Mamer Mamer
U.S government & politics
Mr. Nader
Draft
The US is filled with so much food that there are regulations on how long a company can keep food before being forced into throwing it away. This extra food is not used to feed its own people who do not have enough purchasing power to buy this wasted food for themselves. This paper will talk about the food insecurity in US, the types of programs that are used to help those with low income, and how to improve these programs so that rates of food insecurity can decrease.
Food insecurity is defined by the Life Sciences Research Office as, exists whenever the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or the ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways is limited
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or uncertain (Dinour). Food insecurity has been on the rise for the past 30 years but has been rising higher than usual starting form 2007. The rise came from the economic crisis of 2007 leaving many workers with low income jobs or no jobs, in 2012 14.5% of Americans were food insecure and in 2013 the rate dropped to 14.3%, this is an improvement form 2011 of a rate of 14.9% (). On prevalence rates of food insecurity from State to State: eight states are below the U.S food insecurity rate, 24 states are near the average, and 14 states are above the national average (). The food insecurity rate of 14.3% from 2013 increases to 19.5% to household with children of the age 18 and below (), the government hands are tight at these times because just as there is a rise in food insecurity there is also a rise in obesity. On studies done by US department of Agriculture, adults that are food secure are healthier than adults that are food insecure who have a higher percentage of people that are obese. The study also showed that women are more obese then men and a low percentage of kids that live in a food insecure homes are obese. Many explanations are created to figure out why food insecure citizens are more obese than food secure citizens but two hypotheses’ stand out that are used by researchers; children who grew up in poverty are more likely to become obese as adults or the adults buy inexpensive foods that are unhealthy and harmful to the body overtime. The statistics given by researchers and the United States of Department of Agriculture indicates that food insecurity in the US is slowly decreasing, this may be caused from an improving economy or from the use of government aid programs helping low income families. The US has several programs to lower the food insecurity rates, the most used is SNAP (formally known as the Food Stamp).
The SNAP program gives a family a card that has a certain amount of money to buy food, the amount on the card gets replenished every month till the SNAP program for that family expires. The SNAP program is a great way to help struggling families but it does has its disadvantages; one disadvantage is the ability to withdrawal money from the SNAP card, not all but some adults take the money and use it for their own needs leaving less money to buy food. The second disadvantage is that some adults get too comfortable or feel discouraged to move out of the poverty zone, allowing them to count on the SNAP program more and increasing application number to the SNAP program after experiment day. Another program used by the government is WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children). The WIC program provides nutrition education, nutritious foods, and referrals to health and other social services to low income pregnant women. The WIC program is an excellent program created by the government because it educates women about eating healthy and feeding nutritious foods to their families. WIC gives participants a check or vouchers every month that can only be used to purchase nutritious foods or healthy infant food. A program similar to WIC is the National School Lunch Program because it provides nutritious food to children threw the age of 18. The NSLP is used in over 100,000 public and private schools across the country with over 31 million children who are either receiving free lunches or low-cost lunches (). The NSLP is a good program because it relieves some pressure on parents who are struggling to earn income and also relieves the reliance on the SNAP for the only source of food income. NSLP is extended in summer by using a food truck that stops at a public area at 12:15 p.m., usually the city public library is the location
to encourage families to come to the library and to encourage kids to read more. The government has given a good effort to reduce food insecurity but more improvement can be made to some programs either by learning from successful programs or creating a newer better programs.
Walsh, Bryan. “America’s Food Crisis.” NEXUS. Eds. Kim and Michael Flachmann. Boston: Pearson, 2012. 166 – 173. Print.
There are many policy issues that affect families in today’s society. Hunger is a hidden epidemic and one major issue that American’s still face. It is hard to believe that in this vast, ever growing country, families are still starving. As stated in the book Growing Up Empty, hunger is running wild through urban, rural, and even suburban communities. This paper will explore the differing perspectives of the concerned camp, sanguine camp, and impatient camp. In addition, each camps view, policy agenda, and values that underlie their argument on hunger will be discussed.
Today SNAP is the new name of the federal Food Stamp Program. “SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The name was changed to SNAP to meet the needs of clients, which includes a focus on nutrition and an increase in the amount of benefit received” ("supplemental nutrition,"2011). Another detail about SNAP is its ability to respond to changing needs caused by economic cycles or natural emergencies on the local, state and national levels. It is second to unemployment insurance in its responsiveness to economic changes. SNAP is very helpful to low-income families’ monthly resources, increasing the chance families is able to meet basic needs.
Food insecurity is one of the major social problems that we have in our world today. The concern about this problem is the increasing number of people that are beginning to experience hunger more often. “While hunger has long been a public health concern in developing countries, it has received varying degrees of attention in the United States, most notable during the 1930s and 1960s” (Poppendieck 1992). In addition to lack of food, there are consequences that follow. People, especially children, who suffer from food deprivation also undergo some health issues such as malnutrition and obesity, which leads to more health care and hospitalizations. “In the early 1980s, most reports of hunger involved families with children, the elderly, the unskilled and unemployed youth, the mentally ill, the homeless and minorities” (Brown 1992; Nestle and Guttmacher 1992). However, a particular ethnic group that is greatly affected by food insecurities are the Hispanic...
According to the “Hunger and Poverty Fact Sheet” on Feeding America’s website, in 2014 there were over 48 million Americans living in food insecure households, which included 32 million adults and 15 million children. For over 35 years, Feeding America continues to be in the forefront in solving this crisis by providing food to people in need through a nationwide network of food banks. In the late 1960s, Van Hengel established the nation’s first food bank and years later established the first national organization of food banks, Second Harvest. Second Harvest was later called America’s Second Harvest the Nation’s Food Bank Network and in 2008, the national organization changed its name to Feeding America.
The federal Food Stamp Program is an assisted nutrition program that helps millions of eligible, low-income individuals and families (United States Department of Agriculture). This program gives its recipients extra money each month to try to help them have better food security. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is also the largest program in the federal safety net (United States Department of Agriculture). In Ohio’s Appalachian counties, there are 515,300 recipients which is 25.4% of the population (Job and Family Services). The Supplemental Nutrition Program is a good program except for one problem that can be fixed relatively fast and one problem that it will take a little time to solve. The problem that can be fixed right away is that the Supplemental Nutrition Program can be abused by the recipients buying junk food instead of healthy food. The problem that will take some time to fix is that some recipients make unhealthy food choices because they do not have access to a local supermarket. In order to fix these two problems the Food Stamp Program needs to better regulate what can be bought with the Food Stamp card and items in convenient stores need to be better stocked in order to keep accepting Food Stamp cards.
The Indiana School Breakfast and Lunch Program is a program open to those children who live in a low income household. “National School Lunch Program (NSLP) is a Federal entitlement program open to public and nonprofit private schools and residential child care institutions. Lunch is available to all children at participating schools, and the meals must meet specific nutritional requirements to receive Federal funds (Indiana Department of Education, 2013). This Program is open to those who reside in Indiana and who are a parent or guardian of a child who in school, and does not continue beyond high school. This program has requirements that deal with the level of household income. The household income requirements deal with the household income before taxes have been taken out. If there is a household of one person, they cannot make more than $21,257; a person in a two person household cannot make more than $28,694. This scale continues all the way to that a household of eight cannot make more than $73,316 (Indiana Department of Education, 2013).
British Columbia (BC) is a wealthy province that provides a variety of publicly funded services to its residents, however, from 2011 to 2012 almost 1.1 million British Columbians and 4.9 percent of Canadian children were affected by food insecurity (Rideout & Kotasky, 2014, Statistics Canada, 2015). Food insecurity goes beyond not having enough to eat but also has an impact on health equity and social justice. “Children experiencing food insecurity have poorer school performance, and having not learned healthy eating habits in childhood; they face additional challenges of healthy living as adults” (Rideout & Kotasky, 2014).
Food insecurity does not discriminate; it reaches many segments of society (Whitney, DeBruyne, Pinna, & Rolfes, 2007). Even through closely related to poverty, not all that have food insecurities are in poverty. Often it is the working poor that are hit the hardest. The working poor are a group that despite having a job, there income is too low to meet their need or that of their family. Most of the working poor (56%) live in families with children, so that the poverty of these workers affects many others as well (Problems Facing the Working Poor, Kim 1999). Many lower to middle class families will temporarily struggle with food insecurity at various times during the year. For these families government assistance may not immediately available. Appling for Supplemental Nutrition Assistanc...
The United States is known as the wealthiest country in the world. But, there are many people that can't afford to buy food for their families, many are also homeless. “While hunger affects people of all ages, it's particularly devastating for children even short-term episodes of hunger can cause lasting damage."(“Child Nutrition Programs") Child hunger in the United States is caused by poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, and food shortage; however there are many solutions to this problem like FRAC strategies, food banks, summer feeding programs, and backpack feeding programs.
Food insecurity is an issue faced by millions of Americans every day, and the biggest group affected by this is working families with children. Food insecurity is so big that the United States government has now recognized it and provided a definition for it. The United States government has defined food insecurity as “a household level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food” (USDA.gov). Food banks and anti-hunger advocates agree that some of the causes of food insecurity are stagnant wages, increases in housing costs, unemployment, and inflation in the cost of food. These factors have caused food banks to see a change in the groups of people needing assistance.
In order to determine the prevalence of households that are food insecure, “The Food Security Supplement is administered annually to about 45,000 households as part of the monthly, nationally representative Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The supplement has been conducted annually since 1995.” (Health Indicators Warehouse, 2013). The survey was developed by the USDA in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control, and asks participants questions about their confiden...
Poverty is regarded as the major cause of food insecurity. A household food security depends on access to food. America has access to good healthy food. However, a family too poor to buy them do not enjoy food security. Rosenbaum and Neuberger (2005) report that each year the number of people using government food assistance programs grows. “Food stamps are targeted to those with the greatest need for help in purchasing food… [and] helps to lessen the extent and severity of poverty (Rosenbaum and Neuberger 2005)”.
In the year 2015, around 40 million U.S. citizens were food insecure (Randall para. 3). Food insecurity can be defined in paragraph 3 by “[having] difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources. This 12.7% of American citizens also contains another group - children. Aged 10-17, 6.8 million adolescents struggle with a food insecurity. There have been several years of cuts to the social programs designed to help these people, along with the Great Recession continuing to leave an impact on the U.S. economy (para. 6). Under the Obama administration, $8.6 billion was cut from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as Food Stamps. From 1993-2001 under the Clinton administration, former President Bill Clinton’s administration “gutted the welfare system” (para. 15). Because of these budget cuts, the families who rely on food assistance from the government have been allotted less throughout the years. From a sociological perspective, the concepts of sociological imagination, class stratification, and social location are in effect when it comes to child hunger in the United States. Being hungry is an issue larger than any one individual can control.
Food insecurity and poor nutrition is an alarmingly large problem for low income families, especially in developing countries. Many strategies exist to fight this problem, although not many of these address all the factors contributing to it along with all the possible solutions to solve it. In many cases, multiple strategies must correlate and work together so that all the determinants of this issue are addressed and can fight food insecurity from different angles. This essay will discuss the significance of the problem, a range of possible strategies to solve the problem, and go into detail on a select few that will correlate and work together to solve different factors of food insecurity and poor nutrition.