Congratulations to Lara Lewison from Eastside Prep for a well-written editorial. If I may, I would like to disavow you from some of the progressive ideals (spin) you have been taught in school.
First of all, ‘Food Insecurity’ is a trope of progressive idealism, in which the panacea is “everyone shops wisely,” at Whole Foods. The “misconceptions and paradoxes” you cited about the “state of hunger” in the U.S. have more to do with the concept that “more government will solve everything” than it does with the actual ability of residents to purchase food via government largesse (funded by taxpayers, FYI).
Resourceful people can usually find a way to game government systems, no matter how these well-intentioned they may be. Thus, when food stamp recipients trade or sell their food stamps to buy chips, beer, cigarettes and lottery tickets, they are expressing their “freedom to make bad choices.” This is not the fault of the government program; it is an inherent defect of progressive idealism.
Second, real ‘Food Insecurity’ is (should be) defined as the ability to have physical and economic access to sufficient food for survival. People of the third world understand this implicitly. People of the first and second world think that if one cannot afford organic, free-range, non-GMO, gluten-free products, one is food insecure.
Third, rice, potatoes, raw fruits and vegetables, and day-old bread are all examples of inexpensive food products that are widely available. None of these are “junk food,” and if food stamp recipients spent their allotment on these staples, their families would not be food insecure. Granted, they might be bored with their limited food choices, but (I thought) the purpose of the program is nutrition, not excitement. Further, charitable organizations do not dispense junk food, unless you believe a can of beans and a block of cheese are junk food. Who taught you this?
Finally, you rightly call out the U.S. government farm subsidy program for criticism. As most government programs do, it started out simple and was well-intentioned, but inevitably grew and grew, becoming outdated, bloated, convoluted, and co-opted by special interests, as most government programs do. No, I’m not talking about the agribusiness lobby; our farming industry is the most efficient and productive in the world. I’m talking about the ethanol lobby; who seeks to maintain subsidies for farmers to grow excess corn – not to feed the world, but to be used in the production of ethanol fuel.
Nothing illustrates the unintended (or intended) consequences of progressive ideals better the ethanol lobby, whose “environmentally-friendly” goal is to take a high-nutrition foodstuff (corn) and convert it into a motor fuel. When the market wouldn’t pay the premium for this inferior product, the ethanol lobby stepped up to (make campaign donations, then) coerce, cajole and/or goad legislators to pass laws that made ethanol use in motor fuels mandatory. The fact that farmers benefited financially from this market manipulation is true, but secondary to the “more important” progressive ideal of reducing our consumption of fossil fuels, even if only by a marginal amount, no matter what it costs.
Roger Clarke-Johnson, Kirkland
