Mark Winne, a food justice activist, author, and former director of the Hartford Food System (a grantee of the Presbyterian Hunger Program) helps change the angle from which we view the high food price issue and focus on the importance a living wage. Cities around the country are moving forward on this and changing the tenor of local economies. Thank you again, Mark!
High Food Prices - Just Another Bad Day in the Foodline
By Mark Winne
The current spate of alarming farm and food stories - drought, rising food prices and shortages - has riveted our attention on the precarious state of our food system. As a nation that has become accustomed, at least for the past generation or two, to an abundant supply of affordable food, the daily accounts of everything from food riots to soaring egg prices have catapulted us out of our comfort zones.
For some, these events may mean that those weekly strolls down the tastefully lit aisles of Whole Foods now become monthly. And for those who have resolutely spurned such discount pariahs as Wal-Mart, second thoughts may be in order.
For another class of American shoppers, however, rising food prices, whether organic or conventional, are just another bump in the road on an already trying journey. I'm speaking of low-income families, and increasingly low-to-middle income families who now find themselves treading closer to the lower end of the income spectrum.
Use to standing in line at county food stamp offices or the neighborhood food pantry, the nation's poor seem to know how to tough it out when times get hard. Like a "last in, first out" inventory system, the poor are the last in line on those rare occasions when there is an equitable distribution of abundance, but they know that they are the first to be cut when scarcity sets in.
Almost 35 million Americans in 2006 - 11.3 percent of the population - were classified as food insecure or very food insecure (a term that used to mean "hungry") by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Not coincidentally, this is almost the same number of Americans who live at or below the nation"s official poverty level. When those folks are combined with 57 million Americans who are considered near-poor, we have nearly one-third of a nation already struggling to put food on the table.
But what is perhaps most striking about the 11.3 percent figure is that it is exactly the same as when USDA first measured food insecurity and hunger in 1996. In spite of current federal nutrition assistance expenditures (e.g. food stamps, school lunch) approaching $60 billion a year and a private system of 50,000 emergency food sites such as food pantries, we as a nation have made little progress over 12 years in reducing food insecurity.
The twin jolts of a declining economy and food/energy inflation have driven record numbers of people, nearly 28 million, into the food stamp program. But their use of food stamps doesn't mean they aren't still clinging precariously to overcrowded lifeboats. On average, food stamps provide an individual with barely enough to live on - about $1.04 per meal. This number will increase in proportion to inflation, but not until October. And the new Farm Bill (still not signed into law as of this writing) only makes incremental improvements in food benefits and eligibility.
In our nation's schools, food service directors are scrambling like never before to feed millions of children who are eligible for federally funded child nutrition programs. But with barely one dollar per meal to pay for the food portion of school lunch, our redoubtable lunch ladies are consulting scripture for recipes that turn stones into bread.
Some anti-hunger advocates have estimated that the situation could at least be managed with a fifty percent increase in the food stamp program, or about $18 billion per year. Coincidentally, this about what it costs to wage the Iraq War for one to two months. But we all know that the President and Congress are not willing to realign the nation's priorities.
What must be understood here is that food insecurity has become a way of life for far too many Americans. The current economic crisis and soaring food prices that are now stinging the middle and upper classes are one more slap in the face to the poor, though perhaps a gut punch to the near-poor now taking their place in food lines for the first time.
Food insecurity has cast a dark shadow over the national landscape for decades, primarily because Americans cannot muster the political will to effectively address its root cause, poverty. Instead of developing and adequately funding job training, childcare, and even national health insurance, a small core of advocates have doggedly pursued the creation and expansion of 15 separate public food programs, such as food stamps and national school lunch.
With equal vigor, but with vastly greater numbers, volunteers and paid staff have brought forth a formidable network of free and emergency food banks, pantries, and soup kitchens, the likes of which have no parallel in the developed world. Together, public food programs and private initiatives have succeeded in mitigating the worst aspects of poverty, namely hunger, but even on their best days, only succeed in managing poverty, never ending it.
There is a larger problem, however, in the United States that will neither be solved by government nor the goodwill of a million compassionate charities. The lines in food stamp offices and at food pantries are being fed by our growing low-wage economy, where the attention to the bottom line is slowly, almost imperceptibly, starving its workers. It was Henry Ford, who as legend has it, paid his workers enough so that they could buy the cars they built. Today, growing numbers of U.S.-based companies don't even pay their workers enough to feed themselves.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a county food stamp director who was confused by the growth in food stamp applications in spite of the county's record low unemployment levels. The recently opened Wal-Mart Supercenter and a separate Wal-Mart regional distribution warehouse had provided hundreds of jobs to county residents. But to his chagrin, the county director realized that Wal-Mart's wages were so low, that many of their workers still qualified for food stamps. Public funds, i.e. the U.S. taxpayer, were subsidizing the nation's biggest retailer.
Until our public policies once again take on the task of ending poverty, and private industry is forced or shamed into paying a living wage to all its workers, hunger and food insecurity will be business as usual for tens of millions of Americans, numbers that are now growing rapidly in light of food price inflation. A few cities like San Francisco and Santa Fe, New Mexico have living wage ordinances which mandate wages near $10 per hour. These are good starts that must be expanded and replicated across the country by citizens who wish to hold both our government and private industry accountable for the existence of hunger and food insecurity in the richest nation on earth.
The recent flare ups in our stressed food system may remind us how
vulnerable we all are to economic and natural forces, to say nothing of
our unquenchable appetite for cheap energy, but for the poor and those
now joining their ranks, it's just another bad day in the food line.
Mark Winne is the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon Press). The book can be purchased online at www.amazon.com or www.beacon.org.
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