When was the last time you thought about hunger?
It doesn't seem to get much play on this website. Which is weird, considering how much the subject of food comes up; we talk all the time about what we're eating in diaries like What's For Dinner or OrangeClouds115's always excellent diaries, and recipes are posted on a regular basis both in Top Comments and as a way of responding to trolls without feeding them. Yet rarely does the subject of how much food we eat come up.
We're mostly pretty affluent here, so starvation is probably not something very many of us face, and it shows. A recent search revealed only 32 diaries that had to do with hunger, none of which had hunger in America as the central subject. 35.1 million people - about 10% of our population - are going hungry in our country, and we're not talking about it. I'm just as guilty as everyone else... maybe even more so, since I know what it's like....
Issues of class and labor seem to pop up quite a bit on Daily Kos as sidebars or as impacting other topics in important ways, but they don't get their own diaries as often as they perhaps should. Yet work and class have enormous relevance in American life. Almost all of us must work for a living. Most of us who work owe a great debt to organized labor - even if we are not ourselves members of unions, we benefit from the advances unions have made over the years, in safety conditions, limited hours and overtime pay, benefits, child labor laws. And while a shrinking percentage of American workers are represented by unions, not only do union members earn more than their nonunion counterparts, but nonunion workers in highly unionized industries and areas benefit from employer competition for workers, leading to better pay and conditions. Class issues, too, apart from the question of organized labor, are central in many of the political struggles of the day. From bankruptcy legislation to the minimum wage to student loans, legislation affects people differently based on how much they make, what kind of access to power and support they have.
With this series we aim to develop an ongoing discussion around class and labor issues. Such ongoing discussions have emerged in the Feminisms and Kossacks Under 35 series, and, given the frequent requests for more (and more commented-in) diaries on these issues, we hope this series will accomplish the same. Entries will be posted every Tuesday night between 8 and 9pm eastern. If you are interested in a writing a diary for this series, please email Elise or MissLaura and we will arrange for you to be put on the schedule.
I was about 12 years old when I experienced a period of "food insecurity". My father had lost his job of 13 years; my stepmother still worked but became pregnant around this time and eventually had to stop working too. My older brother was 14 or 15. We lived with my grandmother for a little while, then with my grandfather, (but it was during the summer so it felt just like vacation to me; it never occurred to me that we were actually so poor, we had to live with them). Finally, my dad got pension money he was owed. We used it to buy a mobile home and rent a tiny patch of land in a trailer park. We had our own place but we could barely afford food.
I remember what I ate when I got home after school and no one was around to tell me not to eat anything. It was often bread, flattened and carefully ripped off in little sections so that it would seem to last longer. Sometimes I got in trouble for that, though; sometimes, I had eaten the bread that was supposed to be used for sandwiches for the rest of the week, and we couldn't afford to buy anymore. Other times, it might be a spoonful of peanut butter, carefully licked so that I could hold onto the illusion that it was satisfying my hunger. Or just straight sugar... brown sugar and powdered sugar were the best because we didn't use them that often and you could take solid little balls out between your fingers, whereas regular white sugar required a spoon. I still remember what raw potatoes tasted like. I remember grabbing handfuls of cereal and wondering how much I could take before it became obvious, while still trying to eat enough to stave off the hunger pangs for a little while. If it was near the end of the month and I had eaten too much already, I got nothing.
Breakfast was the best meal, the only one that actually satisfied my hunger. It was just cereal with milk, but it was just enough to make me feel full for a little while.
Lunch was just a peanut butter sandwich and one Little Debbie's lunch snack or a small apple. All I remember about lunch back then is that I was always finished before everyone else.
Dinner was the worst meal: a quarter of a box of macaroni and cheese, stretched a little further with a little hamburger, chopped up hot dogs, or some spaghetti sauce, or a quarter of a box of Hamburger Helper or Tuna Helper. We joked that we could write a cookbook with all the cheap variations on macaroni and cheese we had to use. If there were any leftovers, they went to my dad and brother who, according to the logic presented to me, were bigger and therefore needed more food.
Above all, I remember being hungry all the time. It wasn't something I noticed much then, since it was so much a part of my everyday life and I had never paid attention enough to know better. But from the vantage point of adulthood, I can see it clearly: I was always wanting to eat, and even dreaming about food.
The effects are still with me, too. I should probably be a few inches taller, but the lack of proper nutrition at a key point in my growth undoubtedly stunted me somewhat. I still hate hunger pangs and would give up just about everything else before I would give up food. When I was younger, I used to admire the full pantries and refrigerators of my friends; now that I'm able to do that for myself, one glance at my piles of food makes me feel more secure even when I'm worrying about money because it tells me that I'm not that poor. And while I can't definitively point out any long-term effects, I'm sure that some of my current nutritional imbalances (like mild anemia) are linked to my childhood hunger.
Finally, my parents relented and applied for food stamps. We got so much and had gotten so used to having to go without, we didn't know what to do with all the food we suddenly had. But here's where my happy ending breaks down: this was all prior to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. And of course (because nothing has been going right in the past 6 years) hunger has only gotten worse: "People are leaving welfare, finding work, playing by the rules, and hunger is going up." How are we supposed to convince people to buy local, organic, sustainable (and thus often more expensive) foods when they can barely even afford to feed themselves?
-----------------
Other informative links:
Tables of Food Insecurity and Hunger for 2004 (pdf)
Center on Poverty and Hunger Bulletin, October 2005: Hunger and Food Insecurity Increase for 5th Straight Year (pdf)
FoodFirst Fact Sheet: The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Go Hungry (more statistics)
Ask Umbra (article on prioritizing organic food buying and how to find them cheaper)
-----------------
Action links (with much thanks to Elise for finding these for me):
Illinois Community Action Association
links on food in schools
Green Earth Institute, with even more links to some state hunger programs as well as federal ones
Please feel free to add more links in the comments if you have them!