Most Americans have never really been hungry. I am amongst that majority. In my life I doubt I have ever gone more than 24 hours without eating something, and if it has happened it was because I was ill. Most of us just don’t know what it means to feel really hungry.
Based on reports I have heard, Carbon County exists in what is called a food desert. That is considered a place where it is hard to find a good, well-rounded meal that you can buy from a food outlet. Whether you agree with that or not, some do consider our area that way.
I recently sat through a presentation by a health professional in our community in which she explained that many, many of her clients’ last meal came from a gas station. That is nutrition-deficient living, but is far from being hungry. When you are hungry, really hungry, anything is better than nothing. Well, we have people living right here in our community that can’t even partake of what is in the food desert we live in. They don’t have the means.
Hungry on weekends
There are a lot of students in our public schools whose only real meals of the day are the free breakfasts the district offers everyone, and the free or reduced lunches that are provided each day. On weekends, particularly on long weekends, many kids leave school on Friday and never have anything to eat until the first day of school the next week. Many of our schools have started programs to send home food for students that need it so they have something to eat over the time off.
The world’s population continues to grow, and more mouths mean there is more need for food. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world, or one in nine, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014-2016. Almost all the hungry people, 780 million, live in developing countries. The fact is, however, that there really is more than enough food produced to feed everyone on the planet. These people are starving because of poor means, a lack of political power and that they have have no way to apply pressure to the economic market that would provide them food.
To be really hungry, going without hardly any food for weeks, months and even years is a foreign concept to most of us. I did get a little insight into what that was like, however, when I interviewed a number of World War II veterans back in the early 2000s that faced hunger either because they were out in combat for so long and separated from supplies or in one case, because that soldier had spent three and a half years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
Buzz Cline of East Carbon talked to me at length about what it was like to really starve, in fact almost starve to death. After spending two years in a Japanese run prison in the Philippines, he was shipped to Japan to work in some heavy industries because the number of men to work there from the local population had been depleted by being conscripted into the military. He said he lasted out the war there, but he lost a lot of weight. Many days all the prisoners got was a cup of rice to eat while they were working very hard in the refinery there. Later, as the war came close to an end, they got even less and many of them had lost as much as half their pre-war weight. At the time all they could think about was food. One day the director of the camp they were in came in with an interesting offer.
“The Japanese commander asked what he could get us and even suggested he could get us girls,” said Cline laughing as he told the story at the time. “None of us cared one bit about girls; all we wanted was food.”
He told me that any of the Hollywood pin-ups at the time, whether it be Lana Turner, Veronica Lake, or others, would not have got a glance from any of the men in his barracks, who were almost all in their early 20s, if they had come in the barracks without a hamburger in their hands. The need to eat, to have food, was all consuming. It was the only thing they could think about.
In a contrary position to many places in the world, Americans today have literally everything they want to eat and then some. Now I am not trying to be some bleeding heart liberal who wants everyone to feel guilty, instead I want to sound the alarm, maybe one you have heard many times.
Hunger leads to upheaval
Hungry populations make for war. Hungry populations make for political upheaval. When a group of people want something, no, that should be need something (and food is a need), everything in a country or a region can go to hell in a hand basket quickly.
The world’s food crisis needs to be solved, yet there are so many roadblocks to the solutions. As individuals, and if we had the means, I doubt few of us would withhold food from those millions that are starving. But as groups of individuals, we indirectly make political decisions, or our leaders do, that have an effect on all those that are starving. Pain comes in a lot of forms, but the lack of food is worse than any, because it leads to all kinds of other diseases. It also leads to hatred of those that have it all.
How can we make a difference? Well, I suggest we start at home. I have no problem with people helping the masses in other countries in one way or another, but it is painful to see people in our own communities who are without what they need. Sure, a poor person in Carbon County is much better off than a poor person in Somalia, but we can really affect what is going on with our local population more than we can somewhere on the other side of the world.
This thing about people, particularly kids, not getting enough to eat, not getting the right nutrition for growing bodies and minds, is a real problem. The solutions are not always easy because some of the problems are so complex, so dynamic, with so many moving parts.
It takes a community to solve this problem and our area has always been one that found answers to get through tough times. With things the way they are, we need to protect those that are most vulnerable.
We need some of that problem solving right now.
There is hunger close to home, and we should recognize that
Rick Shaw