Poverty, Nutrition, and the Recession

The following excerpts are from an article in the November 29, 2011 issue of Christian Century magazine.

Religious leaders and members of Congress were getting a firsthand taste of what it’s like to eat on $4.50 a day as part of the Food Stamp Challenge in Washington. In the challenge, participants try to live for a week on the average amount received by people who use food stamps, known as the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP)…. The Food Stamp Challenge is part of Fighting Poverty with Faith, an annual interfaith initiative endorsed by 50 national religious organizations.

This year is a particularly critical one for the cause, faith leaders said, because Congress is considering significant cuts to the more than $64 billion program….

Although SNAP is called a “nutritional assistance” program, good nutrition may be unattainable for many of those receiving benefits…. “The health risks are terrible, when you look at sugar, sodium and fats in the foods you must buy on $4.50 a day,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), who once received food stamps as a single mother.  Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat nonvoting delegate from Washington, D.C., said one in four families in the nation’s capital are on SNAP. Since the beginning of the recession, she noted, the number of those on SNAP nationally rose from 27 million to 44 million, and nearly half are children.

Eight members of Congress, all Democrats, agreed to take the Food Stamp Challenge.

This article struck a chord with me because of the number of people who call or come to the church regularly for help. We try to have bus tickets and McDonalds and Subway coupons in the church office; but we have to ration how many and how often we can give those out, and even then we periodically run out. Other people come asking for more significant help. I had a number of requests this year for food, and toys for children, for Christmas. Normally I would not have been able to respond to all or even most of those requests; but this year I was able to transfer $500 from the Senior Minister expense account to the fund we use to help people, and that enabled me to respond positively to most of those Christmas requests.

We hear how hard this recession, and recent wage stagnation, has hit middle-class folks. Those who were already poor may be facing an even harder time.

Curt