A food stamp paradox: Starving isn’t the issue – it’s access to nutritious foods, By Eric Schulzke, April 28 2012, Deseret News: “When Jill Warner’s husband lost his job as a product manager in 2009 and entered a bout of hard-core unemployment, they and their four children eventually turned to food stamps. For the first four months, they had zero family income and received $900 a month in food stamps. ‘We ate what we wanted,’ Warner recalls. ‘And we had plenty of flexibility.’ She would leave Costco loaded with snap peas, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and fresh meat, and after a busy day she would stop at Papa Murphy’s on the way home. Because Murphy’s is ‘take and bake,’ rather than served hot, she could use food stamps. ‘Food access was great,’ she said, ‘but mortgage, utilities and car payments were another matter.’ After a few months, her husband found entry level work that barely paid the bills, and their food benefit dropped to $500. ‘That was very tight,’ Warner said. ‘We had to compromise and buy more basic foods, and it was a close call.’ Firmly entrenched in middle class habits and attitudes, Warner is not quite the face of American hunger…”
Tag: Malnutrition
Poverty and Nutrition
The nutrition puzzle, February 18, 2012, The Economist: “In Eldorado, one of São Paulo’s poorest and most misleadingly named favelas, some eight-year-old boys are playing football on a patch of ground once better known for drug gangs and hunger. Although they look the picture of health, they are not. After the match they gather around a sack of bananas beside the pitch. ‘At school, the kids get a full meal every day,’ explains Jonathan Hannay, the secretary-general of Children at Risk Foundation, a local charity. ‘But in the holidays they come to us without breakfast or lunch so we give them bananas. They are filling, cheap, and they stimulate the brain.’ Malnutrition used to be pervasive and invisible in Eldorado. Now there is less of it and, equally important, it is no longer hidden. ‘It has become more visible-so people are doing something about it…'”
International Food Aid for Children
WHO to recommend improving food aid for malnourished children under 5, Associated Press, October 13, 2011, Washington Post: “The World Health Organization said Thursday it plans to recommend tighter nutritional standards in food aid for young children, a move activists say is necessary to improve donations from countries such as the United States. The new guidelines are likely to make food aid more expensive in the short term, but the improved formulas will be more effective at reducing moderate malnutrition in children under the age of 5, the head of WHO’s nutrition department told The Associated Press…”