Just one week ago, I wrote a post on an extensive study that concluded that one in five Americans went hungry last year.
Unfortunately, it’s likely I’ll find myself writing quite often about the disheartening food crisis in the United States. Today, a new study, this time by Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief charity, released its own report, Hunger in America 2010.
The data from Feeding America is interesting, because they are associated with 41,600 food banks (and other sorts of feeding agencies) across the country, so their numbers correlate directly with emergency food distribution throughout the United States.
Currently, the organization is providing food to 37 million Americans, including 14 million kids and three million seniors. That means that one in eight Americans relies on Feeding America for food. The charity’s food network says they are feeding one million more people than they were in 2006.
But the following stats are the ones I’ve found most hard to swallow. Since 2006, there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of children who are depending on Feeding America for basic food needs. Thirty-six percent of the households fed by the group’s network have one or more adults working. And while 76 percent of adults who used a food pantry last year were unemployed, 3.2 million of them had lost their job sometime in the preceding 12 months.
What this says is that children are bearing a tremendous brunt of the hunger crisis. And that just over one-third of those going hungry aren’t unemployed — they’re severely underemployed. And of course, two-thirds of hungry Americans don’t have jobs — and many of them lost their income at some point since Wall Street burst in 2008.
The human toll of this recession is astounding. Perhaps even more astounding is how ineffectively our so-called public servants have reacted in the face of such misery. We live in the richest country in the world, and the weakest among us — children, the elderly, the working poor, the unemployed — have experienced little to no relief.
The only good news would seem to be that with eligibility requirements eased and benefits slightly increased for the SNAP/food stamps program, the hunger crisis isn’t as bad as it might otherwise be. There was also a $1 billion increase in child nutrition programs — such as school lunches — last year.
Despite these glimmers of hope, however, we’ve clearly not done nearly enough to help the hungry find access to food in times of need, or better help them feed themselves. Indicative of this, Feeding America said that given the huge uptick in people seeking food from pantries, many sites had to cut food portions and even turn away folks.
How is this possible in our land of plenty? We are the world’s largest exporter of corn and soybeans; we rank among the highest beef exporters, too. I know America has enough food for everybody who lives here.
The Treasury Department and the Fed have been crowing since mid-last year that our economy has “rebounded,” and that for the first time in two years our economy is growing instead of contracting. But all the while, unemployment has remained in the double-digits (10 percent is “low” these days, and of course it underestimates true unemployment and completely disregards the underemployed). And among certain demographics — particularly minorities — unemployment may hit the teens and 20’s this year. Indeed, Feeding America produced data that is consistent with this: blacks and Latinos constitute 34 and 21 percent, respectively, of those seeking food.
We must get food on hungry Americans’ plates. One debate taking place in Washington right now could steer us in the right direction. The question of doubling the Department of Agriculture’s budget to buy surplus commodities for charity feeding programs ought be a no-brainer. No food pantry should be turning people away in their time of dire need.
But we need to get people back to work, too. Fearmongers will yell about frozen budgets and rising deficits, but if we are able to bail out the fools on Wall Street who flushed our economy down the ****ter and if we are able to spend ungodly sums of money each day on unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then we can bail out the folks who power our economy from the grass-roots up.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, our society is only as strong as the weakest among us. In 1967, he lamented that a nation that encourages “economic exploitation” and “continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Forty-three years later and what has become of us?
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/...-must-act-now/
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