Live and Learn of the second week. These struggles serve as reminders that the ghosts
of the Great Depression are still with us.
In a cruel twist of irony, those who rely most heavily on food aid are
agricultural and food-service workers. These are the people who plant,
harvest, process, prepare, deliver, and clean up after us. They serve in
banquet halls for wedding receptions and conferences. They dutifully
comply with requirements to throw away untouched plated food when
guests fail to show up.
Admittedly, there are some who game the system, just as there are
affluent people who cheat on their taxes, slough off at work, defraud
friends and family, or renege on contracts. Overall, the most vulnerable
in the country are no different from most Americans striving to fashion
a better life. But as part of the lowest-income strata in society, they hold
little sway with politicians.
Until we choose to live and learn, and demand better of our elected
officials, it is worth remembering that more than one in five children
now live below the poverty level (close to one in four in rural America).
Those who receive SNAP benefits fare better as adults in health and
education than eligible children who do not. These least fortunate live
in the shadows, observing how those with easy access to food liberally
waste food while determining their access to food.
Focusing attention on who deserves food assistance draws attention
away from far greater subsidies. Subsidies, it is worth remembering, are
benefits received without compensation. If nature were valued for the
ongoing “public assistance” it provides, each of us would be guilty of
receiving subsidies at levels that dwarf all other social and government
programs.
In other words, all of us are freeloaders. Without nature and the
environment there would be no fresh, filtered water transporting nu-
trients, petroleum for powering tractors, wood for cooking, or food
and fiber from other living organisms. The evolution of genetics that
enhances yields, the life-sustaining temperatures and climate that keep
us alive, the ongoing cycling of carbon and nutrients, and the formation
of new soil to grow plants are just a few of the countless subsidies we