Ending Hunger in America
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Speaker: Dr. H. Eric Schockman
Dr. H. Eric Schockman
President, MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I just wanted to start with a reality check. At hunger summits, which many of us have been to and continue to go to, there tends to be a dooms-day, sober analysis that comes out of our meetings. We are dealing with life and death, and indeed I think the truth in those moments really hit us at every step of these presentations. Let me, however, take a moment of levity, if I can, to move us beyond just the seriousness of our endeavor.
So there was a rabbi, a priest and a Lutheran pastor. And the question to themselves was, “How do you take care of your personal needs? How are you driven to find those personal needs? But indeed how do you value your needs with God’s needs?” So the priest said to the group, he said, “It’s very simple for me. I draw a circle, and I throw the money in the air, and the money that lands inside the circle belongs to God, and the money that lands outside the circle belongs to me.” So the Lutheran pastor said, “Well, I have a very similar formula. I indeed do the same thing. I draw a line, and anything to the left of that line belongs to God, and anything to the right of that belongs to me.” And finally the rabbi said to his colleagues, “Well, I really have a different formula. I draw a Star of David, and then I throw the money in the air, and the money that lands on the ground belongs to me, and the money that stays in the air belongs to God.” You like that? Thank you. Let us all juggle our money in the air.
Well, I’d like to get into the depth of my discussion and really leave you with the beginning and the end with two words to end hunger in America. And those two words are “charity” and “government,” charity and government.
The scandal of hunger is America’s dirty little secret. Over 30 million hard-working have-nots cannot pay the rent, medical bills and still feed their families. Indeed, as Bob made reference to – let’s just take that very quickly locally – in the last three years, 45,000 Iowans have lost their jobs due to recession. And many of them, many of them have wound up on food stamps and on food pantry lines to make ends meet.
Food and hunger are really the lens through which we see America and which America has become, a country indifferent to the basic needs of its citizens. We cannot rely on just charity alone to end hunger in America. Beginning in the 1930s, 1940s when Franklin Roosevelt articulated his four freedoms, including the freedom from want, America has made a commitment, and a commitment not always perfect, but a commitment to feed those who are less fortunate.
From Appalachia to the ghettos of Detroit, an emergency food system grew up, and it grew up parallel with nine national domestic food programs in this evolution of America’s response to hunger. Those national food programs, like food stamps, burst in 1939, are still the frontlines of hunger defense in this country.
Yet, just as food stamps itself has never had a hundred percent participation – in part because of the stigma and the shame we culturally put on those programs and in part because of the bureaucratic hurdles we place in front of individuals applying for their entitlement to eat in America – truth be told: If one was to add up all the food, nutritional federal programs – take a calculator, add them up – the total would come to less than 2%.
Thousands of emergency organizations that have been set up in this parallel system and labor every day to do God’s work. Hunger and security in America is growing and not shrinking. So let’s talk about solutions.
Solutions are complex because hunger is seen not, not as a pressing political problem. But I believe there is a paradigm shift going on that we see and I think will hasten the end of hunger in our lifetime, if not only in the United States but globally. So are we ready? Are we getting there?
I think what we have seen is the tracking polls that Bob made reference to in the United States. We have seen that, indeed, 80-90% of likely voters will tell pollsters they understand hunger. In fact, they know hungry people in their circumference of the world. This is indeed a paradigm shift. And I think we’re getting the questions about root causes and ultimately questioning what are those root causes.
And we have to go through science, and we have to go through economics, and we have to go through questions ultimately of theology that get us back to what Plato ultimately called “the master discipline.” That master discipline is politics – building a political will, educating democratic citizens that nations do not protect the nutritional well-being of its citizens through handouts. Our moral outrage must be funneled into the political action realm and ultimately in cogent public policies.
So where are we? We’re moving along some very interesting lines these days. And I think very similar to many of your endeavors in the room with the U.N. Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger. Indeed, I think what we are doing in the United States parallels your work internationally.
There has been an insipid group of national, prestigious, leading anti-hunger organizations in the United States that have banded together over the last two years. They are called the Medford Group, because their original meeting was in Medford, Massachusetts. But the Medford Group, though, however, has taken the lead in really putting together shoulder-to-shoulder a statement, a Millennium Declaration to End Hunger in America. It is a monumental task for us in the anti-hunger community to do this kind of work and to really forthrightly bring a proactive agenda forward so we really do have vision, we really do have substance, and we really do have a program to end hunger.
Let me indulge you for a moment with my limited time left with just some quotes from the Millennium Declaration which you cannot possibly see on the screens behind me. However, as you later will circulate, on the left outside this room there will be a resource table after lunch with the Millennium Declaration ready for your take-home.
Let me just quote very quickly, because I think it’s cogent and very powerful:
“We call upon the nation’s leaders and the people to join together to end hunger in this nation. America carries the wound of 30 million-plus people, more than 12 million children, whose households cannot afford an adequate and balanced diet. Hunger should not have any place at our table. It is inconsistent with our commitment to human rights and objectionable to the American values of fairness, opportunity and family and community. Our nation is committed to leaving no child behind. But children who are hungry cannot keep up. They cannot develop nor thrive, they cannot learn or play with energy or enthusiasm. Hunger stunts the physical, mental, emotional growth in many of these children and strains the souls of America.
“Many different points of view unite behind this declaration. Some of us work to end hunger who have deeply held religious beliefs. Others are motivated by hunger’s impact on health and cognitive development. Still others are driven by the long-term economic human and ethical cost of hunger. All of us are motivated by the recognition that America’s moral authority in the world is undermined by as much as hunger is in our midst.
“Regardless of our religious beliefs, our political commitments, persuasions, we share the conviction that we as a nation should act to end the scandal of widespread hunger.”
The declaration goes on to recommend actually a two-step process, a twofold process. One is ending hunger through programmatic response, by where it belongs, in the levels of government policy and efficient delivery of food today. And that’s both in partnership with our charitable sector and most important by a government’s responsibility to deliver food into people’s stomachs.
The second part of that process is ending the root causes of hunger. We can’t keep throwing babies into the river, rescuing them at the bottom end of this process. We need to be upstream, preventing the babies from falling into the water, from slipping below the level of consciousness. We need to be there, we need to be moral.
The second part of this deals with a lot more complex questions. It deals with the systemic issues of employment, of livable wage (not just standard wage), it’s a livable wage, and ultimately the supports and the family needs that are taken for granted in many sectors of the United States economy.
So we call on the United States President, we call on Congress, and we call on elected leaders in states, in cities, in the jurisdictions of the United States to provide decisive leadership to end hunger. Let us work together – government, business, religion, charities, citizens – to achieve an America where hunger is a distant memory and that we live in the values of a great nation.
I think ultimately that’s what we need your help for today. I ask all of you to help us stoke and inflame and ratchet up the political will. The status quo is not working. The status quo cannot work, be it in America or Uganda, in Haiti or North Korea, in ghettos of urban societies or in peasant fields.
As one scholar succinctly puts it, “Food goes with justice because food grows on common ground.” No matter how people are divided – by race, by class, by creed or by country – we all eat for a living.
Thank you.