Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Blue Collar, Bare Cupboards 

By Sasha Abramsky       

March 26,2008, In These Times

http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/print/3574/

Ten miles outside Eugene in west central Oregon, little
wooden houses and mobile homes make up the town of Alvadore.
The homes are too far apart to give the town--population
1,358--the appearance of a city, yet too close together for
it to come off as true countryside. Old, domestically
manufactured cars line the streets, as well as a few rundown
mom-and-pop convenience stores.

Small farmers, mill workers and construction people live
here. And they work hard--or at least they do when they can
get employment. There's a dry nuts and prunes plant just
outside town, as well as a Country Coach facility that
manufactures motor homes. Many of the residents hold down
several jobs to make ends meet. Yet for an increasing number
of people in Alvadore, getting a paycheck--or even several
paychecks--is not the same as earning enough to put food on
the table.

Schools throughout the counties of central Oregon, the
state's hunger belt, report that kids come to classes hungry
on Mondays--and endure the long summer vacation months when
no free school lunches exist.

Alvadore, like many dilapidated towns in modern-day America,
is at the wrong end of an array of economic changes--from
globalization to higher energy costs--and many of its
citizens are falling through the social safety net. The
result: increased hunger. 

Payday loans and food boxes

Many of the town's residents turn to the corner of 8th and B
Streets, where the large wooden Alvadore Christian Church
stands. On the fourth Thursday of each month, a sign is
staked in the churchyard: Food Pantry.

During the winter months, around 40 families show up to
receive bread, muffins, applesauce, canned soups, canned
vegetables and other staples. In the summers the number of
families served increases.

In one corner of the church is a table of food provided by
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The rest--the vast
majority--comes from donations by the local community. It's a
model that works during flush times, but it isn't a
particularly effective way of feeding the hungry during down
times, when more people are struggling to make ends meet and
fewer are able to donate food to charity.

Becky Darnall, 34, volunteers at the pantry and also relies
on the food boxes from it. She says that when the pantry
first opened two years ago, "we had 26-to-28 families. Within
the last six months, it's gone up to 40."

Becky's husband is a cook at a restaurant in nearby
Springfield. In 2006, he earned $24,000. Last year, $27,000.
This year, with a pay raise, he hopes to earn $30,000. As for
Becky, she works part time as house-help for one of her
neighbors, which brings in $8 an hour.

They have three kids, are raising a nephew and are living in
a 30-year-old mobile home with a leaky roof and dubious
electrical wiring. They drive an old Chevy Blazer with a
malfunctioning engine that they cannot afford to repair, and
that reduces the vehicle's fuel efficiency to a ludicrous--
and prohibitively expensive--seven miles per gallon. Becky's
husband spends $15 per day just driving to and from work.

Until this year, the family was unable to afford co-payments
on the health insurance offered through her husband's work.
As a result, the Darnalls were saddled with $1,000 in
emergency room bills when Becky came down with asthmatic
bronchitis last year. The bills got sent to a collection
agency, and the family is now struggling to pay them off.
This past November, Becky's husband needed an MRI, which
landed the family with an additional $1,200 to pay off.

"We can get by," Becky says cautiously, "but the difference
between volunteering [at the church] and not is vegetable
soup with macaroni thrown in. ... It's more like a real
dinner."

Before she started coming to the pantry, she says her family
jumped through hoops to qualify for food stamps, and still
ended up with hardly enough food to survive. "There were a
few times it was really tight. But we got by."

At first, Becky says, they borrowed from friends. Then they
started borrowing against their future income. "The payday
loan thing, which is a nightmare," she says, referring to the
practice many low-income Americans have resorted to in recent
years of borrowing against their paychecks in order to make
it through the last days of the pay period. It's an
exploitative--and usurious--financial trap that, over the
years, has contributed to the economic crippling of America's
poor.

"It took us almost a year to get out of it," Becky
acknowledges. "But without it, we'd have been S.O.L," she
says, laughing bitterly.

The Darnalls have been married 17 years, but only in the last
year have they had to decide, month to month, which bills to
pay and which services will get shut off.

"And my husband's worked the whole time," Becky says. "We
didn't sit back and live off the system." 

JELL-O, but no fruit

Across America, close to 40 million people are listed as
being "food insecure," according to the USDA. That means that
even if they don't actually go hungry, they constantly worry
about how to put food on the table.

The Darnalls fit this category. So, too, does 83-year-old
widow Helen Wagy, a retired laundress who worked for 35 years
and now receives $912 a month in Social Security--her entire
retirement income. Wagy lives in a mobile home in the town of
Corvallis, Ore. She gets boxes of food from a group known as
Gleaners that gathers unpicked produce from local fields and
persuades supermarkets to donate produce that is damaged or
has exceeded sell-by dates.

"I have rent to pay, electricity to pay, telephone to pay and
the luxury of a TV to pay," Wagy says, bundled in a fleece
jacket and purple trousers, as she sits in a chilly wooden
building owned by the city's park department, in a little
park off the highway. The building--not much more than a
shack crammed with fridges and freezers--serves as a
distribution point for Gleaners.

Her friend Roberta Coulter chips in. Without Gleaners, she
explains, "I'd probably lose a lot of weight. They help me
very much. Without them, I could make the JELL-O but I
wouldn't have the fruit."

And they are the lucky ones.

Of the nearly 40 million who fear going hungry, an estimated
11 million-plus Americans occasionally miss meals, according
to the USDA. They include many adults in a family who
sacrifice their own portions to ensure their children are
fed.

In most countries, such people would be defined as being
"hungry." Bush's America uses a more Orwellian term.

In 2006, the USDA instructed government agencies to no longer
refer to this group as being hungry. The change came about
after a Committee on National Statistics of the National
Academies reported it could not conclusively determine
whether people who couldn't afford to buy food actually
experienced "discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes
beyond the usual uneasy sensation."

As a result, the 11 million Americans who cannot afford to
stock their houses with food are now classfied as
experiencing "very low food security."

In the decades since the Great Depression of the 1930s, this
category would have been made up largely of the long-term
unemployed, the homeless, perhaps the mentally ill and other
marginalized groups.

These days, however, increasingly it is the working poor--
whose wages have stagnated, whose cost of living has gone up
with higher gas, food and healthcare expenses, and whose time
is now spent standing in line at food banks. 

A 21st century depression

Over the past decade, the percentage of food bank clients in
Oregon who are members of a family with at least one person
employed has gone from 30 percent to 47 percent--an increase
that translates into tens of thousands of Oregon families.

But this problem is not exclusive to Oregon, where the local
economy has been decimated by the collapse of the timber
industry, and the threat of going to bed hungry absent the
aid of food charities is constant.

Throughout the United States, a startlingly raw form of
poverty has entrenched itself within the bottom tier of the
economy. In Appalachia, where hunger has never been far from
the surface, states such as Virginia and Tennessee continue
to see high levels of hunger.

In parts of Texas, especially border regions dotted with the
colonias of immigrant populations, food insecurity swells.

In a belt of rural counties in eastern New Mexico and western
Oklahoma, empty bellies are endemic, as they are in in
California's San Joaquin Delta, one of the most fertile
agricultural centers in the world.

A decade ago, Oregon had the highest level of hunger of any
state. So, the state government got serious about the
problem, channeling resources to help poor Oregonians access
the federal food stamp program and encouraging an expansion
of private food charities.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who set up a Hunger Relief Task Force
after taking office, went so far as to live on food stamps
for a couple weeks, limiting his food expenditure to $21 per
week (or $1 per meal), the average amount allotted per food
stamp recipient in the state, as a public relations gimmick
intended to focus attention on the problem.

"It was an incredible challenge for us," says Erinn Kelley-
Siel, the governor's human services adviser. "Too many
Oregonians are having to rely on food banks to supplement
emergency needs and are relying on food stamps as primary
sources of food."

Oregon's numbers improved, but they did so mainly through a
reduction in hunger in the big cities. In rural areas like
Benton County, the problem grew worse.

In 2000, the state classified 11.2 percent of rural residents
as being "food insecure." Four years later, that number had
grown to 13.6 percent of all rural residents.

But after years of overall progress, the return of economic
hard times means that hunger statewide has started to edge up
once again, following a path seen in almost every state in
the country.

In two of the hardest hit counties, Linn and Benton, food
bank workers estimate that 42,000 people received food boxes
in 2007. And, unlike the Portland metro area to the north,
these counties have small populations.

Statewide, 11.9 percent of Oregonians are now classified as
being "food insecure." Nationally, the figure is 11.4
percent. Surveys by food banks and food pantries consistently
find that high utility bills, gas prices and healthcare
costs, along with job loss and inadequate food stamp
coverage, are pushing more and more working Americans into
reliance on private food charities. Volunteers' anecdotes
back up these findings.

Yet even as the need has grown, federal government has
drastically cut both funding and food contributions to food
banks. In 2000, food banks nationwide received $250 million
in federal funds through Title IV of the farm bill. Today,
that number is $140 million.

A generation ago, at the high watermark of USDA subsidies for
food banks, 90 percent of the food these organizations
received came from the federal government. These days a food
bank such as Oregon's huge FOOD for Lane County storage
facility, based out of a strip mall a couple miles from
downtown Eugene, receives only 12 percent of its food from
the feds.

An hour's drive to the north, in the town of Corvallis, the
falloff in federal aid has been even more dramatic. As
recently as 1987, 85 percent of the food received, and
distributed, by the Linn-Benton County Food Share came from
the USDA. In 2008, that number is 6 percent, says Ryan
McCambridge, director of the Linn-Benton County Food Share,
in the central Oregon city of Corvallis.

"We make up the difference and the shortfall by literally
begging it from our communities--local businesses, farmers,
food drives, grocery stores. Everyone and anyone," says
Denise Griewisch, FOOD for Lane County's executive director.
It is, she explains, akin to a "voluntary tithe" on the local
population.

Farmers, Griewisch notes, are producing less food, as they
divert more land to growing corn for biofuels, meaning that,
since 2003, the government has been able to purchase less
surplus. What food is produced is now costing more and is
often ending up on the export market, snapped up by consumers
in other countries with their own food production shortfalls.

To add a final twist, new computer programs allow
supermarkets to calculate inventory more effectively, which
means that supermarkets have less excess produce to donate to
food pantries.

Statewide, the Oregon Food Bank has seen its supply of food
dwindle by 3 million pounds a year since 2005, according to
its Chief Executive Officer Rachel Bristol. As a result, the
size of food boxes is being cut in some locations, down from
a five-to-seven day supply to a mere three days.

This past year, says Griewisch, food contributions to FOOD
for Lane County were down in every donation category. And
that's a problem, given that 3 percent to 5 percent of Lane
County's 338,000 residents eat a food box meal on any given
day, according to the organization's estimates, and 20
percent of county residents are food insecure at some point
during the year.

"For a lot of folks, the emergency food box system was set up
to respond to family emergencies," says McCambridge of the
Linn-Benton County Food Share. "Over the last eight to nine
years, instead of emergencies, people are relying on food
boxes to a greater extent. It's really becoming a supplement
to incomes. The biggest demographic is folks who have jobs
and can't make enough to make ends meet." 

When illness means no paycheck

Juan Cortez-Villa is a 30-year-old father of four, who lives
in Eugene and works full time in a local wheat-packaging
mill. Before that, he worked at another mill, in Medford. He
wears a puffy gray jacket to protect himself from the winter
cold, a white baseball cap, jeans and heavy boots. On his
face is a thin goatee.

Juan earns $13.25 per hour, and, after taxes, brings home
$1,800 per month. His income places the family above the
poverty line. But between the money he sends back to his
mother in Mexico, the rent, his utility bills and soaring
medical expenses, Juan has found it harder to stay afloat. At
the end of every month, there's always a shortfall.

Juan would need "$15, $16 an hour" to overcome the gap, he
explains through a translator in a community center in Eugene
known as Centro.

Since the rent and utility bills must be paid, his family
regularly goes short on food. When he's gotten sick and had
to take unpaid leave from the mill, the family has ended up
with nothing.

"I was unable to do anything," he says, "get any help. Some
person gave me a phone number to this place [Centro]. I had
no food for eight days, with my sons and wife." He pauses,
and qualifies his statement. "Just a little food. A friend
gave me eggs, tortillas. I felt sad for myself, was crying.
It's bad for my family. I was scared because I didn't know
how to look for help."

Immigrants, mainly Latino, make up 4.6 percent of Lane
County's population, and more than one-quarter of Latinos in
the county live at, or below, the poverty level.

Statewide, according to the Northwest Federation of Community
Organizations, nearly half of Latino adults experience food
insecurity. Throw in a medical emergency, and all the
ingredients are present for people to go hungry. 

Buddy, can you spare a dime?

At the Catholic Community Services center in the working-
class town of Springfield, a 15 minute drive from Eugene, you
can see a line snaking outside the one-time church on any
given Monday, Wednesday or Friday morning.

Young and old, male and female, they wait patiently for the
doors to open and for staff members to place their names into
a database. Then they enter the food pantry and fill their
boxes with whatever food has been donated that week.

"On a slow day, we'll serve 80-to-100 people," says Joe
Softich, 61, the church's food program manager. "Toward the
end of the month, I expect to do at least 140 families, maybe
180."

Softich is a skinny, gray-haired man, his somewhat gaunt face
covered by a thick beard. He grew up in a grocery store in
the copper-company town of Anaconda, Mont., studied
microbiology, Russian and religion in college in the '60s,
and decided long ago that feeding the hungry was his calling
in life.

He shows me freezers full of meat and vegetables, boxes of
beans and fruit, peanut butter and cartons of milk. "We see
so much need. You hear these stories day after day. You need
something to sustain you beyond feeling good about what you
do. It's a delicate thing, to be able to help in a way that
isn't demeaning."

Softich estimates that 13,330 Springfield residents received
food from Catholic Community Services last year.

"We ran out of food three days ago," says Angela Oliver, 38,
a one-time drug addict who got clean and recently moved back
from Washington State to Oregon to live with her sister and
her sister's four children. "We have a few things in the
freezer meat-wise, but I'm pretty much a vegetarian," she
says. "We have no milk for the little ones, no vegetables, no
bread."

Three of the four children get free lunches from school,
Oliver says, and the fourth, the youngest, lives with her
grandmother. "The kids don't go hungry. They eat before I do,
[but] there wasn't seconds. There was just enough for
everyone." She adds: "If there was no food bank, I honestly
don't know what I would do. We couldn't even scrounge dimes
up right now."

To be poor in America has never been easy. But to be poor in
Bush's America is devastating. The federal government has
turned its back on--and has made it clear it doesn't take
responsibility for--those who are unable to make it on their
own.

[Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and the author of
the recently published American Furies: Crime, Punishment and
Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment (Beacon). He is
also a senior fellow of democracy at Demos, a New York-based
think tank.

Sasha Abramsky is the author, most recently, of American
Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass
Imprisonment.]