What Should Flutter Cook? 2
Courtesy of Jen
In 2000, 13 million children lived in households that did not have an adequate supply of food, and almost 3 million of these children lived in households that experienced hunger.
— U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, March 2002 "Household Food Security in the United States, 2000"
— U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, March 2002 "Household Food Security in the United States, 2000"
I am always surprised when people show up hungry. In a country with food on every corner and obesity at an all time high it’s easy to forget that not everyone gets to eat. Several years ago I was working the front desk at the shelter when a family with three kids walked in. Dirty, haggard, exhausted. They had been camping up in the hills for weeks because they’d been evicted after losing their source of income. I learned later that they’d run through their food supply and had been meagerly eating out of trashcans and what they could round up. They realized they were near the end of their rope and came in for help. Hunger isn’t obvious like other sorts of wounds. You don’t think when you see someone in the states that they actually might be starving.
The father quietly asked "do you think we might get a little food for the kids?" and so I brought them back to the dining room and rounded up some bag lunches. Homeless bag lunches are no joy to anyone – a peanut butter sandwich and an aging piece of fruit. I gave lunches to the family and the kids immediately tore into them and gulped them down. Their parents moved to hand their lunches to their children when I asked if they were hungry too. The mother replied that they were but their kids hadn’t eaten in a couple of days. These were little kids, all under ten years old. Kids that need nutrition and sustenance to survive. To make their brains and bodies grow.
I immediately rounded up more food including big glasses of milk and the few vegetables I could find. They ate everything i gave them, quietly with dirty fingernails, they ate. And from then on the first question I have every time I meet a new family is "are you hungry" and more often than not the answer is yes.
so participate, let’s make a small dent in the problem, and be a part of the solution. Make your donations and vote in the What Should Flutter Cook? Contest to combat hunger.
August 10th, 2007 at 4:15 am
Hey! It’s jen, bringing it, as she always does.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:26 am
I’ve made a donation to the local food bank here, but didn’t know you were running a contest. I’m having a hard time reading some of the stuff on your blog, it’s hard to read because the color is so pale.
Anyway, good stuff.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:10 am
ah flutter. happy to help a terrific cause.
so help us understand better (i may be the only dense one in the house) how do we choose a recipe? where do we donate?
August 10th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Thank you for understanding. I live on a very fixed income due to a serious illness, and my children survive on school lunches and the donations of two food pantries. We do not qualify for food stamps, or indeed any government subsidy because I ‘make too much money’ on SSDI.
We are often hungry at the end of the month when the food runs out. I eat one meal a day. As a diabetic, this is very bad for me, but I can’t possibly eat any differently due to financial constraints. And yet, I am CONSTANTLY being belittled on various other blogs for my circumstances, called fat and lazy (I’m neither), a welfare cheat (I don’t get welfare of any kind) and a leech on society. Constantly. I’m just honest about poverty in America, and people do not want to face that it exists on all levels.
I’ve been told by bloggers that don’t even know me where to live, how to manage my money, what I’m spending too much money on, how bad a parent I am for being in this situation, etc. I am constantly astounded at the mean nasty spirits that hate poverty and disabilities to such an extent that they say, and I quote one particular blogger “I don’t fucking care how many years she paid into the system. People “like her” make some of us just want to get rid of any social services and say, “Fuck you.”
And as I said, if a person “LIKE HER” asked me for a scrap of bread because she was homeless in the cold, I would turn around and give the bread to the stray animal wandering by instead.”
Yeah. You should just see what this delightful person and her pals say about people on welfare. It’s astounding that people actually still believe that people on welfare live in mansions and drive caddys. But they do!