I had been putting off posting what was to be my 500th post for weeks, months, (years? gasp) until I found something worthy to write about. Inspiration never truly struck so I’m posting a little ditty I wrote for The Jewish Federation’s Fed Up with Hunger initiative, which originally appeared on their Give Life Meaning blog.
I was talking to the Dr. Missus about Fed Up with Hunger and she mentioned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. According to her, eating and other essential human needs like breathing and drinking make up the base of Maslow’s hierarchy. This base level must be satisfied before higher-order activities in human life can be achieved – you know, the things that make up a civil society like morality, creativity, spontaneity, acceptance of facts, self-esteem, friendship, family, so on and so forth. Forget her smart talk, the layman’s translation is: the Hierarchy is like psychological Jenga; if you take out the lower blocks, you lose.
This is why I’m Fed Up with Hunger. Hunger deprives the people suffering from it – and the society as a whole – of their potential.
However, since nobody is starving in the streets, hunger in the first world is sort of an opaque problem. If you’re a busy person with a job and you and your family are lucky enough to not be directly affected by hunger and food insecurity, it can be difficult to really be fed up with hunger in a world so full of food. In fact, food is so overabundant, we waste a full third of the food we produce, so I can see how an appeal to end hunger might not really connect and hit you where you live.
But it does. And in a big way.
If you are a parent, your child likely attends school with children who are food insecure. In LAUSD, about 3 out of 4 children qualify for the free-and-reduced lunch program. As studies show, hungry children are less attentive, meaning they have more difficulty learning, and as they are more disruptive, they also impede the learning of their your kids. Also, hunger and malnutrition are contributing factors to childhood obesity, which in Los Angeles is reaching epidemic numbers. In L.A. County, more than 1 in 5 children in the 5th, 7th and 9th grades are obese .
If you are a local business leader, you are losing out on $500 million of annual economic purchasing power in the hands of your customers because Los Angeles County’s participation in the Food Stamps program is only at 50%. While it’s true that Food Stamps can only be used to purchase food and other essentials, they generate over $1 billion of local economic activity annually, so even if food retail is not the business you are in, you still get the rippling economic benefits of the best fiscal stimulus the federal government can provide. Furthermore, you are footing part of the $5.8 billion in annual lost productivity due to hunger and malnutrition issues in Los Angeles County.
If you are an environmentalist, wasting food is exactly like wasting resources like land, water and sunlight. Annually, over 100 billion pounds of edible food (1/3 of our country’s total food production) is not eaten, which is equivalent to wasting 10 trillion gallons of water a year. That amount of food waste, which could more than adequately feed our nation’s hungry, is like wasting the amount of water in the Hoover Dam every year. Currently, only 2.5% of all food waste is recycled. The rest of the 97.8% sits in landfills creating methane tons and tons of gas. By volume, food waste is both the largest contributor of water waste and methane gas production in the world.
If you are a labor leader, protecting workers’ rights also means protecting workers’ ability to work. Hunger and malnutrition effectively short circuit peoples’ wills to work, making them less productive, unfocused, and sick more often.
If you are a local elected official, you should very be fed up, especially in a time of such fiscal difficulty. Because of L.A.’s low participation rate in the Food Stamp program, you are losing out on around $10,000,000 in local tax revenue and $65,000,000 at the state level.
If you are a federal elected official, you should be horrified that the total economic cost to the United States of hunger and malnutrition is conservatively estimated at $90 billion a year. The cost of ending hunger is about $25 billion. I’m no mathlete, but even I know that that saves around $65 billion, give or take. Meanwhile, as we are so consumed by the health care debate, it’s important to note that it will be impossible to rein in the rising cost of healthcare without taking a look at the things we eat.
If you are in the military/law enforement, you are a natural ally to strengthen the nutritional value of school lunches because you have noticed that 3 out of 4 adults of military age are physically unfit to serve. Close readers of history will remember that the National School Lunch program began in 1946 as a measure of national security. President Truman started the program after reading a study that showed many young men had been rejected from the World War II draft due to medical conditions caused by childhood malnutrition. We have a similar problem now as the military has been lowering its fitness and BMI index requirements for new troops due to our expanding national waistline. If we don’t appropriately address the food our young children eat, we will not have a military fit enough to protect our country nor a police force fit enough to protect out neighborhoods.
If you are a health care provider, you are seeing many more diet-related illnesses than ever before – and that’s only of the people who can come in to see you because they have health insurance. As you know, hunger and malnutrition lead to a host of preventable diseases and illnesses. Furthermore, the health care costs of malnutrition and obesity in California is over $20.7 billion annually and Los Angeles County accounts for more than a quarter of that cost, spending $6 billion a year.
If you are a concerned member of a community, neighborhood council, or homeowners’ association, you are likely fed up with crime in your neighborhood. Good news! Hard science has proven a link between poor nutrition and violent aggression (Joseph Hibbeln’s “Seafood Consumption and Homicide Mortality”, Bernard Gesch’s pioneering research on Omega-3’s, and USC’s Adrian Raine, with whom the Dr. Missus almost studied under, who is continuing the great work in this field) and social science has proven that in communities and neighborhoods where people are fed, crime goes down because desperation decreases. Rather than being fed up at the result of poverty and hunger, you should be fed up with their root causes and do something about them because when they fester, they lead to declining property values and crime.
If you are a person of faith, feeding the hungry is central to your faith. Whether you ascribe to the concept of tikkun olam in Judaism, compassion in Christianity, zakat in Islam, and d?na in Buddhism, you are doing God’s work by helping those who are not as fortunate.
I could go on but I think you get the picture. No matter who you are, you are affected by hunger and food insecurity. Getting beyond that, more than anything else, ending hunger is just the moral, right thing to do. Please join us in this fight.
