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 f