Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (18 page)

Other evidence exists to prove the reality of hunger in America. Poor children have actually been shown to be physically stunted compared to their middle-class counterparts. A Center for Disease Control study in the mid-1970s documented that up to 15 percent of the poor children examined showed symptoms of anemia and 12 percent were stunted in height.
²⁴
Dr. Robert Livingston of the University of California at San Diego told us that “poor children have measurably smaller head circumferences than those in families with adequate income.”
²⁵

Our infant death rate is another powerful indictment of our society. Because the infant mortality rate (deaths of babies less than one year old per 1,000 live births) in part reflects the nutrition of the mother, it is often used to judge the overall nutritional well-being of a people. Even though per person spending on health care has leapt tenfold in less than 20 years,
²⁶
our infant mortality rate ranks 16th in the world, almost double that of Sweden or Finland.
²⁷
In the United States, 14 babies die for every thousand born alive. This national average is “not enviable,” the journal
Pediatrics
sadly notes.
²⁸
But averages do not uncover the real tragedy. Among
nonwhite
babies the infant death rate is 22 per thousand, about the same as that of an extremely poor country like Jamaica.
²⁹
Even assuming much better reporting of infant deaths here, this comparison should alarm us.

Even averages among nonwhites mask the extreme deprivation in some communities. In the Fruitvale area of Oakland, California, just across the San Francisco Bay from my home, the infant death rate is 36 per thousand. And in the capital of our nation the rate is 25 per thousand, approximately that of Taiwan.
³⁰

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of hunger amid abundant production comes from the few people who have the courage to go into our communities to meet and talk with those who are suffering from lack of food. One such person is a woman I met five years ago when we both participated in a Philadelphia “hunger radiothon,” 24 hours of commercial-free radio in which all the breaks were used to tell people about hunger and its causes. Investigative reporter Loretta Schwartz-Nobel spoke about people starving in Philadelphia. As I was writing this book, I heard from Loretta again. This time she sent the manuscript that documented the hunger—even starvation—that she had witnessed. Her evidence includes many passages like this one, quoting an elderly former civil service worker in Boston:

I’ve had no income and I’ve paid no rent for many months. My landlord let me stay. He felt sorry for me because I had no money. The Friday before Christmas he gave me ten dollars. For days I had had nothing but water. I knew I needed food; I tried to go out but I was too weak to walk to the store. I felt as if I was dying. I saw the mailman and told him I thought I was starving. He brought me food and then he made some phone calls and that’s when they began delivering these lunches. But I had already lost so much weight that five meals a week are not enough to keep me going.

I just pray to God I can survive. I keep praying I can have the will to save some of my food so I can divide it up and make it last. It’s hard to save because I am so hungry that I want to eat it right away. On Friday, I held over two peas from lunch. I ate one pea on Saturday morning. Then I got into bed with the taste of food in my mouth and I waited as long as I could. Later on in the day I ate the other pea.

Today I saved the container that the mashed potatoes were in and tonight, before bed, I’ll lick the sides of the container.

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 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

O
NCE 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 it was more profitable in 1981 to grow corn for export than to produce cattle. Thus, given the production imperative basic to our system, a decline in beef eating which helped undercut ranchers’ profits led to a potentially
more
damaging use of our soil and water, at least in the short term.

Similarly, although the low price of grain is one reason why so much goes to feed livestock, more expensive grain would not be the answer. Would it reduce the mining of our resources? Alone, no. If grain were more expensive, the push to produce it would be even greater, to take advantage of the higher price.

The disturbing discovery is that there is no single change that could alter the self-destructive path we are on. Many things will have to change. But this does not mean that we can wait until they can all happen at once! Eating less grain-fed meat is not the answer in itself, but if this step means that more and more of us will be asking
why
the current American diet developed and
what can we do
to alter the forces behind it, then we are on our way.

The first step is uncovering the right questions.

As long as we focus single-mindedly on increasing production and then on finding ways to dispose of it—through livestock, exports, or gasohol—we can neatly avoid asking the most critical social questions. As our nation was being built, we did not learn how to ask these questions. The continent’s vast natural resources, the delusion of “Manifest Destiny” which led Americans to seize most of the United States from its native inhabitants and Mexico, the cheap labor offered by slavery—all these allowed Americans to evade critical questions of justice, resource efficiency, and sustainability in our agriculture. After 200 years we face the consequences: the production system which has provided such abundance for most Americans is now beginning to threaten our food security.

It turned out to be easier to develop new seeds, new machines, and new ways to use grain than to deal with issues of power: how decisions are made and for whose benefit, taking into account not only the immediate return but the long-term impact of these decisions. Our national blindness to the issues of power—how to share it fairly and effectively—has been aided by myths deeply rooted in our national consciousness. So we must begin by looking inside ourselves.

First, a belief that paralyzes many people is the notion that human beings are motivated solely by selfish interests. As a result, democratic economic planning, based on cooperative decision-making instead of a battle of vested interests, is viewed as impossible. And people are bound to doubt any movement or organization claiming to be based on cooperative principles, because if human nature is inherently selfish, people will not cooperate willingly. Claims of cooperation must be masks for coercion.

But look at your own life and the historical record; human beings are much more complex than this. Sure, we all have self-interests. The species would not have survived without them! But most people also want their lives to have meaning beyond themselves. And this is one right denied so many Americans—-the “right to feel useful.”

So the question is not how to extinguish individual self-interest in the interests of society, but how to begin to build economic and social structures in which the individual can serve her or his own interests and the community’s interests at the same time. There need not be an irreconcilable conflict.

The tragedy is that under our current economic ground rules, many feel they must choose: either ravage our resources today to stay in business or conserve these resources and run the risk of bankruptcy.

Second, we must examine the myth that the essence of democracy is the unbridled freedom of the individual. But wait … every responsible society limits people’s freedom. In our society freedom is limited by wealth. Those who have wealth have many options; those without wealth have many fewer. Today the “freedom” to own farmland is denied to virtually all those without it, except the few with great wealth. So the question is not
whether
freedom is limited, but
how
. Is our way fair? Is there a more just and democratic way?

Once we accept the myth of unbridled freedom, then placing a ceiling on an individual’s “success” is seen as undemocratic. So Americans defend anyone’s right to accumulate unlimited wealth. But isn’t this a frontier concept? On the frontier it appeared as if there were enough resources for everyone. But the frontier has disappeared; there’s only so much farmland in the United States and now it’s shrinking, not growing. Yet we give some the right to own 100,000 acres when we know this denies dozens of farm families the right to own any land at all. Is this democratic?

Third, we must probe our deep fear that social planning is always alien and handed down from the top. Hearing the word “planning,” we immediately see a grim-faced Politburo officer handing down production quotas. Our stereotypes make us blind to the similarly antidemocratic planning that takes place in our own economy. Industry and government executives here speak English instead of Russian, but their power over our lives may be just as profound as that of economic decision-makers in the Soviet system.

So the question is not
whether
we should have planning. Every society has planning. The issue is
what kind and by whom
. (In Sweden, for example, a committee of local residents decides who can bid on farmland that is for sale, if it is to be sold outside the family. Typically, these committees try to ensure that it does not go to the larger farmers.) But so narrow is our view of planning that it is hard even to imagine developing democratic, accountable planning mechanisms controlled locally and coordinated nationally. In our blind fear we hand over our power—to the unaccountable. What is grown depends only on what will sell to those with money, not on what is needed by those without money. So production is not accountable to need. Neither is production accountable to our children and grandchildren, who will need the resources squandered today. Processing and marketing decisions, moreover, are accountable only to the boards of directors of a handful of corporate giants, as we’ll see in
Part III
.

We have the information to break out of these old fears and misunderstandings. After 200 years we can see where they have taken us. And we can learn from what we see. The destruction of resources, the emergence of a landed aristocracy, and hunger in America are
not necessary
. Shocked into this realization, we can begin to imagine the shape of an economic system truly consistent with democracy. What we need now is courage.

I can’t offer you a set of how-to’s to get us moving in the direction of greater democracy, although
Part IV
shows you what some other people are doing. But here I would like to offer certain principles that have evolved as the basis of all my work over the last ten years. While there is no blueprint for how we can transform our society, the first step is to develop a sense of the direction in which we want to move—an orientation that more and more people will come to share, so that our distinct tasks become ever more complementary and therefore ever more effective. Here is what I would like to offer to the building of such an orientation.

My Grounding Principles

1. Because scarcity is not the cause of hunger, increasing production alone is not the solution. The solution can be found only by addressing the issue of power. Thus, “development” must be redefined, here and in the third world, not merely in terms of more production or consumption, but first and foremost in the changing relationships among people. Development must be the process of moving toward genuine democracy, understood as the ever more just sharing of political and economic power.

2. Just as “development” must be redefined to encompass the concept of power, so must “freedom.” For what is freedom without power? Freedom to complain about what’s wrong in our society without the power to do anything about the problems is virtually meaningless. Thus,
freedom from
interference is only part of what democracy means. We must also have
freedom to
achieve what makes life worth living—the freedom to have safe and satisfying work; the freedom to enjoy security in the form of food, housing, and health care; the freedom to share in decisions affecting our workplace, community, and nation; and the freedom to share in the responsibility of protecting our resources for coming generations.

3. The concepts of economic and political democracy are inseparable. As the eminent jurist Louis Brandeis said, “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth in a few hands, but we can’t have both.” Thus, democracy must go beyond the ballot box. It must include the wide dispersion of wealth and control over resources. It must entail the development of accountable, flexible planning structures for resource use from the community to the national level. And the concept of democracy must not stop when we go to work each morning; it must involve the opportunity for self-management in the workplace.

Political and economic democracy are inseparable concepts because where wealth is in the hands of relatively few, laws regulating control over society’s basic resources are made in their interest. What’s more, this minority’s economic might allows it to defy laws not in its interest. (In the United States such monopolies as American Telephone and Telegraph defy antitrust laws; likewise, in California a handful of corporate farming giants have for decades flouted federal law prohibiting their profiting from tax-funded irrigation.)

4. Democracy is not a static model to be achieved once and for all. “Democracy,” said William Hastie, “can easily be lost, but is never finally won. Its essence is eternal struggle.” Thus, every society is in a process of change and must be judged by the
direction
in which it is moving—toward a more just distribution of power or toward more and more tightly held power. Sadly, I believe my own society is moving away from democracy, toward greater and greater concentration of economic and political power.

5. Within every society, “capitalist” or “socialist,” those who have power tend to increase their power. The
only
way to move in the opposite direction is for those who have less power—that means
us—
not only to resist this tendency but to actively take part in the redistribution of power. That means taking on greater and greater responsibility ourselves. In other words, movement toward genuine democracy can happen only when ordinary people realize that they have both the right and capacity to help make the important political and economic decisions in their society.

With these five grounding principles, the critical question becomes, how can we take part in the redistribution of power? I hope that
Part IV
will help you answer this question yourself.

^*
This drop in beef consumption was made up for by 10 pounds per person more of both pork and poultry.
¹