Hunger USA
Thursday, June 3, is National Hunger Awareness Day. What does America need such an observance? Times are better aren't they? America is the most powerful empire in the history of the world. Hunger in America?
I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks. -- George W. Bush discussing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and US food donations on CNN (January 2, 2003).
The United States has never grown so much food. Scarcity is down, food
is cheap, and enough food is produced to provide for every women, man, and
child. Yet, in the world's richest nation, more than 36,000,000 people,
including 14,000,000 children, experience hunger. (Mark Nord and
Margaret Andrews, "Reducing food insecurity in the United States:
Assessing progress toward a national objective." The United States
Department of Agriculture and Economic Research Service Report, May 2002.)
When Americans do get food, what do they eat? A UC Berkeley study, just published, shows that junk food, sugary drinks and beer make up nearly one-third of the calories adult Americans consume daily. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which used data from the same comprehensive survey, an estimated 64 percent of U.S. adults are either overweight or obese. About 15 percent of children are overweight, and 40 percent more are considered unfit. Although two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, many of them are malnourished. Obviously, we need to worry about weight, but we also need to realize that people are eating a huge amount of food that has no useful micronutrients like vitamins and minerals, said Gladys Block, a professor of epidemiology and public health nutrition at the university.
Why don't Americans eat better? No one holds a gun to their head and forces them to buy junk food. Those most likely to go hungry are families with poverty-level incomes, single mothers and children, and the elderly. Proportionally, African-American and Latino households suffered from hunger more often that the national average. Some 7,700,000 African-American families and over 8,000,000 Latino families worried about food. (Nord and Andrews, ibid)
The major barrier to healthy eating is poverty. Poverty in America? The
unprecedented economic growth of the 1990s should have lifted all boats,
but studies reveal that the boom economy only lifted yachts.
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From the FoodFirst Fact Sheet: In 2000, over 11 percent of the U.S. population, 34 million people lived in poverty. (6) The average person fell deeper below the poverty line that year than ever before on record. (7) Sixteen percent of all children live in poverty in the U.S. In 2000, the federal government's official poverty level for a family of four was $17,463 -- an egregiously inadequate amount a family needs to survive. There's no rocket science to why the number of people living in poverty parallels the number of people going hungry. Without enough money to eat, people will go hungry. Since the late 1960s, the gulf between the haves and have-nots has been widening in America. Data from the 1990s showed that the richest 1 percent of the U.S. population owned 40 percent of the nation's wealth. The late 1990s had historic lows in unemployment levels, but the working poor in the U.S. still did not earn enough income to make ends meet. And why? The 2000 U.S. Census Bureau reveals that 50 percent of the total income earned in the U.S. went to the pocketbooks of the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. households. (8)
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1 in 4 children do not eat regular meals each day because of lack of food in their home. 67% of those seeking emergency food assistance have an income of $10,000 or less. Of these individuals, 49% are working fulltime. |
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The 2001 Survey Hunger and Homelessness, released in December 2001 by the
US Conference of Mayors, reports that, on average, requests for emergency
food assistance and emergency shelter increased in U.S. cities surveyed
last year. Of the 27 cities surveyed, 93% showed an increase in requests
for emergency food assistance, with an average increase of 23% in the
number of requests received. In addition, 81% of the cities showed an
increase in requests for emergency shelter, with an average increase of
13%. -- Reported by MAZON, A Jewish Response to Hunger, on the web at
So if Americans are hungry, how can they be so fat? Ask the American Fast Food Advertising Industry. It promises a happy meal, quickly, packing a cheap, sugar whallop, just the thing when you're really hungry and need something to keep you going. After all, things are picking up. We'll have money tomorrow, won't we?
It seems we have two kinds of poverty in America: one a lack of food, another a lack of knowledge. If we knew what is done to us and what we are doing to ourselves, perhaps we could change it. But the solution doesn't seem to be within the realm of an individual. How can one person correct economic wrongs, reinvigorate the educational system, restore human priorities to a system aimed at power and control?
To find out more about hunger that is bad and getting worse in a
country that blames the individual for being too poor or ignorant to eat
properly, check out these organizations and articles:
- Food Research and Action Center, at http://www.frac.org/index.html, especially their report, "Hunger in the U.S."
- MAZON, A Jewish Response to Hunger, at http://www.mazon.org/, and their information on "Hunger/Food Insecurity"
- The FoodFirst Fact Sheet, "The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Go Hungry"
- Hungry in America, by Trudy Lieberman, in the July 31, 2003 issue of The Nation, on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030818&s=lieberman
- "The Hunger in America's Midst", by Bill Shore, in the June 3, 2004 issue of The Christian Science Monitor, on the web at http://csmonitor.com/2004/0603/p09s02-coop.html
- Sugar and alcohol basic food groups for many adults, High-calorie meals often nutritionally deficient, UC Berkeley professor finds - Kim Severson, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, June 2, 2004, SFGate.com (the online SF Chronicle) at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/02/MNG0U6V4S436.DTL
