(Host) Commentator Helen Labun Jordan is the e-Vermont Community
Broadband Project Director at the Vermont Council on Rural Development.
She’s also a board member of the Vermont Foodbank. And she would like to
see more understanding that hunger is a problem in Vermont – one that
we should be addressing far more aggressively.
(Labun Jordan)
Conventional wisdom for getting folks to pay attention to a cause, any
cause, is to lead with a story – for the very good reason that we all
enjoy a story. The tricky part of stories, though, is that talking in
anecdotes can make it easier for us to believe a problem isn’t
far-reaching, especially when it’s one we don’t intuitively associate
with our home here in Vermont.
September is national hunger
awareness month. And ‘hunger’ is one of those non-intuitive Vermont
problems. It’s hard to imagine anyone could go hungry here. After all,
we’re surrounded by food, from farm fields to grocery shelves. But
hunger is complicated. And by the time someone experiences the physical
condition of hunger a lot of things have gone wrong.
Hunger is
one part of what’s called ‘food security’ – which is a way of talking
about what it means to have enough food today and to know that you’ll
also have enough tomorrow.
In 2010, 14% of Vermont households
were food insecure. That puts us in the middle of the national pack. But
when you look at degrees of insecurity, at who’s at greatest risk,
we’re the 11th hungriest state. Also in 2010, 86,000 Vermonters needed
emergency food assistance. Shocks like Irene or an economic recession
bump those numbers higher.
Then there’s nutrition. Are we
getting the foods we need? Almost a third of Vermonters report they
can’t afford enough food or enough nutritious food.
And food
security affects our children. Nutrition is crucial to their development
and ability to learn. But more than 12,000 Vermont children rely on
food shelves every month. And nearly 40% of our students are eligible
for free and reduced price school lunches.
Now, remember that
we’re living in a country that produces far more food than we need –
enough so that we waste about 40% of everything we produce. The food on
our plates moves through a distribution system that is faster and
further reaching than ever before. Here in Vermont that food system
enjoys more popular attention than probably anywhere else in America,
and it’s tied into traditionally close knit communities where neighbors
look out for each other.
In other words – finding a solution to hunger is never going to get easier than it is right now, and right here.
Yet
providing food for everyone remains a problem. It is, in fact, the
world’s oldest public policy issue. We’ve formed whole civilizations
around it; we’ve been in this boat together since the first hunter got
help from the first gatherer.
And here’s the point where
statistics fail us and anecdotes come in, because in some ways the
numbers don’t matter – even one story of people in our state going
hungry is too many. The reason why we don’t intuitively associate this
problem with Vermont is that we shouldn’t.
September is hunger
awareness and action month, and we’ve got one week left. Perhaps that’s
not enough time to completely solve hunger, but it’s enough to get
started.