HUNGRY AMERICA

Wyoming resident Mary sets out from her home everyday to collect discarded wooden pallets. Despite debilitating pain from spinal arthritis, she then uses an axe to chop them into firewood. Like many senior citizens across the country, her social security payments do not cover her medical bills, or her household and fuel expenses. Mary, who is also diabetic, visits the Salvation Army Food Pantry in Casper for a food box.

Gloria Muniz, 45, from New York, is a single mother struggling to provide for her eight children and two nephews, all under the age of 16. Unable to work, Muniz relies on social security, public assistance and food stamps to get by. After all the bills are paid, she has about $20 left in her purse each month to spend on food and other essentials such as school supplies for her children. “But they don’t last me very long,” says Muniz. The upshot: the family often goes hungry.

Like the unfortunate families mentioned above, there are over 35 million Americans — nearly as many as live in California — who don’t know where their next meal will come from. Job losses, home foreclosures, and other recent crises have been truly life altering for Americans, with one in eight people struggling with hunger.

These are official figures and experts say the numbers could be higher. “The numbers have been provided by the US Department of Agriculture,” says Ross Fraser of Feeding America, the nation's leading domestic hunger-relief charity that provides food assistance to more than 25 million low-income people facing hunger in the US.

Over the years, the number of people showing up at food pantries and soup kitchens in the US has surged, with more than a thousand operating in New York alone. Requests are so high that some food centres nationwide are turning away the hungry.

What makes the demand so striking is not only the suddenness but also the demographic that is seeking help. For instance, most of the newcomers that show up at Feeding America’s centres have been employed and have managed to survive dips in the job market. Many of them are couples and single parents who had managed without handouts.

Hunger is a significant problem, according to annual reports issued by the United States Department of Agriculture. Around 11 per cent of people live in households where they may not have enough money to put adequate food on the table — that’s 35.5 million Americans.

Among them are 11 million who say their situation is so grim they sometimes don’t eat for an entire day because they can’t afford to. Worse, hunger is an everyday reality for 12 million American children.

“We soon will have the most food stamps recipients in the history of our country,” says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center. All across the country, from LA to Detroit to New York, it seems the soup kitchen lines getting longer. “Right now they are really fighting for their lives,” says global economic analyst Alan Bragman.

A recent USDA report says more than a third of these households “had very low food security — meaning that the food intake of one or more adults was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food”.

So why does a country that spends more on its military than the next 11 nations combined, have so many people in such dire straits? How can so many starve in a country that spends $350 million each on 185 F-22 stealth fighters?

According to a USDA official, hunger is very much a hidden problem. “When you walk by people who may be hungry, it's not necessarily evident they're hungry. “This is something that low-income people don't talk about a great deal.”

Worse, the US government does not want to talk about this nagging problem. What most people would describe as going hungry, the USDA couches it in the euphemism “food insecure.” 
Deaths caused by malnutrition and plain hunger are passed off by hospitals and coroners as “natural causes” or “failure of bodily organs”.

Also, the US has been loath to admit it has gaping holes in its socio-economic fabric. As many 7.3 million Americans reportedly died of starvation during the Great Depression, a fact that lies buried in US census data, but which the government has airbrushed out of official records. Here is what a child wrote during those years: “We changed our usual food for something more available. We used to eat bush leaves instead of cabbage. We ate frogs too. My mother and my older sister died in a year.”

Americans aren’t that desperate yet, but things could worsen. The estimates are for the period before the recession kicked in. With millions more having lost their livelihood since then, the number of the hungry and starving is likely to be higher. The latest figures do not include the estimated 750,000 Americans who are homeless on any given day. That’s not counting people living on the fringes of society—in Miami, for instance, convicted criminals live under highway bridges with the state’s grudging approval because an ordinance intended to keep predators away makes it nearly impossible for them to find housing.

The scary part is that as food prices spiral out of control, Americans are not just competing with each other for food and resources. In the midst of an economic downturn, keeping in step with a billion Indians and a billion Chinese in the global marketplace is going to be an extremely tall order.

—rakeshkrishnan@indiaempire.com

April 2009