Hunger in America

Home sick today (stomach bug), so I'm watching Hulu. Not that I don't watch hulu ordinarily, but now I have the time to actually watch the commercials. One of these caught my attention: it's the Public Service Announcement about how one in eight Americans "struggles with hunger" -- black and white stills of photogenic people of all demographics, interspersed with everyday items shaped like the numbers one through eight, to convey that hunger could strike anyone, while a bad Springsteen impersonator repeatedly groans "I'll never let go of your hand". Tag line "Who's the 1 in 8 in your life?" You know the ad?

It's for a group called Feeding America. If you visit the website, it comes down to an awareness campaign built around a single government statistic: "in 2007, 36.2 million Americans lived in food insecure households". I don't know about you, but 'food insecure' doesn't evoke a common-sensical definition to me. So I looked up the original report. Read it for yourself.

Turns out the USDA does an annual survey, with 18 questions about food availability. If you answer a certain number of them "Yes", you count as "Food Insecure". Indeed, 11.1% of Americans fit this description.

That's one in NINE, not 1 in 8, but here's the part that I really object to. The "Feeding America" ad, website, and materials all refer to "hunger" as though it were the biological symptom, and to "lack of food" like one in nine Americans have empty bowls and that's it. The government study, and it's questionaire, repeatedly use the key phrase that's missing: going hungry because "there wasn’t enough money." It's not like 1 in 9 Americans can't find a grocery store! There isn't a famine! There's no food shortage; there's a MONEY shortage. Some people just don't have enough MONEY. They're POOR. They're SO POOR they can't afford FOOD.

This is, however an old story. An ad that said, "just a reminder, but about 11% of Americans are broke at some point during a given year. We like to think they could be living next door, but they don't -- you don't know anyone that poor, at least not personally. Please support social welfare spending!" wouldn't tug at the heart strings quite the same as the "hunger Russian Roulette" concept -- it could be you of someone you love who is suddenly struck by hunger, so you should empathize. This appeals to the same instinct that says, since about 5% of the population is gay, any group of 20 or more people must have a gay person in it.

This is what bothers me:

1- The public is too stupid, blasé, or both, to care about the actual facts.
2- There are well intentioned people who think it's okay to distort reality to get through to the dummies.
3- Since there's an ad campaign, someone is willing to bankroll this mendacity. Altruistic mendacity, but still.
4- This is the kind of policy advocacy that leads to government bread wagons. After all, if the public is too dumb to get that poverty has bad effects on the poor, then they probably think "give them food, then they'll have food" is a good policy solution.
5- Someone presumably got PAID to come up with all of this. Someone whose combination of low ethics and bad statistical sense entitles them to be the SUBJECT, not the author, of such a PSA.

Ugh, sigh. Back to throwing up my breakfast. That I bought with MONEY. That I got from the GOVERNMENT (but it's okay, I work for them!).