I’m gearing up for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank‘s #blogmob tomorrow, and while I’m excited to be a part of this event to raise awareness about hunger in our community, my enthusiasm was tempered a bit on my drive home. NPR, my go-to in-car radio companion, had two stories on food insecurity which pointed out the following statistics:
- 17.2 million households were food insecure in 2010 – they had trouble putting food on the table, or didn’t know where their next meal would come from.
- Children in 386,000 households went hungry at some point in 2010.
Both stories also noted that these statistics would have been worse if not for government nutrition programs. One in seven Americans (over 45 million) are in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, an increase of over 10 million since late 2007.
In the richest country in the world, ten million MORE people needed assistance eating in the past three years. While I’m not overly religious, I do try my best to be a good person, do what I can to help others, live a life where I can look myself in the mirror every day. And yet I hear that one in seven Americans need help eating? Where is their help from their neighbor? Where is their ‘brother’s keeper’? Who’s been shirking on the ‘do unto others’ part of the golden rule so that these people – almost 400,000 *children* – don’t have enough money to eat?
Thanks, NPR, for firing me up and making me angry. Thanks, USDA (who I usually nitpick) for releasing this data during Hunger Action Month. Thanks, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, for giving me an opportunity to learn more about the face of hunger in our community tomorrow, so I can DO something about it.
People who know me know I’m a mama bear when it comes to my family. I may have just broadened the reach of my claws.
