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.

Food Bank

Our city has a large local food bank that includes a large plant for drying and packaging food for shipment. The food bank has done some useful work particularly in sending dehydrated food to poor areas overseas and to locations hit by natural disasters. However its main public focus is on ameliorating a supposed problem with hunger in our own country and in particular in our own region. Its influence is pervasive. We are faced at every turn with canned food drives for the food bank sponsored by this or that organization, often offering free or reduced admission to some event to those who bring a donation. The public schools push their students to participate. Clubs and groups of all sorts join in. One grocery store sells preselected, pre-wrapped donation bags that customers can purchase and drop off. A local TV station devotes the weeks before Thanksgiving to hectoring the citizenry to bring food to the food bank.

This is all interesting and seems to make a lot of people feel virtuous. It provides a diversion to a number of people and allows a lot of folks to get their picture on TV or their name in the papers. However one has to wonder if we are being given a little slice of the big lie with all this.

In the first place, to the extent malnutrition exists in this country it seems almost always connected with things such as dementia or other debilitating health problems of the elderly, willful neglect or abuse of children by a parent or custodian, drug abuse, alcoholism, mental problems, or simply bad choices that have nothing to do with the actual availability of food. The main nutritionally related health problem of poor people in this country is obesity, not anything related to deficiency. The country spends billions of dollars each year on the food stamp program - now called Supplemental Nutritional Access Program or SNAP - to make food available to those who need it. Of course the food stamp program has its problems with  overpayment, fraud everywhere, and the opportunity for recipients to use the benefits to trade at a discount for money to buy non-food items instead of purchasing food, but these again are not problems of availability of resources to obtain food. (It is interesting as an aside that those beating the drums for the food bank seem not to realize that their claims of hunger in the community are a tacit admission that the food stamp program could use a strong dose of reform and loophole closing.)

Still the drumbeat goes on, and there is usually an undertone, attempting to induce guilt and suggesting that those sitting at home with plenty to eat are somehow to blame. Well they aren’t, and they should reject any suggestion that they are. They should enjoy their Thanksgiving turkey with a sense of pride and gratitude that they live in the freest, most productive country the world has ever seen (with perhaps a kind thought for the farmer). They might also consider finding other charities besides the food bank or its national affiliates.