Off topic: My first real post! This is part one of a series I'm working on. Poverty and Hunger are topics that are close to my heart and my experience, so they will likely be recurring themes on this blog. Excuse the rather garbled lack of structure, it was getting late and I promised I'd get something up before the end of the day. Without much further ado, the post.
In light of recent discussions going on at Canadian Cynic and Feministe on the topics of living wages, poverty, and obesity, as well as my general interest in environmental justice, I’ve been mulling some things over about the way all these issues interact in a western capitalist countries, and in general how all these points that seem to integrate.
Certainly, starvation due to poverty isn’t the issue in Canada or the US anymore, but rather access to enough quality food in reliable quantities. Food is a poverty issue, because the poor are subject to lower quality food and food insecurity, it is an environmental justice issue, because the poor are forced to eat food that is bad for the environment and simultaneously bad for their health. A personal anecdote here: my partner is allergic to almost all antibiotics, and when he first moved to here to Canada, he quickly learned that he could not eat eggs, which were the staple cheap protein of our meagre diet, because non-organic eggs contain such a high level of antibiotic residue that he was developing his typical reaction to antibiotics from eating them. The University of Michigan recommends only buying Organic and Free Range eggs to prevent allergic reaction and development of antibiotic resistant bacteria. But who can possibly afford environmentally sound food, let alone food that isn’t going to cause them allergic reaction and harm on this level, on the current minimum wage (Ontario $8/hr, US Federal $5.15/hr)?
Digression aside, “Hidden Hunger”, that is malnutrition simultaneous with sufficient caloric intake, is a huge problem not only in the developing world but in the developed world as well. When you’re poor, you’ll eat whatever will fill you up, nutrition be damned. I know when I was broke, I lived almost solely on plain pasta, potatoes, rice and ramen, with the occasional egg or sometimes canned tuna when it was on sale in my pre-full-blown-vegetarian days, because they were filling and I could afford them and still pay my rent. Besides being limited for money, the poor are often more strapped for time than the wealthy, frequently working multiple jobs that are physically draining, and are as such too exhausted to cook full blown meals when they return home – that’s even if they can afford the basics necessary. Food may be cheap, but acquiring the tools to prepare huge amounts of food in advance: stock pots, utensils, and so on may not be an option. Barbara Ehrenreich noted in Nickel and Dimed that she and many of her co-workers often didn’t even have access to an oven or stove, let alone pots and pans, leaving them at the mercy of fast food and convenience stores for their meals.
I said I was going to try to tackle obesity, so here goes. The low quality of food that is available to the poor, and the need for the poor to eat calorie-dense rather than nutrient-dense food to feel full on their small food budgets necessarily leads to obesity. Couple that with low food security and high stress situations, which lead the body to slow the metabolism and store energy due to the sense of crisis situation/impeding famine, and the fact that even when trying to eat healthy, they will have to buy the cheaper end of said healthy foods, i.e. cheaper cheese will more oily filler, white bread because whole wheat is more expensive and whole grain is certainly out of the question, and in the US, High Fructose Corn Syrup is prevalent in all but the more expensive end of everything from bread to canned vegetables. Fresh fruit and vegetables, besides being out of the price range of many, can be impossible to have frequently due to problems with transportation. When one doesn’t have a car or much time, or much energy left after two shifts at work, getting groceries can be a luxury. Many poorer areas don’t have local quality grocery stores. When I first moved here, there was no grocery store in the area, and getting to one required a rather long bus ride, and then carrying the groceries home on the bus, also with the knowledge that I probably wouldn’t be able to make another trip for weeks. Fresh vegetables do not maintain their freshness that long.Part two, with more talk about the political ramifications of hunger/hidden hunger and proposals for what we can do to follow.
