Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [61]
When there are bones I keep them. I know this is going to be hard for you to believe and I am almost ashamed to tell you, but these days I boil the bones till they’re soft and then I eat them. Today there were no bones.31
If your reaction is that Loretta has simply ferreted out a handful of senile old people who refuse government help, read her book Starving in the Shadow of Plenty (Putnam, 1981). She is convinced that the people she met are only the tip of the iceberg. “It’s happening all over the city,” said a social worker in the community where this starving woman lived. “They can’t get welfare; they’re too old for the job market and too young for Social Security. What can we tell them to do? Tell them to go to the hospital and get treated for malnutrition?” In a Mississippi community, Dr. Caroline Broussard told Loretta, “Whole families come here malnourished. But what’s worse is that we know for every hungry child or adult we see here in this clinic there are 20 to 30 others in the area we are not getting to.” And in New York City, according to the Community Service Society and a number of public officials, 36,000 people are living on the streets. Again, we think of homeless street people as a third world tragedy. Yet their numbers are increasing right here in America.
Illusion of Progress
Most Americans believe that since the late 1960s we’ve made steady progress in eliminating hunger and poverty, due to the introduction of food stamps, school lunch programs, and supplemental feeding programs for pregnant and nursing women. And it’s true that these programs have had an impact. In 1967 the Field Foundation sent a team of physicians to investigate hunger in America. Their tour of depressed communities riveted national attention on hunger. Ten years later another Field Foundation team of physicians returned to the same localities. Their 1979 report noted “fewer visible signs of malnutrition and its related illnesses,” although “hunger and malnutrition have not vanished.” They attributed the improvement not to overall economic progress for the poor: “… the facts of life for Americans living in poverty remain as dark or darker than they were 10 years ago. But in the area of food there is a difference. The Food Stamp Program, the nutritional component of Head Start, school lunch and breakfast programs, and to a lesser extent the Women-Infant-Children (WIC) feeding programs have made the difference.”32
Clearly there was progress for those who received the benefits. But these benefits are totally inadequate. (A Texas family of four, for example, is expected to make do on $140 a month in welfare benefits.)33 Moreover, poverty programs have never reached all those in desperate need of them. The food stamp program reached only half of those eligible for most of its life, reaching two-thirds of those eligible only after rule changes in 1977.34 Programs for pregnant women and young children have served only one-quarter of those eligible.35
Moreover, the value of all our welfare programs has been declining over the 1970s because, except for food stamps, benefits are not tied to inflating prices. And now even food stamp benefits are falling behind. The poor are the worst hit by inflation because they spend a much larger share of their income on necessities, and the prices of necessities (housing, food, fuel, medical care) rose twice as fast as nonnecessities in the 1970s. Inflation has cost welfare recipients 20 percent of their purchasing power over the decade.36
In sum, if the lives of the poor have improved at all over the last two decades it has been, for the most part, not because of increases in job-related incomes but because of government programs, such as the grossly inadequate health and food assistance I’ve just discussed. And even these gains are being reduced by inflation and cut by President Reagan and the Congress elected in 1980.
As to the alleviation of poverty itself? New figures from the Census Bureau show that gains made