Partially inspired by this thread.
How much of a problem, if any, is starvation in the United States? Excluding anorexics/bulimics and persons in vegetative states like Terri Schiavo, do people ever die or get close to it because they simply can’t get enough food? (I use the term “can’t” here loosely to include those who are unable or unwilling to find work and aren’t eligible for government aid)
What about during the Great Depression?
It is possible to starve to death in America but I believe you would be hard pressed to find a case that didn’t involve exceptional circumstances. Those would include mental illness, major drug or alcohol problems, the elderly, people lost in the wilderness, children starved by their parents etc.
I don’t know how an able-bodied, able-minded person could actually starve. There is free food all over if you look and plenty of people willing to feed a truly starving person. Starvation doesn’t happen in a day or even a week so it would be hard to see how someone with the body and will couldn’t scrounge up enough to survive.
What Shagnasty said.
I couldn’t find any statistics on Google, but common sense says that you can’t starve in the United States unless you are (socially) isolated and incapable of getting food for yourself. No person, of sound mind and body, could starve to death in an inhabited area of the United States. There are simply too many food sources: dumpsters, handouts, charity, hospitals, theft, and prisons.
Even a person of unsound mind would have a problem. Starving to death takes a long time and before death a person would look like a person starving to death. This would draw attention to them almost certainly resulting in an offer of a meal or, if the person couldn’t or wouldn’t eat, tube feeding.
I doubt it’s possible without extenuating circumstances. I’m friends with a few “freegans” who are people who don’t spend money. They live mostly off of dumpsters and the occasional roadkill deer. Surprisingly, they lived quite well, and often had to research food preservation techniques for when they ran in to a fifty pound haul of cabbage or something. Food was NEVER an issue for them. Their garbage harvest yielded boxes and boxes of perfectly good food.
I know a few dozen dumpsters around here where you can walk away with enough food for dozens of people- even good stuff like fine pastries. The excess found in our society is amazing.
I’ve known a lot of hippies, and the general consensus seems to be that, baring an exceptional circumstance, you should be able to scrounge around for enough food to at least stay alive, and most of them were in good shape and not starving at all. If you’re willing to dumpster dive, you’ll find lots of discarded food. There’s also charities that’ll feed you, Hare Krishnas, etc.
Exceptional circumstance, btw, means you’d have to have some crippling mental or physical disability, or be lost in the woods, or purposefully starved, etc.
I would think that while starvation because of economic reasons in the U.S. is quite rare, death because of malnutrition isn’t all that uncommon.
Starving to death takes a while. My mother passed away from colon cancer and she essentially starved to death. It took several weeks for her to pass away.
The only starved persons I have seen (of course they were dead) were people entirely dependent on someone else for care. A few infants, a few very elderly people, and one mentally ill son who didn’t seem to have fallen far from his mom’s tree.
There is not one post I have seen that I disagree with … just want to add something touched on but not explicitly said:
Almost every municipality has shelters for the homeless and abused woman and children that offer free food.