Hungering For Recovery
by digby
I'm thinking that winning the future might mean that this doesn't happen in the richest country in the world:
One in five Californians struggled to afford enough food for themselves and their families last year, according to a new report by the Food Research and Action Center.
The rate in California was slightly higher than the national average of 18%.
Jim Weill, president of the Washington-based nonprofit, said the figures underscore the need for a strong nutrition safety net — including food stamps and school meals — for families that continue to struggle as the economy begins to recover.
"While the nation's Great Recession may have technically ended in mid-2009, it has not yet ended for many of the nation's households," Weill said in a statement Thursday. "For them, 2010 was the third year of a terrible recession that is widely damaging the ability to meet basic needs."
The report was based on data collected for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which conducted telephone interviews with more than 350,000 people in 2010, including 35,543 people in California.
Just over 20% of California respondents answered yes to the question: "Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?"
That places the state at No. 16 in the nation for food hardship, the report said. The highest rate was recorded in Mississippi, where nearly 28% said they did not always have enough money to buy food. The lowest rate, just over 10%, was in North Dakota.
The best case scenario is only 10% of North Dakotans didn't have enough money to buy food in the last year. Somehow that just doesn't seem right to me in a nation which boasts hundreds of different brands of mascara and diet soda. It seems to me that a country that wealthy should be able to ensure that all its citizens have enough money for basic necessities -- food, roof, doctor.
But when you have this, hunger follows:
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