Children
Why Food Matters
Published July 30, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
I realize that for a blog that is dedicated to understanding and alleviating the sources of poverty, I talk quite a bit about food. This is mainly because I think food, at it's best, can help people rise up out of poverty; and at its worst, contribute to diet-related health problems and force farm laborers to live an undignified life of poverty and despair.
Many times in the realm of poverty work, it seems as though food is addressed only in the most simple of terms: do people have enough of it, or not?
But there are so many other reasons why food, both producing and eating it, matters to those less fortunate than most of us. Here are a few:
1) One of the single greatest indicators of a persons likeliness to become obese is income level. The rationale is simple: the less money you have available to spend on food, the more likely you are to purchase products that give you the greatest bang for your buck.
Subsistence is the Only Choice
Published July 29, 2009 @ 11:00AM PT
Monday's post about the lack of housing affordability for anyone working minimum wage struck a chord with many readers; to date, it's driven the most readers to this blog. I noticed that after folks read it, they tended to root around in our Actions to see what they could do. There's a lot of options, but here's a couple suggestions:
- Join a campaign for a Living Wage;
- Join a coalition of affordable housing advocates to push for more quality housing for low-income Americans, especially for families, the elderly and the disabled;
- Fight for welfare "reforms" that count higher education towards work and expand access to subsidized childcare and for longer periods of time. (There's actually a lot more that could be done, but I'm trying to keep you all focused.)
Talking about poverty day in and day out can get pretty debilitating - I can't imagine how it is for my readers and loved ones who live it everyday. I'm feeling particularly beat down this morning by the combination of this absolutely horrendous report of the tragic confluence of child poverty, tenant exploitation and substandard housing from New Orleans, as well as the insistence from many readers around the web that minimum wage is generous enough - that if immigrants can get by, why can't we; that it will make teen workers more irresponsible, that it will hurt the businesses too meager or cheap or profit-oriented to even pay benefits. Bull. Bull. And more bull.
Poverty: The Elephant (or Giant, Bloodthirsty Rat) in the Room
Published July 29, 2009 @ 05:08AM PT
Among more pleasant things, like snoballs and crawfish, it seems that summer in post-Katrina New Orleans is marked by horrific, nearly unbelievable local news stories involving some sort of gory death or injury. In 2006, for example, Zachary Bowman strangled, dismembered and cooked his girlfriend before committing suicide by jumping from the roof a French Quarter hotel. Ideally, these hair-raising stories might spark more informed conversations amongst both our elected leaders and everyday residents about issues ranging from mental health to recreational activities for our young people to policing and crime prevention.
Recently, another horrifying news story surfaced in the New Orleans area. On July 18, three-month old Natalie Hill’s parents awoke to find Natalie dead in her crib, with hundreds of what looked to be rat bites all over her. Her nose and part of one of her legs had been completely chewed off. There were bloody rodent footprints in the crib and on the floor around it. Since then, the Jefferson Parish Coroner’s Office has ruled that Natalie did indeed bleed to death from rat bites.
Although many people jumped to conclusions about the quality of Natalie's parental care in the wake of this horrific death, this is really a story about poverty and the quality of our affordable housing stock.
imagine sOmeOne's paying attentiOn
Published July 24, 2009 @ 05:26AM PT
Imagine a headline "Upper Income Households Paying Too Much of Monthly Budget for Housing."
Yeah, right. But I am guessing that if upper income households were forced to cope with budget busting housing costs, skyrocketing utility bills, soaring food prices, off the charts transportation expenses, well, things would be different.
Back to reality. Yet another report (one could wonder how many reports are needed to convince lawmakers of a problem??) documents the extreme burden low income households face in keeping that household--as in avoiding homelessness. University of Chicago's Chapin Hall released the report that bodes ill for over 18 million households.
Suggestions for the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act
Published July 23, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
When Congress finally gets around to discussing the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act this fall (if they ever get this pesky health care reform thing out of the way), I'll have a few suggestions for how to make school nutrition programs more effective at providing healthy meals to the nation's children.
Before I go into the specifics, here's a little background on the importance of this legislation:
Every five years the window of opportunity opens on Capitol Hill as lawmakers and their staff work together to improve, tweak and reauthorize the federal Child Nutrition Programs....The School Breakfast Program and the National School Lunch Program are permanently authorized. However the other child nutrition programs that affect school nutrition operators must be reauthorized every five years. The Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), State Administrative Expenses (SAE), the Special Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and other smaller pieces of the complete package of child nutrition programs must be renewed because they have actual expiration dates.
As you can see, proper attention must be paid to this reauthorization because it includes provisions for some of the most important supplemental nutrition programs we have in this country. With the economy still sputtering and demand at food pantries and soup kitchens continuing to climb, it is of the utmost importance to strengthen these programs and provide them with adequate funding.
Gorilla Marketing: Framing Poverty
Published July 21, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
As I was writing my brilliantly titled blog post this morning about California's budget cuts, :), I kept thinking about this report I heard on WBUR this morning concerning Mass. Governor Deval Patrick's proposed budget cuts and the impact on the state's zoos. The story ruefully points to the "benefit" of having two newspapers in Boston (for how much longer, one wonders) and how their warring coverage of the threatened euthanizing of zoo animals due to budget reducations distracted us from the direct human impact of those cuts.
"All the while this Animal House drama played out, other victims of the governor’s budget vetoes – from senior care to education to services for children and families – were virtually ignored.
Which brings us to the third eternal truth of budget-cut coverage: It’s a zero-sum game. Every photo of Little Joe displaces an image of elderly hardship or shuttered libraries.
That’s guerrilla warfare of an entirely different kind."
Pun intended! Chortle, chortle.
But in all seriousness, I get that reduction in amenities like zoos, libraries, music classes, etc. have a detrimental impact on our quality of life and human development. But, I'd argue, so does leaving our elderly to ration their meds or to let kids' asthma go untreated or to relinquish teens to idle, hot summer afternoons with little to do. I was one who fell prey to the zoo story (heh). I pay a remarkable little amount of attention to local politics given I was raised in this state and have been back for 5 years now, but I went so far as to post the zoo story on facebook, chuckling at the idea of the zoo admin holding the legislature hostage with threats of dead animals and weeping children. (The zoos' cuts were restored.)
I'm not sure what lesson to take here: reporter John Carroll's original point that kids and animals are winning causes every time, or the uglier, flip side of that that hearing about poor grandma eating her cat food or freezing to death in the winter makes us so uncomfortable that we'd rather just not hear about it. Why is that? I get our easy moralizing about poor mothers, given we're a society that believes we have the right to legislate reproductive behavior. But why don't we feel a similar level of protectiveness for our elders as we do for kids? Am I way off here? Social Security is fairly sacrosanct; so maybe I'm wrong.
But there's no denying that people are much more jazzed about their pets or zoo charges than they are their most vulnerable neighbors.
R.I.P. Frank McCourt
Published July 20, 2009 @ 05:16AM PT
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
Frank McCourt wrote this in the second paragraph of his award-winning bestselling memoir, Angela's Ashes - a chronicle of his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. McCourt died this weekend from cancer; he was 78.
I read Angela's Ashes and loved it. I was in my 20s, living comfortably in NYC, pursuing a Master's degree and after that, working full-time. Life was good and plentiful.
But there was something about Angela's Ashes, cultural, I suppose, to which I could strongly relate, and my mom felt the same. It was odd, we thought, how much a story about extreme poverty in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s could resonate with our own Irish-Catholic experiences in Boston.
Such poverty, or even a slightly less desperate, modern American version, I'd barely felt it growing up, but seen my cousins struggle with it in Boston, and knew my parents had experienced it as well. Again, not to the depths that McCourt described, but the alcoholism; the cold, condemning shoulder of the Church even as it fed and clothed families; the concept of living "on the dole" as my father still quips today whenever my material needs become parasitic - all of these I know from experience or family history, passed down through the generations. And of course, what continues through my generation: tough exteriors and a distrust of emotionalism, the joking and heckling to get through tough times.
“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
Yep. Rest in Peace, Frank, and may you have them in empathetic stitches wherever you're headed.
More on McCourt here, here, and here.
(Photo of Frank McCourt by David Shankbone)
