We Must Mind the Food Gap, Says Author

Mark Winne wants to close the "Food Gap" in the United States.

Winne, the head of Hartford Food Systems and the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, believes that the federal government has made a terrible mistake in allowing the private sector to handle feed-the-poor programs since the 1980s when President Reagan made the decision to cut back on many government programs in the traditional Republican stance of smaller government and more personal initiative and personal responsibility.

Reagan was aghast at the fact that by the late 1980s the federal government was spending $100 billion to finance 59 welfare programs that were not winning Johnson's "war on poverty"

According to Winne, the soup kitchens and food banks of the United States typically act as hubs for giving out mere "table scraps" to those who would otherwise go hungry because they don't have enough money to go to the grocery store. Winne, who has experience in working within that industry, says that the food that the poor must take is all too often of low quality, lacking in nutritional value or being spoiled in addition to sometimes just not being very palatable.

Winne characterizes people like himself as "lucky" and the poor "unlucky", and insists that despite their heavy criticisms Lyndon Johnson's Great Society-like War on Poverty begun in the 1960s was working.

Winne says that we have a responsibility to end poverty and hunger in the United States.

Writes Winne, "We know hunger's cause -- poverty. We know its solution -- end poverty. Let this [Holiday Season] remind us of that task."

However, a rising group of economists calling themselves Masonomists would tell Winne, "Drop the 'we'".

Masonomists say that "we" in today's parlance always means "the government", and they are unyielding in their stance that the government can never do for society what private initiative can do.

Masonomists, who have named themselves after the George Mason University economics department and its "Public Choice Theory", insist that regarding the federal government as the embodiment of a higher ethical code that informs our decisions-which they readily say people have need of-is a pure fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.

Masonomists say that it is continued federal government interference in the private sector, not lack of it, that continues to delay and complicate the "cure" for poverty and hunger. The "we", they say, should never be the government, but should instead be just like the original "we the people", with citizens taking it on themselves to practice the compassion and charity and create the businesses that feed quality food to the hungry.

Winne admits that, contrary to most people's perceptions, about 80% of food provided to the impoverished and hungry in the U.S. comes from the federal government, while only 20% is being provided by private initiative.

Masonomists would argue that number demonstrates that less, not more, government would result in less, not more, poverty.

This journalist's close friend Angela, who lives very rurally and keeps her own garden, when asked about this subject has insisted that more people should grow their own food, especially now that the government's mandates for ethanol are, according to the great majority of economists' predictions, going to result in a sharp spike food prices, perhaps on the order of 5%, which would be an enormous rise to the poor.

Her feelings echo a rising tide in America wherein people want to get fresher foods from more local sources, with more and more grocery stores and supermarkets finding it a great idea that saves on transportation, storage, and production costs.

Winne, too, believes that an increase in the number of local farmers' markets would be magnificent.

Source of Winne quote: Washington Post, "When Handouts Keep Coming, the Food Line Never Ends", Nov. 18 2007