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By Root 1404 0

since the mid-1960s had been virtually wiped out by 1980, even before the Reagan administration began to ax social-welfare programs. And in 1981 the nation experienced one of the biggest increases in poverty since the early 1960s, when the Bureau first started collecting poverty statistics. In early 1982, a county administrator in South Carolina told The New York Times how he experiences poverty’s tightening grip: “The population of the jail has tripled, even though there has been no increase in serious crime,” he said. “People get themselves arrested on some minor violation so they can get a meal or two, and I can prove that.”37

“We’re at risk of turning back the clock to a time when hunger and malnutrition were common in this country,” Nancy Amidei told me. Nancy is director of the Food Research and Action Center in Washington, D.C. Over the last year she has talked throughout the country with low-income people who are already being affected by the Reagan budget cutbacks. What they told her can be summed up by 82-year-old Luisa Whipple who told a congressional committee, “I plead with you not to cut back the food stamp program, because as you cut back food stamps you cut back on our health and you cut back on our lives.”

Every society must be judged as to how well it meets the basic needs of those unable to meet their own, and on whether it provides a living wage to all those able to work. Our society fails on both counts. How can we act on this judgment? First, we must keep alive in our minds the reality of hunger amid the massive squandering of food resources, for only a sense of moral outrage can keep us probing how our society evolved so as to divorce production from human need—and only a sense of moral outrage can force us to question our everyday life choices, asking just how each choice either shores up or challenges the economic assumptions and institutions that generate needless suffering. The “what can we do?” is then answered, not in one act but in the entire unfolding of our lives.

What we eat is only one of those everyday life choices. Making conscious choices about what we eat, based on what the earth can sustain and what our bodies need, can remind us daily that our whole society must do the same—begin to link sustainable production with human need. And choosing this diet can help us to keep in mind the questions that we ourselves must be asking in order to be part of that new society—questions such as, how can we work to ensure the right to food for all those unable to meet their own needs, and a decent livelihood for all those who can work? How do we counter false messages from the government and media blaming the poor and hungry for their own predicament?

Ironically, the notion of relating food production to human needs might strike most Americans as a “radical” idea. We know we’re in trouble when common sense seems extreme! But maybe it hasn’t gone that far yet. “We’ve been going at it from the wrong end in the past,” Agriculture Secretary in the Carter Administration Bob Bergland admitted. “This country must develop a policy around human nutrition, around which we build a food policy, and in that framework we have to fashion a more rational farm policy.”38

5.

Asking the Right Questions

ONCE WE UNDERSTAND how the ground rules of our economy force greater production yet bypass the hungry, we realize that grain-fed meat is not the cause of our problems. It is a symptom and, for me, a powerful symbol of what is wrong.

If grain-fed-livestock production and consumption were the cause of our problems, then producing and eating less would be the answer. Today Americans are eating less beef—16 pounds per person less than in 1976.* What has been the impact?

Some ranchers, desperate to maintain their livelihood, are planting crops on pastureland. In early 1981, when Eugen Schroeder of Palisade, Nebraska, realized that he stood to lose $200 on each head of cattle, he plowed one-fifth of the 5,000 acres he had previously used for pasture.2 Along with thousands of other farmers, Schroeder found that