Hunger in America

Some thoughts that plopped out of my head as I read an expatriate e-friend's thoughts and prayers after hearing the world news on TV, where politically biased news readers talk about hunger in the United States as if it were something that fitted into the Marxist narrative where horrible capitalists force people to work sixteen hours a day and don't pay them enough to feed them. Well, that's not the way it works. I thought of this person's foreign readers reading the words that fit into the narrative that totally does not fit, and found myself typing all this...

Much of the poverty in the US is caused by our definition of poverty as having less than 80-90% of the people. That means that 10-20% of people will *always* be “below the poverty level”…the poor, poor people who might have to depend on government aid for cell phones, private school tuition. and name-brand athletic shoes for unathletic growing children.

People who’ve lost everything in floods, fires, etc., really are poor–at least temporarily. People who are homeless in cities really are poor–though the majority of “homeless & hungry” panhandlers are neither homeless nor hungry. Then there’s the kind of poverty that comes from not knowing what to do with what people have. I think that accounts for most of the hungry children, whatever color.

It’s not that food, or money to buy food, isn’t there. It’s not that most of the children are small or thin! Most of them are grossly overgrown from eating hormone-fattened meat. They have deficiency diseases because they make bad food choices. They make bad food choices because they listen to advertisements!

I doubt that they’d read books by us old (and White) foodies, and remember, a few years ago, publishers not picking up on a book a young man who survived our peculiar kind of famine wanted to write. The medium to reach them would probably need to be rap videos.

But seriously…anyone with an address can get food stamps in the US. Do not be deceived. They get enough money to buy food for a month. In my town I know which ones always have money/food to barter for other things at the end of the month, and which ones always blow out their handouts in the first week and have bare cupboards toward the end of the month. We cannot and must not try to force food choices on people, so not much can be done except to offer decent school meals (if possible) for the kids. The ones who are hungry for half the month are the ones who eat convenience food for the other half. The ones who bake bread and cook beans are likely to bring me sacks of canned veg to trade.

So for the second half of the month, in my town, they can go to the food bank. Some young relatives of mine run that program now. They get all kinds of food donations and cash, too, to help with water and electricity bills. It’s a very well intentioned program that ought to be an adequate safety net if people knew how to use a safety net, and of course some do. They give people a reasonable mix of meat, veg, fruit, bread, pasta, nuts, dairy, and pricey “treat” foods, three big bags per person, enough to get anybody through two weeks…but of course there’s no guarantee that anyone will be able to digest the food person was given, and no efficient way to substitute more appropriate items. They’ll give a whole bag of frozen food to someone who has no freezer, so what’s not eaten that day will be ruined the next day in summer. They give meat to vegetarians, dairy products to the lactose-intolerant, wheat products to the gluten-intolerant, and often on roads leading away from the food bank on handout days you find a whole bag of handout food someone couldn’t use lying beside the road!

Then there’s a church meal program for those who can’t cook, which spotlights an even worse problem–the case I knew of personally died just this summer–where addicts will buy food, take food from food banks and church meal programs, and resell that food for booze and drugs.

Hunger is a large-scale problem even in the USA, but not one that can be solved by just throwing money at it.