Sweet Charity

In chapter two of Sweet Charity, the author does a very nice job of crunching big numbers down into meaningful statistics. Living on the poverty line around 15,000 dollars a year may seem difficult to imagine at first.  But an average American spends one third of their income on food, which would be 5000 dollars for the year. This translates into 100 dollars a week and 25 dollars a week for each person in a four-person family. That’s only a little more than three dollars a day for each person. This astonishing statistic gives the author the right to question the poverty line. The author claims that the biggest problem involving the poverty line is that it was established back when clothing, transportation, and shelter were cheap, which enabled people to actually spend one third of their income on food. However, the prices of food, transportation, and shelter have risen, making it increasingly difficult for the poor to allocate one third of their income to food. After discussing the poverty line, the author goes into depth about the rise of food kitchens and why people end up going to them including reasons such as high shelter costs, unemployment, and inadequate public assistance. However, the main reason why people go to food kitchens and pantries is that they have recently become unemployed. And with unemployment rates high, the short-term unemployed become the long-term unemployed causing people to rely even more heavily on food kitchens.

I found this chapter very interesting. I’ve actually volunteered at a food kitchen before and I’ve witnessed the shame and embarrassment people feel. What really surprised me though was the fact that food kitchens would require people to validate that they are actually poor. Coming to the food aid service is embarrassing enough for many but having to prove that you don’t make enough money to provide for you and your family is even worse. In my opinion, giving to all, instead of rejecting a few is a much better philosophy that food aid services should follow.

1.     What can be changed in our society to help people allocate one third of their income to food?

2.     Should there be requirements for people to go to food aid services or should whoever feels the need to go be allowed?

The Roots of World Hunger

Why is world hunger such an issue? Yes, our population has grown exponentially in past years, but our food production has grown at an even faster rate. The Scarcity Fallacy written by Stephen J. Scanlan, J. Craig Jenkins, and Lindsey Peterson, talks about world hunger and its causes. As you might guess from the title, there is some mistaken belief as to what is the true cause of world hunger. The authors of the text clearly point out that the widely held belief that world hunger is caused by a limited supply of food is wrong. The authors even go so far as to say that “on a per capita basis,” food is more abundant now than any of the years past. In fact, “poverty, inequality, conflict, and corruption” are the true “contributors to world hunger”. The authors give statistics backing up each one of their hypothesized causes of world hunger. For example, countries with higher than 35% poverty rates (extreme poverty), also have child hunger rates above 35%. To make matters worse, people living in or near the poverty line, spend 60% of their income on food compared to the poorest American who spends 15-20%. After the authors identify the causes of world hunger, they propose a couple of solutions. The first is that food must be seen as fundamental human right. This would increase the importance of mitigating world hunger in the eyes of the public and would also protect the poor against the high price of food. Their second solution would be to rid food agencies of corruption thereby guaranteeing that the efforts of these food agencies reach the right people through the right means. They also propose sustainable agricultural practices and fiscal policy.

            “The challenge, in short, is to create a more equitable and just society in which food access is ensured for all.” That’s no simple task. It might seem easy to write that down in a sentence and dream of one day in which everyone is educated, ethnic inequalities are broken down, and money doesn’t rule the world; but we are far from that dream. Some steps have been taken, however, they are only superficial and do not help in the long run. It is as if we have trimmed the branches off a tree but the roots are still there and the branches just grow back. If world hunger is to be fought, we need to fight the roots of the problems that the authors mention in The Scarcity Fallacy.

1)   How do you propose we fight world hunger?

2)   What do you think is the most surprising statistic the authors give in the text?