Food Insecurity

When I was growing up, there was not a lot of money. I wore hand-me-down clothes and was glad to get them. A vacation was taken driving as fast as you could to have minimal nights on the road and ideally grandma came along to pay for the few motels. I remember once after my family walked into a restaurant, they saw the prices on the menu, and we all walked back out.

My experiences back then weren't unusual for a lot of families. There were small things that were fun, like a car that liked going for Sunday drives and couldn't pass a Dairy Queen without going in for a strawberry sundae-- my favorite. Through those years of father being out of work because the union voted to strike or once was laid off because we were going through a recession and people weren't buying as much of what his job produced, I never knew food insecurity-- nor was there a time we had to go to food banks. There might not have been luxury meals, but there was always enough food to be full at night.

When you look at the rising price of gasoline, heating costs, health insurance, utilities, and how food has gone up up up, Sunday drives are probably a thing of the past for many families; but what has been surprising to me is that food is a problem for too many people. This is not talking about starvation but rather struggling to put enough on the table to keep their children's stomachs full. School lunches used to help but have you looked at what a school provides these days. It's corporations who send it in and it's fast food and not a lot of it-- carbs and minimal on anything else.

When I first started hearing about food insufficiency, I thought no way. I understood in the world there are places where people don't have enough food, but here we have food stamps. The more I learned, the more I see why it's happening as this article depicts with working class families suffering insufficient food in Missoula.

Check out this link: Food Insecurity and hunger statistics by state.

Some of this might be people have forgotten the ways families used to get food or those networks are broken. I remember as a child going to someone local for eggs and milk. Nowadays those sources aren't available or when they are, they cost more than the grocery store, which is generally the case with farmer's markets. I love them where the grower can sell direct to the consumer. They are fun places to buy fresh produce with better quality, but they are no place to shop if you are short on funds because at least in my area, their costs are higher than at the supermarket.

On our farm, we produce beef and lamb which are cheaper than the store, but we don't have the legal right to sell small amounts to anyone. We sell a quarter or half of the animal itself and work through the local kill, hang, cut, and wrap company which is one of the few still operating in this area. I just hope they can stay open. The whole process though requires a relatively sophisticated customer, who has a freezer and enough money to buy a lot of meat at one time. When we looked into donating a beef to our local food bank, they had no way to deal with anything but canned and processed goods. That might change.

Where it comes to food stamps, I would guess, based on knowing working poor, that some have too much pride to accept help; some barely over qualify. Many families are one accident or illness away from these kinds of problems. Some children live in homes where the parents or parent don't have the wisdom or concern to make sure their children are healthily fed.

It appears that real programs to help such families, those who are stretched to their limits just to pay for rent, gasoline, medical care or insurance, and utilities, are food banks-- created and funded by individuals. The government in power doesn't believe in government subsidy programs for anybody but the wealthy-- like say oil companies or financial institutions. Even if we get a change of political philosophies in control, these kinds of problems won't be solved instantly and the problem is right now for families.

Many self-titled conservatives believe ordinary people would have all they need if they work hard enough. They should do some research, but they won't because they don't want to know. It might cause them to be uncomfortable with their expensive, gladiator war and keeping their own tax cuts.

The immediate point to this is, for those who care and are financially able, research how and then donate to good food banks-- ones with wholesome food, no religious strings attached, and with a good ratio of giving to costs.