Monday, September 24, 2007
Food Insecurity
I never thought that the technical things in Orwell's 1984 would come to fruition, but I was always worried about newspeak. That reduction of language had a real shot of coming true. Behold.
There isn't any starvation in America. Whenever it happens, usually some evil parents, of some sort, starving their kid or charge to death, it makes the news. We have the opposite problem, too much food and the 20% obesity that follows.
However, that's not good enough for some bureaucrats, so they have concocted a new description, called food security, strictly from the self evaluated response to a questionnaire. If at all times in the past year you have had all the food you thought you needed for an active and healthy 'lifestyle' then you are food secure. If at any time during that year you have not had all the food you think you needed, then you are food insecure. 12 years ago they used to talk about food insecure with hunger (feeling uncomfortable from lack of food) and food insecure with severe hunger, but the newspeak is now down to three categories: Food secure; Food insecure; and, Very low food security.
In an earlier post I made fun of Al Gore and his Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman for saying in 1997 that there were 30 million hungry people in America. I was right. They were wrong. The 1995 figures (p.5) were that 88.1 % of the American households were food secure and only .o8 % (roughly 800,000 people) were food insecure with severe hunger. That's not even close to the millions Gore and Glickman were falsely portraying as starving, sorry, suffering from hunger.
The 2005 figures (p. 4) are better; a full 89% are now food secure (so much for the problem growing) and only 3.9 % have very low food security.
School children of poor families get free breakfast and lunch on school days. The federal Food Stamp Program is so rich in food and poor in takers that they are running advertising to get more people to apply for food stamps. Anyone who says there are a lot of hungry people in America and the problem is getting worse is delusional. Just in a separate reality.
Or perhaps the idea of actually not having enough food to eat has been replaced by the newspeak 'food insecurity'.
There isn't any starvation in America. Whenever it happens, usually some evil parents, of some sort, starving their kid or charge to death, it makes the news. We have the opposite problem, too much food and the 20% obesity that follows.
However, that's not good enough for some bureaucrats, so they have concocted a new description, called food security, strictly from the self evaluated response to a questionnaire. If at all times in the past year you have had all the food you thought you needed for an active and healthy 'lifestyle' then you are food secure. If at any time during that year you have not had all the food you think you needed, then you are food insecure. 12 years ago they used to talk about food insecure with hunger (feeling uncomfortable from lack of food) and food insecure with severe hunger, but the newspeak is now down to three categories: Food secure; Food insecure; and, Very low food security.
In an earlier post I made fun of Al Gore and his Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman for saying in 1997 that there were 30 million hungry people in America. I was right. They were wrong. The 1995 figures (p.5) were that 88.1 % of the American households were food secure and only .o8 % (roughly 800,000 people) were food insecure with severe hunger. That's not even close to the millions Gore and Glickman were falsely portraying as starving, sorry, suffering from hunger.
The 2005 figures (p. 4) are better; a full 89% are now food secure (so much for the problem growing) and only 3.9 % have very low food security.
School children of poor families get free breakfast and lunch on school days. The federal Food Stamp Program is so rich in food and poor in takers that they are running advertising to get more people to apply for food stamps. Anyone who says there are a lot of hungry people in America and the problem is getting worse is delusional. Just in a separate reality.
Or perhaps the idea of actually not having enough food to eat has been replaced by the newspeak 'food insecurity'.
Labels: Bureaucratic idiocy
