Hunger Games: Spilled Milk #385
Hunger continues to persist in America, but not because we can't fix it. That's essentially a version of political violence. Read on for my thoughts on hunger and starvation in America and worldwide.
Next week, we return to our regularly scheduled programming here on Spilled Milk, including lots of easy, breezy stuff like recipes! But as people who have a food life, we need to always be aware of those who don’t enjoy the same basic human right. So here is my take on hunger in America.
At this time of year, as we gather, eat turkey and share our love of food, let’s always remember the neediest. Head to the “philanthropy” section of my website and consider a gift to any of these organizations today.
A few months ago, my friends, mentors, and thought partners José Andres and Sir David Miliband wrote op-eds for the New York Times and Time, respectively. Andres, the multi-hyphenate chef and founder of World Central Kitchen, highlighted the urgent moral imperative of feeding the approximately 2 million starving citizens of Gaza. Miliband, the director of the International Rescue Committee, urged America to maintain its fight to feed and nutritionally sustain the world’s most vulnerable citizens until other countries could step up and fill the impending gaps as we withdrew much of our own assistance. I re-read their essays several times, moved as I always am by their eloquence and their indisputable compassionate reasoning. I have worked on the fight against hunger for almost 25 years here in our country and abroad. Given the fact that we can statistically eliminate hunger in America for what amounts to a rounding error in our federal government’s annual budget, I believe the choice not to feed the hungry is way past being a national embarrassment, and beyond moral reprehensibility. I believe in many ways it is now genocidal.
Am I hitting a nerve? I hope so, because I think given the fact that hunger disproportionately affects women, children and people of color, we have eclipsed the worst of ourselves when it comes to failing to prioritize feeding our fellow Americans.
Let’s break it down. America has more than enough food. We waste around 30 to 40 percent of it annually, most of it pre-consumer contact. We also spend well over $6 trillion a year at the federal level annually, and yet tens of millions of Americans, many of them children, go hungry. To eliminate hunger would cost, depending on whose estimates you look at, about $30 billion to $35 billion a year. That’s about half a percent of our federal budget. That’s the same amount we routinely lose to accounting errors or spend on tax breaks for 300-foot yachts.
So yes, when a society with obscene abundance refuses to feed the hungry, despite having the tools, the money and the logistical know-how, it stops being a matter of policy failure and becomes a deliberate act of neglect. That is a factual statement.
I used the word genocidal. That’s strong language and understandably provocative. But here’s the thing: Genocide isn’t just about mass killings. It’s also defined in part by the systematic destruction of a group’s ability to survive and thrive, including through denial of food and resources. When hunger disproportionately impacts so many desperate and disadvantaged communities, and when policy after policy either ignores or worsens that dynamic, it is obviously not an oversight. It’s a pattern. This isn’t a red or blue or a left or right issue. This lack of a real policy to prioritize feeding Americans has been true for over 60 years … well, actually, longer.
Allowing people to suffer and die slowly, invisibly and without justification because it’s politically inconvenient and not profitable is a violence of its own kind. Maybe the more accurate term would be “policy-driven starvation.” Would that make you feel better? But deeply racialized consequences aren’t just bad political optics; they are a moral and political indictment.
And here’s the truth, as hard as it is to swallow, as hunger continues to persist in America: It’s not because we can’t fix it. It’s because we won’t. And that “won’t” is a choice, a brutal and calculated choice.
I completely agree with you, but it is not just hunger that needs to be taken care of in this country and in the world. It is health care and affordable housing. The current regime is far worse than those in the past and is outright following the genocide playbook. We must rid our country of this corrupt and evil regime. Something is very wrong when you have a person earning $1 trillion dollars and another has 12 cents in their bank account because they didn’t get their SNAP benefits.
This is the problem when the government takes over from the church, communities, and neighbors.