Add Passion and Stir: Living on $2 a Day
Poverty and Food Equity in America
Our latest Add Passion and Stir podcast episode is really powerful. Kathy Edin (sociologist, poverty expert and author) and Tom McDougall (DC area food access social entrepreneur) sat down with me and Debbie to talk about how people on public programs like Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps) are already desperately struggling to survive. We know that the proposed program cuts in the President’s budget will further devastate these families.
Kathy Edin (author of $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America) specializes in the study of people living on welfare. In her work over the last two decades, she discovered that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has grown to one and a half million American households, including about three million children. She has spoken with families about how they live in such extreme poverty, revealing a growing bevy of survival strategies.
In this Add Passion and Stir episode, she shares stunning statistics and touching anecdotes of these impoverished families. For example, when she asked one young girl what it was like to be hungry, her response was, “It feels like you want to be dead, because it’s peaceful when you’re dead.”
Washington, DC area social entrepreneur Tom McDougall founded 4P Foods, a CSA that focuses on environmental sustainability and access to health fresh foods for low-income people. Food equity is important to Tom. “Good, transparent, sustainable food should be the norm, not the exception. Crappy food that’s making the earth worse and killing people along the way — that should not be a normal thing. So yeah, let’s create a better food system that is baked in the ideas of equity.”
Together, Kathy and Tom illustrate how our current systems — political, social, economic, geographic — keep poor people from succeeding. They argue for more equity in our social programs and a more dignified way of serving the poor.
Tom believes, “We can’t talk about fixing the food system unless we talk about money and politics… subsidies… institutional racism… the history of farming. … If we move the needle just a tad on food equity, it means we’re moving a lot of other needles along the way.” In Kathy’s work, she found that, “When it comes down to it, what people seem to want more than anything else is dignity. … but a lot of our social policies deny people that.” She also posits, “There may be a different way of serving the poor that is much more empowering and respectful that could really change the paradigm.”
Hear their recommendations on what we can do as individuals and as a nation to improve these dire circumstances for the poor in America. Also hear my call to action for everyone to take personal and political action to help families in need and prevent these budget cuts from happening. Listen here or on iTunes.
