Hunger in the U.S.: A Problem as American as Apple Pie

By Joel Berg, Seven Stories. Posted February 4, 2009.

The following is an excerpt from All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America, by Joel Berg.

We have long thought of America as the most bounteous of nations … [t]hat hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable. More is at stake here than the health and well-being of [millions of] American children. … Something like the very honor of American democracy is involved. -- President Richard Nixon, May 6, 1969, Special Message to Congress Recommending a Program to End Hunger in America

Try explaining to an African that there is hunger in America. I’ve tried, and it’s not easy.

In 1990, while on vacation, I was wandering alone through the dusty streets of Bamako, the small capital of the West African nation Mali, when a young man started walking alongside me and struck up a conversation. At first, I thought he wanted to sell me something or ask me for money, but it turned out he just wanted to talk, improve his English and learn a little about America. (He had quickly determined by my skin color that I was non-African and by my sneakers that I was American.)

When he asked me whether it was true that everyone in America was rich, I knew I was in trouble. How could I explain to him that a country as wealthy as mine still has tens of millions suffering from poverty and hunger? How could I explain to him that America -- the nation of Bill Gates, "streets paved with gold," Shaquille O’Neal and all-you-can-eat-buffets -- actually has a serious hunger problem? That in a country without drought or famine and with enough food and money to feed the world twice over 1-in-8 of our own people struggles to put food on their tables?

In Mali, such a statement was a hard sell. While that nation has one of the planet’s most vibrant cultures, it also has one of the least-developed economies. The country has a per capita annual income of $470, meaning the average person makes $1.28 per day -- and many earn far less than that, eking out subsistence livings through small-scale farming or other backbreaking manual labor. With the Sahara desert growing and enveloping ever-increasing swaths of Mali, the nation frequently suffers from widespread drought and famine. According to the United Nations, 28 percent of Mali’s population is seriously undernourished.

I tried to tell him that not all Americans were as rich as he thought, and that much of the wealth he saw was concentrated among a small number of people while the majority toiled to make a basic living. I explained that living in a cash economy such as America’s presents a different set of challenges than living in a subsistence and barter-based economy, which exists in much of Mali. That in America, you have to pay a company for oil, gas and all other basic necessities. You must pay a landlord large sums of money to live virtually anywhere. That while many workers in America earn a minimum wage equaling less than $11,000 a year for full-time work (the U.S. federal minimum wage was then $5.15 per hour), they often pay more than $1,500 per month in rent, which equals $18,000 per year. So, many actually pay more in rent than they earn. Then they have to figure out a way to pay for health care, child care, transportation, and yes, food. When Americans have expenses that are greater than their income, they must go without basic necessities.

I thought I was very persuasive, but I still don’t think I convinced him. Given that English was likely his third or fourth language, perhaps he didn’t precisely understand what I was saying. Perhaps concepts such as paying for child care didn’t resonate with him since few Malians pay others to care for their children. Moreover, I bet that -- all my caveats aside -- $11,000 a year sounded like a great deal of money to him.

Standing there in Africa, for the first time in my life I briefly had a hard time convincing even myself that hunger in the United States was something that I should seriously worry about given that things were obviously so much worse elsewhere. After all, I was forced to consider that, as bad as hunger is in America, U.S. children rarely starve to death anymore, while they still do in parts of the developing world.

But then I recalled all the people I had met throughout America who couldn’t afford to feed their families -- who had to ration food for their children, choose between food and rent, or go without medicine to be able to buy dinner -- and I reminded myself that, just because they weren’t quite dropping dead in the streets didn’t mean that their suffering wasn’t significant indeed. And then I further reminded myself that America was the nation of Bill Gates -- and more than 400 other billionaires, not to mention more than 7 million millionaires -- so it was particularly egregious that my homeland allowed millions of children to suffer from stunted growth due to poor nutrition. I thus came back to the same conclusion I reach every day: while hunger anywhere on the planet is horrid and preventable, having it in America is truly unforgivable.

It is not surprising that it is often difficult to convince average Americans that there is a serious hunger problem in the United States. Our nation tends to think of hunger as a distant, overseas, Third World problem. Our collective mental images of hunger are usually of African children with protruding ribs and bloated bellies -- surrounded by flies and Angelina Jolie -- sitting in parched, cracked dirt. When I try to explain U.S. hunger to Americans, some automatically assume I am inflating the extent of the problem. They simply don’t see it in their daily living. They know that America is the richest and most agriculturally abundant nation in the history of the world. They can’t believe that a place with so much obesity can have hunger. And besides, they assume that I am exaggerating because I am an advocate, and it is my job to exaggerate.

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Joel Berg is executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and served eight years in the Clinton administration in senior executive service positions at the Department of Agriculture. He is the author of the new book ALL YOU CAN EAT: How Hungry Is America?

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