This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Plow to Plate Film Series Presents: A Place at the Table

A Place at the Table, a film that deals with hunger in America, begins gorgeously with sweeping aerial views of several of the film’s locations: Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Mississippi and an exquisite opening song by country-folk, duo, The Civil Wars.  This film, brought to us by the same team that did Food, Inc., is not made on a shoe-string budget.  It features beautiful cinematography, a specially commissioned soundtrack produced by T Bone Burnett, and a whole cast of well-known subject matter experts including Jeff Bridges (founder of the End Hunger Network), Chef Tom Colicchio, and professor and writer Marion Nestle (as well as some others we’ll talk about later).  However, the people the film follows: 5th grader Rosie who lives with six other members of her family in a decrepit house in Collbran, Co. or young mom Barbie Izquierdo from Philadelphia who struggles every day to feed her two children, know perfectly well what it is to live on a pittance.

 

What these breathtaking opening vistas of America mask is an underlying desperation brought on by the hard truth that hunger in America has been steadily increasing since the late 1970s so that today approximately 50 million people are food insecure, meaning they do not know when they might obtain their next meal.  They are not hungry because food is in short supply in the United States.  It’s because they are too poor to feed themselves properly and government policies are not designed to adequately address this issue.  In fact, they often exacerbate the problem.  For example, Rosie’s mom Trish works in the local diner, the Cattleman’s Grill, and earns $120 every two weeks but can’t get food stamps because the family earns too much.  Trish’s salary is supplemented by Rosie’s grandfather who works in a hospital, nevertheless, they typically run out of milk and are left eating their cereal dry.  These families have become experts at stretching their food supplies, as well as their budgets, and also reaching out to friends and neighbors.  But many of them are in the same boat so local charity becomes a lifeline.  In Collbran, a very small community, between 80 and 120 people attend Wednesday evening dinners, sponsored by the local church, which also runs after school meal programs and delivers bags of food every week to those in need, though these contain many processed and unhealthful company donated items.

Find out what's happening in Prospect Heights-Crown Heightswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

 

Which brings us to another problem related to hunger, namely obesity.  A Place at The Table explains how the two seemingly opposite phenomena, are, in fact, related.  The Mississippi Delta is the most food insecure and obese place in America.  It’s a river delta rife with “food desserts” where you will be fortunate to find a fresh banana.  However you will have no problem finding little shops off the main highways carrying chips, soda pop, cookies, cakes, candies, and canned goods. What these smaller stores carry and their relative costs is a complex subject that involves farm subsidies, geography, and the economics of retail supermarket food distribution.  But the result is that eating well for many residents of the delta (and also many parts of urban America) involves costly trips to distant supermarkets where shoppers are then confronted with a choice between expensive produce and or cheap processed foods.  Since 1980 the cost of fruits and vegetables have risen 40% while “junk food” has gone down in price 40%.  Faced with a choice between spending $3.00 for a head of broccoli that provides 400 calories or buying a few cans of Chef Boyardee and getting 4,000, many shoppers choose to maximize their caloric bang for the buck.

Find out what's happening in Prospect Heights-Crown Heightswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

A Place at the Table takes you through these and many other thorny policy issues and you may recognize some familiar faces.  Jan Poppendieck, former Park Slope Food Coop Safe Food Committee member, City University of New York professor, and author of Sweet Charity and Free for All: Fixing School Food in America walks you through the politics of food charity and school food.  Park Slope resident Joel Berg, who’s spoken at past Plow to Plate events, author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America and the Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, is featured.  And while you may not bump into him in the produce aisle any time soon, British author, academic, and journalist, Raj Patel, is interviewed.  Raj was the key note speaker of the 2009 Brooklyn Food Conference (now the Brooklyn Food Coalition) that was conceived, planned, and executed by the Safe Food Squad with the help of many other Coop and community volunteers.

A Place at the Table does not make you angry so much (though there’s plenty of frustration and exasperation to be felt towards the politicians whose grand compromises increased the federal budget for child nutrition - and meagerly – only at the cost of cutting Food Stamps).  Rather, it’s a different emotion you are left with, namely shame.  From the red wood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters (to the streets of Philly, to the Grand Mesa in Colorado, to the flood plains of Mississippi) we can and must do better than this.  Everyone deserves a place at the table.

____________________________________________________________

A Place at the Table: Tuesday, November 12th, 2013

Park Slope Food Coop – 2nd Floor

7:00 p.m.  Free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Prospect Heights-Crown Heights