Feeding the Hungry

Cultivating Justice

“If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time, cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.”

Norman Borlaug

“Thirty-five million people in the US are hungry or don't know where their next meal is coming from, and thirteen million of them are children. If another country were doing this to our children, we'd be at war.”

Jeff Bridges

I don't like to write about politics, but sometimes I just can't ignore an issue. This week, Congress is arguing about the budget. One side wants to trim the budget by cutting subsidies to large, corporate farms, while the other side wants to trim it by cutting food stamps for poor people. I've been extremely fortunate in my life to never have gone hungry; in fact, I am able to feed myself well. But in a country were two-thirds of the population are over-weight, how can it be that 13-million children are still going hungry?

Yesterday, I was in Wal-Mart buying staples, and the very large woman in front of me in the check-out line was heaping her purchases on the counter—three boxes of Little Debbie snack cakes, a 3-lb. log of ground beef, four 3-liter bottles of soda, and family -sized packages of chicken necks and livers. I watched and gave myself airs, thinking, “no wonder she's fat, look what she eats...' And then I remembered my own childhood. There were many lean years when we didn't have a garden. We ate a lot of fried fat-back with saw-mill gravy and canned vegetables; we ate foods dense in calories, like eggs-and-brains, and smoked ham-hocks. Mother fried chicken gizzards and chicken livers. In short, we ate what we could afford, what gave us the most calories for the least money. We never went hungry, but we certainly didn't eat well. The woman in front of me at Wal-Mart used food stamps to purchase her groceries. I wondered how many mouths she had to feed, and understood her desire to fill their bellies.

We need to start over in this country and really think about what we are doing. I feel so frustrated when our elected officials play politics with people's lives, and especially when the people who are on the bottom rung of society's ladder are the first to be dismissed. I understand that fostering dependency is not a good thing---so why are we doing it with huge, corporate farms that make millions of dollars per yea? Why are we paying huge subsidies to international corporations, period?

Perhaps we need to educate people who receive food stamps about healthy ways to feed large families with little money. Maybe we even need to disallow the purchase of sodas, Twinkies, and potato chips with food stamps. But, if we want peace and justice in our world, we have to see to it that children do not go hungry. Community food banks in all urban areas are low and even food drives are not producing enough to go around. Let us, as individuals, do what our elected leaders will not do, and make the effort to help. It's the least we well-fed Americans can do.

In the spirit,

Jane