I would love a big mac right now – supersize it baby!

I am listening to the program on hunger right now. The SC caller talked about buying cans of beans. I am not criticizing the woman, there may be many good reasons why she cannot cook. However, one can buy a bag of dried beans at a fraction of the cost of the canned beans.

Is not part of the problem the lack of skills in the kitchen? I am a Guardian ad Litem and in many of the homes that I visit all the food that I see is pre-prepared. I see so many people that have no idea of how to cook or prepare a meal from scratch.

I order the food for our church pantry in Attleboro. I can tell you that the number of people has increased. The problem is that I can’t get the food I need from our main source, which is the Greater Boston Food Bank. They do not have the staples we need, especially rice, peanut butter, pasta etc. It’s disturbing that the government through the USDA and the MEFAP (Mass Emergency Food Assistance Program) doesn’t supply enough food for pantries.

In the past decade the rents of the poor have gone up drastically compared to their income .Most of the money which would be going to food is going to pay rent . I don’t understand how no one can see that until rents are controlled the homeless wil be rampant . Until then we won’t begin to solve the hunger problem .

This story hits home for me, for several reasons. I don’t want to call in and hear my voice on air, but I know of three situations (friends, acquaintances) who are regularly without work and therefore without food. What I’ve seen on their parts is also a failure to go without. Without cable TV, for example, so that they could pay their water bill and have money for food. Sometimes, with one single mother who is a friend, I saw her spend all her food stamps on prepackaged food–rather than cheaper healthier food. And yet another, who refuses to sell her electronics or WHATEVER it takes to get food on the table. Its possible that people freeze or panic and make bad decisions, but I think people need to be told that they should do whatever it takes to get access to funds, which means sell belongings, go without cable or internet, or sell their car…if that’s what it takes.

to the Hilton Head restauranteaur: When I lived in the
Buffalo area 15 years ago, local volunteers would pick up leftover foods from restaurants all over the area and drop it off at local food kitchens. I don’t know if the program is still running, but it’s an idea to think about out and possibly implement in areas with lots of
restaurants.

donna, acton, ma

What about survival of the fittest?

Hello,
36 million of your people go hungry.
45 million have no health coverage,
and another 15 or so million have a limited
“insurance”.
Hundreds are dying weekly in Iraq because
of your war there.
And now this economic mess thanks to your
“liberal” “minds” and beliefs.
Oh,there is lots of press about all this,
but will that help ?
And I am really curious,how do the people
responsible for all this,and for that matter
the well-off,sleep now days ?
Regads,
I.Kiraly

great subject…
a friend of mine makes a decent salary, but after paying child support for three children, rent, car and all the rest, he is left in the negative every month. He shares custody of the children and still was refused food stamps to help feed his children. The formula does not take into account the actual life conditions.

In terms of people’s questions as to why high fructose corn syrup is used in everything….here is a short and concise answer from theaccidentalhedonist.com in short,
“Because the government wants it that way.

The Federal Government accomplishes this in two major ways:

* Sugar Tariffs
* Corn and Sugar Subsidies

Add these two variables together, and the result is sweetener made from corn.

The difficulty in explaining how the above work is in understanding that none of the above would exist without at least tacit complicity between the Sugar Industry, the Corn Industry and the United States Department of Agriculture. Remove any one of those three players from the equation, and the tariffs and subsidies most likely go away.

Let’s start with subsidies. A subsidy was developed to help a farmer make up money lost between the cost to produce a product, and the higher market cost. For example, if it cost me 1 dollar to grow a bushel of corn, and the market demanded only 80 cents, the government would make up the difference and pay me 20 cents, plus a little more so that I can make a profit and give me a reason to keep growing corn. A nice idea in theory, but in practice it essentially ends up paying a farmer both when they produce too much and when their crop prices are too low. As anyone with a passing grade in Econ 101 can tell you, making too much of a product is one cause of lower prices, the government ends up giving out a lot of money. To the cost of $22.7 billion in 2005.

A free market economy is exactly what we don’t have in our agricultural industries.

Now let me introduce you to the Big Player in the Corn Industry – Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).

The libertarian Cato Institute writes of ADM:

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. Thanks to federal protection of the domestic sugar industry, ethanol subsidies, subsidized grain exports, and various other programs, ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30

Do you want to know who makes HFCS? It’s Archer Daniels Midland. Do you want to know who pays for HFCS? That’d be you and I, in the form of the taxes we pay to the U.S. Government. The government spent $41.9 billion on corn subsidies from 1995 to 2004, a trough of money at which ADM gladly ate. ADM buys 12 percent of the nation’s corn at a heavily subsidized price from farmers, and turns it into high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol.

But there’s another side to this coin — The sugar tariffs. The sugar tariffs, put in place by law and enforced by the USDA, are so complicated that many people give up worrying about it. After all, paying $2.25 for a five pound bag of sugar is no big deal. Unless you consider that we could be paying as low as a dollar for that five pound bag, and wholesale purchases of sugar by companies like Coca-Cola, Heinz, and Kraft would pay even less.

So here’s the Sugar Tariff in action:

1. First, USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation lends money each year to sugar cane processors at a specific rate per pound of sugar. The loans must be repaid, with interest, after nine months.
2. The processors use the money to operate their factories and to pay sugar growers for the cane or beets that they deliver to the mills. Should the price of raw sugar fall below the amount set by the government at the time of the loan, the sugar processing companies are allowed to forfeit their sugar in lieu of repaying the loan.
3. The law requires that this program operate at no net cost to the federal government. The government must then manipulate the market to keep sugar prices higher than the price at which the sugar companies would forfeit their product. Otherwise the government would be out of the money lent and still have the sugar to distribute, further adding to the governments net cost.
4. To manipulate the market, each year the USDA estimates how much sugar Americans will consume in the following year and how much sugar U.S. growers will send to market to meet consumers demand.
5. The USDA then establishes a quota for imports of sugar from foreign producers, such as the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the Philippines, and Australia. This quota allows just enough sugar in to meet demand, but not so much as to affect the already high prices.

And that, in the nutshell, is why we use HFCS in place of Cane Sugar. We inflate the cost of sugar, lower the cost of corn, and Archer Daniels Midlands buys an excessive amount of corn at excessively low costs in order to make HFCS.

If you want to get HFCS out of our foods, have the government take care of the Tariffs, the subsidies, or both.”
And this is in 2006…….think of what is NOW happening!
Footnote from:
Tariffs and Subsidies – The Literal Cost of High Fructose Corn Syrup
01/24/06 @ 11:30:00 am, by Kate Hopkins

CxH’s comment/question deserves a response.
How does one define “the fittest”? Do you mean the old white man on numerous pharmaceutical drugs who can’t run anymore but who has a million bucks in the bank? Is he more “fit” to survive than a 52 year old, healthy woman who has been laid off from 2 jobs in the past year? A 25 year old?

I submit that the standards of “fitness” have changed dramatically since Darwinism was adopted by predatory businessmen as an excuse to be ruthlessly predatory with impunity. Oh, now they expect to be REWARDED for preying on others, as well.

So CxH: Do you want to meet this 52 year old woman on a level playing field and duke it out with rocks and brickbats to find out who is the “fittest”? Think about that. No guns allowed and leave your wallet at home.

To all actions…reactions. It happens in human interactions! How long can we continue to die of obesity, when the rest of the third world is diying of malnutrition? 10% of the world population consuming 90% of the world ressources! What an unfair entitlement, are we experiencing a correction? Is this crisis”poetic justice”?

If you are hungry in America it’s your own fault. You can geet a bag of rice for 2 bucks, beans, some veggies..it’s very cheap for food here. There are still alot of service jobs for people. Just pick up a McDonalds job on the weekend..(I did…3 years..to pay off the car early). I wish they would do away with food stamps and stuch…just find people a job..make them work..they will feel better about themselves.

Fittest, not meaning physical ability to conquer but the intellgence to seek out a solution to their suffering. I’m not saying that dumb people are the only ones affected by hunger but it seems like there are some who are more resorcefull than others. Not “enjoying” raw foods like brocoli seems like it should be pretty low on the list of concerns for someone who is hungry. There are certainly too many people that don’t have enough enjoyable food. I can imagine that beans and rice can get boring. Let’s ask the rest of the hungry world if they’d be upset with 12$ a week of beans and rice.

Thank you for clarifying your question, CxH.

Resourcefulness is a definite asset in hard times. Historically, many people prosper in underground economies when the doors to legitimate work are padlocked and on-the-books jobs are scarce. For example,The prohibition era, early Depression years of the 1930’s ushered in many resourceful “families” of gangsters and, consequently, a growth industry of policing and prosecuting them.

Enjoyment of one’s meals is a primary human drive. Starvation and/or strict, monotonous rationing of food has never been popularly embraced by civilized cultures. Do you really believe the majority of American people will simply fade into third world lifestyles without some reaction?

When is the last time you were offered only beans and rice as a daily diet for years on end? Or, raw broccoli every day and nothing else? Come on, please, the rest of the world comes HERE, often illegally, to escape that kind of dietary poverty.

First we lose our jobs to cheap (often illegal) laborers then WE are expected to adopt the lifestyles of the countries they fled in order to “survive” and prosper?

Very unrealistic thinking. Like it or not and regardless of one’s personal sociopolitical ideology it must be acknowledged that we have a crisis here that will not be cured by an involuntary daily diet of beans and rice.

It’s a bit of an exageration to say that a majority of Americans are headed twards the lifestyle of third world countrymen. We’re talking about people being hungry, not starvation. This isn’t about people dying it’s about living more comfortably. There is no doubt a hunger issue in the states, but a realistic solution would be something along the lines of sustainable agriculture rather than a hand out of cheetos. Give aid to those who are not able bodied. People who can work should join wwoof.org

Every church I know of has a food bank as part of the Great Commission…when my parish is petitioned for food, we provide in epic proportions…Christians and other people of faith are the most giving people on earth…the fact that government cannot comfort those in need should not surprise anyone.

I have a partial solution. Take the horses that the Bureau of Land Management have been corraling for the last 20 years and slaughter them for the meat. If you think that is disgusting think of all the people who donate their organs to save a life. Why can’t we donate horse meat to save lives? Lots of protien there!

Thank you for this show. Unfortunately there was not enough time to cover this topic in the depth it deserves.

I’d like to comment on one of the last concerns voiced by a listener and discussed briefly: that of people choosing non-nutritious foods vs nutritious foods at food pantries and with food stamps at grocery stores. One solution which was not mentioned was educating families on nutrition and on easy ways to prepare healthy, low cost meals.

Recently I had the opportunity and privilege to sit in on a session of Share Our Strength’s Operation Frontline in Boston. Share Our Strength is a national organization which works hard to make sure no kid in America grows up hungry. They have a number of very creative and successful programs, which include partnerships with restaurants and chefs, corporations and non-profit organizations to engage as many people as possible to work towards their goal. Education is an important pillar in their programs. And there is always more to do.

Operation Frontline was a real eye-opener for me. It includes education about healthy food, about purchasing healthy food on a limited budget, about meal preparation and about availability of assistance. Knowledgeable nutritionists and well known chefs help to run the program. I participated in a food preparation lesson and I learned a lot. I also watched the excitement and enthusiasm of the participants who were learning, practicing what they learned and helping each other. I was particularly impressed by the support the participants provided one another and the lasting friendships formed via the program.

I observed people helping people to help themselves–and having a lot of fun doing it. And education was the key.

There are ways we all can help: by increasing awareness of the problem, by influencing policy, and by donating our money and/or time to non-profit organizations like Share Our Strength, The Boston Food Bank, and other organizations like those mentioned on today’s show.

The poverty line requires that you give up your dignity in order to get help. The time involved, the forms, the documentation, the running from one place to another, and the ultimate “reward” of too little help to do the job–many people who need it will not bother for what they might get. Would you? Many of these people have the kind of jobs that don’t give them any time off for such running around? What do you choose: help with food, or a paycheck?

I’m with Joel that jobs that pay living wages are the best solution to hunger, with government aid coming second, and charity efforts a distant third. However, in 1994-96 the organization I run (West Michigan’s regional food bank) collaborated with Michigan State University in international award-winning research to discover how charity efforts can become more effective and more cost-effective. What we found was startling: That tremendous (up to 50-fold!) increases are possible. Our findings are posted on the “Resources” page of our web site (www.wmgleaners.org) and can be downloaded free. The report (“Charity Food Programs That Can End Hunger In America”) includes a scoring tool you can use for evaluating charity food programs in your community.

[...] Story: Hunger in the USA Url : http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/12/hunger-in-america/ [...]

I am a case manager for a community mental health agency that services the Greater Detroit Area. Mr. Berg’s comment that navigating through the entitlement system is “Kafkaesque” is such a great description. It resonated with me, and I am going to share the description with my co-workers (giving credit where credit is due of course). Great show.

what good are living wages if rents can go up as much as they want ?Think about it …..housing should not be a business .

I was watching the news recently and there was an item about a farm in northern California that had a lot of crops still in the field after the harvest. They put an ad in a the local paper saying they where giving away what was left on the ground.

They expected a few hundred people would show up.

40,000 people showed up to pick up onions and potatoes and cabbages.

40,000 people, something is wrong in this country, dreadfully wrong. Why there are not riots on the street every day I don’t know.

America has many different programs to take care of its poor and old. The needy people may not know where or how to apply for all these resources. People are qualified for SSI when their Social Security income is below a certain number, currently $765.82 and is adjusted annually. People who got SSI not only get subsidized for rent, they also get free health care insurance, and food stamps. Other than that, seniors can apply for meals on wheels which delivered right to their apartments. People seldom just depend mainly on food stamp money for their food like the woman who called in the program.

Posted by R.M:
what good are living wages if rents can go up as much as they want ? Think about it …..housing should not be a business .

OK then if housing is not a business then how do the landlords pay for the upkeep of the property. How do they pay for the insurance and the energy needed to heat the building. How do they pay for the bad renters who don’t pay the rent and then leave. How do they pay for the few idiots who live like animals and destroy the property.

I’m not a landlord, but I have known a few small property owners, and while they make decent income the amount needed for the enterprise of a just a few apartment buildings is staggering.

As in all things there are good tenants and landlords and there are also bad.

The price is based on what the market can afford.

You want socialism and subsidized housing look at all the awful housing projects in the large cities in this country.

You want a real wake up call try visiting the Gorbals housing estate in Glasgow. It’s not as bad as it was in the 80’s but it’s still awful.

Sigh! Why have a show where a silver tongued activist gets to pluck every ready answer to anticipated questions from his box of index cards.

The obese “hungry” are fat because they feed their fat faces with protion sizes and seconds that are a lot bigger than your grandma or great grandma ate. American young people are taller than ever which indicates better, not worse nutrition.

Americans, especially youngsters, are more sedentary than in the past with bedroom TVs and videogames. Kids are not fat because they eat a poor peoples diet. They’re fat because they burn calories like pampered rich people.

The guest plays fast and loose with facts; typical of an activist. I don’t know about skim milk but 1% fat milk is cheaper than 2% which is generally cheaper than “whole” milk. I don’t know where the guest shops in NYC but this is true of Pathmark, Stop & Shop and Western Beef.

I happen to believe food stamps should be relatively easy to get, however it’s time it stops being the corporate welfare program for the food industry. Why should someone be able to buy a bag of potato chips with food stamps? Potato chips are expensive recreational food.

Food stamps should pay generously for staples, milk, bread, eggs, beans, flour, oil, meat, fish, poultry, produce etc. I would stretch the definition slightly to include frozen vegetables which often make more sense than perishable fresh produce.

I get disability because I have several illnesses…lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, myasthenia gravis and others. I sure didn’t choose to grow up to be disabled. I appreciate that I get any help at all. I cannot work. I worked for years with my disability until I just could not do it any more.

My last business was an organic CSA farm for about 15 years. I was a chef for 20 years before that. I know good food and how to cook it.

I just spent almost 3 years homeless because of a divorce. I lived in my van and camped. In October I finally made it to the top of the list on subsidized housing.

In Florida I got $573/month disability and $30/month food stamps. In NY I am getting $704 disability and $14 food stamps. That’s my entire income. Who are the people getting all the food stamps? I almost fainted when I heard the maximum is $176/month. I wish I was so prosperous!

I hear about all sorts of social programs and the “safety net”, but most of it is not out there for someone like me…disabled, single, 52 years old.

I cook everything from scratch….and it’s REALLY hard to get by. Starting over a new life from scratch is financially tough, no matter how much you have!

[...] on my way to buy garlic yesterday, I was listening to NCPR. There was a program on about food stamps, food banks and food insecurity in the US. Before going in Aldi’s I listened a while, then when I came back out it was still on. I [...]

Something didn’t strike me right when the guest said people in rural areas can’t get produce. What about planting some seeds in the ground and growing some? I grew up in a semi-rural area and while we got most of our food from the grocery store we always had vegetables in the backyard.

<<<<>>>

Where I am now living, we have a 90 to 120 day frost free growing season. That means about 2 or 3 months when you can go out and get fresh stuff from the back yard….if you HAVE a back yard.

In the nearby “big” town of Saranac Lake, the senior complex is several stories high with no land for planting. There are a zillion variables why people might not have fresh food or any food.

I went through a few years where I was too sick to leave the house except to go to doc appointments or the hospital. I was no longer able to grow my own food.

There have been months or years when I had no car and there was no public transportation available. The general stores in VT did not sell produce, so you had to be able to drive 15 miles to the grocery store.

One person’s reality can be VERY different from the next person’s circumstances.

Wendy, You are probably right. I thought it over so more and I realized there are probably plently of reasons people in rural areas can’t get produce. At the same time though it seems like growing food and even hunting could be solutions for some of the hunger problems in rural areas.

posted by Jeff: “The price is based on what the market can afford”.

If its such a problem , don’t become a landlord …If the government helps the banks is that socialism ?……What are you talking socialism ? don’t bring that card up it won’t work .That fad went when the Berlin wall came down ….give me a break … You can’t play with peoples lives and raise rents as much as you want ……its not humaine ……

In response to Pearl….

About Meals On Wheels…not just any poor or disabled person is eligible. Most locations have guidelines similar to this…

Who is eligible for Meals on Wheels?

People who are at least 60 years of age, who are homebound, unable to cook for themselves and lack outside support are eligible.

Thankfully, most people do NOT fall under these guidelines…but then we are not eligible.

And about SSI, the dollar amount contributed per person, per month by the feds is $637 this year. A few states add a bit more…
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/SSIamts.html

R.M. you did not read my post correctly.
Rent control is a form of socialized housing and it does not work. Your pissed off because you don’t make enough money to live in whatever city you live in. The market does dictate how much rents are.

Are there bad landlords, you bet there are. There are also good ones. To expect the landlord to give people a break just because it’s housing is ridiculous. If you don’t like it go live in public housing which I would not wish on my worse enemies. If the government is going to make subsidies housing then they should build nicer homes. As the did in Roxbury the housing estate near Longwood is a good example.

When the price of oil to heat the apartments goes up are the landlords supposed to eat that? Why, you the renter are heating using the energy.

Heat and hot water is included in a lot of rents.
The rent reflects that and the landlord has averaged this out. It is a business, period.

I am all for laws that keep the percentage of the landlord raising rents above a reasonable amount per year, but rent control never worked in Boston or Cambridge, it created bad housing.

If there are no landlords then there you will not have rentals.

Most landlords need to cover taxes, insurance, heat and hot water, upkeep and so on. There is also a profit to be made. If you break even, what’s the point? Who in there right mind would want to be a landlord and only break even. It’s a business if you don’t like it don’t rent, buy your own apartment.

I also think that one area that has not been mentioned is cohousing which is a way to get affordable housing in high density cities. This idea is a great solution to a lot of housing and food issues. I think if designed well they could all have gardens and that would mean a lot of good fresh food could be grown for part of the year.

jeff you are obviously are a land lord …..and you are scared of regulations….

What Wendy said is very true. Lack of transportation, illness, disabilities, etc, when combined with insufficient income, contribute to the problem of hunger and obesity in this country.

Not to mention, it’s hard enough to discern that for which you qualify, then, face the maze of paperwork and bureaucratic nonsense involved in getting that assistance when you’re healthy, let alone when you are not healthy, lack access to transportation, and have very little money to spare.

[...] love dearly, and I live in a peaceful country. Last week, coming home from taking a final, I heard this program on “On Point” about hunger in America. It’s disgraceful that such a wealthy [...]