Charlie could suck on a single grain of rice for a month!
It means that your source and funding of food is insecure. It doesn’t mean you are starving and at death’s door but that you are unsure whether you will have enough to eat in the coming weeks.
In other words, it’s a perfectly descriptive term that I would think most English speakers without an agenda would be able to grasp pretty quickly.
Nobody is “secure” in anything unless they have big bucks in the bank - I’m “food insecure” if for some reason I lose my job this week, but I would never think of it or describe it in those terms, and I certainly wouldn’t respond to some kind of survey that I was - because I’m not.
I guess it’s more suscinct than saying “Worried about where next week’s meals are coming from” but there are NO guarentees in life, for anyone, about anything. It smacks to me of a statistic made up to make things sound worse than they really are - measuring “insecurity” or “uncertainty” is a much wider net that “hunger” or “starvation”.
Also, it’s a term created by people with an agenda, so careful where you swing that brush.
Yeah, you aren’t. That’s the point.
Is this your style of debate? If it doesn’t apply to you it doesn’t exist?
Food insecurity? I remember living on the streets and getting money for food by selling plasma(($9 a session). I didn’t have a place to cook food, so it had to be cheap hamburgers and the like. Some days you eat, some days you don’t, and the insecurity fills your gut when the empty carbs vacate the premises.
No, I’m not debating anything, I’m merely point out that making up a new term to describe a common (and age old) problem makes it seem like it’s some kind of NEW problem.
What is the definition of “food secure”? How far into the future do you need to be able to divine in order to declare yourself as such? We need to know what these terms mean if we’re to have any understanding of the problem and solutions being presented.
It means that you have no idea where your next meal is coming from.
Well I would have thought so too, but then that means if you DO know where the next one is coming from, then are you “food insecure” if you aren’t sure about the one after that? What time-frame are we talking about; a week? a month?
And again, how far out into the future do you have to KNOW you’ll have food to be considered “food secure”? I assume that’s a catagory, because it is implied in the term “food insecure” - there must be some form of food security that it is measured against.
I suspect the only way to ever really be “food secure” is to know that you’ll be getting food from some government program in perpituity, and that people using the term “food insecure” are advocating for just that solution. I know, sounds too crazy to be true…
So…we should never look at the aggregate suffering of others if it doesn’t directly threaten their lives? Just because you are secure now and could, at some point, become insecure, it’s a non-sense made up metric?
Food insecurity, as a term, was introduced to describe the level of poverty that’s common in America. Very few people are “starving”. A bunch of people are “hungry” and a lot more people live in existential hell because they are constantly worried about how they are going to get food, whether they will have a job tomorrow, what will happen to them when their 26-year-old car dies and they don’t have the money to have a mechanic spit on it from across the street.
We only concern ourselves with the food aspect of their needs, but it’s not easy living in a situation where anything that gives will completely ruin your life.
That appears to be the upshot of this thread. If you aren’t dead yet, you must not have any troubles.
Do you think most Americans worry about not having enough food to last the week or month?
I’m comfortable with defining “food secure” as being confident that your grocery budget will last till the next time you get a paycheck or EBT card re-up. Thus, someone who is “food insecure” would be the opposite of this.
It isn’t rocket science.
And I suspect you are carrying this out to ridiculous extremes that have no basis in reality. When you spend time trying to figure out where the food is coming from instead of wondering what to fix for dinner, you are food insecure. When breakfast, lunch and dinner are nothing more than words because you eat when and if you can find food, you are food insecure. When you don’t eat enough to stay healthy because you fed the kids first, you are food insecure. When you have to sell off plasma to feed yourself, you are food insecure. When you have to choose between the rent bill, the heating bill and the food bill, you are food insecure.
Food insecurity means never having to say, “What would you like for dinner, dear?”
Sure, here in the real world that’s what it means. In the rightwingoverse, it means your weekly drive to the grocery store in your Cadillac to pick up t-bone steaks and Faygo with your foodstamps may get put off by a sudden, fleeting sense of shame over taking generous handouts when there are self-reliant Randian demi-gods like Werekoala who has had to struggle uphill both ways for absolutely everything in his life.
I visit the US from the UK regularly. Every time I arrive I am shocked again about the levels of rooflessness and abject poverty- street people and the obviously mentally ill in psychosis induced disorganised conditions. This is not recent but has been obvious for over forty years. Added to the lack of access to reasonable preventative health care, this street living culture causes death rates such that the average age of death is in the forties and fifties. It is a kind of cultural genocide of the weak and crazy. I am appalled every time I visit!
All other advanced western countries manage to avoid this occurring to current US levels- all have a minor problem with people refusing services from welfare and charities, but nowhere is the problem seen on such an industrial scale.
That appears to be true. You are making various assertions, talking about how things don’t apply to you, and then I guess we’re all supposed to check our reading comprehension at the door and say, “Yeah, I really can’t know what food insecurity means! Damn the government and Gallup polls!”
Letter to principal: Please excuse Mary and Mikey from physical education classes and recess until further notice. They are on a calorically-limited diet and your class activities are a direct threat to their survival. Sincerely, Patriotic Parent
In my job I regularly work with extremely impoverished and impaired individuals. I’m curious exactly what - if any - assistance folk believe ought to be provided to the least capable persons. I don’t wish to sound overly dramatic, but even if you think someone is largely responsible for their current situation, do you wish them to live on the streets? To starve?
Take the guy I just spoke with - longtime hard drinker, illiterate. Showing the impact of decades of misadventure - most likely with other, non drinking-related physical and mental conditions. You make the rules. Is it better for this individual to be provided some minimal assistance/support of some kind, or better for him to fend for himself?
My personal opinion is that a society as wealthy as ours ought to provide some MINIMAL safety net - the exact form and extent of which might be debated. But the current situation impresses me as being far from optimal. Assistance is often very difficult to obtain, comes from various sources with varying requirements, and is subject to various limitations.
The fact that the US is the only Western Advanced country that has no safety net is its shame (second only to its attack on the underclass via incarceration- did you know that a quarter of the world’s prisoners are in US Jails). This is such a moral issue- all religions suggest that the sick, poor and impaired should be treated well. A choice to not do so speaks to the moral worth of a nation.
If they’re in school, they’re probably eligible for free breakfast and lunch under most programs, so this is a bit disingenuous. Not to mention the total joke most PE classes are these days.