Supporting the Local Food Pantry
February 10th, 2014 · 1 Comment · Posted in Local events
A huge crowd showed up to support the local food pantry in Cambridge last night. In fact, the event was delayed at least 15 minutes while more chairs were brought into the hall behind the Presbyterian church to view a documentary about hunger in America called A Place at the Table.
An estimated 49 million Americans, many of them children, are considered “food insecure,” meaning they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That’s a result of poverty, and with the gap between the haves and have-nots getting bigber all the time, the problem is only getting worse. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, there were 200 food pantries in the entire country. We thought we had hunger licked. Since then the number of food charities has exploded: some 40 million Americans-or one of every eight–receives emergency food assistance each year.
The USDA estimates that more than 14 percent of all U.S. households were “food insecure” in 2012.
In Cambridge, a village of 1,800, the Loves and Fishes pantry gave out some 17,000 servings of food last year while taking in 197,000 pounds of donated food stuffs. The pantry is open six hours a week for people in need, and serves a hot lunch on Fridays.
Hunger and obesity go hand-in-hand because the cheapest items in the supermarket aisles are processed starches and sugars, the primary culprits in weight gain and attendant problems such as diabetes and coronary artery disease. As the film points out, those are the same kinds of foods you’re most likely to find at the food pantry as well. “We’ve tried a thousand points of light,” says one expert. “It hasn’t worked.”
The relative price of processed foods declines while the cost of fruits and vegetables steadily climbs. Can you guess which industry our federal government subsidizes?
That’s more billions of your tax dollars at work. Hunger, it turns out, does not have a lobbyist in Washington.
Good Post!