Why Are New Yorkers Hungry?

Why is it that in the richest city in the world with record low unemployment, the problem of hunger is getting worse? A new report issued by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger is titled "Hunger Hangs On: NYC Food Pantries and Soup Kitchens Still Overwhelmed."

The report asserts that hunger and poverty are increasing in the city because of declining wages and rapidly increasing costs for housing, food, and other basic necessities. Considering the fact that we've spent trillions of dollars fighting the war on poverty, has it ever occurred to the government officials that they might be approaching the problem all wrong? I have another question that needs answering. If hunger is increasing, why is this city so overweight that the mayor has to put a ban on trans-fat products? Are we starving or are we hungry? Maybe we're starving because we're all obese and on a diet.

I've handed out food packages at my church and I recall getting similar packages from the convent of the Sisters of Mercy on 106th Street in Manhattan. There were no such thing as food stamps back then, but I seriously doubt that my mother would have applied for them. She didn't believe that the government should be in the business of charity.

The executive director of the coalition, Joel Berg, told a Daily News reporter, "In a year when the stock market went through the roof - and the number of billionaires in the city nearly doubled - it is unconscionable that 1.3 million New Yorkers, including many children, did not have enough to eat."

Families with low incomes qualify for medical benefits, food stamps, section 8 housing, earned income tax credits, heating-bill assistance. They can receive clothing from various charities. Their children can even receive special scholarships for private schooling. There is no good reason for anyone to go hungry in New York.

Many advocates were outraged at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's recent decision to replace the word "hunger" with "low food security." An editorial in the Baltimore Sun read, "In dropping words like ‘hungry' and ‘hunger' from their reports, government officials have embraced sanitized subjectivity over the greater truth. No one in line at Trinity has ever blamed the gnawing pain in his or her stomach on something as harmless sounding as ‘food insecurity.' Hunger is hunger. It can't be mistaken for anything else, and to abandon that word is to deny its pain and desperation."

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. It is important to define the cause of hunger clearly so that we can properly relieve it without causing dependency or enabling any personal abuses patterns. Is it ever wise to dole out meals to the hungry without asking for some form of help in exchange? Maybe the food pantries and the soup kitchens wouldn't be so overwhelmed if the patrons were asked to help out once in a while by sweeping up or washing dishes.

The idea that nutritional foods are too costly for the poor is ridiculous. Potatoes, rice, beans, flour all cost less than the takeout foods from the restaurants that populate the inner city. The problem, of course, is that they require cooking, but why cook if you don't have to?

I'm sure that Mr. Berg is sincerely concerned with the welfare of those in need, and he isn't alone in that sentiment. Sunday, I went to mass at a church where the pastor must have been molded out of a liberation theology because his sermons always seem to include political references. He said, "Sin exists when there are people starving in the world. Children are dying every day of hunger and malnutrition. While here in this country, people throw away food. The gap between the rich and the poor grows wider. That is a sin."

The question the good father has to ask is why are the people still starving in other countries? Maybe it's time to start criticizing the corruption in those countries where the gap is insurmountable.

In the parochial school I attended decades ago, every one of us lived in a slum. We came from broken homes, but we were told how lucky we were to live in this country. We would look at the Maryknoll missionary magazine and see pictures of the starving children in Africa or South America, living in dirt huts, their stomachs distended. We would collect our pennies and put them in a cardboard box to send to the missions. Nothing over there has changed.

New Yorkers are really doing okay - but then, without the hungry, wouldn't the anti-hunger advocates be unemployed?