Hunger
How Many Calories Does $1 Buy?
Published August 27, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The answer depends largely on what type of food you're purchasing.
As I was reading through the recent TIME Magzine cover story on the real price of cheap food, I came across reference to a study conducted by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The study examined how many calories, of certain kinds of food, one dollar can buy you. They determined that:
A dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit.
Yeah, you read that right. A dollar can buy you almost 10 times more calories from potato chips than it can from fresh fruit. Is it any wonder that obesity and food security are so intricately tied to income level in this country? I think not.
This statistic has a lot to do with why many people who do not have adequate access to healthy foods are often unhealthy and overweight. Really, it's all about the energy density of the foods we eat. Let me explain.
Prisoners Feed the Hungry
Published August 23, 2009 @ 05:57PM PT
As hunger spreads, many states are relying increasingly on inmates for farming, "gleaning," and food bank assistance. Prisoner assistance with stocking food bank warehouses, picking food from fields that might otherwise rot, or even planning and harvesting produce occurs through formal employment programs that states run mostly for non-violent, short-term offenders. Free prison labor is a godsend for stretched food banks and state budgets alike, and prisoners gain needed work skills that may prove useful when they are released.
The article is very positive in terms of this skills-for-food exchange. Assuming - and this could be a big if - that the prisoners are treated well in these manual labor programs, the examples of prisoner assistance and food bank gratitude from Ohio to Texas are a refreshing contrast to the reality of overcrowded, militarized, segregated prisons nationwide. Institutions that we've starved of resources so desperately that prisoner training programs have been slashed left and right, contributing to growth of repeat offenders who languish on the inside and can't cope on the outside. Please use the revolving door to your left, sir.
For the prisoners participating in these farming and food bank programs, I wonder how many of them have ever picked up a bag of food from a local bank, in addition to packing them up now. Here's wishing them some success in translating what they've learned as they've done their time to fruitful employment and steady wages when they're out. And many thanks to the incarcerated around the country who are helping us fight the scourge of hunger.
(Boxes of potatoes at the San Francisco Food Bank by a tree is nice)
1 in 5 Americans are Poor
Published August 22, 2009 @ 11:34AM PT
As summer melts away and non-profit organizations gear up for a difficult fall, anti-poverty activists need an accurate picture of just how tough it is out there. Following up on Greg's great post from Thursday that captured the growth of hunger nationwide, we offer now a quick summary of the latest recessionary figures:
- 37.3M people were living below the official poverty line in 2007; 2008 should see another 1.5M added, for a statistically significant growth to 12.7% of the population. Experts anticipate an even worse result by the end of '09, and estimate we could hover around 15% of the population officially considered living in poverty. Even acknowledging how outdated this poverty measure is, we have not counted 1 in 7 people living in poverty since the recession of the early 1990s. And if historical census figures that include the "near poor" are anything to go by, we can expect 1 in 5 people, or 20% of Americans, to be living in or near poverty by the end of this year.
Taking Stock: Hunger Across America
Published August 20, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
In previous posts, including this one, I've talked about the need for adequate summer feeding programs in order to make sure that children do not go hungry while school is out of session.
But as the economy continues to contract and unemployment continues to rise (although apparently levels of joblessness are beginning to level off), I've come to realize that it's not just children who are in need of food assistance this summer, it's everyone.
From middle-class families to single parents to young couples trying to support themselves on minimum wage jobs, it seems as though no one is immune to the pangs of hunger this season.
With this in mind, I decided to take a look around the country to see how bad it really is out there:
Survey on Classroom Hunger
Published August 13, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
(Hello everyone, Greg here. This week I'd like to feature a guest post by Stephanie Keller from the nonprofit group Share Our Strength. The organization is asking teachers who have experienced child hunger in their classrooms to fill out a short survey to help Share Our Strength document and raise awareness about hunger in the classroom. If you're a teacher, please fill out the survey (link below). If you have teacher friends or colleagues, please forward this to them. Thanks in advance for all that you do!)
Every day, in classrooms across America, teachers witness the devastating impacts of hunger on the children they serve - problems that we might see as behavioral, teachers know are often the result of children not eating breakfast that morning or dinner the night before. We hear from teachers across the country that more children come to school hungry on Monday morning than any other day of the week, because they didn't eat enough over the weekend.
This summer, Share Our Strength is talking with teachers across the country about child hunger in their classrooms, and we need your help. Through a project called Hunger in America's Classrooms: Share Our Strength's Teacher Report, we hope to raise awareness about child hunger in America and build a movement of Americans dedicated to ending it.
Action Alert: Modernize Poverty Measurement
Published August 11, 2009 @ 01:01PM PT
Two bills have been introduced in Congress to update our federal poverty measure that is based on an extremely antiquated estimated proportion of a family's budget spent on food. Both the House and Senate bills rely on National Academy of Science recommendations in which "the cost of food, clothing, housing, utilities and medical expenses be considered. Income from non-cash benefits, such as food stamps and government tax credits, should also be counted" in an updated poverty measure (right now, these social supports can tip people over the poverty line and deny them much needed assistance).
The linked news piece above shows that by following the NAS recommendations, the new poverty line for a family of 4 (2 adults, 2 kids) in 2007 $$ would jump from about $21k to almost $28k, an increase of almost 25%. To my eye, it still looks extremely low. We really need to make geographic considerations when tying assistance programs to estimated costs of living.
This reform is at the heart of the work we do as anti-poverty activists. So far, the House bill, introduced in June, has 10 sponsors, all Dems, and has probably gone on to a quiet convalescence in the House Ways and Means and House Oversight and Govt. Reform Committees. The Senate Bill is less than a week old, introduced by Dodd and co-sponsored by Sen. Bingaman of New Mexico (D). It's gone on to the Senate Health (etc.) Committee, which might have its hands full right about now.
Healthcare reform or not, this is one issue that can't wait. Contact Your Representatives (and Committee Members above) and tell them to support an updated poverty measure today!
(Difference in NAS and official poverty measures, from The Stanford Ctr for the Study of Poverty & Inequality)
Our Economic Human Rights
Published August 10, 2009 @ 07:09AM PT
Perhaps it's the dog days of summer, or, more likely, the harsh realities of our current economic environment, but the poverty news is more and more of the same lately: states running out of funds just as more and more people join the various assistance programs. Legal aid faltering just as more people need help navigating the court system. And so on.
If there was ever a time to revisit a more fundamental view of poverty and inequality, it's now. Courtesy of regular contributor Jan Lightfootlane, I want to talk about economic human rights. Jan recently joined anti-poverty activists from around the world to strategize around ending poverty at the conference, "Building the Unsettling Force: A National Conference to End Poverty." The conference embraces the human rights framework to confront the intertwined, structural hardships that drive people into poverty and keep them there; workshops were organized around the human right to housing, the human right to healthcare, the human right to a living wage, and so on. These rights are enshrined in the UN Convenant on Economic & Social Rights, a 1960s era document that the US has recognized but never fully ratified, leaving us as a nation ambivalent over whether our citizens have these rights as much as we enjoy the rights to free speech and political participation.
