hunger
lborkowski | November 30, 2015As many of us indulged in Thanksgiving meals last week, NPR’s Planet Money podcast and WAMU’s Metro Connection shared stories on ways food banks are using technology to improve food distribution.
The Planet Money story focuses on how Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks, distributes the donated food it gets from farmers, manufacturers, retailers, and government organizations. Until a few years ago, the headquarters staff didn’t know enough about what kinds of food local organizations most needed or could arrange to get – which is why a food bank in Alaska missed out on a…
kkrisberg | November 20, 2015It’s not surprising that food insecurity has a negative health and academic impact on young children — numerous studies have come to that conclusion. However, a new study has begun to dig a little deeper into the topic, zeroing in on the lingering aftermath of the Great Recession, when food insecurity and child poverty reached record levels, and examining the particular effects of transitioning from not worrying about having enough food to living in a household with limited or uncertain access to food.
Published this month in Health Affairs, the study looked at transitions in food security…
kkrisberg | May 20, 2015Do food assistance programs deliver more than food and nutrition? Can relieving the stress of food insecurity provide positive psychological benefits as well? A new study says yes it can.
In a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers set out to examine whether participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly referred to as food stamps, was associated with better overall well-being and specifically, lower rates of psychological distress. In analyzing data from the SNAP Food Security survey, the largest longitudinal…
kkrisberg | April 3, 2015Thanks to the federal School Breakfast Program, millions of low-income children have the opportunity to start the school day with a healthy meal. But does the program impact the brain as well as the belly? A new study finds that it does, with students at participating schools scoring higher in math, reading and science.
A striking illustration of the connections between nutrition and education, the study not only found higher academic scores within schools that participate in the School Breakfast Program, it also found that the effect was cumulative. In other words, the longer the school…
kkrisberg | February 3, 2015If national lawmakers took action on less than a dozen policy fronts, they could reduce child poverty in the U.S. by a whopping 60 percent. In sheer numbers, such a reduction would lift 6.6 million children out of poverty and significantly improve their opportunities for living long and fruitful lives. For the public health field, in particular, targeting poverty — a root determinant of lifelong disease and disability — could put an entire generation on a trajectory toward better health and well-being.
Those numbers are from the Children’s Defense Fund, which late last month released “Ending…
lborkowski | November 8, 2013According to the latest figures from the Census Bureau, 15% of the US population lives in poverty. The figure’s even worse for children: 22% of those under 18 are living in households with incomes below the federal poverty level. The US economy is officially out of the recession, but an estimated 95% of all the income gains since 2009 have gone to the 1% of the US population with the highest incomes. For millions of people, food stamps (technically, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) make the difference between buying groceries and going hungry. Yet Congress has allowed…
sastyk | April 22, 2013From the Japan Times:
Former Irish President Mary Robinson’s foundation for climate justice is hosting a major conference in Dublin this week. Research presented there said that rising incomes and growth in the global population, expected to create 2 billion more mouths to feed by 2050, will drive food prices higher by 40 to 50 percent.
“We must prepare today for higher temperatures in all sectors,” said Gerald Nelson, a senior economist with the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
All of the studies suggest the worst impacts will be felt by the poorest…
dr. dolittle | February 27, 2013I read an interesting article today on how eating insects may save the world. The rationale: eating insects are not only nutritious (high in protein and fat), but would also help to save the Earth's resources as the human population continues to expand.
According to Aaron T. Dossey, a biochemist, entomologist, and founder and owner of All Things Bugs, humans consume ~40% of potential terrestrial productivity and livestock currently takes up ~30% of the Earth's land (pasture and growing feed). With the growing population of humans, food consumption will necessarily increase. He sees insects…
sastyk | September 6, 2012Shockingly (or not so much, if you read here regularly), despite the supposed improvements in the economy, more and more American families are struggling to put meals on the table. The USDA reports a record 46.7 million American households are on food stamps. 17.9 % of American households (up 700,000 from 2010) didn't have enough food at least some of the time. In addition, the number of households with "very low food security" - meaning people regularly go hungry rose by almost half a million households - as high as at the height of the economic crisis. Notably, this is data that covers…
sastyk | September 6, 2012There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods. This shouldn't be a shock, but many health claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise. The Atlantic's Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that nutritional content is why we grow organic - in fact, that's not how the organic movement started. The reality is that such claims are hard to evaluate - what varieties are you comparing? Is this industrial or small scale…
lborkowski | July 13, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Hunger in America can be hard to see. It doesn't look like the image of hunger we usually see on our TVs: the wrenching impoverishment and emaciation. Talking about American hunger is hard because, well, there's food all around us. Everywhere you look, there's food — people eating food, people selling food, people advertising food, people wasting food, people dying of eating too much food. The obesity epidemic alone is getting so big that it's slowly swallowing the health care system in billions of dollars of care.
We have a food problem.
But food cost money. So for some…
sastyk | May 23, 2012So with the return of spring comes the return of Occupy, which by and large, is probably a good thing. OWS deserves some props for drawing attention to inequity, for bringing radicalism back, and for showing a very complacent corporate and political leadership that the people still have bite in them. Generally speaking I approve of Occupy.
One of the things I don't approve of, however, catchy as the framing is, is the "1% vs. 99%" rhetoric. The reason I don't is that I think it functionally masks really deep inequities - by putting the second percentile together with the 92 percentile, it…
sastyk | November 27, 2011For the last few weeks and over the next month, attention to hunger will be at its annual peak. People will donate turkeys, time and checks, canned goods and garden produce to food pantries. Many of us will find ourselves thinking of those in need in this season. We'll dish out cranberry sauce and decorate cookies, volunteer at the food pantry or in the shelter kitchen, and focus on making sure that the season of lights and joy is also one where people aren't forgotten. This is a very good thing.
It is also important to remember that most of the regularly hungry or food insecure people in…
sastyk | October 5, 2011
From the UN FAO, we can see that world food prices remain extremely high. We also, I think, when we conjoin this with oil prices can see that there is at least a significant correlation.
So much of what has been done in agriculture over the last 75 years has served to tie oil and food prices more tightly together, but it is increasingly clear that the world's poor cannot afford to have their access to food controlled by the price of energy on world markets. That kills people, to put it as bluntly as possible.
This is one of the reasons I'm least convinced that improving agricultural…
sastyk | September 14, 2011The USDA indicates that in 2010 there were above 17 million households in the US (out of about 115 million households total) that were food insecure, and had trouble getting enough food on a regular basis. Only 59% of those households, however, received Food Stamps, WIC or School lunches, the three largest US food subsidy programs that make up the bulk of US nutritional supplementation programs. Which means that nearly half of all households were either receiving no support despite food insecurity, or relying on food pantries, soup kitchens and other resources.
One of the most significant…
sastyk | September 6, 2011Mark Notaras has a great review of the UN's World Food Program on the links between food insecurity and conflict:
Brinkman and Hendrix point out that the relationship between food insecurity and violent conflict is not one way. High food prices are both exacerbated by and exacerbate the chance of civil unrest. In other words, food security is a pre-condition for political stability and political stability is a precondition for food security. The question of what came first is perhaps not as relevant as attempting to understanding how to escape what Collier and his colleagues refer to as the…
mikethemadbiologist | August 29, 2011One of the ludicrous notions that has infected our political discourse is that government jobs aren't 'real' jobs (tell that to fireman when your house is burning down...). But a lot of private sector jobs are heavily subsidized by the government. I'm not referring to private contractors hired by the government, but jobs that are supposedly private sector. Low wage private sector jobs. How are these jobs subsidized? Food stamps (now known as SNAP; italics mine):
Saucedo, who earns $9.70 an hour for about 26 hours a week and lives with her mother, is one of the many Americans who survive…
sastyk | August 23, 2011- The basic Rogoff/Reinhart observation that financial collapses due to asset bubbles just take a long time to work through. Given the size of the 2008 collapse, historical evidence suggests that it's going to take five or six years to recover, and that's that.
- The Tyler Cowen "Great Stagnation" hypothesis. We've picked through all the low-hanging economic fruit over the past century, and like it or not, we're now entering an extended period of low productivity growth because we're not inventing lots of cool new stuff.
- The related (I think) investment drought hypothesis. Ben Bernanke…
sastyk | August 9, 2011From Counterpunch, Ehrenreich, who, along with Jonathan Kozol and the late Joe Bageant and a vanishingly few others, tells the true story of American poverty more clearly than anyone else explores how we punish the poor::
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several…
sastyk | July 26, 2011On Friday, in a move that shocked, truly shocked America, President Obama said that food stamps were more important than Defense. Since this sort of prioritization is one of the fundamental differences between the US extreme right (aka Republicans) and the US center-right (also known as the Democrats), the fact that this caused an uproar among Republicans should also stun you. Republicans warn us that slashing America's defense budget until it is only double the next largest nations will cripple us, Democrats call the Republicans meanies, and everyone ignores the point.
The point is that…