When I found out that Ken Regal, 65, was retiring at the end of June from a nearly 40-year career at Pittsburgh’s Just Harvest food advocacy organization, I knew I had to interview this man before he disappeared. I’ve known Ken off and on over the course of 30 years, sharing conferences, ideas, and woes as local food groups battled for community food security. He had always stood out in my mind as one of the more passionate, thoughtful, committed, and even humorous people I’ve worked with. Driving directly from the Pittsburgh airport to the Fireside Pub in the city’s Bakery District, I caught up with Ken to eat and drink our way through three hours of food movement history and deep reflection. What follows has been edited for length, clarity, and an attempt to maintain a PG-13 rating.

L: Ken; R: Mark

Mark Winne. Before we start, I want you to know we have just one ground rule: Say whatever you want.

Ken Regal. That shouldn’t be a problem.

The Early Years

M. Aside from the first 10 years of your life growing up in Brooklyn, most of your personal and professional life is rooted in Pittsburgh. What’s the rest of your early life story and who and what got you into the food justice world? In other words, who do you blame?

K. The first thing to know is that I didn’t seek out anti-hunger/food justice work. I wanted to do left-politics work, and I needed to earn a living—two things that don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. My politics didn’t come from my father who told me once the only reason he didn’t vote for Richard Nixon all five times Nixon was on a national ticket was because he was too young to vote the first time [1952].

M. I hate to confess this, but the only President’s hand I ever shook was Nixon’s when he spoke at a rally in my New Jersey town when I was 10 years old

K. Your secret is safe with me! My mother had more liberal politics and paid attention to current events, but my politics were largely shaped by Jewish social values. I was brought up in a moderately observant household; I was very involved in my synagogue’s youth groups, and over time, I became more religious than my parents.

M. Why?

K. Because unlike them, I believed what they taught me.

M. What else encouraged you to make a turn to social justice?

K. The earliest memory I have was when my grandfather took me to the United Nations when I was seven. I loved it because I was taken with the notion that all these nations could get together to make the world a better place. But as we left the building we were confronted with a giant anti-[Vietnam] war demonstration. I remember seeing long-haired hippies for the first time. They were mocking the U.S. as if a peace settlement had just ended the war. But I was seven and didn’t get the joke. After I got home, I was so upset when I discovered it wasn’t true.

M. What about Pittsburgh?

K. There was a very bitter teachers’ strike at my high school in Pittsburgh, and a friend of our family and member of our synagogue was an English teacher and a member of the union’s negotiating team. She wanted the students to be supportive of the strike, so recruited me, at the age of 17, to organize a student picket line. That was my first action ever.

My synagogue was small in a not-very-Jewish community. In fact, I was the only Jewish kid in my high school graduating class which was frustrating since there was a layer of antisemitism. It was based on ignorance more than hatred, but it gave me the lived experience of being a minority, something that I found helpful as the organizations I worked for waded into DEI issues.

M. It’s interesting that you weren’t what we might call a natural “foodie”, that your work trajectory took you down other social justice roads. How did the transition to anti-hunger and food justice work occur?

K. Well, I do like food a lot! Everybody should have some! But after college I had been working in various community, labor, and political organizing jobs around Pittsburgh including ACORN (Association of Community Organizations Now) and a city council campaign that elected someone who eventually become the first “out” elected official in the Pennsylvania State Legislature. I even applied for a VISTA position, but I was literally in the middle of filling out an application when President Reagan pulled the plug on the program.

M. I wonder how many young people are having the same experience today under the Trump/Musk regime!

K. In 1985 I heard about a part time fundraising job at a Pittsburgh organization called Hunger Action that I applied for and got. But within a year, the organization split into two factions that each had very different ideas about our direction. Being a little mercenary, I tried not to take sides hoping I might get a full-time job once the dust settled. My plan sort of paid off when Just Harvest, a new non-profit with a strong food policy and advocacy mission emerged from the fray. I was hired as one of three co-directors at the starting salary of $8.79 an hour, more money than I had every made before. More importantly, I’ve been getting a steady paycheck from Just Harvest every two weeks for the past 38 years!

M. But three co-directors for a small non-profit…how the heck did you make that work?

K. Since we had strongly held leftist principles, the only way we could conceive of running such an organization was with a flat, non-hierarchical organizational structure. We all had different job titles, but we all held the rank of co-director. It might sound confusing but sometimes it worked out well, like when we’d get a call from someone who asked to speak to the director. Depending on who they were—whether we liked them or not—we’d either say, “speaking” or “they aren’t here right now, can I take a message?”

The other co-directors were Anne Conley and Joni Rabinowitz, a person I admired greatly. Anne left for another position a year later, but Joni and I continued as co-directors until 13 years ago when she retired. I’ve been the sole director since then. But everything I learned in this work I learned from Joni. I never could have done what I’ve done at Just Harvest without her.

And as far my “early years” go, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

M. It sounds all too familiar to many of us who decide to make a career of social justice work and in the non-profit field. Organizational shake-ups and disagreements over mission have roiled many groups I’ve worked with, especially in my early days. But at least your starting salary beat mine—I began in Hartford at $8 a hour!

Food Justice Advocacy

M. Once Just Harvest found its footing, what kind of issues did you tackle?

K. School breakfast. Like school lunch, USDA reimburses eligible school districts for the cost of serving breakfast to lower income students. But unlike school lunch, serving breakfast first thing in the morning at schools had largely been considered optional, partly because of the additional logistical problems associated with eating at school at the same time school begins.

The Pittsburgh school district and the independent school districts (43 altogether) in surrounding Allegheny County were among the few large metropolitan areas in the country that did not offer school breakfast in 1985. It was a good and winnable issue for us. We had a number of allies including a group called “Women in an Urban Crisis” who ran a Black Panther-like breakfast program at one of the city’s lowest income schools. We listened to the people and parents, but the Superintendent of Schools, our main adversary, listened to the finance and business office, school bus people, and principals. It was hard work but we eventually won. As a result, tens of thousands of children across Allegheny County can now get a free breakfast at school.

M. Today, looking back on campaigns like that, it’s hard to imagine that things like decent food for school children was something that public officials once resisted. Our current food assistance battles with the Trump administration remind us not to take our gains for granted.

Are there any other highlights from that period that come to mind?

K. My co-director, Joni Rabinowitz, was a radical Marxist but well respected by local leaders of all stripes because she told the truth, was frank, stood by her values but was never an asshole. She was personable and could sit down with someone who radically disagreed with her and talk about their hobbies for 20 minutes! But a week before we were scheduled to meet with the most conservative school board in the county about breakfast, the Pittsburgh newspaper ran a profile of Joni that, among other things, asked her who she’d most like to have dinner with. She answered Fidel Castro! Not surprisingly, we got red-baited like crazy at that school board meeting because of that article! But before too long, children in that district were eating school breakfast.

M. Looking back over 40 years with Just Harvest, I bet you have a number of other best moments, and perhaps some low points as well.

K. Sometimes it’s hard to separate “best moments” that were good for my ego from those that were good for Just Harvest and the community…

M. Maybe you should look at those ego moments as partial compensation for low pay—a kind of fringe benefit!

K. Well, I admit it’s really fun to see yourself on TV; it’s really fun to have important people thank you for running a successful fundraising campaign; it’s really fun to be quoted in the newspaper (back when there were newspapers). And it’s really fun to be the recipient of significant gifts from Bruce Springsteen and hear him talk about Just Harvest on stage! When he performed in Pittsburgh in the late 80s, it was the first time he gave money to food organizations, something he started doing everywhere he performed across the country [my organization, the Hartford Food System, received major support from Springsteen on at least four occasions. He continues that practice to this day]. In Pittsburgh, he supported the food pantry run by the United Steelworkers Local 1397 whose members were hurt badly by closing steel mills.

M. How about bad times?

K. As the fundraising director, I knew when we didn’t have enough money to cover the payroll in two days. Then there was the Wednesday morning staff meeting the day after Trump’s 2016 election when I had to rally a very depressed group of young people. Just as bad was the election of a Republican Pennsylvania Governor who must have searched the country high and low for the most draconian Secretary of Human Services possible, a true hero of the Heritage Foundation! He took great pride in seeing how many people he could kick off Medicaid.

But here’s a good moment without ego. On the first day my son (he’s now in his 30s) started elementary school, he brought a flyer home that told parents how to sign their children up for school breakfast. As I’m reading it, I realize that thousands of parents across the city and county are also getting the same flyer. That was because of my work!

M. Is there a lesson there?

K. It’s a reminder of the power of public policy advocacy. If we had taken all the money we raised and used it to directly feed poor kids, it would have lasted a week. Instead, we now have a federally funded program that has fed hundreds of thousands of children millions of dollars of meals over several decades. School breakfast is now normal; it’s just one of those things that’s in the world.

Movements, Justice, and a Philosophy of Social Change

M. Let’s turn from the local to the national, and from the practical to the philosophic. Having heard you speak on a variety of topics in the past I’d love to hear your views on topics like the food movement and social justice, including DEI. On the last topic, we’ll ask the restaurant to turn up the music in case MAGA operatives have bugged our table.

K. The struggle for food justice has been creative in good ways. If Just Harvest has any particular skill, it’s been in stealing really good ideas from organizations all over the country. There is a sense of experimentation and idea sharing in the food movement that is really valuable. What we as a movement haven’t mastered to our detriment is the art of building a mass movement capable of taking mass action.

M. Why have we come up short? Is it because the food movement has spoken powerfully and eloquently on hunger, equitable food systems, and sustainability but failed to cohere around a central message and organizational structure?

K. Unlike the labor movement, civil rights movement, or the welfare rights movement, the food movement quickly devolved into lots of organizations with separate missions, albeit echoing similar themes, but never coalescing around one powerful message and action.

M. I’m wondering about the relationship to funding and how it influences the evolution and breakdown of movements. The movements you mentioned were largely self-funded while the thousands of organizations that made up the food movement were and are dependent on a nearly infinite number of funding sources in the usual non-profit way.

K. That’s exactly right! The self-funded model is a very important part of what can make a mass movement work. Even though the civil rights movements received support from the United Autoworkers, the Ford Foundation, and mainstream white churches, there was a deep, personal commitment.

M. As evidenced by the woman in the pew of a Black church who dug deep into her purse when the plate was passed to sustain the marches and marchers.

K. Right. It also goes to how affluent people think about poverty and rights in fundamentally different ways. They see the path of least resistance to address hunger as direct food assistance through food banks. This of course solves an immediate problem, but it prevents the kind of movement-driven resources from being generated, the kind of movement capable of promoting fundamental change.

Even organizations like Just Harvest that address underlying root causes inevitably require mainstream money. A big chunk of our budget comes from government; a small chunk comes from affluent individuals who attend the galas we put on, and an essentially non-existent fraction comes from people who are poor. The last time we took up a collection at a neighborhood meeting in a church basement was almost never!

M. How about leadership and participation by lower income people, and people with lived experience?

K. We have not had much success in building long-term leadership among those members of the community, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. We tested and ran [organizing and training] model after model. We ran a leadership development project for low-income women that only produced one graduate. She did go on to organize a Black women’s advocacy organization, and in the process, overcame the same hardships—her son was killed in a gang shooting—that the other participants faced but couldn’t overcome. They disappeared as soon as we stopped paying them to attend meetings.

M. It sounds like you did everything you could.

K. Leadership development required more resources than we could commit as well as more resources than we could find from funders, especially when the payoff from that kind of investment takes a very long time to achieve, if ever. I worry about the future of our movement if it can’t create mass power for working class and poor people. No revolution has ever been won without that.

M. Let me push back on that for a moment. Wasn’t the goal of the food movement to deliver more resources, primarily in the form of healthy and affordable food? You’ve done it with your work on school breakfast and other Just Harvest campaigns and projects. SNAP delivers over a $100 billion in food assistance annually; 60,000 food banks and pantries do the same; thousands of community farmers’ markets and food production projects make the commitment to local food security visible.

K. I wonder if we suffer from lack of ambition. Some of my staff at Just Harvest want us to be more militant. They want to work on securing a basic living wage and good jobs for all. I point to the Poor People’s Movement and similar efforts over the years. Many weren’t genuinely made up of poor people—they were mostly young, disaffected anarchists. We tried it 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and it never worked then, why do you think it will work now.

The closest we came to a mass movement was the welfare reform campaign during the Clinton Administration, but it started to decay when people said they were too busy working to attend the rally! Are you fucking kidding me! Nobody said that in Flint in 1937 [a 44-day labor dispute that was a groundbreaking victory for unionization]. The labor organizers were breaking balls if you didn’t show up to the union meeting after working a 16-hour shift!

M. I guess what we lack in terms of class consciousness and the fire in the belly, we try to make up for in our affinity for smaller scale, community-based food projects; mostly white, highly educated liberals who defend SNAP; and thousands of affluent, mostly white, often retired volunteers at food banks who call their members of congress when asked to. But I agree, these are largely not poor people nor do they constitute a mass movement.

K. I love those food projects too because what they bring to the table is a moral and symbolic clarity. What they don’t bring to the table is economic impact. I’m still a Marxist and the thing that influences everything else is the economic relationship between the owning class and the working class. And if the working class doesn’t have class consciousness, it will never win.

DEI, Red and Green Chile, and Moral Obligation

M. I don’t want to forget about DEI. I’ve been known to remember weird stuff, and one of those times was in 2000 at the Community Food Security Coalition’s annual conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico which you attended. During a heated plenary session, several participants accused the conference organizers of not doing enough to ensure a greater diversity of attendees. It was also Halloween, and several people were wearing costumes including two women dressed as chiles—New Mexico’s iconic pepper—one as a green chile and the other as a red chile. You spoke up during the debate to say that the conference had done a good job to ensure diversity, and jokingly, referred to the fact that we had both red and green chiles present! Do you remember that?

K. I remember most of it including feeling pissed-off at the over-the-top PC-ness of the diversity challenge when, in fact, there had been an aggressive and successful effort to raise money for low-income scholarships as well as simultaneous Spanish-English translations in the workshops, something I’d never experienced before at a conference. And, yes, you’re probably right about my chile joke!

M. How do you see DEI in the food movement today?

K. I sometimes joke that everyone more radical than me is insane and that everyone less radical is a sell-out. I worry that my own sensibility on the anti-racism agenda is like that too—anyone more anti-racist is just guilt tripping, and anyone less so is in denial as to how pervasive structural racism is. I’ve been to anti-racism trainings—some good, some bad, some really bad! The best ones acknowledge that we all have different identities, and we code-switch between them. For me, I’ve led a life of privilege as a white, straight man, but I’ve lived my whole life as a member of a minority religious group that has been oppressed for thousands of years. The most emotionally meaningful thing I do each year is gathering with my family for the Passover Seder where, among other topics, we talk about being descendants of slaves. If not for the intervention of the Almighty, we’d still be enslaved. That gives us a moral obligation to care about the well-being of other people.

M. In a recent Pittsburgh NPR piece about your pending retirement, a local activist by the name of Dave Coplan said you are an exemplar of “moral leadership.” How do you apply both a moral obligation and moral leadership to your work?

K. Well, Dave’s a very generous guy! But as I said earlier, what I learned from Jewish social values is the need to approach the systemic nature of poverty. If you heed the Torah’s commandments, particularly with regard to food, you are commanded to leave the corners of the field unharvested and to leave the gleanings for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. You may own the field, but you don’t “own” the corners, the poor do. We’re not told to do it as an act of charity, it’s not optional; it’s a commandment.

M. That’s not charity?

K. No. It’s not a “good deed,” you’re not getting an award for being a good philanthropist, you’re not getting a tax deduction. That’s all bullshit! By setting aside those corners you are in fact “paying your taxes.” I refer to this as history’s first “entitlement program.”

M. How would you instruct younger people interested in entering the social justice field?

K. I want to get them out of the mindset that all we have to do is give poor people some food and we’ve done our job. I remind them that over 100 years ago, entire cities would burn to the ground because all we had were volunteers manning a bucket brigade. Today we pay for professional fire departments, and we don’t lose cities or even neighborhoods.

M. I sense a lesson here for the Republican majority…

K. You’re right. When Republicans say we’ve spent a trillion dollars feeding people but we still have hunger, I remind them we still have fires which is why we pay for fire departments. Because we have federal food programs today, nobody starves to death in America.

M. To circle back to your earlier thoughts, we need those corners of the field—those programs—because our capitalist system doesn’t work for everybody; its failures are legion, and they leave vast sections of the country clinging to the edge of a cliff for their lives.

K. These are the kind of questions and arguments I ask students when I’m trying to get them to think.

M. Well, you got me thinking, but it looks like we’re the last people in the restaurant which is why we’re getting a dirty look from our server. Before we go, what are your plans for retirement?

K. I want to spend more time gardening. I also plan to hang out at the New York Mets spring training camp in Florida; probably spend more time with my NYC family members. Beyond that, probably sleep late and smoke dope all day. Don’t print that last part!