Are you food insecure?

I recently watched A Place at the Table, a documentary about the plight of 50 million Americans struggling with food insecurity. The notion of not knowing where your next meal is coming from is mind boggling to me; particularly in this country, yet 1 in 6 Americans face hunger. As children, I think most of us took for granted that food was available to us whenever we wanted it, giving no thought to whether our parents struggled to get it to the table. 

In the 1980s, the cost of processed foods decreased due to an increase in farming subsidies while the cost of healthy foods increased. This, coincidentally, coincides with the increase in the obesity rates. So if you’re working with a limited income then you’re going to spend money on the cheapest calories you can get, right? That means you’d get processed foods. Would you believe farming subsidies began as a charitable act in the 1930s? That’s right folks, a charitable act on the government’s behalf.

During the Great Depression, farmers produced more food than people were buying, so as part of FDR’s New Deal, Congress passed the Agriculture Adjustment Act in 1933. Essentially, the law paid farmers to not grow food on a certain percentage of their land to reduce the market glut. It also called for the government to buy excess grain from farmers, which it could later release on the market if bad weather affected yields.

Additionally, it included a nutrition program — the precursor for food stamps — to feed the hungry. Did you know food stamp eligibility is based on a total household income? To qualify, the income for a family of 3 cannot exceed $24,000/year. If you’re a single woman raising kids how do you ensure your children receive the nutrition they need for developmental purposes? If your children don’t have enough to eat, or enough of the right kinds of food to eat, then that impacts how they perform in school.

Well they have plenty to do with it. The three biggest crops receiving subsidies are corn, wheat, and soybeans, which are coincidentally the three ingredients prevalent in processed foods (ex., chips), yet single income families are consistently faced with choosing between what’s nutritional and what’s cheap. Fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are not subsidized because these foods are grown by farmers who run smaller operations and don’t have the political clout that producers of corn, etc., have which means their influence is smaller. If you live in an urban community where mom and pop stores are prevalent (also known as food deserts), then the chance that you can buy fruits and vegetables is considerably smaller. So if you’re a single person, or a single parent, living on a fixed income then your opportunities to have nutritious meals for yourself and your children is severely limited.