"Vast expansion in aid kept food insecurity from growing last year" |
The article published by the New York Times ‘’Vast expansion in aid kept food insecurity from growing last year’’, written by Jason DeParle, addresses how government extraordinary spending last year allowed food insecurity levels to remain unchanged from the pre pandemic times. Overall the 10.5 percent of American households that were food insecure didn’t change and the 3.9 percent that experienced ‘’very low food security’’ - meaning reduction of food intake due to resource shortage - did not change either. Another issue that the author addresses is the disproportionate increase in inequality between black households and white households, shown by the 21.7 percent of black households who experienced food insecurity compared to the 7.1 percent of white households.
Although the effort of president Biden to increase government aid, there has been a lot of criticism whether it is still necessary. However, what most people who haven't been food insecure misunderstand is that in an economic crisis, most commonly food will be the first thing to cut. Also, we must understand that although food and poverty go hand by hand, they must not be treated as synonyms. This, meaning that most people who are suffering from food insecurity are not poor since they do not qualify for the hard-to-qualify under the poverty line little box. In Pressure cooker, it is exposed how one car repair could send a whole household into food insecurity. Because of how little control low-income families have over their time schedule, ‘’[i]f one thing goes wrong, it creates a domino effect in all the other areas of their lives’’(69).
In the article, 4 lessons from the pandemic are depicted; “as aid rose, good insecurity fell’’, “Schools play a vital role’’, “The gaps between Black and White Americans are large”, “Charity plays an important but limited role”. As reported in the article, although food insecurity decreased overall, it rose in households with children by 1.1 percent in just one year. After the pandemic, closure of schools meant a cut of school meals, thus the government addressed this issue with electronic benefit cards. Nevertheless, as addressed by Marion Nestle, the pre pandemic “laws provided just enough aid to keep people from dying on the street (inconvenient, unsightly) or engaging in outright rebellion (politically problematic), but never enough to live decently”(67). Even though the article exposes the benefits SNAP is bringing to ,low income households through food stamps, it fails to take into account how this mechanism push people to acquire ultra processed foods due to lack of access to grocery stores, in other words, people who live in food desserts have no other choice but to feed their families with this unhealthy choices, which in my opinion seem no more like a choice.
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