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Having recently come back from a private screening of the film, A Place at the Table, hosted by director Lori Silverbush, I could not be more grateful for this bowl of salad sitting in front of me. Fifty million Americans go hungry in our country with one in four children not knowing where their next meal is coming from. In one of the richest, strongest nations in the world we are seeing our own citizens deprived of a basic human right: food. A Place at the Table explores the growing hunger strife of America-from backwater towns to sprawling cities-showing that the faces of hunger are not what we presume.
Like most, when I hear of famine I picture a child from sub-Sahara Africa with a swollen belly and sallow face sitting on the floor of a dirt-packed hut. The last thing I imagine is an overweight person in small town America with a paying job and relatively pulled together appearance. My thoughts on hunger always seem to gravitate towards the extreme-if one is hungry they must be homeless, unemployed and devastatingly thin-a notion that many carry and that this film aims to disprove. In fact, obesity and hunger go hand in hand in America as do a variety of sicknesses associated with malnutrition.
Food stamps afford low-income families with up to $3 a day or $21/week-often meant to sustain a family of many members. Next time you’re in a grocery store imagine how would you spend those $3. Right off the bat fruits and vegetables would be taken out of the equation due to their growing prices, which would leave you with the options of packaged, processed foods like chips, cookies, ramen noodles, etc. As evidenced by the film, some of the smaller towns in America struck by hunger don’t even receive a shipment of fruit or veggies and are in “food deserts” where the only options for families are goods riddled with high sugar and chemicals. If your choices come down to starving or eating chips to stay alive then you start to see the connection between obesity (especially in childhood) and the hunger problem afflicting the United States.
Likewise, schools face budget limitations when it comes to feeding their students. With their hands tied behind their back and only $3 allotted per child, cafeterias are also left feeding children starchy, heavy, fatty foods that further fuel the obesity problem. Meanwhile the government allocates 4.5 billion towards the school lunch programs, a laughable investment when compared to the $700 billion invested in bailing out the banks and fat cats of Wall Street. The government went so far as to support the school lunch program financially by cutting funding from the Food Stamps social program-essentially taking food out of the mouths of one family and putting it into an equally needy one.
What the film, A Place at the Table, does is blow the lid off the hypocrisy, urgency and misinformation surrounding an issue that hits very close to home. Director Lori Silverbush and wife of Top Chef, Tom Colicchio, explained that the inspiration of her movie came from a Big Brothers, Big Sisters volunteer program she was involved in a couple years back. A girl she mentored had started to slip in her grades and school performance and assuming this to be a sign of learning disabilities, Lori helped get the girl into a school for students with special needs. Assuming the problem solved, she was shocked when she received a call from the principle that her mentee was found foraging through the trash bins for food during school hours. The young girl did not have a learning disability, she was simply hungry and was living off one meal a day-the meal provided at school. The realization seemed to ground Lori and set her on a mission to not only increase awareness of the hunger crisis in America but to eradicate it completely.
Today the hunger crisis in America has seemed to grow significantly from being virtually rendered non-existent in the 1970s to now causing 14% of people to be labeled as ‘food insecure’ in just New York alone. The answer it would seem comes from a combination of awareness, action and support-of realizing what the face of hunger looks like, speaking out about the problem and pushing legislation to act. As the film puts it, it is a travesty that 50 million people are going hungry in a country with more than enough food.
Learn about how you can take part in the fight against hunger both in your community and nationwide here.
*Photos displayed belong to A Place at the Table and are not the property of The Pin the Map Project.
