Flat Broke in America - Eating Castoff Food, the Dredges, the Outdated

Maybe you've been a food bank recipient, maybe you haven't. If you have, you have been presented with cans of tomatoes, refried beans, and green beans, bags of oatmeal, bags of beans, bags of pasta, bags of potatoes, cans of beef with oodles of saturated fat globules floating in it, little eensy containers of artificially colored yogurt with oodles of additives and preservatives in them. While certainly those who live off of food banks don't need to dine like kings so that they will be pressed into working far faster so that they can afford to eat anything they feel like, they need to be more well fed than that.

Evidentally when there are food drives, the only foods that people purchase and don't eat, that languish in their cupboards are tomatoes, green beans, and refried beans. People never, never ignore any other foods in their pantry.

The true meaning of charity: love. You feel sorry for the hungry in some abstract way, not because you love them as part of the human race just as yourself. Maybe they can get a meal of refried beans topped with stewed tomatoes and that will be one less day that they will have to go out begging. Maybe they can make a bean and tomato salad, maybe they can make some sticky oatmeal with that gluey oatmeal and those tiny little boxes of raisins.

You see the Santa near the supermarket door at Christmas time, asking for some change to help the homeless and the hungry. You feel that you can't do without your essential items, so you scuttle around the poor collector who is trying to do his best -without eye contact - lest you be perceived as selfish for having a life that takes all of your money and then some, to support, or you place your change in there, but not a larger portion of it, and he says "God bless you."

Change the scene now.

You end up in the hospital due to some tragic mistake and the tables are turned. Your creditors have now turned into vultures. No longer sending you every offer and then some, they turn to harassing you every morning by phone, all several of them, and send you a letter stating that they will take your car if you don't pay off a small medical bill. You have to use food banks to survive, even to survive. You take their food home, and lo and behold you are besieged with junk food. The career path of dietician exists because food directly impacts health. What we are saying when we offer the dredges of our cupboards and our pennies and not our quarters or our dollars, is that the people who got hit with the economic recession deserve to be ill. If the tables are turned, and you end up asking for food from food banks, you can be victimized by the food in the system if it is not healthy food.

Here are three ways to be helpful to America's hungry:

1. FeedingAmerica.org
2. Stampouthunger.info
3. Contribute something that someone would enjoy to local food banks of decent quality.

For some of you, can you donate a turkey to the cause of hunger? Meat is healthy, but the dredges of the outdated foods and junk drinks are not.

FeedingAmerica helps provide food to over 37 million Americans each year. [FeedingAmerica.org]. According to the bureau of Census, America's population is 309,890,044. This works out to be 11.9% of America's population. When you take into consideration the junk offered at food banks, and the health care crisis, is it any small wonder that America's health is suffering?

Case Studies in Government Starvation by Rationed Food:

I knew someone who had fifty dollars in food stamps per month, and $600 in SSI monthly. She had typical utilities like everyone else does. She had me accompany her to food banks when she could afford to get there. She had food bank food, and it's no wonder that she was sick. Most visits revealed hardly anything in the refridgerator.

I knew someone else who had $78 per month in food stamps, and a very strict, frugal SSI. She had me buy top ramen, mac and cheese, and the cheapest chicken possible, and had me buy the junkiest pop when it was on sale. She was skinnier than a rail, and could not recover.

I knew someone else who had no food stamps, a measy SSI, and preferred to eat one meal a day. He had a lot of top ramen and Mac and cheese.

As a caregiver, I was appalled to see the starvation that the government allows and pressed for visits the food bank. They couldn't always afford to go, and when they did, they were given junk food. The state then swoops in with fancy nurses for wound care, advises for the client to eat protein for wound healing whether or not their $50 to $78 a month could actually support buying meat or even nuts for that matter (both are expensive). Two or three times a week wound care nurses at probably the rates of $35 per hour would do home visits to dress wounds generated by physical inactivity, when some of these people, if they were given more nutritious diets via increased food stamps, healthy food at food banks, enough miles in the state budget to drive them there, and required nutrition classes for both client and caregiver if need be, would have recovered. The cost of nationwide emphasis on anything but effective diet is national medical crisis due to lack of medical care, but by all means, send the sick people to work on coffee eating processed food and be certain to make them fight for disability for 2 to 5 years before even giving it a thought.

Meanwhile, back in politics, the government has endless funds for their own propaganda and priorities, but the less fortunate and their circumstances are put on back burners and waiting lists. Never mind the starving! It's up to the people to complain - we have had enough. This is how you treat us. If we lose our jobs during a recession we will end up standing in line at the food bank, given castoff food and junk food, with less emphasis on the nutritious. When we end up disabled due to stress from the layoff and eating the junk to barely survive until finding some way to generate a paycheck, we will have to fight for two to five years, and if we win, guess what, the attorney that prepared the case will get 30% of the cut. There's a better way. There has to be. People's revolt - the people who can afford to eat, should get a load of some of the starvation stories and put themselves in the shoes of the people in line at the food bank. If they don't, they might be the next ones fighting for health without a job, on the castoff foods provided in charity. Charity means love. Or at least it used to. Love your neighbor as yourself. Who is your neighbor?

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