hunger

This is the second of three posts on films from the 2012 Sundance Film Festival addressing inequality, poverty, and social class.

Finding North is a title so perfect it doesn’t fully sink in until after you’ve finished watching the film.  The documentary by filmmakers Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush doesn’t allude to it at any point during its 84 minutes (except in song lyrics during the opening credits), but it provides a powerful paradigm for the rest of the film: quite simply, any country whose citizens go hungry while there is enough food has lost its direction and must get back on course.

This week’s shiny golden douchebag statuette goes to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. A recent article published in The New York Times reported that the number of people living in households lacking consistent access to adequate food his risen to 49 million Americans. In the 14 years that the Department of Agriculture has been collecting these statistics, these are the highest ever.

A bit more data from the survey to put this in perspective: of those 49 million, one third of respondents reported that they are "outright hungry" meaning they experience frequent hunger pains, are forced to skip meals or reduce portion sizes.

The households facing the most dramatic food shortages are usually headed by single mothers. In the last year, the numbers of households reporting severe food insecurity that also contain children has swelled by almost 200,000 to top out at 506,000. Of those 506,000 households, 37% were headed by single mothers as opposed to 14% that reported married, two-parent heads.

Now this is where the d-bag factor increases exponentially in relation to the food insecurity data.