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INTRODUCTION
Hunger may be difficult to understand for those who have not experienced it. Indeed, the global scale of human hunger is immense: despite having decreased substantially since 1990-92,1 the United Nations estimates that around 842 million people, twelve percent of the global population, were "unable to meet their dietary energy requirements in 2011-13[.]"2 In the United States, hunger, officially cognized as "food insecurity,"3 increased substantially in the years leading to, during, and following the Great Recession (December 2007 to June 2009).4 For example, from 2006 through 2012, approximately thirteen million more people in the United States became food insecure, and about ten million more people became impoverished.5 Thus in 2012 approximately forty-nine million people lived in food insecure households.6
In this Article, I take the opportunity presented by law students in the nation's capital, who organized the April 2, 2014 law review symposium, "Poverty in the New Gilded Age," to reflect on how United States law and society cognizes hunger and poverty by highlighting an important but understudied split in the circuits of the United States Courts of Appeals over the constitutionality of cities' efforts to criminalize, and otherwise regulate, people who provide food to hungry people within city-owned public places like parks, sidewalks, and streets.7 Adopting the terms preferred by some of the politically motivated social activists who have litigated against their criminalization for sharing food with hungry people, yet who expressly eschew the label of charity, I call such laws the anti-food sharing ordinances, and their sociolegal challenges, the food sharing cases.8
Before discussing the circuit split over the food sharing cases, however, I critique the symposium framing of the present sociolegal situation of the United States-the idea of a "New Gilded Age." Part I starts with three critiques of the image chosen to frame the symposium, which foregrounded a solitary, apparently homeless middle-aged, and racially White man. After explaining my concerns that the symposium image unduly conflates homelessness with other situations of poverty, obscures the current demographics of impoverished people in the United States, and fails to train our gaze upon the power elite,9 who are arguably responsible for creating the sociolegal situation of the New Gilded Age, I then ask what law students and critical sociolegal scholars might mean...