I don’t think that is what @Pardel-Lux was implying at all. You are attacking the wrong argument. It is this piece of delectable ignorance that deserves your fury and scorn:
Fair enough and apologies for any misdirected ire. But I’ve heard the “People aren’t starving therefore your complaints about food poverty are moot” argument a lot over the years, so I’ve got a definite bee in my bonnet about it.
Jack Monroe does definitely appear to be different, and has been a notable anti-poverty campaigner for years based on their experience of living in extreme poverty. They have recently (at the request of followers) launched some products (t-shirt, bags, etc) but all money is going to food banks and food poverty charities. And they would very much prefer that the government address the problem properly rather than charities having to do it.
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I work in a food pantry and in homeless outreach. Anything further I have to say on affluent people’s attitudes toward food insecurity belongs in the Pit.
Yeah, out and out death by starvation is unusual in the US, but food insecurity that is bad enough to interfere with daily life is quite common. Way, way too common.
I find it interesting how in the USA there seems to be a bit of a sense of if your aren’t in the top 1%, you are somehow “struggling” (at least in certain circles). Like somehow people still manage to eke out a living on mere hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
There are people in my [affluent] community who are all to comfortable designating people who fall between the cracks as “no one”.
“No one” except:
- undocumented immigrants afraid to reach out for help for fear of being reported and deported
- people with mental illness or substance abuse issues or both
- elderly people who have slid into poverty and are too proud or not mentally capable of negotiating the bureaucracy to get help that is available.
- kids whose parent is working 100+ hours a week to keep them from becoming homeless, and has no time to prepare nutritious meals
These people don’t count. They aren’t really human, apparently.
You left out homebound sick people who don’t have the energy to prepare food, nor to negotiate the system. There are a lot of people like that. Most of them don’t literally starve to death, instead, they don’t get enough nutrition and so they can’t fight off their illness and die sooner and at higher rates from “illness”. They die from lack of food, but not from “starvation”.
Obviously, it depends on what you spend and what lifestyle you establish. People can get into trouble despite having multi-million dollars in income or investments and others are comfortable, relatively speaking, on five-digit incomes.
Of, one of the really minor first world gripes I have is that it happened ‘after we’d gotten it all figured out’…The house was being paid for, the cars were sorted, the kid’s schooling was going according to plan. We really could have used it 17 years ago when we had toddlers, I was making half of what I make now and couldn’t afford to paint the house, much less send the kids to school.