Meet Dr. Janet Poppendieck

USFA Emeritus Council Member

Hunter College
City University of New York

Jan is a Professor Emerita of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York, and a Senior faculty Fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute at the CUNY School of Public Health and Health Policy. Her primary concerns, both as a scholar and as an activist, are poverty, hunger, and food assistance in the United States. She is the author of Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression (Rutgers: 1986; University of California, 2014), Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (Viking, 1998, Penguin, 1999) and Free For All: Fixing School Food in America, (University of California Press, 2010), which received the 2010 Book of the Year award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. Jan is a recipient of a 2011 James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. She serves on the Board of Directors of Community Food Advocates, and the Advisory Committee of Wellness in the Schools. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and family.