observation, Maril provides a richly detailed view of poverty from the perspectives of people who live with it daily. Although Oklahoma has a long history of poverty, Maril sees hope for the future. The challenge is getting people and policy working together at all levels.”—Gene F. Summers, PhD, Former President, Rural Sociological Society.

“Once again, Robert Lee Maril brings us into a world whose workings can seem invisible. A gifted ethnographer, his latest work offers a close and telling portrait of hunger and poverty."—David Cunningham, Washington University in St. Louis, and author of Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era KKK