- ‘Today in the United States – because tens of millions of people live below the meager federal poverty line and because tens of millions of others hover just above it – 35.5 million Americans, including 12.6 million children, live in a condition described by the federal government as ‘food insecurity,’ which means their households either suffer from hunger or struggle at the brink of hunger.’ (15)
- ‘The number of adults and children who suffered from the most severe lack of food – what the Bush administration now calls ‘very low food security’ and what used to be called ‘hunger’ – also increased in that period from 7.7 million to 11.1 million people – a 44 percent increase in just seven years.’ (16)
- ‘The number of ‘emergency feeding programs’ in America – consisting mostly of food pantries (which generally provide free bags of canned and boxed groceries for people to take home) and soup kitchens (which usually provide hot, prepared food for people to eat on site) has soared past 40,000. As of 2005, a minimum of 24 million Americans depended on food from such agencies.’ (16)
- ‘The number of ‘emergency feeding programs’ in America – consisting mostly of food pantries (which generally provide free bags of canned and boxed groceries for people to take home) and soup kitchens (which usually provide hot, prepared food for people to eat on site) has soared past 40,000. As of 2005, a minimum of 24 million Americans depended on food from such agencies.’ (16)
- ‘While Americans have often envisioned people in poverty as lazy, healthy adults who just don’t want to work, 72 percent of the nation’s able-bodied adults living in poverty reported to the Census Bureau in 2006 that they had at least one job, and 88 percent of the households on food stamps contained either a child, an elderly person, or a disabled person.’ (18)
- ‘The real trouble is the inability for many working people to afford to support their families on meager salaries, and the inability of others to find steady, full-time work.’ (18)
- ‘In we were to put the American political system on trial for its failures, hunger would be ‘Exhibit A.’ Unlike other books that have argued that domestic hunger is a very unique problem, this book posits that it is actually emblematic of our society’s broader problems. The most characteristic features of modern American politics – entrenched ideological divisions, the dominance of big money, the passivity and vacuity of the media, the undue influence of interest groups, and empty partisan posturing – all work in tandem to prevent us from ending domestic hunger.’ (19)
- ‘We’ve gone backwards, and our modern elected officials deserve most of the blame. While, in the 1970s, the newly instituted federal nutrition safety net that Nixon and McGovern helped create ended starvation conditions and almost eliminated food insecurity altogether, in the early 1980s. President Reagan and a compliant Democratic Congress slashed federal nutrition assistance and other antipoverty programs. Reagan also began the multi-decade process of selling the nation on the false notion that voluntary and uncoordinated private charity could somehow make up for the large-scale downsizing in previously mandated government assistance. Predictably, hunger again rose.’ (19-20)
- ‘What was a household that was ‘food insecure without hunger?’ In such a household, people might occasionally skip meals; reduce portion sizes; buy more filling but less nutritious foods; or worry about where they will get their next meal, even if, for the time being, they were not going for long periods of time with no food at all. In other words, these households were at the brink of hunger.’ (28)
- ‘When interpreting food security statistics, it is important to keep in mind that households are classified as having low or very low food security if they experienced the condition at any time during the previous 12 months. The prevalence of these conditions on any given day is far below the annual rates. For example, the prevalence of very low food security on an average day during the 30-day period from early November to mid-December 2006 is estimated to have been between 0.5 and 0.8 percent of households (600,000 to 877,000 households).’ USDA (29)
- ‘Of the 16.6 million food-insecure households, 4.0 million households, containing 11.1 million people, suffered from hunger or very low food security at least sometime during the year.’ (30)
- ‘Most people who use food pantries and soup kitchens are poor because their parents were poor.’ (37)
- ‘Food insecurity is strongly associated…[with] increased numbers of hospitalizations. I would point out that a single 48-hour hospitalization, besides being traumatic for child and family, costs federal [health] benefit programs more than a year’s food stamp benefits for a child!’ Dr. Deborah Frank (45)
- ‘Even Henry Ford – no great liberal – understood that workers needed to be paid well enough to buy his cars. It significantly weights down the entire economy when large numbers of people are too poor and too hungry to purchase goods and services, or to be as innovative or productive as they can be.’ (46)
- ‘If you want fetuses to develop properly, you should support expansion of the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, which provides food to young children and mothers, and has a spectacular track record of ensuring exactly that.’ (47)
- ‘Youngsters from food insecure and hungry homes have poorer overall health status; they are sick more often, much more likely to have ear infections, have higher rates of iron deficiency anemia, and are hospitalized more frequently. In short, going hungry makes kids sick….They miss more days of school and are less prepared to learn when they are able to attend.’ Dr. J. Larry Brown (48)
- ‘Hungry children were three times more likely than at-risk for hunger children and seven times more likely than not hungry children to receive scores indicative of clinical dysfunction….The same pattern of at least doubling of risk was found for other indicators of psychosocial dysfunction like special education and repeating a grade….Hungry children were seven to 12 [sic] times more likely to exhibit symptoms of conduct disorder than not hungry children.’ Kleinman, et al., Journal of Pediatrics (49)
- ‘One study found that being poor didn’t make teenagers more suicidal than those who were nonpoor, but being hungry or suffering from food insecurity did make them more suicidal.’ (49)
- ‘In adults, food insecurity and hunger are also closely tied to poor health. Only 11 percent of people who use food pantries, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters in America
- ‘Forty-one percent of the food [bank] recipients reported unpaid hospital and medical bills.’ (49)
- ‘Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Fogel estimated that 20 percent of the population in England and France was effectively excluded from the labor force around 1790 because they were too weak and hungry to work. Improved nutrition, he calculated, accounted for about half of the economic growth in Britain France
- ‘As the Irish famine death toll mounted, British officials preached the gospel of local community responsibility and person self-reliance. Charles Trevelyan, British officer in charge of famine relief, wrote: ‘…indirect advantages will accrue to Ireland from the scarcity, and the measure taken for its relief…Besides, the greatest improvement of all which could take place in Ireland would be to teach the other people to depend upon themselves for developing the resources of the country, instead of having recourse to the assistance of the government [of Britain] on every occasion. If a firm stand is not make against the prevailing disposition to take advantage of this crises to break down all barriers, the true permanent interest of this country will, I am convinced, suffer in a manner which will be irreparable in our time.’ ’ (55)
- ‘The social changes in the 1960s and 1970s that brought large numbers of women into the workplace for the first time affected mostly middle- and upper-class women, since low-income women had always worked outside of the home out of necessity.’ (59)
- ‘Hoover
- ‘I am as much opposed to dole [charity] as any man in this Congress. But there is a difference between feeding a hungry man and dole.’ Rep. David Glover, Depression (61-62)
- ‘The scarecrow in this bill seems to be that it will be considered a dole. Their statesmanship will not permit them to vote for anything that smacks of a dole. Well, I do not care what you call it…I am interested in feeding the hungry. It is a sad spectacle to see men who never felt the pangs of hunger, who do not know what it means to go without three good meals a day, who are living on the fat of the land…in the name of statesmanship, stand here and quibble over a name – over whether this is a dole or a relief measure….Why if that is statesmanship all I have to say is – and I am a Presbyterian elder and believe my church will voice my sentiment – damn such statesmanship.’ Rep. John Flannagan, Depression (63)
- ‘Today’s liberals tend to forget that FDR repeatedly opposed giving out free money and food without requiring work – especially when they blasted Bill Clinton for supposedly betraying the New Deal tradition by supporting welfare reform.’ (63)
- ‘Even though FDR’s food programs were a vast expansion of any previous food aid and even though they began to limit mass starvation, they did not eliminate the widespread malnutrition that festered during the long Depression. When World War II arrived, General George Marshall and others noticed that American conscripts arrived at boot camp too malnourished to adequately fight. Consequently, President Harry S Truman and ultraconservative Senator Richard Russell, chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services and a leading segregationist, teamed up to create the National School Lunch Program.’ (64)
- ‘Following the war, the nation experienced a tremendous long-term economic boom, which created the most prosperous middle class the world had ever known. Most Americans now assume that such growth was solely a result of the independent productivity of the private sector. But government efforts, most notably the original GI Bill, played a critical role in this growth. The GI Bill enabled returning soldiers to obtain government help to pay for college, enabling millions of Americans, including my father, to become the first in their families to attend college. It’s hard to imagine today, but leaders of some of the most elite institutions of higher education opposed that provision of the bill, assuming that people who couldn’t afford to pay for college probably weren’t smart enough to succeed there. The president of the University of Chicago July 25, 1956 , 7.8 million of 16 million World War II veterans had participated in an education or training program. Before the GI Bill, America
- ‘The reason I provide so much text from the hateful letters is to document just how much of the underlying opposition to fighting hunger was fueled by racism, a situation that has not entirely ended even decades later, despite the fact that the majority of hungry Americans were (and still are) white.’ (69)
- ‘The reason I provide so much text from the hateful letters is to document just how much of the underlying opposition to fighting hunger was fueled by racism, a situation that has not entirely ended even decades later, despite the fact that the majority of hungry Americans were (and still are) white.’ (69)
- ‘…such reports set a pattern, followed until this day, by which antihunger groups issue reports specifically to obtain media coverage and thereby achieve public policy improvements. That’s the main reason the organization I manage in New York City
- ‘The biggest advance was the passage of the Food Stamp Act of 1977, which created the Food Stamp Program as we know it today. The act completely eliminated the purchase requirement for food stamps, making them free on a large scale for the first time.’ (74)
- ‘In 1979, the Field Foundation sent a team of investigators back to many of the same parts of the United States found to have high rates of hunger in the late 1960s. They found dramatic reductions in hunger and malnutrition, and concluded: ‘This change does not appear to be due to an overall improvement in living standards or to a decrease in joblessness in these areas….The Food Stamp Program, the nutritional components of Head Start, school lunch and breakfast programs, and…WIC have made the difference.’ Had the nation built upon this progress by further expanding and strengthening these programs, it could have easily ended hunger entirely.’ (75-76)
- ‘In the closing weeks of the administration in 2000, President Clinton announced that the USDA had created a program to enable senior citizens to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets, modeled on an existed USDA program that enabled WIC participants to do so. Although a number of states already had such farmers’ market coupon programs for seniors, and while the USDA only put $10 million into the effort that year, it was a major advance to have the federal government make it a national initiative.’ (80)
- ‘By 2008 – with Republicans having mostly failed to slash nutrition programs and Democrats (again in charge of Congress) unwilling to push for significant increases in them – the nation had reached a sort of uneasy equilibrium on the issue, resulting in the maintenance of a safety net of federal programs that provided enough food to prevent widespread starvation but not enough to actually end hunger in America.’ (82)
- ‘The myth that the safety net was entirely shredded under Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush is false. Cuts under Reagan, as well as cuts as a result of the welfare reform bill that Clinton
- ‘If programs keep increasing even when inflation is factored in, why is hunger still on the rise? One basic reason: The tens of billions spent on federal nutrition assistance programs don’t even come close to making up for the hundreds of billions of dollars lost in food purchasing power of low-income Americans. Wages continue to decline.’ (85)
- ‘The term ‘food stamps’ has actually been a misnomer since the 1990s when paper coupons were replaced by Electronic Benefit Cards (EBTs), which look like, and are used like, ATM cards. This switch was a rare public policy change that pleased both sides of the ideological spectrum. Conservatives liked it because it reduced fraud, as benefits on individualized cards were far harder to trade illegally than generic coupons. Antihunger advocates liked it because it reduced the stigma in making food purchases, since the coupons that were clearly only used by poor people were replaced by cards similar to those that non-poor people use at banks.’ (85)
- ‘Today, the Food Stamp Program, the bulwark of the current nutrition safety net, is not only a lifeline to tens of millions of struggling Americans, it is a huge boon to the American economy. The USDA has calculated that every five dollars in new food stamps spending generates $9.20 in community spending.’ (85-86)
- ‘Food stamp benefits can act as [sic] sort of medicine, improving health and preventing illness. While far too few elderly households participate in the Food Stamp Program and the other government nutrition programs, those that do benefit greatly. A USDA study found: ‘Food-insecure elders who participated in food assistance programs were less likely to be overweight and depressed than those who did not participate in food assistance programs….The positive impact of participation in food assistance programs of reducing or preventing poor outcomes resulting from food insecurity will improve elders’ quality of life, save on their health care expenses, and help to meet their nutritional needs.’ ’ (86)
- ‘While the public often assumes that virtually everyone on food stamps receives help their entire lives, half of the people who entered the program stayed on eight months or less, and 61 percent exited within a year. Some leave because their incomes have risen. Others are still eligible, but are removed from the rolls by governments due to bureaucratic snafus. Less than 15 percent of all food stamp recipients also receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), otherwise known as welfare.’ (87)
- ‘In the fiscal year 2007, the average monthly food stamp benefit per person was $95.64, equaling only $23.91 per week. The minimum benefit – which often went to seniors, people living on Supplemental Security System (SSI), and people living in public housing – equaled only $10 per month, or $2.50 per week.’ (88-89)
- ‘Food stamp participation is embarrassingly low. Only 65 percent of eligible people received food stamps in 2005, a significant increase from 54 percent in 2001. While this increase is encouraging, when more than a third of eligible people don’t get help from the Food Stamp Program, supporters of the program have to admit that there is something very wrong with it. In comparison, I have never heard of so much as one person eligible for Social Security retirement benefits who did not start receiving them after turning sixty-five.’ (89)
- ‘As community health providers, our teams dedicate an incalculable amount of time to assisting families with the pitfalls and traps of filling out applications, understanding requirements and rectifying for the Food Stamp Program, the application for which is much longer (and harder to understand) than the one I fill out each year for my medical license.’ Dr. Deborah Frank (91)
- ‘In a process that essentially treats applicants as criminals, as of 2007, food stamp applicants were required to provide finger images – electronic fingerprints – in four of the nation’s largest states (California, Texas, New York, and Arizona). It is not coincidental that people never have to be fingerprinted to obtain the types of USDA aid going to less poor (and often rich) people, such as farm subsidies, money to ranches for conservation programs, and payments to rural business owners.’ (94)
- ‘To keep tummies full, low-income families eat a lot of cheap fast food and processed foods.’ (119)
- ‘In neighborhoods without supermarkets, it is corner stores, bodegas, and convenience stores that fill in the gaps. Louisville , Kentucky Louisville
- ‘The food industry spends more than $10 billion per year advertising to children in the United States
- ‘Advocates often go too far in blaming the food industry and its marketing for society’s entire obesity problem. Sweden Norway
- ‘Because obesity plays a role in so many serious diseases, it increases health care costs by 36 percent and medication costs by 77 percent.’ (125)
- ‘Of the hundreds of courses at Harvard Medical School in 2007, only four dealt with nutrition; out of those, three concerned nutrition in Latin America and one was about pediatric nutrition in the United States. Not one was about the nutrition of adult Americans. Yet the school has three courses on plastic surgery and four on sports medicine. It has twenty-one courses on oncology and twenty-seven courses on cardiology and vascular disease. It is curious that medical schools spend so much time on problems like heart disease and cancer, which are frequently caused by poor nutrition, but so little time on nutrition itself. If the medical profession doesn’t focus more on nutrition, it is no wonder that the greater society doesn’t. We need to change that.’ (125-126)
- ‘Between 2006 and 2007, the collective net worth of the nation’s top 400 plutocrats rose by $290 billion, to $1.54 trillion. That’s more money that the economy of France
- ‘Between 2002 and 2006, household income increased by 1.38 percent for the poor and the near-poor, 1.08 percent for the lower middle class, 4.38 percent for the merely rich, 5.61 percent for the very rich, and a truly astounding 71.47 percent for the ultrarich.’ (129)
- ‘Given that the gap between the rich and ultrarich is so massive, the gap between the poor and the ultrarich is astronomical, with the 400 richest people having about seventeen times the combined money of the 23 million poorest families.’ (130)
- ‘The fact that wealthy people are getting so much wealthier wouldn’t be so troubling if it were not accompanied by the rest of the nation – working people – facing stagnating wages and surging poverty. In our most recent Gilded Age, as the ultrarich got ultra richer, hope started vanishing for tens of millions who toiled hard to reach or stay in the middle class, and, all-too-often, failed.’ (132)
- ‘In 2007, a record number of people – 15.6 million Americans – lived in extreme poverty, meaning their cash income was less than half of the poverty line, or less than about $8,500 a year for a three-person family.’ (132)
- ‘Of the 37.2 million Americans living in poverty in 2007, 13.3 million (36 percent) were below the age of eighteen; 3.5 million (9 percent) were above the age of sixty-five; and 4.2 million (11 percent) were between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five but were classified by the Social Security Administration as too disabled to work. Thus, 21 million Americans in poverty (56 percent of those in poverty) were either children, of retirement age, or disabled. That meant that about 16.2 million people in poverty (44 percent of all the people in poverty) were able-bodied and between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five. Of those 16.2 million able-bodied adults, about 2.7 million (17 percent) worked full time, 6.3 million (39 percent) worked part-time or part year, and 7.2 million (44 percent) didn’t work at all. Those 7 million able-boded [sic], unemployed people are less than 20 percent of the people in poverty…and many of those actively are looking for work.’ (132-133)
- ‘Twenty-one percent of Hispanics, 8 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 24 percent of African Americans, and 10 percent of Asians were poor in 2006.’ (133)
- ‘The so-called ‘Housing Wage,’ created by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, calculates the full-time hourly wage that a worker would need to earn in order to pay what the federal government estimates to be the Fair Market Rent for a home where that worker lives, while spending no more than 30 percent of that worker’s income on housing costs. The 2006 National Housing Wage for a two-bedroom rental unit was $16.31 per hour, more than three times the minimum wage at the time.’ (134)
- ‘Also in 2006, after seven straight years of increases in the number of Americans without health insurance, 47 million Americans – more than one in every seven – were uninsured, including nearly 9 million children. More than 40 million adults – roughly one in five – did not receive at least one type of health care they needed that year (medical, dental, mental health, prescription drugs) because they could not afford it.’ (134)
- ‘Also in 2006, after seven straight years of increases in the number of Americans without health insurance, 47 million Americans – more than one in every seven – were uninsured, including nearly 9 million children. More than 40 million adults – roughly one in five – did not receive at least one type of health care they needed that year (medical, dental, mental health, prescription drugs) because they could not afford it.’ (134)
- ‘In Florida in 2007, migrant farm workers, picking tomatoes ten to twelve hours per day by hand for some of the largest fast-food chains in the world, earned $0.45 for every thirty-two pound bucket they picked.’ (137)
- ‘In 2006, 51 percent of all American households had annual incomes below $50,000 and 81 percent had incomes below $100,000.’ (138)
- ‘Americans are willing to accept that we have poverty despite wealth, but they are loath to consider that we often have poverty because of wealth. Because Americans (unlike Europeans) are generally socialized into believing that what’s good for rich people is automatically good for everyone, they won’t allow themselves to accept the simple truth that, if some people become ultrarich in part because the people who work for them – either directly or indirectly – aren’t paid enough to support their families, such wealth does indeed cause poverty and hunger.’ (139)
- ‘The dysfunction of our current system of crony capitalism is based upon the twin assumptions that – in order to be competitive in the world economy – US corporations must award astronomical sums to their corporative executives to achieve optimum performance and must pay as little as they can to their frontline workers in order to hold down costs.’ (141-142)
- ‘The dysfunction of our current system of crony capitalism is based upon the twin assumptions that – in order to be competitive in the world economy – US corporations must award astronomical sums to their corporative executives to achieve optimum performance and must pay as little as they can to their frontline workers in order to hold down costs.’ (141-142)
- ‘Because executives rig the system and then choose to pay themselves arbitrary (but huge) amounts which are far more than the market demands (and necessary only in order to support lifestyles that are beyond extravagant), their companies have less money to pay their workers appropriate wages, thereby harming employee morale and dampening worker productivity.’ (142)
- ‘There is little discussion of the far more substantial welfare that is doled out to big business and to wealthy individuals through a variety of tax breaks and subsidies.’ (145)
- ‘Crop subsidies have been protested by progressives who detest corporate welfare, as well as conservatives who are against government waste. They’ve been opposed by both the Bush administration, which believes they distort free trade, and some of the most liberal members of Congress, who believe such money would be better spent fighting hunger. They’ve been routinely blasted by newspaper editorials. And they’ve even been routinely opposed by many farmers. So why in heaven’s name do they still exist? You guessed it – campaign contributions. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, agribusiness contributed more than $434 million to federal political campaigns between 1990 and mid-2008.’ (151)
- ‘The firm experienced a less bountiful year in 2007, but Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein still earned $68.5 million. That year the average earnings of on [sic] Aramark food service employee who worked in the Goldman Sachs cafeteria was a measly $21,320.’ (152)
- ’60 percent of the income gap between any two people in one generation persists into the next generation.’ (155)
- ‘Clinton and his allies at the Democratic Leadership Council and Progressive Policy Institute believed that, if progressives themselves tackled welfare and other excesses of government, they would win back the public trust for a new wave of innovation and progress. They were largely correct.’ (161)
- ‘When most Americans imagine poor people, they imagine people on welfare. Yet…there has never been a time in American history when the majority of people living in poverty were on welfare. In 1960, only 8 percent of poor Americans were on welfare. As a result of welfare expansions prompted by the War on Poverty and the National Welfare Rights movements, the welfare to poverty ratio swelled to 48 percent in 1973, when 10 million people were on the rolls. The rate was 37 percent in 1995, the last year before welfare reform, and dropped to 18 percent by 2000, the last year of the Clinton
- ‘Most people assume that welfare reform slashed funding for poor Americans in poverty. It didn’t. It shifted funding from welfare payments to work-support activities, including Earned Income Tax Credit payments.’ (163)
- ‘We say people on welfare are ‘dependent,’ as if all the rest of us are somehow entirely independent of government and of each other.’ (178)
- ‘In 2006, adult women were 41 percent more likely to be poor than adult men. Women who worked outside the home were 36 percent more likely to be poor than men who worked outside the home.’ (181)
- ‘The collection of child support from absent fathers is failing to help many of the poorest families. In part because the government uses the father’s payments largely to recoup welfare costs rather than passing on the money to mothers and children, close to half of the states pass along none of the collected child support to families on welfare. In a vicious cycle, when fathers known their money really isn’t going to their children but to the government, they have less incentive to pay.’ (182)
- ‘A key reason the United States never developed a more robust social safety net like those in Western Europe is that Americans falsely believed that most of the people needing help were nonwhite.’ (183-184)
- ‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, as Western Europe has become both more racially diverse and more populated with immigrants over the last few decades, voters in these countries have supported scaling back their social safety nets.’ (184)
- ‘In a carefully crafted experiment in which college students posing as job applicants visited 350 employers, the white ex-con was called back 17% of the time and the crime-free black applicant 14%. The disadvantage carried by a young black man applying for a job as a dishwasher or a driver is equivalent to forcing a white man to carry an 18-month prison record on his back.’ WSJ (185)
- ‘An African-American man is more likely to go to prison than to graduate college.’ (185)
- ‘A tenth of all black men between ages 20 and 53 are in jail or prison; blacks are incarcerated at over eight times the white rate. The effect on black communities is catastrophic: one in three male African Americans in their 30s now has a prison record….Part of the answer is a law enforcement system that unfairly focused on drug offenses or other crimes more likely to be committed by blacks, combined with draconian mandatory sentencing and an absurdly counterproductive retreat from rehabilitation as an integral method of dealing with offenders….But there is another equally important cause: the simple fact that young black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes, especially violent crimes, which cannot be attributed to judicial biases, racism, or economic hardship. The rate at which blacks commit homicides is seven times that of whites….The circumstances that far too many African Americans face – the lack of parental support and discipline; the requirement that single months work regardless of the effect on their children’s care; the hypocritical refusal of conservative politicians to put their money where their mouths are on family values; the recourse of male youths to gangs and parental substitutes; the lack of skills among black men for the jobs and pay they want; the hyper-segregation of blacks into impoverished neighborhoods – all interact perversely with the prison system that simply makes hardened criminals and spits out angry men who are unemployable, unreformable, umarriageable, closing a vicious cycle.’ Orland Patterson (185-186)
- ‘Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.’ (188)
- ‘Trying to end hunger with food drives is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon. Because local charities cannot possibly feed 35.5 million people adequately, and because their efforts rarely enable people to become self-reliant, this belief that charity does it better than government only ensures hunger will persist in America
- ‘Part of the problem is that nonprofit hunger organizations across the nation – including the New York City Coalition Against Hunger – depend heavily upon such charitable donations to support our vital work. We’ve come to learn that talking too much about the role of government can decrease donations and that the most effective fundraising strategies give potential donors the clear impression that the only thing standing between a family and hunger is their donation to our organization.’ (194)
- ‘Keeping a charity alive is sometimes more about making the donors and the volunteers feel good about themselves than it is about accomplishing concrete tasks that will reduce hunger and poverty.’ (194-195)
- ‘Business executives organizing community service days for their employees often request that feeding organizations place large groups of highly skilled professional employees together for just a few hours to perform manual labor during prime business hours in just one locations, which must be near the corporation’s headquarters in the central business district of the city. When we respond that it would be much more beneficial to place smaller groups in higher-need (but more distant) neighborhoods in order to use their employees’ professional skills to mentor agencies over time on challenging tasks such as bookkeeping or strategic planning, they still usually insist that their employees volunteer as a large group, near downtown, just once, to carry out manual tasks such as serving soup or putting cans in pantry bags.’ (195)
- ‘The government merely transfers the money electronically onto EBT cards and then, at virtually no additional cost to the government other than the benefits themselves, recipients are able to use the money solely for food. That’s why the vast majority of money in the Food Stamp Program goes to food, not to administrative overhead. In the fiscal year 2007, out of total Food Stamp Program costs of $33.0 billion, the federal government spent $30.3 billion on benefits and only $2.6 billion as their share of the overheard.’ (202)
- ‘When I worked for the government I was derided as a bureaucrat, but when I moved to the nonprofit sector I was lauded as a saint, even though I performed nearly identical work in both roles. People simply assume that nonprofit work is more laudable than government work.’ (205)
- ‘Further complicating the matter are some religious traditions that teach that suffering is noble and that the mere act of giving makes one holier.’ (209)
- ‘Many business leaders whose corporations donate food and money to feeding charities, and who personally sit on the boards of such groups, simultaneously hire lobbyists to oppose increasing the minimum wage and derail government efforts to take other steps that could actually end hunger.’ (213)
- ‘While a few brave food banks, such as the Oregon Food Bank and the Food Bank for New York City, advocate for minimum wage increases anyway, the vast majority of charitable feeding programs remain silent on this vital issue.’ (213)
- ‘In the 1960s, the media’s direct or implicit question was, ‘How can a country this wealthy let children go hungry?’ By the Reagan era and for many subsequent years, the implicit question asked by the media became, ‘Why are all these undeserving people getting benefits with our tax dollars?’ ’ (219)
- ‘Few if any of the major national media outlets maintain a ‘poverty beat,’ even though 37.2 million Americans live in poverty. In contrast, the major media collectively have hundreds of reporters on business, sports, and entertainment beats.’ (223)
- ‘The closer to home an event occurs, the more news coverage it attracts. That’s certainly true for natural disasters and terrorist attacks. But this is not the case for hunger and poverty issues, where some of the media elite are actually more likely to cover international poverty and hunger than those same conditions locally.’ (223)
- ‘The quickest and easiest way to end most hunger in America – with one bold action – would be to entirely reinvent the existing system by combining all existing federal programs (food stamps, WIC, commodities, etc.) into one larger, but more efficient, entity. Today, even if all of the nation’s food charities somehow accomplished the Herculean task of doubling their food distribution (increasing such efforts by 100 percent), this feat would barely dent the nation’s hunger problem, merely reducing the number of food-insecure Americans by 2 million – from 35.5 million to about 33 million. In contrast, if the US United States America
- ‘Food-insecure people spent an average of thirteen dollars per person per week less on food purchases than did people who were food secure. Multiplying thirteen dollars by fifty-two weeks by 35.5 million people, I calculate that, if Americans with low food security had an additional $24 billion in food purchasing power annually, they would no longer go without enough food. But what about a smaller goal of just ending hunger for the very worst off? The same USDA report also stated that people with ‘very low food security’ (hunger) spent an average of $13.50 per person per week less on food purchases than did people who had enough to eat. Multiplying $13.50 by fifty-two weeks by 11 million people with hunger/very low food security, I calculate that, if hungry Americans had an additional $7.8 billion per year in purchasing power annually, they would no longer suffer from hunger.’ (241)
- ‘While Americans have been conned into believing that higher taxes on the wealthy cripple economic growth, long-term economic growth in Western Europe, where taxes on the wealthy are far higher than in the US, has proven that’s just not true. Chart 12B shows that the US
- ‘Another way to dramatically reduce hunger in America
- ‘When they started serving breakfast in their classrooms, kids came in early just for the meals, and now only about five kids a day are late – a 900 percent decrease in tardiness. The principal also told me that absenteeism and visits to school nurses also dropped, and in the afternoons, kids fell asleep in the classrooms less frequently. This is obviously not only good nutrition policy but also good education policy.’ (245)
- ‘A special additional bones could be awarded to any state that demonstrates it has ended child hunger. States would then be required to use those bonuses to expand and improve existing antihunger and antipoverty programs. Such incentives would draw attention to truly effective antihunger programs, which would serve as models for other states.’ (247)
- ‘Across the nation, pantries and kitchens are empowering the people they help with more than just food. One food pantry in Milwaukee
- ‘While some studies show that organic food may be marginally healthier the Mayo Clinic declared: ‘No conclusive evidence shows that organic food is more nutritious than is conventionally grown food….Some people buy organic food to limit their exposure to [pesticide] residues. Most experts agree, however, that the amount of pesticides found on fruits and vegetables poses a very small health risk.’ Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good environmental reasons to buy organic food, and, if the crops are actually grown by small farmers who pay their workers a living wage, there are also excellent social justice reasons to do so.’ (264)
- ‘People who give the impression that it’s better to have no fruit or vegetables at all that it is to have nonorganic produce are doing low-income families a grave disservice. After all, there are mountains of scientific evidence that people who are large amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables (whether organic or inorganic) are likely to significantly reduce their risks of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and stroke. In contrast, most scientific studies indicate that, if people eat nonorganic produce throughout their lives, the trace pesticides on their fruits may very slightly increase their chances of getting cancer down the line, especially if the produce is not washed before eating.’ (264-265)
- ‘While there are many good reasons to slam Wal-Mart, we must keep in mind that their lower prices do provide genuine relief to struggling families. It is no wonder then that, according to the Pew Center
- ‘It is also wrong to imply, as some food security advocates do, that the Food Stamp Program increases obesity by giving low-income Americans extra funds to purchase what the advocates deem food of substandard nutritional quality. A major USDA study published in 2007 found no significant difference between the body mass index of food stamp recipients and equally poor people who did not receive food stamps.’ (268)
- ‘Such thinking also leads some food advocates to propose that the government limit the items that people can purchase with food stamps – an idea also popular with the Right – or place a so-called ‘fat-tax’ on junk food. While well intentioned, such policies would be a big mistake – both patronizing and a waste of time and money. With billions of dollars at stake, the battle to define junk food would be epic, with nutrition experts pitted against food-industry lobbyists, slugging it out one food at a time. Are Raisenets junk food or fruit? Junk food, you say? Then how about a caramel apple? What about a Fig Newton
- ‘Micromanaging the lives of poor people – or anybody, for that matter – is patronizing and usually backfires. A far better strategy than limiting food choice with food stamps, banning fast food, or passing a ‘fat tax’ is to increase the average benefit amount of food stamps so people can afford to buy the healthiest foods – which most food stamp recipients desperately want to do.’ (268)
- ‘We must continue to raise the federal minimum wage and index it to inflation annually. If Congress and the president don’t agree to that, we should insist that, every time they raise their own salaries, they must substantially raise the federal minimum wage.’ (279)
- ‘When businesses brag about their charitable donations, customers should research how they treat their workers.’ (293)
- ‘Someday we’ll ask ourselves, can we imagine a time when America was so stonyhearted that it forced working families to seek food from charities just to survive? A time when the nation was so cavalier that it forced elderly cancer patients to choose between food and medicine?’ (294)
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