Hunger Action Week is September 8 - 14th

The Grand Rapids foodshed is changing and developing in fantastic ways, but for the approximately 13% of Kent County residents who experience food insecurity, the doings at the new Downtown Market are of little interest.  That's because affordable is more critical than fresh, local, or organic to them.

Hunger Action Week is a local effort to address the issues of food insecurity and educate people about hunger in West Michigan.  Some of the scheduled events include a SNAP challenge meant to get people to think how would feed themselves or their families on the SNAP allotment of $31.50 per person per week, a poverty simulation exercise, healthy food cook-off between local chefs, and multiple showings of A Place at the Table, a documentary on hunger starring Jeff Bridges.

While I think learning about hunger in our area is a very good thing and many people could benefit from the realization that their circumstances are not everyone's circumstances, I do have problems with both the SNAP food stamp program and even well meaning, enthusiastically staffed programs like Kids' Food Basket.  Since the government now distributes its food benefits via a swipeable Bridge Card, committing fraud is pretty easy and the government has little influence over which foods households purchase with that money.  Cards do offer both more dignity and autonomy to the process  at the individual level, but much of the money our government spends on "food" goes to complete garbage - high sugar, low nutrition fast foods that ensure that while kids might not feel hungry, they are nonetheless being undernourished and their bodies are not receiving enough nutrients to grow and develop properly.  I have donated to Kids Food Basket before and the suppers they send home are easier to transport than they are to digest.  Juice boxes?  Sugar.  Peanut butter sandwiches?  Sugar.  Trail mix?  Sugar.  Apple?  Natural sugar.  I know Kids Food Basket chooses to send home a meal the organization believes kids will eat of their own accord, but this is not a meal I'd want my child to eat every night.  The body turns excess sugar into fat, and childhood obesity in America is very high.  More than one out of three kids in America is currently overweight or obese.  Many of these kids are the same kids who are in food insecure environments.

The problem with hunger in America is not a lack of food.  We are not sub-Saharan Africa, and even amidst drought conditions, the food supply remains more than adequate for our population.  Grocery stores also toss a significant amount of unspoiled food in dumpsters rather than give it away.  Affording food has become troublesome for many families in the last decade as the price of stables like meat and milk and bread continues to rise along with gas prices, making a trip to the store more expensive all the time.  However, if you are carefully shopping and cooking all of your own meals (not to mention gardening or foraging), it is possible to feed a family on a modest food budget.  The food won't be exciting or luxurious, but it can be tasty, nutritious and regular.  Simple Depression era meals like those featured in Cooking with Clara are easy to make.  I baked four loaves of bread using her recipe last weekend, and they were delicious.  Since my husband received notice of being laid off in July, we've cut back on any extraneous food expenditures (eating out, buying luxuries like bakery goods, soda, nice cheeses, or any other food I love to buy), but we are still eating foods that are healthy and delicious.  I just have to cook or bake much more or pick and can it myself.

Some people resent the paternalism that creeps into discussions about poverty and hunger, but it's already paternalistic to pay for or distribute food - it's based on the assumption that people cannot or will not provide for themselves or their children.  I would prefer to see community kitchens arise to eradicate hunger in our neighborhoods.  It would be far more feasible to oversee what people are being fed and to make sure the nutritional content was high, and it would bring people together back to a communal table where they could interact with the people around them instead of eating a bagged lunch in front of a television or computer screen.  There are plenty of empty storefronts in my area of the city, Creston, and the government's money would be spent employing local people doing hands-on work, it would not be going directly or indirectly to industrial farms, CAFOs, or big food corporations that market crap to kids (and adults).

I know this is a pipe dream - there are too many vested interests in the current state of hunger - but if we are going to talk about what will get people the food they need, I'd love to hear solutions that would help people long term, not meal by meal.

Check out some of the Hunger Action Week offerings.  They look very interesting and may inspire meals at your house too.

Help Grand Rapids fight poverty

A few days ago the City of Grand Rapids tweeted this:

It caught my eye.  Currently there's a lot of interest, a real positive vibe - if you will - floating around the city because of all the investment in it by citizens big and small.  Unlike many cities in Michigan, you feel like Grand Rapids is going somewhere, has a real future.  As a longtime resident of the city, I would like that to be true.  I certainly do not want to go back to the days when downtown was empty and dilapidated.  It was like that when I graduated high school.  

Why was it like that?  There wasn't a sudden influx of indigents, after all.  Well, one reason was that older generation Grand Rapidians had a love affair with the suburbs in the sixties and seventies.  The country had a little prosperity bump after World War II, and people were flush - and sick of the constraints of cities.  They wanted a house with a yard. They wanted to try something new.  They wanted a little anonymity and privacy.  So they built to the north in Northview.  They built to the south in Wyoming.  They pushed into Comstock Park and Kentwood.  

Then the schools integrated and people's kids were being bused all over the city in a grand social experiment, and parents really didn't care for the fact that they couldn't pop into their kids' schools with a forgotten lunch or pair of gym shoes.  They didn't like it that they had no control over where and with whom their kids were taught and how long they'd have to sit on a bus in the morning and the afternoon, and they complained about it.  And the government said, "Shut up.  We know better than you.  This is progress."  So they moved out to Rockford and Hudsonville and Forest Hills where they could have their yards and control where their kids went to school.  And Grand Rapids lost a lot of good prospective homeowners and taxpayers and law abiders and community investors, and the city suffered.  

People with options left partly because they felt the City had no concern for their desires and needs.  They also left because when the first waves rolled out, the number of law abiding citizens still in the city relative to law breakers dropped: it became less safe to live there.  And when it's no longer safe, you get out.

This happened all over the country, and it was the same story everywhere.  Cities were left gutted and crime ridden.  With declining budgets, cities had fewer options except maintaining basic services (or not).  Detroit is the poster child for devolution.  It was once a beautiful city, a vibrant city, a great city.  Now it's a shell.  Soviet Russia was nicer.  Much nicer.  I know; I've lived in both places. 

I have a great deal of interest in making sure Grand Rapids does not become another Detroit.  Or St. Louis.  Or Baltimore.  I'd like to keep the lights on and the murder rate down.  I'd prefer it if the fun pastime of burning down houses didn't catch on here.  So, what to do?

Really the only viable answer to keeping poverty rates down is to encourage more law abiding, tax paying, home owning families into the city.  Grand Rapids doesn't have the money to "fight the war on poverty" and it doesn't have the money to patrol everywhere all the time, so it needs to draw in more residents who will willingly invest their time in making community.  When criminals become a greater share of a population, you have more crime, but when they become a lesser share, you will have less.  This is because people police others better than the police do, at the street level.  People who invest in their neighborhoods - and feel the city will back them up - don't put up with crime.  They form neighborhood watches and they keep an eye out for troublemakers and report them.  They paint over graffiti, and they restore old houses.  They plant trees.  They put their kids in the schools and they volunteer in them.  You see this with gentrification.  Bakeries open and crack houses close down.  They bring in dumpsters and clear garbage and old tires out of city lots and build community gardens.  Things get safer.  Criminals don't like it when people pay attention and complain.  They move out.  

Grand Rapids Public Schools do not have a great reputation.  There are some really solid schools, but most of the kids in GRPS come from families that stay in the city because they don't feel they have other options, and the test scores and graduation rates are poor.  What the City of Grand Rapids needs to do is to lure families who like urban living (and all the amenities cities have to offer) in with schools designed for their needs.  This means more investment in schools like City High because if parents feel they have good options for schools, they will move back into the city (or not move out when their kids get to be school age).  We need to go back to having neighborhood schools.  Grand Rapids has a number of very nice, very safe neighborhoods, but parents who live their know their kids won't go to school there.  So they make other arrangements.

Kids are a sign of growth and the future.  Any organization with a lot of young faces will stick around because when kids grow up loving something (a place, an activity), they usually stick with it.  The City of Grand Rapids needs to invest in families.  Whether this manifests itself as tax breaks or neighborhood schools, parks and playgrounds or active community/neighborhood watch groups, the focus can't be on the poor, if you want the city to be less poor.  The poor will always be with you, someone famous once said.  It's great to help the poor, but city planning should focus on getting and retaining people who think long term and put their money and their sweat into the city itself.