Food Insecurity and Income

I do a lot of thinking in the car, and I've been spending a lot of time listening to public radio during my commute, which occupies a total of three hours a day (WHYY, a fine station, go support them if you agree). BBC's The World in particular has been covering a lot of unrest in the middle east, eastern Europe, and Africa, and it started me thinking about competition for resources, and resources in general.

A lot of the suffering in the world seems to stem from hunger, or the lack of food in a particular place. This is true not only abroad but here in America, where right now nearly 48 million people are enrolled in Supplemental Nutritional Assurance Program, (or SNAP, formerly food stamps.) Since the population of America was about 313 million last year, that is about 15% - a sizable chunk - of Americans who are not able to meet the nutritional needs of their families with their present income at any given time.



This particular observation seems key to me; that income restricts food for these people, as well as those in the third world. The obvious solution, ala Marx, is to put the means of production into the hands of those that need it. State socialism has been tried and failed and I'm not talking about anything on that grand scale, anyway. But if we can decouple income and food production - if we can make food independent of money - then I think we're on to something.

Famine is usually the result of environmental factors and it's not something we can fix short of shipping food to areas hard hit by it, or shipping the people to the food, which has its own problems. But everyday food insecurity - families skipping meals and eating cheap meals lacking in nutrition - is something I think we can put a dent in by growing our own foods.

This is not a new thought; Heifer International has been making large changes in thousands of lives by donating livestock to developing areas and educating people in new husbandry techniques, and I highly recommend you check them out and donate yourself. Most livestock, however, is a relatively high investment - in time, money, and feed, not to mention land. A person renting half a house with a 1/4 acre yard cannot expect to house a goat year round.

But many food plants are relatively fire-and-forget after the initial planting, and a well-fertilized plot can produce surprisingly well. Low-labor, low-fertilizer crops can be easily grown in a surprisingly small amount of space - my family invested a weekend in creating two 4x8 foot raised garden beds using the loosen-and-compost double-dug method described in Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre and planted it in cucumbers, tomatoes, Brussels Sprouts, and a random gourd vine we found in the compost heap which turned out to be a pumpkin. We also used the electrical conduit trellising system they recommended.  We were INUNDATED with tomatoes. We ate them for weeks, made sauce, chilli, canned them, and gave them away. We are still eating them and I think I saw a few tomatoes out on the vine this week, and it is now NOVEMBER. We also pickled, sliced, and gave away cucumbers, peppers, and Brussels sprouts, and we still have three of those which I hear are better after a frost or two. Prior to this, we grew in containers and while that is possible, the natural reserves of moisture in the ground mean that watering is necessary much less frequently in a raised plot than in a group of containers.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we saved a huge amount of money over and above what we would have spent on fresh vegetables over the course of the summer, but often the budgeting issues faced by families who find themselves facing uncertainty about where their next meal may be coming from are not that large, as evidenced by the justifiable concern over the looming reduction in SNAP benefits. USA Today estimates the reduction of benefits at $36/month for a family of four to work out to the loss of 21 individual meals a month, which doesn't sound like a lot - until you are the one who is missing a fifth of the meals you eat in a  month.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Growing on a small plot to cut costs of feeding a family is also not a new idea. There is a reason, after all, that Britain and America encouraged victory gardens during the shortages of the second world war, and by the end of the war vegetable production in the UK exceeded 1.2 billion dollars - 1940's dollars! - and those in America produced 40 percent of all vegetable produce being consumed nationally. This also of course had the effect of keeping produce costs reasonable to feed the troops. This was such an important program a lot of time and money was spent educating Americans who had moved away from their agricultural roots, including movies, posters, and handbooks. Interestingly, Michelle Obama oversaw the first "Kitchen Garden" to go in on the grounds of the White House since the Victory Garden was removed, to raise awareness about healthy eating and about which she wrote a book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America, in which she specifically addresses programs that are addressing nutritional needs in areas under-served with fresh foods.

I think perhaps that in this coming year, I will suggest to Beautiful Wife that maybe we should allow others to stake out some plots on our generous front lawn and do our part to encourage local production of healthy and nutritious vegetables and fruits - and maybe see if the problem with our fruit trees is something that can be fixed, or if we should chop them down to prevent the transmission of whatever blight we have on the apple trees and put in some young, healthy stock.