In America, eating well seems to be wholly for the rich. Race is scarcely, very seldom directly addressed in terms of the food system, especially when you’re talking on a broad scale. The American Society has the idea that low income communities are a bunch of overweight urban black and brown people who don’t care about their health,stuffing their faces full of McDonald’s. I believe the counterpart to that is the middle class or upper class communities that have grocery stores in the closest radius possible which makes up the two poles of the food system.To me it feels very inappropriate and dehumanizing to act like people eating crappy food in America are getting what they asked for. It systematically has been made easier for people to eat unhealthy food and so difficult to eat well.
Who has heard of the Republican war on food stamps ? It came to my attention recently when reading an article on Truthout.org which stated that in the month of September 2013 , Republicans in the House passed a bill that would cut lurching $39 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, otherwise known as food stamps, over the next decade. A spokesperson of this article noted “Whether Republicans like it or not, access to enough food should be a right in this country, not just a privilege. If the free market fails to provide food for the people, then it’s the responsibility of the government to step in and provide it” (2013). It can’t be seen in any other vision because this has been reality for many years now.
A lot of time and energy has been put into building a food system that issues and distributes to economies of scale and what we are investing which has made this world so technological and capable of turning out potato chips and creating the substitute of kale chips. They just are not so efficient of making sure that high quality produce gets into all neighborhoods. As well as cutting down on the distributions of food stamps that just goes into another topic of wanting people of the poor communities to starve. Food stamps aren’t even all that great if you want to get technical, they are mainly accepted by liquor stores and places like 7-11. Those places don’t sell any sort of healthy option goods. An article for Colorlines notes “18 percent of of the U.S adults have received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance benefits in their lifetime,the majority of which as people of color. That total number becomes more illustrative when broken down in terms of race and gender.The Pew data show that nearly 40 percent of black women and 30 percent of Hispanic women have used food stamps at some time in their lives,compared to nearly 20 percent of white women” (2013).
The cut of food stamps can boost the poverty rate as well as make people go hungry. It’s sad to read this decision taking place in the congress because not only is it bad that poor communities aren’t getting the proper nutrition but now we have to worry that they have to suffer starvation.
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