Community Food Grocery

Dolecia Cody and her children have been living on a diet of ramen noodles and canned ravioli. Cody goes without food roughly twice a week. This particular day, she visited the grocery store for the first time in six months in the Mississippi Delta. Yes, in the United States, many do not know where their next meal will come from. In 2016, 15.6 million households in the United States experienced food insecurity. The government has an obligation to help the population meet these needs, yet over fifteen million households still suffer every year. We can no longer allow our neighbors to go without, and the government is obligated to provide more assistance to alleviate the problem.

The United States has already established its obligation to provide basic needs of the American people. The federal government has established programs to provide food,

housing, and healthcare, to a certain degree. While many of these programs need reevaluation, the most urgent is food assistance. The US government spends approximately $70 billion on food assistance programs to alleviate the burden of purchasing food, but this is not enough to provide the basic needs of citizens. Health problems and other major issues arise from the lack of access to quality food. These problems create a higher healthcare cost for the individuals and the government down the road. The government must enact supplemental policy to provide food to these populations.
In addition to providing money to these populations, the government can redirect food that would otherwise be wasted to communities in need.

Annually, the US throws away over $100 billion in food waste. Compared to the number of people that are going hungry, the amount of food wasted is startling. A large amount of this waste comes from grocery stores having to throw away food that is still good because of sell-by dates. It is important to note that a sell-by date is not an expiration date, and this food is safe to eat. The food that the grocery stores would be throwing away would go to community food banks that people already on assistance programs can use for free. These food banks would be closer to populations that are far away from grocery stores, and the food banks would provide health benefits from food that contains less preservatives, sodium, and sugars. By continuing to provide funds for these populations to buy food with shelf lives that they can live on for months and supplementing that with free perishable food, the United States government would more effectively fulfill its obligation to the American

people.
Our founding fathers declared the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The right to life comes first, but a person cannot live without food. As hunger still exists in America, this right to life is being denied. I am not proposing anything radical, simply for the United States government to feed more people with what we already have.