While most of the mainstream media have been busily slobbering over Sarah Palin all week, a lot of the blogs and news websites I read have been talking about something that actually matters: a report from the Department of Agriculture that indicated fully 25% of all the children in the United States live in households that experience what the USDA euphemistically calls “food insecurity”. (Link to PDF of the report itself here). “Food insecurity” means that those families basically do not know where the next meal will come from and frequently have to choose between buying food and paying for other necessities, or even choosing which members of the family will get to eat on a given day.
The steep rise in unemployment is the most obvious factor, but the report points out that food insecurity is a problem even for families where parents hold down full-time jobs, indicating that wages are not able to keep up with the increasing cost of food. The Tom Toles cartoon at the top highlights a genuine irony of the situation — obesity from over-consumption of junk calories because the cost of better nutrition is beyond the reach of people struggling economically.
This article from the Daily Beast looks at the data in terms of what the author calls “Disproportionate Hunger” — where the costs of food, housing and energy are disproportionately high and thus exacerbate the situation. Three of the six New England states fall into the “Top 10″ list: Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut (which comes in at an astonishingly high #4). Massachusetts, by contrast, is #49, and New Hampshire #48. New England is traditionally an expensive place to live due to high energy costs for our long winters and the cost of transportation of goods into this region, and it also suffers from a perennially weak economy outside of the Boston economic zone. When times get bad in this country, New England always feels it harder than most.
This post at Fast Company tries to make the case that maybe we should be looking for technological solutions — incorporating engineered food products like the infamous “golden rice” to improve nutrition in junk food — but that’s really terribly misdirected, if you ask me. The availability of adequate nutrition is not the issue in this country. Indeed, even the global crisis in child hunger is less about the availability of adequate nutrition than it is about the iniquities of the economic situation, although it translates into genuine starvation elsewhere in the world. The issue boils down to the inequalities of the economic situation, whether we are talking about Vermont or Ethiopia.
But, hey, as long as all those Wall Street guys got their multimillion-dollar bonuses for bankrupting the rest of the planet, who cares if some kids in Skowhegan or Bridgeport or Rutland go without breakfast a few times a week, right? It’s their own damn fault for being poor in the first place!
