Letter Writer Wrong on Hunger Issue

To the Editor:

To be effective in fighting problems like hunger and poverty, it’s necessary to have a soft heart and a hard head. In his letter in your December 14 issue, Daniel T. Oliver helps establish that the opposite combination leads nowhere.

He brings little information to support his claim that increased supply of food creates dependency. He’s incorrect in stating that rising demand for food assistance has borne no relationship to economic upturns or downturns.

He’s also wrong in dismissing welfare reform as a cause for increased demand. His argument based on the Second Harvest survey is circular; he cites the fact that most food-assistance recipients interviewed didn’t miss a meal as support for the idea that they don’t really need assistance. Hello? It’s because they’re receiving assistance that they didn’t miss meals.

Surveys we’ve conducted in the Greater Philadelphia area support national studies, including the report Mr. Oliver cites, in documenting rising demand over the past several years. The reasons have nothing to do with the supply of food, but rather with structural economic changes, the aging of the population, and reductions in welfare benefits.

A good economy can slow the rate of increase, but can’t entirely counteract the trends of more people without public assistance, more people with low-paying jobs, and more seniors with fixed incomes.

The reason we need to continue increasing the supply of donated food is that, by all indications, far too many low-income people still do not have basic acceptable levels of nutrition.

In a nation with so much food available, we have no excuse not to expand food-rescue and food banking until hunger and malnutrition are history. Letting good food go to waste while good people go hungry, by contrast, would not only be poor social and economic policy, but would make a sad statement about a wealthy society.

Scott Schaffer
President
Philabundance
Philadelphia

***

To the Editor:

One of the more amazing lines ever to appear in The Chronicle was in Daniel T. Oliver’s letter that “there is no evidence that there is a hunger problem of any kind in America.”

Since I distribute about 60,000 pounds of food per day to the needy of West Michigan, I obviously believe there is a hunger problem.

But no one needs to take my or anyone else’s word for it. They can work the math themselves: Figure out how much it costs a family of three or four to live reasonably, and then check with government figures to see how many people have incomes below that.

Add to that total the number of persons who have incomes above that level who will likely suffer a significant income interruption or crippling expenses during a typical year — a job layoff, house fire, car accident, theft, divorce, major illness of their own or someone they must care for, and so on — and there is approximately the size of your area’s hunger problem.

In reality, a huge number of people are having to make the kinds of choices no one should have to make in a civil society: food or medicine? Food or a roof over their heads? Food or heat?

The staffs of conservative Grinch tanks have traditionally questioned the existence of problems such as hunger and homelessness for fear that government will be asked to tax and spend more on them.

As many as four in 10 Americans are living so hand-to-mouth financially as to be at significant risk of needing food assistance regularly or on occasion. If they are going to get the help they need when they need it, America indeed needs to handle the problem more intelligently than in the past, but clearly step one in that process is to acknowledge that the problem exists.

John M. Arnold
Executive Director
Second Harvest Gleaners Food Bank of West Michigan
Comstock Park, Mich.