Record numbers go hungry in the US

ruggedtoast

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/17/millions-hungry-households-us-report

Government report shows 50m people unable to put food on the table at some point last year

I went to the States for work last month, to normal sort of places that people live, rather than the holiday destinations.

I must say I'm not surprised by this news. I saw proper grinding poverty there, not indolent chavs sticking their hands out for another free giro like we have here, but people who were really on skid row, down and out.

And in the richest country in the world too - where many of the working class and lower middle class people I met were struggling to make ends meet.

carolt

Related to this are these startling figures reported here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6575883/China-has-now-become-the-biggest-risk-to-the-world-economy.html

"At some point, American workers will rebel. US unemployment is already 17.5pc under the broad "U6" gauge followed by Barack Obama. Realty Track said that 332,000 properties were foreclosed in October alone. More Americans have lost their homes this year than during the entire decade of the Great Depression. A backlog of 7m homes is awaiting likely seizure by lenders. If you are not paying attention to this political time-bomb, perhaps you should." :eek:

Interesting article.

LeeSouthEast

Anyone seen V for Vendetta (the film?).

Not the film itself, but the first 10 minutes of the BTN program running on the TV during it. If you have, hopefully you'll know what I mean.

brixham

Don't want to belittle the story of your normal working American BUT.......

Went to New York a while ago and went out for a posh ( by my standards) meal. Ordered a chicken dish, what came out on my plate was two halves of a chicken..... to me that makes a whole chicken for one meal !
Could of fed the whole of this board with what I left on the plate.

Went to one meuseum where Mum Dad and kids of around 8+10 were walking around. The kids were so obese that I would of called it child abuse.
You know when you find something so horrific that you can't look away, twas like that.

Mr_Mumble

So, according to the highly vested (give us more tax subsidies please) interest of the US Department of Agriculture it is the state of Mississippi that has the highest food insecurity (rather nifty tables and charts from the grauniad, it must be said). Odd since according to the Guardian Mississippi is the obesity capital of America and poverty is the cause for that too:

Land of the fat

Obesity kills 300,000 people a year in America and is the nation's number-one health hazard. Nowhere is this more true than in Mississippi, where food is cheap and exercise unheard of. Matthew Engel visits the heaviest state of a country that is in danger of busting the scales.
...
Chief among the probable causes of the crisis is prosperity. The old correlation between poverty and starvation is no longer relevant in the US, a country where it is exceptionally cheap and easy to eat large quantities of bad food. Indeed, it can be difficult to do anything else: supermarkets have a far less sophisticated selection than in the UK, especially in poor areas, and a huge proportion of space devoted solely to snacks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/02/usa.medicalscience

Pobby

I worked for a company in Mississippi in the 80`s. I wouldn`t say it was a rich state, far from it. At the time, I guess illegal, but segregation was still practised. Food is generally a lot cheaper in the States and my goodness, how some of the inhabitants eat.

AS the Op says, here is grinding poverty there, I saw it all that while ago. However there has also been the same mad decade od insane spending that we have had.

I have a friend out there, a mortgage broker earning over $350,000 a year. Her home is now forclosed, the suv has been repo`d. Not a lot different to here.

lostinrates

Pobby wrote: »

I worked for a company in Mississippi in the 80`s. I wouldn`t say it was a rich state, far from it. At the time, I guess illegal, but segregation was still practised. Food is generally a lot cheaper in the States and my goodness, how some of the inhabitants eat.

AS the Op says, here is grinding poverty there, I saw it all that while ago. However there has also been the same mad decade od insane spending that we have had.

I have a friend out there, a mortgage broker earning over $350,000 a year. Her home is now forclosed, the suv has been repo`d. Not a lot different to here.

I spent a lot of time in a few southern states when a child. I remember seeing some grinding poverty. i think in part perhaps it hits harder as the exess in America are so huge too.

It is interesting that obesity is an ''epidemic'' of the poor though, in the western world. I wonder if its partly due to the immensity of savings, that people in art don't understand saving a little really CAN add up. When you see the ries of ''normal'' things seeming impossibly big its hard to feel that the little in your poket could add up to it, I guess. In that case, with lifes pressures mounting and the immeadiacy of sotuations I suppose you look to what can comfort you and your family now. That junk food is so omparitively sheap, that ALL food is comapritively cheap, is probably part of that.

purch

Record numbers go hungry in the US

They've run out of Chicken Wings, Potato Skins and Cheese Sticks :eek:

purch

I must say I'm not surprised by this news. I saw proper grinding poverty there

There was plenty of Americans who lived in "relative" poverty even in the good times, so it is unsurprising, although still shocking that the problem is escalating.

From my experience of living in the U.S. there has always been a huge (30% plus) 'underclass' of people who didn't graduate from school (usually dropping out in their early teens) who are then condemned to a life of minimum wage jobs or no job at all. They do have a qualification called a GED which many of these drop outs take when the penny finally drops and they realise what a mistake they made, but even that piece of paper only usually allows them to get a menial job.

It always appeared to me to be a case that you either graduated from high school and went onto some form of further education, or you didn't, and then spent the rest of your life on the fringes of society.

I do worry sometimes that this is kind of country the U.K. will become too.

Jonbvn

purch wrote: »

I do worry sometimes that this is kind of country the U.K. will become too.

IMHO, we have become like the US in this regard already.
US Trailer Trash = UK Chavs.

lostinrates

Jonbvn wrote: »

IMHO, we have become like the US in this regard already.
US Trailer Trash = UK Chavs.

There is a difference, in further eduction funding. If you are unremarkable but good and commited student in UK further education is available, in US, go whistle.