Food Insecurity

The term ‘food insecurity’ has been around a few years. It is a sanitized version of ‘starvation’. Lately, with worldwide starvation increasing and food riots from country to country, the term ‘food insecurity’ is increasingly used in reporting, even on more balanced NPR.

What is the need to sanitize the concept? Why can’t we face starvation for what it is? Because we, citizens of the United States, have more food and resources than the majority of people in the rest of the world. And because we, the United States, have enacted policies that have deprived people in other countries of food. Can we not face our responsibility for amassing food and resources at the expense of others, consigning them to poverty and starvation? Guilt is a strong motivator, but to use the energy given by guilt to cover up the problem does nothing but assuage our own spiritual insecurity. At least on the conscious level.

President Bush has asked for $700 million to address the problem. On the surface I am glad he doesn’t take the hard-hearted position of a capitalist who believes people are poor because they choose to be, and actually does something toward the problem. However, to keep things in perspective, he is asking for one-tenth the amount of money for starvation that he asks for war funding, making his priorities clear. Politically, how can he not address such widespread starvation? It’s got to be difficult to address the negative effects of policies without changing said policies. And one wonders whether it isn’t just ‘throwing money at the problem’, giving a man a fish rather than teaching him to fish. Dubbya and his supporters might not have been listening in Sunday school. Who would Jesus take advantage of to increase profits?

Sanitized words and buying our way out of guilt. Food insecurity? Spiritual vacuity.