Janet Poppendieck is a scholar and activist in poverty, hunger and food assistance in the US. She is a Senior Faculty Fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. She is also Professor Emerita of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York, where she served as Director of the Center for the Study of Family Policy for many years.

Dr. Poppendieck has authored many articles, published several books and received numerous prestigious awards that recognized her as a national authority and expert on hunger, food assistance and public policy. Her books include 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; Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (Viking 1998, Penguin, 1999); and Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression (Rutgers 1986, University of California Press, 2014). She also received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award in 2011 and appears in the documentary films Lunchlines and A Place at the Table.

Dr. Poppendieck was the first Chair of the Board of Directors of Community Food Advocates. She sits on the Advisory Committees of Wellness in the Schools and the Hunter College Welfare Rights Initiative, and served for many years as a member of the Board of Directors of Why Hunger and the Community Food Resource Center.

Dr. Poppendieck received her MSW and PhD from Brandeis University and her BA from Duke University. She currently resides in Brooklyn with her husband.