Paul Ash
By Tim Henry
Executive producer Khari Johnson
Spending summers on his grandparents farms in Oklahoma, Paul Ash got a glimpse of the agrarian life his family lived for generations. There his family grew, ate and stored it’s own food. They would sell part of the crop to purchase supplies for the farm, but mostly worked to sustain an existence.
“Spending time there certainly takes the glamour out of farming,” Ash said.
He would choose a different life than generations before him, but keeps an interest in how people feed themselves. Before becoming executive director of the San Francisco Food Bank, he would study agriculture and economics at the University of California Davis, then get his Masters in business administration from SF State in the early 1980’s.
As the leader of the San Francisco Food Bank (SFFB) for over 20 years, the SFFB has gone from distributing one million pounds of food a year to over 30 million, working with local organizations and food pantries to find and feed people in need.
He’s confident when talking about hunger and believes it’s only a matter of efficiency and organization, a problem that can be solved.
“One way to think about the job of the non-profit sector,” Ash said, “or the human-services sector is to try and correct some of those real problems of capitalism. “Low-income people often don’t have the where-with-all or the resources to push back,” Ash said. “So in a way, that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to push back on behalf of our clients.”
Part of their work, through lobbying and trying to cut red tape for their clients, is to not let capitalism go to an extreme. “Because if it does go to that extreme I think it will blow up on itself, I don’t think people would stand for that forever. When 20% of the people live below the poverty line… how much more can you tolerate?”
According to SFFB statistics, nearly one in ten San Franciscans are at risk of going hungry.
[ACCORDING TO THEIR LITERATURE]
“Hunger touches people of every age, race, ethnic group and neighborhood. In some families, hunger occurs when a sudden emergency or crisis hits, but for most low-income San Franciscans, hunger has become a long-term condition of poverty.”
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School
Like so many Californians, Ash didn’t grow up here. His father worked in construction and Ash went to eight different schools between kindergarten and 12th grade, before the family settled the Bay Area in 1969.
Ash was late to determine what he wanted to be but has always gravitated towards large scale food production and issues of hunger.
“Maybe I had a better idea of what I wanted to do than I thought,” Ash said. When he decided to get his Masters, his parents were no longer paying for his education and would join the ranks of SF State’s working class students. To pay the bills, he worked in the accounting department of a small business.
“The Cal program was very expensive,” Ash said. “The fees were just astronomical. I think they assumed that some company was paying your tuition if you were taking classes at night. The SF State program was affordable, and it was very hands on. Most of the educators were working In the field, so for an accounting class you would have a partner from an accounting firm, and so on.”
While at SF State he called the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood home but “it was no longer the hippy hang out that it was In the 60’s.” Don’t think tie-dye and dope smoking. Think Ben and Jerry’s, no parking and gentrification.
He didn’t live much of a life on-campus but made little difference since he only had time for night classes.
“It was very quiet,” Ash said. “You could walk from the old business department to the student union, and not see anyone. I was just out on campus a month ago,” he said, “and it definitely feels more like a community than it did then. It didn’t feel like a full college experience when I went there.”
Like many students working and taking classes at SF State at night, it was simply a pragmatic relationship, school was only about school – no frat parties, no homecoming games, just work and class.
And skiing. Most students seem to find a way to have fun, even on a tight budget. Ash would find a way to balance classes and skiing, and snuck up to Squaw Valley in north Lake Tahoe as often as he could. Today he skis with his two young children.
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The Food Bank
After finishing school, Ash was hired as the director of the San Francisco branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in 1984, a post he found interesting, but one he wasn’t especially passionate about. He spent five years there before a friend told him about
the Food Bank.
“I heard that it was an interesting organization,” Ash said, “but that they weren’t doing very well.”
The director of the Food Bank had just left, and Ash was hired to take his place. “It was like something out of a novel. They just handed me the keys and I started on Monday.”
Knowing something about the SFFB and Paul Ash means knowing something about hunger. Most Americans, and indeed, most San Franciscans probably don’t think there are hungry people in their communities, or that hunger is not just something you see plague people in war torn countries in scenes from the TV news.
“If you walked down the street today,” Ash said, “or if you ate in a restaurant today and you were looking across the counter” you would see people “who were technically in poverty. And in an expensive city like San Francisco, it’s exacerbated by the cost of living.”
“So our job is to try and get food to people,” Ash said. “It’s a very achievable problem to solve, we just need to organize ourselves better.”
Ash said he realized how much food the United States is capable of producing when he studied economics and agriculture at UC Davis. “We could almost feed the world based on what we could produce, if we produced all out, as they say.”
Ash approaches hunger scientifically.
“A Masters in Business has a lot to do with logistics, timing, getting things to the right place at the right time,” Ash said. “We have a lot of trucks out there and that have to pick things up and drop things off at exactly the right time, so there’s a lot of planning involved.”
“I think society has become more bifurcated,” Ash said. “There’s fewer people in the middle classes, and fewer people at the very top, and many more sort of at the bottom income range.”
Hunger is a hidden problem, according to the Food Bank’s literature. “Among the vast majority of hungry people who live in San Francisco, hunger is a hidden problem. It strikes individuals and families with children, as well as the elderly poor. Many of the people who need food assistance have full- or part-time jobs. Low-income people are constantly making difficult choices among food, health care and rent; food is often the first thing to go.”
One thing the SFFB has implemented in Ash’ time there is to distribute food in a farmer’s market style – the products are placed on a table and people pick and choose according to their
tastes. This style is not only a more efficient use of food, Ash said, but it allows its clients to keep their dignity.
“It feels much better to choose your own food than to be handed a bag that’s already been prepared,” Ash said. “And then people don’t get things that they don’t want. If someone doesn’t want a watermelon, that’s fine, somebody else will want two, and they can have more bread.”
