Tag Archive for Hunger in America

A Place At The Table

We are expected to get our first frost of the season tonight.  The weather outside today was cold and windy.  Not as cold and windy as my great home State of Wisconsin gets…but my fellow Alabamians were freezing their bottoms off.  They are weak!  Smile.  It was the perfect evening to have a potluck at the Trinity United Methodist Church.  The North Alabama Food Policy Council sponsored the event and all of the dishes came from foods grown in Northern Alabama.

The highlight of the evening was the showing of the documentary, “A PLACE AT THE TABLE”, shedding light on the problem of hunger in the United States.  Three low-income families in rural Colorado, rural Mississippi, and Philadelphia, PA were interviewed on how hunger affected their family.  This post will share my learnings and hunger statistics from this movie.

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When many people think of hunger, they think of emaciated people in third world countries experiencing famine.  Thankfully, starvation is not rampant in the USA. However, food insecurity is prevalent and growing.  Food insecurity is when a person does not know when their next meal is coming from.

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One in six Americans do not have enough to eat.  30 percent experience food insecurity.  My neighboring state of Mississippi has the highest rate of food insecurity.  They also have one of the highest rates of diabetes in the country. I hope to write more in depth about the relationship between poverty and diabetes in a future blog post.

Did you know fruits and vegetables have become more expensive since 1980?  Did you know that processed foods like ramen noodles have become more cheaper since 1980?  The rates of diabetes have risen since then.  Correlation?  There is more than one cause of the increased rates of diabetes in the USA, but this certainly is a contributing factor.

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235 million Americans live in “Food Deserts.”  These are places where fresh foods are not available to the population.

Did you know the average food stamp budget is three dollars a day?  (The modern name of the food stamp program is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.)

The United States, according to the IMF, has the worst record of food insecurity among advanced countries.

Half of all children in American  will receive food assistance in their lifetime.  85% of food insecure people have one person in the family in the work force.

Kathryn Strickland, Director of the Food Bank of North Alabama, closed the evening with local hunger statistics and HOPE.  Her food bank gave away 7 million pounds of food last year.  They served about 100,000 people.  This is about the size of the cities of Decatur and Florence Alabama combined.  32,000 of the people served were children.

A current strategy of the Food Bank of North Alabama is to offer grants to assist small farmers to sell their produce to local schools.  This is a WIN-WIN.  The small farmers will get more money for their produce.  The school children will be getting more locally grown fruits and vegetables in their diets.

50 million Americans are food insecure.  Strategic thinking by people like Kathryn Strickland are helping to make sure these people will have “A PLACE AT THE TABLE.”

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