America land of plenty - REALLY!

 I know that is the view most of the world has of the United States, but if that is true please tell me why government food assistance is growing at such an alarming rate that one in four Americans is enrolled in one of the 15 federal feeding programs. There are 42 million Americans on food stamps and 30 million kids getting free breakfast and lunch at public schools. Fifty million Americans do not have enough food or they are uncertain of whether they can get enough food to feed their families. One in six Americans reported running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20.

The USDA researchers attributed the rise in use of federal food programs to the recession, and indicated that many of the food banks have reported serving people who never expected to require assistance to feed their families. The number of Americans using food programs will grow even more, before things get better.

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where sometime during the previous year people did not have enough food to eat. I do not think using politically correct words make people who are not getting enough to eat feel better. Just like not saying the words ‘Muslim Terrorist” make Muslim Terrorist love us or respect us anymore.

I heard a U.S. politician ask if hunger is really a problem why are there so many overweight Americans. The answer is hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin, people making trade-offs between foods that’s are filling and foods that are nutritious may actually contribute to obesity. For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds are the results of poor diet and are unintended side effect of hunger itself.

As the face of hunger has changed, so has its address. The town of Spring, Texas, is a suburb of Houston where I am from. There are curving streets and shade trees and privacy fences. The suburbs are the home of the American dream, but they are also a place where poverty is on the rise. As urban housing has gotten more expensive, the working poor have been pushed out. Today hunger in the suburbs is growing faster than in cities.

In the 90’s I vacationed in Hawaii and was shocked when a waitress told me that three families were living together and all the adults held down two jobs and were having a hard time surviving. I returned to Houston and shared the story with many. I decided then I would never want to live in Hawaii. But, today we have the same problem in Houston. There are families where all adults are working, but their income is not enough to keep the family consistently fed without assistance. The root problem is the lack of jobs that pay wages a family can live on, so food assistance has become the government’s—and society’s—way to supplement low wages.

We hear American people and American politicians talking about the 99% and the 1%, but what about the 16% who don’t have enough food to eat. President Obama recently described economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time.” The Democratic Party has decided to make inequality the main theme of their political campaigns. And yet, despite the current vogue in Washington for talking about inequality, the same political leaders have paid little attention to the hunger crisis which is now ravaging America’s poor communities.

The Democrats criticize the Republicans for not caring about the poor, but it does not seem to me the Democrats are really willing to champions the poor. All I have seen from Obama and his administration is a lot of talk about the poor and little action. Democrats tend to frame inequality as either an abstract issue or a division between the rich and the middle class. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s this huge disconnect, because the people most affected by poverty aren’t part of the conversation.  The Democratic and Republican politicians are having a national conversation on poverty without poor people.

Thirty percent of households with seniors indicated that they have had to choose between food and medical care and 35 percent had to choose between food and paying for heat/utilities. Nearly 1 million seniors living alone do not have enough food to eat on a regular basis or rely on food banks and charities.

Veterans are more than twice as likely to need help with food – a disgrace.

With all the poverty the USDA recently found that about 96 billion pounds of food available for human consumption in the United States were thrown away by retailers, restaurants, farmers and households over the course of one year. Fresh fruits and vegetables, fluid milk, grain products, and sweeteners accounted for 2/3 of these losses. This is not all the fault of retailers, restaurants and farmers the Federal government must take some of the blame because of Federal Laws that prohibit these products from being given to food pantries or directly to the poor because the government claims they fear food contamination.

The total cost of hunger - loss of work due to sickness, free clinics, etc. – is said to be about $90 billion a year. In contrast, it would only cost about $10 billion to $12 billion a year to virtually end hunger in the United States.

The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. The major problem is people cannot afford to buy food.

Hunger must stop being a silent crisis in the United States! Hunger in America is something the American government seems to not want the world to know about. If they did they may realize they may not be able to depend on America too much longer for foreign aid.