Vaissnavi Shukl
We explored the themes of Agriculture, Food and Waste in season four. Something that we did not get into too much detail was the idea of hunger, which is caused by the lack of food. So, when Dr. Jane Battersby, who was our guest this season, posted about The Hunger Museum on LinkedIn, I was intrigued. The Hunger Museum is a virtual museum that takes a deep dive into the history of hunger and how it can be ended. For today’s bonus episode, we speak to Abby Leibman, President and CEO of Mazon, the organisation that conceptualised The Hunger Museum.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

We’ll start from the top, which is about the museum itself and the museum I think we’re simply called The Hunger Museum. And when you think about museums, ideally, typically, you would think about museums that are centred around ideas, which have something that can be physically shown or expressed or experienced, but then hunger is not on top of my list of museums where I would think about a museum for something. I’ve been to Toy museums. We’ve seen Holocaust museums, history museums, but how did this idea of building a museum around hunger?

Abby Liebman
Well, it started as a desire to think about the origins of hunger in America, if you will, and how we responded to them. So it was really more of a… this idea of conversation about we knew based on what we at MAZON know about hunger and our government’s response to it, that there was a moment in our history, when in the United States, we really almost ended hunger in America. And that stopped and so some of this began in a conversation simply about how important it was to recognize that this is actually not a problem of scarcity of resources, or troubles with food systems, it’s a problem of political wealth. It’s a question of, do the people who govern this country, make it enough of a priority to address those who are struggling with hunger in a meaningful way to really dig into why are they hungry? And then what can we do to create support systems, responses, opportunity so that they no longer struggle? So originally, we thought about doing a timeline. And this was back sometime in early 2019, I think I know, I do all of my time between before the pandemic had, after the pandemic, and they are in the pandemic, whatever we are right now. So it was definitely before the pandemic. So it’s been years that we’ve talked about this, and originally was going to be a timeline. But I didn’t want it to be just a flat timeline, if you will, that moved from, you know, sort of lurching from one moment in history to the next, I wanted it to feel as if people could experience all the elements that were making up life in those particular periods of time, you know, will we… so when you see a timeline of, you know, development of an artist’s work, you typically see what was happening in the art world. And sometimes a little bit about what was happening in the country of origin. But what I was thinking is, well, there are things happening in art, and culture, and pop culture, and the… the ideas of economics versus you know, social programs and religion and all kinds of things, immigration, social policies. And I wanted all of that, to wrap around these moments that we saw as important historical touchstones in the history. So there was supposed to be a timeline. And then the pandemic… a physical, it was like a piece of paper, you know, something that would go around the perimeter of a room and be, you know, embellished in some way. So it looks pretty there, apparently very fancy ways of doing timelines, something I learned in this process I did not know. We then realised, well, we have to take it online. And we started to talk about well, we could do pictures that we could do something a little more elaborate, maybe it’s interactive. I can’t tell you exactly who and how it then evolved into this notion of it feels more like a museum, because we were talking about periods of time, that became galleries and within those galleries, moments to explore in depth and that’s really how it turned into this museum. But a lot of it is really rooted in the idea that if we don’t really look at our history, then you know, it’s trite to say this, but then we are doomed to repeat it. And that’s what we’ve been doing. And we’re stuck. And to get unstuck you have to see who was thinking in a visionary way, years ago, and what vision did they have? And is that still salient now? I mean, I’m not so stuck that I think that well, solutions that worked in the 1960s and 70s, well, they may not work right now and the 2020s, but there’s something there about what was the goal orientation, what were they trying to do? And to dig into that a little bit more and say to ourselves, well, we knew we could do it that way, then we can do it this way now. But if we don’t even try, then we’re stuck.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So what we’ve been doing this season is we’ve been talking to a lot of different people about three broad ideas. So we’ve been talking about production of foods, agriculture, food as in the food that we eat the processed portion of it. And then we’ve been talking about waste, as in the food waste that is left. And throughout the season, we’ve been having conversations that deal with different economics of what it means to be working or dealing with global food systems or food supplies, the imbalance in those systems, the way seeds are modified, the nutrition that we derived out of it. And in fact, the… the reason I came across The Hunger Museum because one of our guests she posted on LinkedIn about the museum. And her work Dr. Jane Battersby she her work is about food deserts in in Africa and that’s also something that we’re looking at is it’s not just the availability of food that ensures nutrition in the food and just how people have or do not have access to that food. Now, what I did not realise while doing all of the season is we were talking about food in and out, but hunger is almost like the other side of the coin, right? So if you’re talking about food on one side, hunger is almost the other side of the coin, where it kind of implies that there is no availability of food, or there’s no availability of the nutrition and proper amounts. Now, when we’re looking at The Hunger Museum as a broad idea, or a broad concept, at the first go, it seems a little bit disorienting in the sense. How do we come to terms with the fact that a museum is the right idea, right building typology to associate an idea of hunger, and I say that because while we’re moving towards this artificial intelligence, Metaverse, virtual reality world, public space, like museums, you know, a lot of them move their programming online during COVID. But then once you know the COVID was over, when went back to accessing those physical spaces, what do you think that does with the idea of access broadly access as in access to food, which leads to hunger, and access to public spaces like museums, and I’m asking this very selfishly, because we, as architects have been obsessed with the design of museums, you know, every famous architect will have been a museum here and there. So let’s look at Daniel Liebeskind. Jewish Museum, you see the Guggenheim by Frank Lloyd Wright and now you’re building a virtual museum, you’ve actually built it. Yeah, just reflect on the broad idea of of access with the museum and how closely or loosely tied is… it is to the idea of hunger because it almost seems poetic and metaphorical in the sense that, in a way, I appreciate that it’s virtual so that everybody is able to access it. But the way you guys have gone ahead and done it is you’ve actually designed a physical space which exists in the virtual… I don’t even know how to explain how to explain it, but…

Abby Liebman
Okay, we don’t… So we think, you know, I think it was one of my colleagues who said, it’s not 3d it’s 2.5 D. It’s something a little more immersive than what is a flat webpage but it’s a same time, it’s not virtual reality because I say those words and get nauseous. So I can’t, I’m not good at that whole. But I want to go back a little bit to the beginning of your remarks, and then loop back to here. So even, you know, listening as you begin to describe the elements that you’re exploring this season that think of how complicated that is, I mean, there’s just all of these different access points and relationships between systems when we just talk about food systems. And when you layer into that notion of food justice, which is really where the Anti Hunger Movement fits, that you’ve got another layer of complexity there. And so when I was alluding to the fact of what we wanted people to experience, this is not just the complexity of the systems designed around food and hunger, but the complexity of people’s lives of what it is that happens to us as human beings, isn’t one segment. Right? It’s everything in our lives is affecting the way we are living our lives. And getting across that complexity was an important part of what we wanted to convey with the museum that there’s a lot going on here. And it is complicated, and that we made choices about what to explore more deeply what to really highlight and, you know, the more you immerse yourself in the museum and its galleries, the more questions we expect that you will have about, well, where did this go? And can I go even deeper here. But it was also important for us to reflect for people about how normalised the issues of hunger have become certainly in our country, and to speke a way of conveying that in a space where people feel like they’re looking at something in an immersive way, right? So when you go into a museum, especially a museum that has a particular theme or purpose, if you will, you know, you’re going in to be immersed in that experience. And we wanted to create that sensibility. But we also wanted people to feel as if they were entering a space, they’re entering a time of really focused attention. One of the things that is often a challenge about working in the virtual universe, is that there are a lot of things that can distract you from what you are doing, you appear to be present, but really, you could be listening to anything, you could be really looking at something else, I could be a very skilled typist, and I could be busy here doing something else, like writing a thesis about something, even while I’m talking to you. And this is something that we hoped would capture people’s imagination in a way where you respect the idea that you have entered a space you are in a, a space that conveys focus, quiet, being thoughtful. I mean, I think about how human beings react in museums, right? We tend to speak, we lower our voices, we speak with a degree of respect, we are focused on what we’re looking at and what we’re experiencing with other senses. I mean, to me, the regret of what happens in the virtual space is that you are isolated from other human beings. So the sensibilities that you get, and what you pick up from when you’re in a public space, are somewhat lost here. But in that you reduced to a lot of the visual, and the…and the auditory. So there’s the other senses, the feeling, the the smell all that and you can’t when we had believed me, we went off on a number of tangents about things, if it were real, what we could do at this, you know, we can have an exhibit that was about, you know, recipes that were from the, you know, the Great Depression, and, and you could smell a lot it would smell like and yeah, we were people of great… Well, I would say, let’s call it imagination and creativity. Often it is like going off topic, but we I think… I think we wanted to convey the seriousness of this. Also, this is a topic that is complicated, and diverse, and, and very much informed and created by a lot of systemic challenges in the United States. And so you wanted people to understand that yeah, it takes a whole museum to look at this, because this isn’t easy stuff. And it isn’t simple stuff. Um, there’s a narrative arc in a museum, there’s probably more than one. And so we wanted it to feel like you were really entering a space, I guess that’s the easiest way to say this, rather than the very long way I’ve gotten to. It’s also what our architect conveyed by what he designed. And this will be lost on some people, but we picked certain materials, we wanted to create a sense of gravitas. But something that is grounded in the past. But as future oriented is looking to the future, that there’s a sense of optimism and the spaces feels like there’s a lot of light and air and space inside the museum. And that’s deliberate. These are choices that we made with our architect to help people come in and not feel burdened by everything they’re going to see. But to understand that there is action that we can take, that can resolve all of this. So it has a sense of hope in it just even in the way the space feel.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And I think also in a way, hypothetically, the location of the museum, even though virtually is so significant, if you want to talk about where…

Abby Liebman
Yeah, it’s… it’s located. So it’s in Washington DC, it is located with the Washington Monument right behind it and in between the United States Department of Agriculture and the US Holocaust Museum, a physical impossibility in Washington, DC, you can’t actually do that also, partly because that land, there is some land there, but it’s you can’t build on it. So we did want to create this idea, the symbolism of that, you know, we are a Jewish organisation, and Jews are very steeped in history. And we every year we spend the year reviewing the complete history of our people, from 1000s of years ago, and we retell stories all the time, because we see the relevance of those stories now 1000s of years later, and we’re learning from them all the time. So thinking about what is a very dominant part of the history of Jews in the world, which is the Holocaust and, and a devastating experience. But one that also, we hope, you know, taught the world the truth of never again, that this cannot happen again. So again, there’s these ideas there, right of this is a really dark time and yet, what emerged from what we hope is a sense of commitment from the world that this is something we will never tolerate again. And then, although I’m not naive, we didn’t tolerate it everywhere in the world, and there are terrible genocides and human rights abuses everywhere. But at least the symbolism was there. And then, and the US Department of Agriculture is in the United States, the government agency that is responsible for the nutrition safety net in America. And that that agency, is the… the government’s response, perhaps a little too narrowly, I might add, that there are other agencies that have responsibilities and other areas that should in fact, be engaged in a lot more of his work. But we liked the symbolism between Jewish and agriculture and that that creates a…a moment for people in terms if you’re aware enough to understand where we’re at.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think it’s also appropriate for the museum to exist in the virtual space because logistically, if I was thinking, you know, the kind of resources and the capital that would go into building and maintaining a physical museum would kind of defy the purpose of it being for something that deals with a problem like hunger, but the virtual museum itself is also extremely elaborate. And when I was talking to Liza the other day, I refer to this one allegory about the American progress going from east to west, it’s a woman in the sky with a torch and that’s… that’s an allegory that is very frequently used in academic classes at Harvard as well. And that’s what I had seen it the first time as how it’s almost depicting progress as movement from savagery to development, you know, the electric road, the railway, the train that goes you know, from darkness to light, and she’s carrying books with her and my friend and I teach this course and we always bring back that allegory. So it’s really nice to see that and how, you know, the idea of development and the idea of food, how they kind of go together? Is there any particular gallery or exhibit that you think is very appealing and that you want to talk about?

Abby Liebman
So I, I very much love the gallery that ‘America in Crisis and Recovery’ and then the ‘World War Two and the Paradoxes of the Post War Era’, both of those because they’re deeply steeped in. There’s a lot of photography in them. I love photography, there’s… there are different moments in here, there’s things, there are posters from that time, I think it’s really evocative of that time. There are commercials that you can play, there’s a TV interview that you can play a clip of, there’s a, but there’s also the photographs of Dorothea Lange and I am a big fan of her work because I thought it was really evocative of what was happening, but also because I know she did this as a part of a government project and that she had, she made very deliberate choices and was very steeped in the stories she was trying to tell with any one photograph. And I love the idea that there are all these different ways of interacting in that space with the history. But I also am mindful of the fact that the museum reveals some narrative arcs that most of us overlook during those times about the amplification of racial injustice that was happening in that time. The… the deep sexism that was very present in that time about the roles of women in this country and, and around the world, actually. So I find it to be the sort of perfect example of what I was hoping we could do with this, which is, here are these different ways of communicating, there’s different ways of absorbing information and different kinds of information that you may not have thought about. I mean, what did it mean that we developed frozen TV dinners? What did that do in terms of access to food? And in terms of creating opportunities for those who had heretofore been boxed out of the paid workforce? What did they do? And in terms of investments in food production, and, you know, we just don’t think about all of that is… that complicated? I think of like, oh, created convenience and did a lot more than that. And so I think, you know, particular those two particular galleries I really am. I really like visiting them being that space.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So you did mention how MAZON the organisation is kind of built on Jewish values and you spoke about that a little bit and how, even hypothetically, it’s located between the Department of Agriculture and the Holocaust Museum. Now, I’m also aware that the museum in the way it’s designed and curated is not specifically built to highlight issues of a particular faith or culture, it’s kind of more broad in terms of its outlook towards history towards the people who it offers access to. My question is in your advocacy, and because this is a museum, that is not just a history lesson, that you’re actively working towards some kind of action oriented goals or bringing about change. How do you see the museum fit into the larger idea of trying to find a solution or find a better way to address the question of hunger?

Abby Liebman
Well, in part because the we tell the history of one, we almost did it. So one of the things that is evident as you move through the museum, and you are… you enter into the galleries regarding the 1960s and 1970s, you can see that there were policies and programs put into place that began to see results in deep declines in the number of Americans who were food insecure. We saw that again during the recent pandemic lockdown times. And so we know that we… we do… we the loyal we know how to actually begin to have an impact on those who struggle with this. But again, there’s this lack of political No, and but there was a time when there was a political well, although that was also a time of great, you know, partisanship and political divisiveness. I mean, you just have to think about what was happening in the 60s, but I think there are some significant differences that you begin to see as you delve deeper into the history and stay in those moments where it really matters who’s in leadership, it really matters about what they they brought from their own backgrounds into those leadership roles, what they that they have vision, but it’s never enough to have a vision, you have to not only have vision, but… but the commitment to realising that vision and the abilities that allow you to actually realise that mission, that vision, it’s not, this isn’t something that happens all by itself, just because you had this brilliant idea, you’ve got to be able to make it real. And I think that that’s what we were seeing, because then President Lyndon Johnson was crafting the War on Poverty and a Great Society Program. He was somebody who came out of the US Senate, he had tremendous influence in the US Senate. And even though it was a divided body, and even though the house was also a divided body, he could push these things through. And it in doing so he… he basically used his leadership to signal that the government is really here to support the people of the country, that… that governs right, that it this isn’t about enriching some portion of the electorate, it’s about government being a support system for anyone who needs it. So I think that the ideas of history are invaluable here. But I also can see for us, if you don’t come from a perspective of values, in our cases, Jewish values, which are fairly universal, about the idea of justice, the idea that in Hebrews that ‘tzelem elohim’, that all human beings are made in the image of God, meaning that there is no judgement, because we are we are all saying this could be ‘I’ It isn’t a question of me distancing myself from you, we are the same and, and MAZON, we we really emphasise the idea of not judging people who have struggles that we don’t have. And instead talking about what do they need? And how can we get it to them because by doing so, we enrich all of us in a way that…that moves everyone forward. That’s the point, and those values help us to enter this space to have created this space and we may not name them throughout the museum, but they are very evident. For anyone who has any familiarity with what we what we articulate as the ways in which we approach this work. As you move through the museum, you will feel them. They’re there.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So the museum has been live for two odd weeks,I think what’s next, in terms… in terms of programming…

Abby Liebman
Okay, so if I say anything other than what we’re gonna really push up, build out, the rest of my, my staff will actually come from wherever they are, and they will haul me away somewhere. So I think that… the this is, you know, sort of echoing back our earlier conversation about access, and virtual versus real and metaverses and all that. But what we wanted was for this space to be as available as possible, but it’s only as available as people know about it. So what comes with this work is the need to push out this resource to some unexpected places to unusual places, because we want everybody to see this because anyone and everyone can experience hunger, and should all have an understanding of what our history is around this and what we can do in the future. So we want to classrooms as you know, 12 year olds, to be able to have a group experience watching together looking at the museum together. And, you know, if we had built this in DC, the idea of a cross country field trip would have been prohibitively expensive for most people and that wouldn’t happen. But this is a way to create that. That kind visit allows us to push this to a place where it might not otherwise go because we love the idea that it was one of your guests who would not be a person we would ordinarily have thought we were reaching who actually did reach, who then told you so this is a lot of this is about idea. How do we share and how to invest in resources that allow us to share so that’s what this is really about sharing information, problem solving, and our work now which is a heavy lift for us is to move this out sort of niche attention that is getting too broad based on to those who are advocates, those who are advocates in waiting, those who had no real understanding why it was that there are people who are relying on school meals here in Los Angeles. Many of the workers in the schools and the teachers went out on strike in sympathy with those workers. And what clicked in immediately, which is a lesson from the pandemic, was an opportunity for parents to come to schools and still pick up the practice and lunch that their children ordinarily get during the school day. And we learned that during the pandemic, so we are learning, we can see that with small changes. We have a big impact. And that’s a deep lesson. You can see how we undid the solutions that we had crafted and it doesn’t take so they can be restored. Or perhaps we need to be restored. Plus, that’s not just good enough to go back to what it was, we were content, let’s do bigger, let’s do more. But the idea is, the next big thing here is marketing the museums of the world so that the world can experience this. If you see it, you will understand why it has to be and so that’s good.I know there’s a lot of work to be done on your end.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I’m wishing you lots of good luck for this endeavour. So thank you for this conversation.

Abby Liebman
It was truly a pleasure. I loved your questions.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.