11-19-08 Ethics Lecture Food and the Politics of Scarcity Edie Jessup Page 1 Of 10
Food and the Politics of Scarcity
Edie Jessup
Good Afternoon. My name is Edie Jessup, and I am privileged to work with Fresno Metro Ministry on a Hunger & Nutrition Project. When asked if I might join you today, as you are wrestling with the future Ethics and the Community, it gave me pause. I see this and Food/Shelter/Health as THE work of society. Notice ‘society’, not just the work of individuals.
Before I begin my more formal remarks, I want to frame my discussion of Food and the Politics of Scarcity. This is an evolving topic of consideration for me over the years.
In 2003, I first put my thoughts together about this topic for the American Heart Association Conference of Cardiologists, and it evolved out of my experience here in Fresno with Hunger, poverty, and chronic disease. I received a call from a middle aged farmworking woman who had been discharged from Community Hospital following a heart procedure. She had no transportation and no food in her home in south Fresno, and no money. She had walked blocks to Catholic Charities to try to get some food. However, they would not give it to her because she had received food from them two months ago, and one could only get emergency food from them every 4 months. Meanwhile, there were no stores in this woman’s neighborhood. How was she to recover? How was here illness related to access to consistent healthy food in the first place---though she had worked for years harvesting food for the rest of us? Beyond the individual’s predicament, what did her environment have to do with her ability to carry through with the Doctor’s orders to eat well in order to recover?
In 2005, at one of the (now 87 Hunger & Nutrition Forums) Metro has sponsored, a Hmong mother, a brave mathematician of the highest order, told me: “I know I am supposed to feed my children 5 fruits and vegetables every day so they will be strong. But I have 8 children, and I cannot afford 40 fruits and vegetables a day.”
An Hispanic mother told me that in her country of origin that healthy food was the cheapest food, but here it is the most expensive, and she must buy enough food to keep her children’s bellies full—even if it is fast food or top ramen.
Another told me that the ‘Schools were teaching her children to eat poorly.’ Schools being the place to learn….
An elder Hmong woman told me that she was never hungry until she came to America.’
These experiences in trying to figure out beyond individual ‘choice’ what influence our social environment plays, and how communities construct access to the basics all humans need (food, shelter, health) in order to thrive and learn, have provoked me to wrestle with our societal ethic of not seeing the environment as being significant, and indeed driving a blaming of folks most impacted by hunger, homelessness, and chronic disease.
Lastly, as a framework, we are entering the holiday/holy day season, when every family and religion calls themselves to charity, and we are faced with deep hunger, and the 7 deadly ‘IN’s of charity:
Insufficiency, inappropriateness, inadequacy, instability, inaccessibility, inefficiency, and indignity. So, when you pull that year old can of cranberry sauce from the back of your cupboard to donate to the poor –please be aware that that is fine, but there is more required if we have any concept of economy, environment and equity.
And, in all of this I have been troubled. So many good people distributing charity food from over 300 purported food distribution points in Fresno County. But we have found only 18 really open to the public, and most of them not accessible without praying to Jesus or producing long documentation about how really poor they are, and only if you could get to the pantry at 10am on Tuesday, and lived in that Zip code. The Fresno Community Food Bank estimates that they can serve only 1/3 of folks experiencing hunger in Fresno County. What are the other 2/3 doing?
Did you know that in Fresno County and much of the Valley:
You can only access most food pantries once every four months, or agree to case management by volunteers?
Fresno County unemployment hovers at over 10% officially (really twice that) and is 2-3 times the state or national rate?
Over 10,000 people are homeless in Fresno and Madera Counties, at least 5,000 in Fresno City?
Over 85% of Fresno Unified kids qualify for free or reduced lunches? Yesterday Federal data released by the USDA announced that hunger for US kids rose 50% from ’06-‘07
Immigrant families are afraid to apply for food stamps and school lunches because they think that if they use these nutrition programs they will be denied legal status or deported by the INS?
If you are a Senior Citizen in California, receiving SSI, you cannot receive Food Stamps, even though you qualify by income? Increasingly grandparents are caretakers for children, and they go without food so kids can eat.
Do you know that the Senior Nutrition (congregate meals program), which is Federally authorized, contracts to the States, then to the Local Area Agency on Aging, who contracts with the City of Fresno Parks and Rec Department who contracts with the Fresno EOC that provides the meals. Do you think much money is left after passing through all those agencies? Senior Nutrition sites are closing because they don’t have the funds, even though seniors are starving due to medication costs?
Did you know that the old Meals on Wheels Program for the elderly is capped with a waiting list of 600, and delivers 7 frozen dinners once a week to those it does serve (not the lovely tangerines you see advertised in the Fresno Bee).
Food Stamps in California, and across the US, have been ‘privatized’? In 2003, all Food Stamps in California and the nation are issued on a debit like card, In California called ‘Golden State Advantage’ or EBT, and though the County will still qualify and case manage recipients, the system, by state contract is run by: Citicorp (then in 2004 was ‘sold’ to Morgan Chase). And that Citicorp then Morgan Chase runs Food Stamps in 46 of the States? And in many places administers ‘welfare’ through the same card. That means that federal dollars for the Food Stamp nutrition program and block granted CalWorks assistance to poor families all goes to Citicorp, now Morgan Chase, to distribute. This morning, it was reported that Citibank is slashing 53,000 jobs. Who is making money here?
A side note, the ‘customer service center’ for Fresno and California Food Stamp Recipients is run out of a call center in India.
Food Stamps, the premier nutrition program, is underutilized. California is LAST in eligible participation nationally—51st. In Fresno County alone, if people who were eligible for food stamps were enrolled, it would mean an additional $188 million dollars a year into the economy for people to buy food!
The iron deficiency anemia rate in the Valley is 4 times the national average, resulting in permanent brain damage to 16% of Fresno children?
For individual kids the permanent injury of hungry is cruel. The cost for our nation in high rates of school failure and weakened workforce productivity when youth reach employment age is huge.
So. Food and the Politics of Scarcity.
We human beings started living in cities on the earth about 6,000 years ago and we did it because our farming got so good that not everyone had to spend all their time growing food. Farmers could raise enough food to feed themselves and lots of other people too, so some people began to specialize in making cloth and others specialized in making pottery and others specialized in building buildings. We created cities as a result of good farming. Some of the oldest cities in the world were in Egypt. From the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead here is a partial list of things a citizen was not supposed to do. One is not to cheat poor people. One is not to take land from a neighbor. One is not to take milk away from children. One is not to waste water. From 6,000 years ago some pretty good recommendations about farming and about what we need to live well in our cities.
Why are we not moved by the issue of hunger and food insecurity?
And now, chronic disease: obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Impairments to living well; OVERWHELMINGLY with racist outcomes.
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What kind of a country would create this?
How can we say what this means.
It is so strange. It is far beyond what makes sense, or, what we intend. What to do, particularly at a local level.
My biggest concern is whether we, you, are looking at people, our neighbors, as persons in their environment. Do we understand people as they live in a place? What environment do you and they live in, and how have we created the environment where we live?
I work for Fresno Metro Ministry, an audacious social justice non-profit. I coordinate a Hunger & Nutrition Project, and work with the Central Ca. Regional Obesity Prevention Project, Fresno Co. Obesity Prevention Policy Council, a number of statewide food security organizations, and most recently with the Roots of Change. I work on access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food at all times for low-income people in Fresno. Fresno, where we raise enough food to feed the nation, and where the very people who harvest our bounty in 106 languages, are hungry. 40% of adults in Fresno County are food insecure at sometime during the year. 1/3 of the children are growing up in poverty. The grandchildren of Selma and Delano are standing in the free meal-kitchen lines. This true here, before the current economic crisis.
The News is: There is no scarcity of food. We have created hungry neighbors by clear policy decisions at the federal, state, and local level. We have decided to not feed people, and not to feed people healthy food. We have created a FOOD SECURITY issue. If we do not change the policies that create an increasingly poor population that is obese and thus inflicted with chronic disease by diet, we all will pay for the costs of increasingly ill neighbors. We will pay for the loss of farmland by sprawl, and the loss of knowing HOW to raise our food, as development usurps broken farms. This is the environment you are living in.
We need to change this environment we are creating very quickly –
If you know who know the consequences for individual health and the accumulation thru society, how can you not become advocates for system changes that support healthy environments for humans and the planet?
Some starts have been made. Wellness policies in Schools might begin to turn the tide for all kids’ health—if we were to fully implement them in Fresno. . But we also have to change the food landscape in our own organizations, communities, and neighborhoods—including Fresno State. Because what we are seeing is epidemic, and it is racist in its outcomes. The African American, Hispanic, and Southeast Asian populations are being hugely impacted by chronic disease by diet. We are creating a situation where children are developing chronic disease in elementary school, and will be impaired physically, mentally and socially for the rest of their lives. They are our future.
Elementary school kids with diabetes, pre-schoolers on inhalers.
Here is the research from Tufts on Kids and nutrition:
Children use food differently than adults. They use food fuel sequentially. So, the kids we see in Fresno might have 2/3 of the nutrition needed to thrive. Their critical organ growth and function has occurred; their physical growth has occurred (often they are overweight from excess empty calories. However, the last 1/3 of nutrition is missing because of poverty, and these kids are not getting the nutrition they need for cognitive and social development. They are not ready to learn and play. They are not physically prepared to develop relationship. Almost all hungry children suffer from severely impaired ability to learn, organize information, concentrate and form relationships. This results in low activity levels, apathy, fatigue; disinterest in their environment; low self esteem, poor social interactions and more susceptibility to illness and school absences. Ultimately, this results in curtained productivity as adults, and our community suffers when young adults and parents are impacted by early childhood hunger. The External alarm we can document is the level of poverty. Poverty is the primary factor associated with hunger. One out of three children in Fresno is living in poverty.
The danger here is huge, and I am sure that doctors and teachers are not asking when and what patients and students last ate, or if they have enough food at home for a healthy meal.
If you think your work or study is very individual to you, I appeal to you to begin to look at a wider environmental view. The neighborhood you live in is a great clue. South Fresno is a clue. Take a bus around and think about how people get what they basically need.
Then, go to your school student government, faculty, board, city council and board of supervisors, and say we must urgently do better. They must do better. Tell them you will be watching how they address the environment: physical and social in your place. If what you see is unhealthy food, expensive healthy food, food shipped for miles, with a huge carbon imprint…..pay attention.
CSUF, as our institute of learning, must get more involved in the community: Anthropology needs to be out on the corner of Chestnut and Kings Canyon doing observations; the Organic Farming folks from the Ag department need to be helping site and start community gardens, the business school needs to be in the community helping small farmers start neighborhood markets and work out food distribution in food deserts in south east and west Fresno. Volunteers need to do community service by gleaning food from fields and distributing it through the Food Bank to pantries that are empty right now.
The gaming of the agricultural industry is breaking the food system. The Corporate world is now defining nutrition, and marketing food and seed that is ruining sustainable farming worldwide, and globally causing increased poverty and chronic disease by obesity.
Fresno is a microcosm of what will happen with economic globalization: agribusiness only exporting of food grown, disintegration of air quality, land taken out of production because the land has been ruined by unsustainable farming practices, and the displacement of rural families to cities; cities who, like Fresno, are unprepared to deal with the migration of poor and culturally different families, and creating extreme urban pockets of poverty. (Please read the Brookings Institute report on Fresno having the worst pockets of poverty in the nation.
Mark Ritchie, when he led the Institute for Ag and Trade, said that there is a basic dichotomy reconciliation we must make:
1. We are internationalists fundamentally. We see the world like the world flag from space, and understand our interdependence as a global issue. This is Globalism.
2. We are also concerned about economic globalization that promotes persons, cities, and nations as competitors.
Make this leap and analogy to the work you are doing and learning, and the ethics of community.
Ritchie posits that industrialization of agriculture and multinational Ag is being argued as if it is a better system than traditional farming. When science and study prove that it is not a better food system, it is argued that corporate agriculture (or corporate social services, for instance) is needed in order to feed or treat the poor of the world. When study and science prove that consolidated and corporatization is in fact not feeding the poor, and is instead impoverishing and hunger is increasing, it is argued that techno-industrialization , corporatization and consolidation is inevitable. And, if we add to the perception that corporate agriculture or corporate health treatment is inevitable –as in ‘you can’t fight city hall’ we are giving the destruction of our food system, our best treatment standards, and the environment over to an irresponsible corporate-individual.
The Hope I have is that we can use policymaking and can show that it is not inevitable. It is a threat to democracy to give over as inevitable the drive toward corporately determined agriculture or health care, or housing, the failure of the food system, health care and housing here and worldwide, and the inevitable hunger and now development of chronic disease by diet.