Food Bank Drive

Helping out a hungry person is a good thing. Honesty  and analyzing the nature of a problem before trying to solve  it are also good things.  There is a lack of the latter two in much of the news, discussion, and propaganda about “hunger” in America.  The SNAP or food stamp welfare program provides poor people with per capita payments sufficient to pay for an adequately  nutritional (though far from fancy or even desirable) diet. The WIC program provides additional money for young children and women.  During the school year poor children receive free lunches and breakfasts at public schools.  According to reports the biggest nutritional problem among poor adults and children in this country is obesity.

One would learn none of this listening to the reports in the traditional media or the maudlin appeals for donations to local food banks during their drives in  the Thanksgiving to Christmas season. Instead one would get the impression that something akin to the Irish potato famine was going on just down the street. (Some of the propaganda is a more subtle as with reporting on alleged large percentages of people with “food insecurity” instead of those actually malnourished.  That term is quite different from malnourishment, intended to be  equated with it by propagandists and unthinking  journalists and talking heads,  and vague enough to cover a good deal of irrelevant  situations.  Anyone living paycheck to paycheck whose grocery budget gets tight before the next payday or any college student who spent too much money partying and is going to be a little short until  Daddy’s next check arrives might be labeled as suffering from food insecurity. This calls to mind the saying  that amateurs lie with statistics by fudging the data while professionals do it by monkeying with the definitions.)

There are some  malnourished people in this country. The evidence indicates this is mainly a matter of abuse and neglect by parents or other caretakers of children and by  caretakers of disabled people, ignorance about  how and why  to select and prepare food in ways that provide adequate  nutrition and are affordable by  one’s income, or poor choices by people with mental problems  including addictions. Though there is nothing wrong with the food bank drives apart from the way they are sold, the banks they support are band aids at best and may sometimes enable counterproductive behavior.  It likely  would be more useful  to spend the time and effort on trying to prevent or  stop abuse and neglect, providing instruction to reduce the ignorance,  and offering therapeutic help to the mentally disturbed.

However that would take harder work, give less opportunity for televised preening,  and lack the political benefits for the left of inducing guilt among the self-supporting and a resentful sense of entitlement among the non-self-supporting.  It probably is not going to happen.  

We’ll still be donating to the food bank drive starting soon on one of our local TV stations. However we'll likely make larger donations to outfits such as Meals on Wheels or the Salvation Army.