Why are People Hungry in a Country of Plenty?

It was so painful that I shut it down. The three-year civil war in Georgia cost us; there was political instability, permanent financial, economic, and social crisis. With that there was of course an acute food shortage, food insecurity and hunger. Today we try not to think of and talk about that time. It’s not only about the memory of physical hunger, but memory of helplessness, degraded pride, and humiliation. Too many wounds, too much pain.

 Reading Mark Winne’s “Closing the Food Gap” combined with our discussions in class put me right back into that time. My pain now explodes in the form of compassion to those who are hungry and food deprived in the richest country in the world, a supposed country of plenty.  Right here, right now, 35 million people are hungry or food insecure. I guess we never really feel and grasp what this really means – 35 million people. My little country all together is only 5 million people. Try to feel and envision it – 35 million hungry Americans!  And if you really do, then you too should feel anger at the system that allows it to happen.

In the article “Why do we still have hunger in America?” Renee Morway gives very disturbing data on hunger from different sources. A study conducted by America’s Second Harvest revealed that from 30 million people suffering from hunger in America:

• 36.4% of the members of households served by the A2H National Network are children under 18 years old.
• 8% of the members of households are children age 0 to 5 years.
• 10% of the members of households are elderly
• About 40% of clients are non-Hispanic white; 38% are non-Hispanic black, and the rest are from other racial groups. 17% are Hispanic.
• 36% of households include at least one employed adult
• 68% have incomes below the official federal poverty level during the previous month.
• 12% are homeless.    

It’s not that we do nothing about it. On the contrary – the Nation’s Food Bank Network was designed exactly for this purpose - to provide emergency food through food pantries, soup kitchens, and emergency shelters. On top of this we have programs that provide congregate meals for seniors, day care facilities, and after school programs. But this is a drop in the ocean and an inadequate approach for solving the problem. We treat the consequence instead of eliminating the cause of the problem. We all know the name of the cause – poverty! But as Winne writes, “our nation’s approach to poverty has been to manage it, not to end it” (xviii)

            And a question comes to mind – why, why in the world do we tolerate this condition? British novelist and art critic John Berger once said,

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied…but written off as trash.”

There are different theoretical explanations of poverty in the United States. The Individualistic theory states that the cause of poverty is rooted in the individual failings of a person. Somebody is poor, to put it bluntly, because he/she deserves to be poor. Herbert Spencer, famous British sociologist (who coined the term Survival of the Fittest) described poor as “…good for nothing…vagrants and sots (drunks), criminals…men who share the gains of prostitutes and less visible and less numerous there is a corresponding class of women.” Unfortunately surveys show that the majority of Americans today believe that a person is poor because of personal traits. After all, we are the nation who believes that we build our society on the principles of meritocracy. 

Cultural theory of poverty goes a little bit farther – instead of blaming the individual, it blames individual’s culture. It’s their culture (their belief system, values, attitudes and general patterns of behavior and language) that causes their poverty, or at least it helps to keep them in their poverty. Again, let’s blame the victim.

There are those who believe that poverty is caused by social and economic structural failings. Do we all have equal opportunities to access education, health care, nutrition, etc.? It doesn’t matter how talented they may be or how hard they work, some people never will achieve upward mobility in a system where we tolerate “a starkly inequitable distribution of income” (Winne, p.10).  

 I tend to think in metaphors. The way we solve most social problems is like being on a sinking boat with a hole in it. Instead of fixing the hole to stop the water from coming in, we leave the hole, deciding instead to bail out water. We don’t see (or don’t want to see) the cause of the problems so we try to fix only the consequences. As Winne says,

“Our understanding of the events that caused the hunger may be blurry. We may not care to delve too deeply into the sources of someone’s suffering. And complex social, political, and economic explanations may soar over our heads or simply hold no interest. But when we can feel the hurt, we respond” (xxii).

This is exactly what’s most disturbing for me. Instead of solving the problem, the ruling class of American society puts the burden back onto the people.

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration broke the contract with the poor and passed the buck back to civil society, without whom millions of people would have starved”(Winne, p.28).

How convenient is that!!!!

I am not saying we should stop feeding the hungry. No! But we should start solving the cause of hunger. Instead we exploit civic society

“The pressure to feed a rising tide of hungry people fell increasingly to local communities and especially to nonprofit organizations and faith-based institutions. But rather than rise up in rebellion against the mean-spirited ideologues who controlled the government…grass-roots groups fell back on a kind of quintessential can-do American spirit to address the crisis at hand.”(Winne, p.25).

            Are we solving the problem or walking in a vicious circle?

Reference:

Kelso, W.A. (1994) Poverty and the underclass: changing perceptions of the poor in America. NYU   Press.

Rank, M.R. (2005). One nation, underprivileged: why American poverty affects us all. Oxford University Press. 1 edition.

Winne, M. (2008). Closing the food gap. Resetting the table in the land of plenty. Beacon Press books.

Pictures are Courtesy of":
Boat - http://www.zazzle.com/u_s_economy_bail_out_poster-228968387847618374
Hunger - http://www.toonpool.com/cartoons/World%20Hunger_5419
Sign - http://www.ediblesadvocatealliance.org/harvesting-ct-blog/bid/39187/Hunger-is-silent-Shared-Harvest-Connecticut-Combats-Food-Insecurity
Fight Hunger - http://activerain.com/blogsview/771186/daily-bread-east-alabama-food-bank-fighting-hunger