Food
poverty is when people of a certain socioeconomic background have the worse
diet and worse access to food. There are many areas in Kalamazoo that do not
have access to groceries stores or do not have access to healthy foods. Many
children also rely on the food provided by their schools as their only reliable
source of a hot meal. With budget cuts to programs that provide meals to people
who need them there is a great concern on how to not only stop food hunger but
also provide a way for more people to gain access to nutrients and foods they
need.
For
this post I want to discuss how we could improve our food industry systems as a
whole. We produce so much food and waste just as much of it. Is there a way to
balance these out so that everyone can have access to food? These videos
discuss the problems of the food industry and its implications in America.
Going to Bed Hungry:
The Changing Face of Child Hunger
Kid President Needs
Your Help to Fight Child Hunger
A recipe for cutting
food waste | Peter Lehner | TEDxManhattan
Siani, thanks for bringing up this incredibly important topic. These videos made me think a lot about my own habits when it comes to food consumption.
ReplyDeleteWhile I was watching Lehner’s TED talk, I was thinking about how much food doesn’t get eaten here at K. Our cafeteria wastes a lot of food. I know that I am guilty of this, although I do try to be conscious about how much food I take. For me, a big problem is when there are certain foods that workers dish out for you (as opposed to letting you choose for yourself how much you want). I often end up with way more food than I want or can eat. I feel uncomfortable leaving lots of food behind, but I also don’t want to continue eating when I am no longer hungry. I’m wondering what the reasons are behind deciding when/why the workers dish out your food for you – it seems like it’d be easier to manage food waste if they didn’t do this.
I think that managing our food waste is one step in working towards a food system that permits access to all. I’m lucky enough to have grown up in a situation where I didn’t have to think about access to food. Growing up, we always had plenty of food, and I never had to worry about where my next meal was coming from. My community didn’t really talk about food access much. We had canned food drives, but these were always framed as helping people from outside of our community, not people within it. As a result, I grew up thinking about food access as an issue that didn’t impact anyone that I actually knew. Now that I’m older, I recognize that this is far from the truth – I’m sure there were people in my school that didn’t always have sufficient food (or sufficient healthy food.)
I don’t think it’s possible for us to think about food access without also talking about larger structural issues of economic inequality. The videos pointed to some “bandaid” approaches to food access. Programs that help provide families with meals are important and I’m certainly not disparaging this work. Food banks are other resources like that can make a huge difference in people’s lives. At the same time, however, they don’t always address the larger reasons why people don’t have access to food. I’m thinking about issues like a livable minimum wage and why some types of labor are seen as more valuable than others. An approach that focuses more broadly on addressing economic inequality, I think, needs to exist in tandem with programs that provide food or meals to those who need them.
Thank you so much for those interesting videos. I was especially interested in the TED talk; I felt that that video had so much useful and inspiring information and ideas for the future. I was especially shocked to hear about the large percentage of food that is wasted in the United States, but at the same time I wasn’t, because I have seen how wasteful we can be. I can remember so many instances where people I know, my family and friends, and even myself have not finished what is put on our plates. I also know the struggle of grocery shopping; one thing I find especially difficult is shopping for a single person. As I live off campus I cook all my own meals, and I only buy groceries for myself, and unfortunatly some of those end up going bad because I cannot finish a family sized head of lettuce before it goes bad. This same thing happens with my fruits and vegetables too; I buy the smallest portions available but I cannot always finish one large onion before it goes bad. This makes me think not only about our waste as a country but also about our portion sizes. I am interested in hearing about what other people have to say about this in class; thanks for the interesting topic!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for these interesting videos. The video about children going hungry was especially sobering. 1 in 5 children go hungry in the United States. That is way too high of a statistic considering the technology and resources we have available. Hunger is an unfortunate reality for many people in the United States. In recent years, food donation centers have not been able to address the issue of hunger adequately in part due to an increase in demand for food donation centers, an inadequate amount of donors needed to keep up with this increase in demand and donations lacking in quality calories that are needed to avoid malnutrition. Putting the reality of the amount of people who are hungry in the United States in relation of the massive quantities of wasted food, it is obvious that there is a need for a methodology in the food supply chain that works to reduce food waste and also allows edible food waste to be redirected to food donation centers. Lean, a form of continuous improvement, can improve the efficiency of the food supply chain overall and by sector to reduce the amount of food waste produced. Food donation is an important practice in disposing of edible food waste as it is putting such waste to use while addressing a social issue in the United States. The productivity and efficiency of producing food in the United States needs to be addressed as well as reducing food waste in the home. I agree with Peter Lehner that the government should design programs to push manufactures to design better products AND ALSO to reduce waste in their production processes. This can be in the example he gave with jam kitchens by farmer markets that use the unsold produce to make gourmet jelly and then sell that. Or, it can be through integrating lean processes to highlight where waste is occurring and then to donate that food to food donation shelters where hungry people can gather the food and consume it.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a little shocking to consider the topics of food waste and food insecurity together—that one in five children in the US is food insecure while 40% of food produced in this country is never eaten seems, well, wrong. But while the U.S. Declaration of Independence declares that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights, it doesn’t say anything about access to food or even clean drinking water. Our economic system is not designed to feed everyone, despite rhetoric about American farmers “feeding the world.” I think the solutions to these two issues are very different (less food waste does not necessarily mean less hungry people), but what’s useful about considering them together is that it highlights that the problem of hunger in the U.S. is not due to a lack of adequate agricultural production. Which then allows us to focus in on the real problems of economic disparity and to ask questions about why, in a country as wealthy as the U.S., is it acceptable that some people do not have access to the basic elements that sustain life like food, shelter, and water. Again, who is in control here? Who benefits when a significant portion of our population doesn’t know where they will source their next meal or is one medical emergency away from food insecurity? Who benefits from children not receiving nutrition adequate to healthy growth and development?
ReplyDeleteThere are many ways that we can improve the food industry systems and food waste. I know that Whole Foods, I believe, gives away free food that is expired, such as loafs of bread, muffins, cookies, fruits, vegetables, and other perishable foods. I remember being apart of a non-profit program for inner city teens, where we combined the performing arts with social justice. I remember, during lunch, we would take that food from Whole Foods and make sandwiches and eat fruits and vegetables. After the day was over, everyone would take the left over foods. Growing up, I was also apart of City Year, where I and other students helped to complete community service. During the lunch time, the process was similar to the performing arts program for inner city teens. We would ear donated foods from food stores and restaurants. When eating these foods, I never thought that the food tasted any better than non-expired foods. In fact, it felt nice to eat food that wasn’t wasted. At home, if my family has old fruits or vegetables, we always make different foods out of the experienced food. For example, for fruits and vegetable, we make smoothies. For old bananas, we make Banana Pudding. Old foods can be made into so many things. Old fruits, such as strawberries and grapes can be made into jellies. Like these programs, expired foods can be donated to non-profit organizations. There can also be programs that allow community members to learn how to cook and make different meals with expired foods.
ReplyDeleteFood access is a huge, multifaceted issue that people around the US deal with on a daily basis. It is an undeniable aspect of the way our current food system is modeled, that we produce and waste an abundance of food, while somehow, 1 in 5 children still go hungry. It is disheartening and confusing to learn about and seems paradoxical. I really appreciated all three of the videos Siani provided us, but I also think they remained at a pretty superficial level. Food banks and other charity meal providers are necessary to meet the immediate needs of people experiencing food insecurity, but they are not a viable, long-term solution to lack of access to food. The Ted Talk is helpful in pointing out the absurd statistics of food waste, but again, does not demand a total restructuring of the industrialized capitalistic food system that basically ensures that unequal food access will always exist. In social justice activism, we are always talking about the difference between treating short-term problems and addressing the root causes/systems which result in those problems. Food security and food waste are major issues that cause suffering, but they are a result of a much larger, more pervasive, and more dangerous system at work.
ReplyDeleteThe ted talk really made me think about the food system that we currently live in and the inefficiency of food consumption/production within these systems. There are so many different and innovative ways that we can alter our food system in order to decrease the food waste. I wonder why we haven’t taken advantage of them just yet. I feel, although with little proof, that the agriculture system benefits financially by the overconsumption of food. However, as the presenter mentioned, supermarkets would save millions of dollars by lowering their food waste. Food waste in general is a horrible thing to be doing. I was lucky enough to have grown up with an abundance of food. I did not have to skip a meal or ration out my food. I do not like to use this as an excuse for effectively using food. I can see how lowering food waste can lead to more people having access to food. However, I believe that society is more capitalistic than socialist and will not make it as simple as lowering food consumption and using the difference to feed low socioeconomic individuals.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading an article (but also it was a Facebook article how legitimate is it?) where it talked about France supermarkets donating their “left over” sale to a local homeless center. We don’t even have to think overtly big about food waste is coming from. Restaurants like Panera or supermarkets with produce that cannot be sold anymore because it’s past their “due time” (yes, microbes have a watch and will attack passed midnight after Cinderella leaves) are wasted. And all these are perfectly good bagels (using Panera for example) that could be donated - they aren’t fresh, but they aren’t spoiled or rotten or anything like that at all. Increasing “productivity” of agriculture (which is a conversation of its own because current agriculture damages the land like no other and isn’t really productive the way people think it is) is not a conversation we should be having when 1/5 of the food we produce are not being eaten.
ReplyDeleteAnd also this is a great chance for us to reflect on how we see food - ultimately agriculture exists so that people can eat, a basic activity we need to stay alive. We’ve mentioned how we don’t spend time to cook anymore, to really invest time in adding spices, making broth, and seasoning the meat (microwave dinners are my personal enemy). I wonder if we would be less inclined to toss out food if we spent so much time on making it.
Food insecurity and food poverty are huge issues within our global food system, so thank you Siani for bringing them to focus for todays class!
ReplyDeleteSomething I kept thinking about when I was watching the videos provided was how strange it is that there essentially exists a whole ad campaign for not letting children starve. It seems wild to me that 1 in 5 children going hungry being a bad thing is something we would have to convince people of, but that feels like what the videos we watched were gear towards. I was slightly frustrated by how they focused all their energy to this end and didn't actually address how to end food insecurity. This is of course a complex and multifaceted issue, the root of which is the root of a whole host of social injustices, but ignoring them because it's too complicated to fit into a 4 minute video doesn't seem right. I'm looking forward to exploring this further in class.
Food insecurity is a major problem throughout the world-- and especially in Kalamazoo. The fight for food justice is one that has been on my mind greatly recently, and I believe that the fight for it is related to many factors that dive deep into other social issues that pervade our systems today. When asking how we can balance out the food in our system to be able to provide access to everyone, I think about the social structures that make it difficult for people in certain neighborhoods to obtain healthy, fresh food because of the lack of a grocery store in that area, which is due to the demand/business of that grocery store in that area, which is due to the price of the food in that area. Furthermore, many people also have difficulties getting transportation to obtain their groceries from a grocery store that has fresh food. To really tackle the food insecurity issue, we must firstly allow for more people to take the time out of their day to go out and buy their food, as well as keep the price of the food affordable. One idea that I've heard about that has helped with this issue is the implementation of urban or community gardens. I wonder how it would work in terms of longevity and community engagement, and this is something I would like to find out more information about. Something else that is available through our government are food stamps, which can be used even at farmer's markets to obtain good food, but I'm not sure the effect of this in practice. When I think about these issues, I have a hard time coming up with broad-scale solutions that really tackle the issue for the larger population, and rather think about a social/conditioning shift to the people at the upper side of the "food security" to recognize that they live in abundance and help alleviate and redistribute this abundance. I also think about reforming educational systems, which could help but does not tackle the issue of the price of food, but maybe more education could help people re-prioritize their spending to really allow them to feed themselves and take care of themselves through food. I look forward to a class discussion that will help me think about some more broader scale changes that can be made through policies.
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot for the videos it offers a lot direct truth of food poverty! It includes many facts that people are not sure about it.
ReplyDeleteFor the historical aspect, we already do much better on satisfying every one's demands of food compares before. However, it is never enough. Food poverty problem is still exists. For this issue, I think no one can give a perfect answer. The only thing we can do is to balance it as much as we can. I think grocery stores and restaurants always sales a large amount of food. They choose to do it because they believe this is the best way to produce benefits of them, instead of doing charity for people still struggles for food poverty. In addition, there is some deep and inclement issues in food poverty problem. I think it will make most people uncomfortable, but, it is truth