Euphemisms. We invent them every day to avoid the stark truths of the world we live in. The latest is “food insecurity”. What the hell is that anyway? Are you insecure about your food? Worried about it? Is the food at risk of being taken hostage? The USDA grades the degree of food security until you are eventually left ….
Hungry. When you get past the gobbly gook, you confront the reality that while not many people may be starving (no one even mentions that word), a lot of people are getting too little food. And what they get, is often low in quality. Worse, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. This summer, schools, churches and other innovative meal programs started the summer meal program nationwide because otherwise the kids who get free or reduced meals at school, wouldn’t get fed.
National Geographic has been doing a series on Food. Their latest issue focuses on Hunger in America. It is an eye-opener. They pose the question: “Why are people malnourished in the richest country on earth?”. The answers are not simple. They focused on the working poor and the elderly since most people think that hungry people are unemployed, lazy, or otherwise “undeserving”. According to Nat Geo, one-sixth of Americans do not know where their next meal is coming from. That’s a lot of people. You may know some of them. And most of them work.
Today the hungry hide in plain sight. They live in the suburbs and work at stores you frequent. They’re farm hands and home health aides -growing your food, caring for your sick relatives. They are in low wage jobs that don’t pay enough to both eat and pay rent. Their kids go to school with yours. And they are invisible.
Watch the videos embedded in the article. It is a powerful experience to listen to these people describe their struggles. You can feel the pain they live with, trying to care for their kids. The photos show kids filling up on junk snacks before bed; it is the only food they have. And junk food or poor quality processed foods are what most pantries provide. Overwhelmingly, the food that supplements what they can buy on their limited income is the worse kind you can eat. The children and parents are often overweight or obese, while malnourished and hungry. The irony is striking. And because they look well-fed, they are dismissed as lazy or undisciplined.
I’ve written here about obesity myths. But it is becoming more obvious that obesity and hunger co-exist all too frequently among the working poor and the elderly. The web of social problems that lead to this mess are many: low wages; elderly living in poverty on a meager social security check because they spent their lives in low wage jobs; a polluted food system that values large amounts of cheap “food” over smaller amounts of moderately priced real food; lack of cooking skills or time to cook; an insistence on meat as a key ingredient in a healthy diet; no place to garden and no time to tend one; the power of TV marketing on children’s food choices. The list is long but you get the point. It is hard to even know where to start if you want to make a difference.
Certainly wage inequality needs to be solved, but with the current political climate, I’m not hopeful. So if we aren’t going to solve poverty, what are we left with?
1- Work with food pantries to provide more bulk foods and fewer processed foods. Canned vegetables are the least attractive but the logistics of storing and delivering frozen and fresh is harder. Some pantries (like this one and this one) seem to be distributing much healthier food.
2- Sponsor cooking classes focused on fast, simple, healthy food. Get grant funding to provide pressure cookers and a cookbook to attendees and demonstrate how to use them. You can cook dried beans and whole meals fast with this simple tool. They are a vital cooking tool in many countries so people can obtain inexpensive plant-based protein.
3- Set up mobile farmers markets to serve food deserts. Beans&Greens is an outstanding example of this effort. They even provide cooking demonstrations during the summer. Farmer’s markets usually participate in the SNAP program, which is a plus.
4- A woman in the Nat Geo article had taken up foraging. She started a garden with some of her SNAP supplement and learned to can her produce. These options need wider publicity along with a program to disseminate the knowledge and skills to enhance people’s diet this way. Dwarf vegetables can be grown very inexpensively in containers if there is little dirt available where people live so a house and a yard aren’t essential. The down side to these strategies is that someone in the family has to make finding and preparing healthy food their primary focus. If all adults are working, that’s harder to do.
But no matter what else we do, we must stop judging these families as inadequate because they are poor and hungry. The comments section after the Nat Geo article is shameful. People disparage the poor for having a cell phone, or a car, or a TV. Without a car or a cell, you can forget employment. It’s a measure of our lack of empathy and humanity that we first assign blame rather than understanding the challenges these people face - lack of knowledge, skills, and resources to live healthfully. But we can help. And we have a moral obligation to do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment