“Help! I’ve Fallen and Can’t Reach My Microwave Burrito” or This Thing Called Hunger

Thanksgiving day, I watched the C-SPAN channels hoping for something I could sink my teeth into—the rest of the channel rerun lineup was about to kill me!

I stumbled upon the back half of an interview with Marco Grimaldo, interim director of Bread for the World, and he was discussing hunger in the U.S. and how the government had recently changed its term from “hunger’ to “food insecurity” to denote poverty-level eating and nutrition.

I grabbed the phone to call in a comment, but was unable to get through. I then elected to e-mail Mr. Grimaldo at the Bread for the World website, and my message got sent back.

While still full of fire and gumption about the whole “hunger” issue, I’ll post it instead.

Mr. Grimaldo’s contention is that if we throw enough money at the problem, it’ll go away—either at the recipient level, the farm subsidy level, or both. If we rewrite the Farm Bill or increase the amount of food stamps and other various aid to poor people, charities, and agencies set up to temporarily alleviate hunger, this will fix the problem—but you and I know this isn’t the case.

The letter:

“I saw your interview, and had this to add, but couldn't get my call in:

The microwave has become our biggest bane to poor people and food. There
are at least two generations (maybe more) that didn't get Home Ec education
in schools, and therefore cannot eat unless the food is either pre-prepared

----- Message truncated -----”

My rant was about how people rely too heavily on food that’s either pre-prepared (by some sort of third party), or microwaveable. If you were to give a poor person today 2 cups of flour, ½ cup of sugar, an egg, 1 t. baking soda, and some milk, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. This, by the way, is the recipe for basic pancakes—it cannot be casually tossed into the microwave in any but the finished form.

I’ve written about hunger before, and it took on the view of a two-sided coin of malnutrition: one side of not enough calories, and the other side of too many calories. There’s also a third side: WRONG calories.

Food stamp programs, church dinners, food banks, soup kitchens, and anyone else who provides free food to the poor all have one thing in common: WRONG calories. They tend to emphasize what will fill a person up for the least money and effort. What’s REALLY needed is a return to basics—Home Ec classes, shopping classes, nutrition classes, and how to read a cookbook. We need to make friends with Betty Crocker again.

At least two generations (possibly more) have grown up without public school access to Home Ec classes—and with mothers marching off to work, leaving kids at home to fend for themselves, the microwave has replaced the mother as the main source of nourishment. As we well know, food engineered for the microwave leaves a LOT to be desired when it comes to good nutrition, and it doesn’t help matters when bad shopping skills, a lack of nutritional knowledge, and a lack of preparation skills are thrown in.

As far as “hunger” and “food insecurity” go, the government is right—there is NO hunger here in America. More accurately and to the point, there is a food security problem, meaning that people have trouble accessing GOOD food, not food entirely, as the term “hunger” denotes. There is also a new term floating around to denote food insecurity, and it’s called “food deserts,” which I plan to write about in an upcoming article.

With all the food banks, church-served meals, soup kitchens, grocery store dumpsters, and stores and restaurants that leave separately-bagged reusable food out for street people to get at, how can anyone actually BE HUNGRY in this country? The people who regularly starve to death on the streets of Bangladesh in full public view wish they had it this good!

It’s just another Liberal heart-string emotional blackmail pseudo-crisis fundraiser opportunity. Today, I could’ve had Thanksgiving dinner for free at any number of churches in my area—ALL of them were serving!

Remember the Save the Children ads from years ago, where a man would walk through the streets of some misbegotten village and show filthy kids half naked and fly-encrusted, picking through a trash heap? Those ads today don’t feature such children—nowadays, the children are fully clothed, clean, fly-less and chubby-cheeked. Hardly anything to jerk tears over any more, huh? Our generosity and largesse has spread all around the world and boosted the lives of millions, yet we’re supposed to be upset about people here in America who’ve fallen and can’t reach their microwave burrito.