The article Who Eats Emergency Food not only discusses what kind of people are taking advantage of emergency food programs, but also what forced them to need assistance, and whether or not the aid available is enough. One of the most misunderstood thing about the homeless is that majority actually have some kind of employment. However for most of the people, jobs don’t pay enough or the hours are not sufficient. When a person is working part time at a minimum wage job, it is almost impossible to fulfill the basic living needs. Unfortunately people find cutting food costs one of the easiest things to do when money gets short. Furthermore, because people have this opinion of food, they turn to food banks and the overtaxed government aid programs for support.
Although people have access to government aid in the form of food stamps and subsidized food programs, the aid is not enough and it doesn’t come in time. Government officials fail to realize that people have needs that extend past just food. If a person believes that cigarettes or their child’s new pair of shoes is more important than food than they will use food stamps for that instead. Unfortunately this is one of the major reasons that the food stamp system is in my opinion such a failure.
What questions do these readings raise for you? And did you understand Poppendeick's discussion of the social construction of hunger/why we talk about hunger and not the over-arching issue of poverty? We'll discuss it more in class, as it seems to be missing from most of the summaries for today. FYI, for some reason, the first half of your post uses a black font, which makes it unreadable unless you highlight it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I thought your post below was Interesting about calorie counts on menus. Where do you think the line is best drawn for informing consumers about the nutrition information in what they eat? Were you glad to know how caloric the options were at Johnny Rockets, or was it not worth the trade-off of diminishing your enjoyment? Do you feel the same way about nutrition information labels on foods in stores? How much information do you feel is appropriate to share with consumers, and how easy should it be for them to find it? You raise a really interesting topic for discussion!