A new USDA report on hunger just came out - but unfortunately, they don't even show the full extent of the problem. The numbers are from 2007, pre-economic-shit-hitting-fan.
Overall, 11.1% of Americans lived in "food insecure" households during 2007. That is 36.2 million people, or a little less than the entire population of California. Can you imagine? An entire California of hungry people? The government calls that number "essentially unchanged" from 2006 but in reality even if the percentage change is low, it means there are an additional 700,000 people who were food insecure in 2007.
Of those "food insecure" households, over one third have "very low food security" - which I believe, translated into English, means HUNGRY. We're close enough to Thanksgiving that Sarah Palin is doing photo ops next to turkey executions, so I think now is a good time to talk about the state of hunger in America.
Some Definitions
The government doesn't like to talk about hunger anymore. It sounds too, oh I don't know... negative. It's depressing. So instead they talk about "food security." Just so you can make some sense of what they say, here are their definitions:
Food insecure—At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. Food-insecure households include those with low food security and very low food security.
Low food security—These food-insecure households obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake by using a variety of coping strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries.
Very low food security—In these food-insecure households, normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.
The 2007 Numbers
According to the report:
- 11.1% of all U.S. households (13.0 million households...not people) are food insecure.
- 37.7% of households below the poverty line are food insecure.
- 30.2% of households headed by a single woman are food insecure.
- 22.2% of black households are food insecure.
- 20.1% of Hispanic households are food insecure.
- 7.0% of all U.S. households (8.3 million households) had "low food security" in 2007.
- 4.1% of all U.S. households (4.7 million households) had "very low food security" in 2007. That's 11.9 million people - about half a million more than the population of Ohio.
- 691,000 children went hungry in 2007 - a 50% increase from 2006.
Probably the most significant number here in terms of the rise in hunger is the 691,000 hungry kids. All of the other increases were less. Typically in a hungry family, the kids get to eat. If you're a parent, you'd rather skip a meal than make your kid skip a meal. Plus - kids can benefit from free breakfasts and lunches at school and from other federal nutrition programs like WIC (Women, Infants, and Children - a program that provides food to pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and kids under 5).
Hunger in 2008
Anecdotally, I've heard BAD things about hunger in 2008. In October, I went to a conference on community food security and several attendees ran food banks. I asked several of them about the demand at their food banks. All said the same thing: usually demand goes down in the summer (because people don't have to pay for heat so more people can afford food) but this year the demand did not go down. They anticipated it would rise quite a bit once the weather turned cold.
One person said something that really struck me: now, requests for food are coming in by email. In the past, the hungry were people who didn't necessarily have computers or internet. Now, middle class people are falling into poverty and needing food assistance for the first time. All of a sudden, the segment of the population that DOES have computers is food insecure.
Myths About Hunger
Since the topic is suddenly extra-pertinent, I'd like to engage in a bit of myth-busting about hunger. You're probably familiar with Naomi Klein's idea of "disaster capitalism." Well, hunger is used for disaster capitalism too. The general plan seems to be to use hunger as an excuse for all kinds of abhorrent environmental and economic crimes and to explain it to us by saying we have no choice if we want to solve hunger.
Frances Moore Lappe (author of Diet for a Small Planet), Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, and Luis Esparza, wrote a great book about 10 years ago busting 12 myths about hunger, and unfortunately those 12 myths are still often accepted by the mainstream. Here are the ones I found most relevant:
1. We don't have enough food. Nope, not true. The world produces so much food that if we ate it all, we'd all be morbidly obese. In our own country, we've got about enough to give each man, woman, and child (including the babies) 3700 calories per day.
2. Nature causes famine. If you look around, the problems come from people, not nature. If a person freezes while living on the street in the winter, was it the cold weather that killed them or the cruel society that wouldn't give them shelter? Likewise, when you look around you see that the rich can always find food. It's the poor who starve, and quite often they live among plentiful food - they just can't afford it.
3. We've got too many people, we can't feed them all. This goes back to the idea that there isn't enough food. If you look at population density and population growth and compare that to hunger, you will see that there isn't much of a correlation. Compare Costa Rica and Honduras... Costa Rica's got half as many acres in cultivation per person as Honduras (i.e. less food per capita) but much better nutrition and life expectancy.
Where you do find rapid population growth side by side with hunger, you'll see that the problem isn't just hunger... it's that most people (especially women) are deprived of land ownership, jobs, education, health care, and old age security. THAT is the root of the problem, and that's what needs to be fixed.
4. If you want to grow enough food, you've gotta sacrifice the environment. Bullshit. There's no trade-off between food and the environment. For example:
Most pesticides used in the Third World are applied to export-crops, which play little role in feeding the hungry, while in the US they are used to give a blemish-free cosmetic appearance to produce, with no improvement in nutritional value.
The problem isn't that poor people in the third world need to eat and therefore they must wreck the planet. It's that people in the developed worlds demand exotic or out-of-season produce and tropical hardwoods, and large corporations are eager to sell them to us even if it means killing a rainforest or two. We CAN have sustainable agriculture and sound economic policy and simultaneously grow enough food.
5. The Green Revolution was a success. The "green revolution" was when we exported industrialized agriculture to the developing world. And you know what? It did work for a while. After all, when you first start using unsustainable techniques, typically you get good results. You're using tons of water, using up the nutrients that have built up in the soil over time, etc, and with all of those resources you use you'll get good results. Until you've depleted the topsoil and the water's gone...
But focusing narrowly on increasing production cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter the tightly concentrated distribution of economic power that determines who can buy the additional food.
The modern version of this is happening with biotechnology (i.e. genetically modified seeds). And you know what? It's still not a solution. GMO seeds are created for industrialized, unsustainable agriculture. Until we can get ourselves back to sustainable agriculture, we're just spinning our wheels and getting nowhere.
6. We need large farms. Again, this cuts to the core of the misunderstanding - the assumption that hunger is caused by lack of food production when in reality it is caused by lack of democracy. Hunger has increased as food production has become more consolidated into fewer hands.
Studies done in America show that large farms create 3 classes (one that owns, one that manages, and one that works) leading to increased crime, high school drop outs, teen pregnancy, family instability, and all kinds of other negative social effects. Small and mid-size farms don't do that.
Large landowners who control most of the best land often leave much of it idle. Unjust farming systems leave farmland in the hands of the most inefficient producers. By contrast, small farmers typically achieve at least four to five times greater output per acre, in part because they work their land more intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems. Without secure tenure, the many millions of tenant farmers in the Third World have little incentive to invest in land improvements, to rotate crops, or to leave land fallow for the sake of long-term soil fertility. Future food production is undermined. On the other hand, redistribution of land can favor production. Comprehensive land reform has markedly increased production in countries as diverse as Japan, Zimbabwe, and Taiwan. A World Bank study of northeast Brazil estimates that redistributing farmland into smaller holdings would raise output an astonishing 80 per cent.
7. The free market is god. If eight years of Bush doesn't give us proof that this is bull, I don't know what will. Thom Hartmann had the grandson of FDR on his show a while back and he (FDR's grandson) made the point that a 100% free market was never the goal... you end up with monopolies and that certainly wasn't what Adam Smith had in mind. We need regulated capitalism to ensure fairness to all.
In this task, government has a vital role to play in countering the tendency towards economic concentration, through genuine tax, credit, and land reforms, to disperse buying power towards the poor. Recent trends towards privatization and deregulation are most definitely not the answer.
8. Free trade is the anser. Free trade causes a "race to the bottom" - as we're losing jobs to countries that pay workers $1/day and treat them like shit, other countries are suffering too, producing export crops to feed our demand for cheap food instead of producing food to feed themselves. The net result is increased hunger here and abroad.
10. U.S. aid helps the hungry Not so much. In fact, this year CARE rejected U.S. food aid because it can actually HURT the hungry. Instead of giving aid by purchasing food from farmers in poor countries, the U.S. uses food aid as a subsidy for its own agribusiness. Then it pays more U.S. companies to transport that food oversees. All in all, it's one big government handout to U.S. companies. In other countries, the food aid then undercuts farmers there who can't compete against free food. The Frances Moore Lappe article suggests that instead of sending food aid, we should use the amount of money we spend now for food and use it to instead forgive debt from third world countries.
11. When they lose, we win. There are no winners from poverty in the U.S. or abroad. The George W. Bush school of thought that believes it's a zero sum game in which we need to give a tax break to the rich and then cut programs for the poor has now proven itself by landing our economy in the shitter. In the U.S., we all win together when we use a bottom-up approach to the economy instead of "trickle down." Help out the people at the bottom and they will have enough money to buy from our businesses, leading to job creation, and so on. As for poverty abroad:
Enforced poverty in the Third World jeopardizes US jobs, wages and working conditions as corporations seek cheaper labor abroad. In a global economy, what American workers have achieved in employment, wage levels and working conditions can be protected only when working people in every country are freed from economic desperation.
Here at home, policies like welfare reform throw more people into the job market than can be absorbed at below minimum wage levels in the case of "workfare" which puts downward pressure on the wages of those on higher rungs of the employment ladder. The growing numbers of "working poor" are those who have part- or full-time low-wage jobs yet cannot afford adequate nutrition or housing for their families. Educating ourselves about the common interests most Americans share with the poor in the Third World and at home allows us to be compassionate without sliding into pity. In working to clear the way for the poor to free themselves from economic oppression, we free ourselves as well.
What The Right Has to Say About Hunger
This is an old article but it's worth bringing up. According to the Heritage Foundation, poor people aren't hungry - they're fat! The article points out that 70% of food insecure adult males are overweight or obese, and even worse for women. Not only that, but food insecure women are more likely to be overweight than women who are not food insecure.
The conclusion, according to Heritage? The poor have too much food, not too little. By their logic, programs like food stamps will just make the poor fatter and we should quit feeding the poor so we don't make them fatter.
This logic totally ignores the fact that a healthy diet requires many things that the poor may lack - time and equipment to prepare food, time to shop for food on a regular basis and access to a nearby grocery store, somewhere to store food. For millions of low income Americans, the only places to buy food are convenience and liquor stores, gas stations, and fast food joints.
And even if you can get to the grocery store, the cheapest foods are the junky ones, and the healthy stuff is more expensive. In fact, the New York Times just reported that sales of spam, Mac 'n Cheese, beer, rice, beans, Jell-O, Kool-aid, instant poatoes, pancake mix, and Velveeta are going up in these economic hard times. Umm... at least rice and beans are healthy.
The truth is that right now, food stamp recipients in U.S. cities like Philadelphia and Boston can't afford a healthy diet, even using the government's own "thrifty food plan" (the basis of food stamp benefit calculations). According to a study done in those cities, if you were to go shopping for all of the foods in the Thrifty Food Plan in low income neighborhoods, you'd need thousands of extra dollars per year to afford them. (Food stamp benefits are NOT calibrated to the cost of living in different cities.)
How Can We Help The Hungry This Thanksgiving
With Thanksgiving in less than a week, what can we do now? First of all, donate to your local food bank. You can give them food or money (this site has a food bank locator in the lower right corner). If you are a manager or owner of a business, consider doing a food drive. Offer your employees the opportunity to wear jeans to work in exchange for donating some food.
Beyond Thanksgiving, let's focus on the Child Nutrition Reauthorization, a major bill coming before Congress in the next year. It will make the rules for WIC and school lunches in the years to come, so it's a big opportunity to put some fantastic, progressive changes into effect. I'll be covering it on my blog and occasionally on DailyKos too.
If you want to write your Congresscritter, here are some things you can ask for in the Child Nutrition Reauthorization:
- An update to the definition of foods of minimal nutritional value. You can't serve foods of "minimal nutritional value" in schools but right now that is defined in a way that allows basically all foods into schools.
- More money! Increase the federal reimbursement rate! Right now schools get about $2.55 per kid per meal from the government, yet they spend an average of $2.88. And only about $1.00 of that goes to food - the rest is labor & supplies. What kind of healthy lunch can you afford for $1.00??
- Give schools money to update their kitchens so they can actually prepare healthy food for the kids.
- More money for school gardens and farm to school programs.
- Ban "pouring rights" agreements (deals in which schools get kickbacks from soda companies for selling extra soda to their students).
- Get the "competitive foods" out of schools (i.e. junk food... food that is unregulated by federal nutrition standards).
- Expand the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program so all WIC recipients can participate. (This program gives $20 per year to WIC participants to spend on fruits and veggies at farmers markets.)