In Vance County — just to the north of Raleigh — 48 percent of children are on food stamps as is 40 percent of the county’s African American population.
In the richest country in the world — mere miles away from the Research Triangle — 28 percent of a county’s population cannot afford its groceries.
Wake County is not hurting as deeply as Vance and other impoverished counties in North Carolina, such as Halifax, Martin and Edgecombe County, that have had their number of people on food stamps grow substantially in the last year.
The problem is no less urgent. A report released earlier this month by the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicated that families in 17 million households had difficulty providing enough food for their household at some time in the last year.
Worse still, many families who are eligible for food stamps — now called food assistance after a federal rebranding effort during the Bush administration — fail to receive their benefits. Almost a third of Americans don’t receive their stamps, despite a reduction in the stigma food stamps formerly conjured.
Many futurists — people who attempt to discern future world trends — look at population growth as the greatest food-related challenge facing the world in the next century and bemoan how we’re all going to die from a warming atmosphere. They say we’ll never be able to feed the population down the road and will be flooded when the ice caps revolt against our sport utility ways.
The population models and Al Gore types are persuasive, but I have faith in our ability to remedy some of the ills down the road; international financing and engineering prowess can go a long way.
What I’m worried about are the millions of American children who wake up hungry each day, the parents who can’t afford the basics and the families who went without on Thanksgiving.
The global warming hypothesis will still be here in a decade, as will the incredible population growth in Asia — the hungry in our midst may not.
According to the New York Times, nearly 36 million families are now enrolled in the federal food assistance program. Another recent USDA study reported that many families are still not receiving the food-assistance benefits they’re qualified for. In North Carolina alone, 1.3 million residents were eligible for food stamps in 2006 — a number that has definitely grown during the last two years. Of that population, only 67 percent received their benefits — coincidentally, the same as the national average.
This statistic is pathetic and shows a weakness on a state and national level. The stigma may be gone from the food assistance program and its enrollment increasing, but the results aren’t good enough. We are facing a national problem.
Most students, myself included, hope for snow days and the chance to take a day off from school. That’s not the way my hometown school district sees it. In Washington, D.C., where many students receive their only two warm meals of the day at school, the school board does everything it can to keep schools open. It knows how many children would go hungry if schools close.
National hunger is a difficult concept to grasp and act upon, but at the very least we need to be aware of it and remember those in our local communities who are staring at empty pantries this holiday season. Simply making others and yourself aware of the availability of food assistance would be a big step in the right direction.
