At 3 p.m. Friday, I was hungry. Not unusual in a reporter’s work day that generally begins at 6 a.m. The problem was, I had no food. There was food in the house — I just couldn’t reach it or prepare it. I was paralyzed on August 26, 2016 — an ironic date as that is Women’s Equality Day in the U.S., the day that commemorates the 1920 adoption of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, giving women the right to vote.
In the years since my paralysis when I could no longer cook for us as I did daily, my wife — a stellar cook — would make us meals. And on days when I was on deadline and she was home, rather than teaching at Drexel University where she was a design professor, she always made a nice midday lunch.
But my wife, Maddy Gold, died suddenly a year ago during her courageous battle with a rare aggressive cancer. In the months since then, her best friend has come by the house every morning at dawn to leave me food for the day and feed the feral cat colony out back before she goes to work.
Several evenings a week, she also makes dinner and feeds Maddy’s and my cats and me. It’s an arduous and unpaid second job for her, but it has kept me and the cats alive since Maddy’s untimely death — and even before, when chemo often meant my wife was too weak to care for the cats and her bestie would come by to feed them and make sure we were okay.
On Friday, the bestie was needed at her job earlier and whirled through in mere minutes. While she left me some cold pasta, it was not much and there was no backup cereal, crackers or yogurt as usual. And so I was hungry. And would be hungry until she came by after work at 9 p.m.
It was miserable, being so hungry for so long. I’ve been grief-stricken throughout my unexpected widowhood and the isolation I’ve experienced due to my disability has exacerbated that grief. Being hungry made me think about what a great cook Maddy was and how even as she endured chemo, she cooked. It was such a part of who she was, having learned as a child from her Italian immigrant grandmother the umami of food and how important sharing food was to the language of love. Maddy loved cooking for me, her bestie and our other friends and family.
Being hungry made me think a lot about what it means to be hungry. For me it was temporary, but for millions of Americans and nearly a billion people worldwide hunger is neither temporary nor the abstract of “food insecurity,” but daily. In 2021, I wrote about how the World Food Programme asked the world’s richest men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, to contribute 2% to stop starvation in Africa. They refused.
We’ve stopped talking about hunger. We use the political term “food insecurity,” which is somehow meant to make people who are hungry feel less stigmatized. Let me tell you, not being able to get food, even for a half a day? That’s hunger — it’s not some amorphous, distancing, sociological term. It’s a physical pain in your stomach and it makes you feel light-headed and angry.
Hunger is rampant in America and the world. Israel is currently on trial in the International Court of Justice in part for starving half of Gaza — a million people. It’s an accusation the Netanyahu government refutes, but the day after the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas massacre that killed 1,200 Israelis, the Israeli prime minister announced that Israel was cutting off all access to food, water and electricity as reprisal against Hamas.
Over one hundred days into the war, Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and weaponizing food, says UN human rights experts. On Jan. 15, the World Health Organization said preventing famine and deadly disease outbreak in Gaza requires faster, safer aid access and more supply routes.
But while Israel is an easy target as the scenes from Gaza are being broadcast daily on CNN, MSNBC and ABC, the fact is, the U.S. is rife with hunger and it’s not a headline, it’s not a topic for the WHO, UN or Save the Children like the horror in Gaza has been.
Why not?
The politics of hunger are masked by that “food insecurity” moniker. The pandemic unquestionably worsened food insecurity rates across the country and forced food banks and other organizations to adapt. In the U.S., the Dickensian reality of hunger is huge: More than 44 million people in the U.S. face hunger, don’t have enough food to eat or don’t have access to healthy food. That’s 18% of Americans — many of whom are children.
In 2022 alone, 49 million people turned to food assistance for extra help. On Monday, President Joe Biden and Mayor Parker visited Philabundance on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, where they packed food for Philadelphia’s food insecurity crisis, which impacts one in four Philadelphians. Hundreds of thousands of our neighbors are hungry right now.
Nationally as well as locally, as PGN has previously reported, LGBTQ+ Americans are disproportionately impacted by poverty and food insecurity, according to the Williams Institute at the Law School of UCLA.
In recent weeks, Republican governors in Iowa, Mississippi and Texas have all opted out of federal summer food programs for children who would ordinarily get lunch at school, which is often the only meal of their day. Iowa’s Gov. Kim Reynolds said she thought kids were too fat.
Mississippi’s Gov. Tate Reeves said he didn’t think Mississippi — which has the highest poverty rate in the nation — should be creating more “welfare state” expansion.
Congress approved a Biden administration initiative to feed poor children during the summer. But in all, 15 GOP governors are opting out of letting kids eat this summer, which will impact about 8 million children.
In addition, about 2 million parents and young children could be turned away from WIC by September without full funding. Congress, on a bipartisan basis, has fully funded WIC for more than 25 years, but has failed to provide the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) with the additional funding needed to avoid turning away eligible young children and pregnant and postpartum adults with low incomes for the first time in decades. WIC’s funding needs have grown due to higher-than-expected participation and food costs.
I was only hungry for a matter of six hours and it sent me into a spiral of discomfort, frustration and fear. For millions of Americans, there is no friend coming later to make them food. Nor is there food in the refrigerator or kitchen cabinets. There is only hunger — not food insecurity, but gut-grinding hunger. What are we doing to end it — in our city, our country and the world?
Resources:
How to Fight Food Insecurity in Philly: thephiladelphiacitizen.org/how-to-fight-philadelphia-food-insecurity/
Philadelphia Food Access Guide for Vulnerable People: phillyfoodfinder.org