With Portland’s ubiquitous farmers markets, a committed locavore “foodie” movement, and the great luck of being located in the Willamette Valley—home to some of the most fertile soil on the planet—how could the Rose City possibly face any food security issues? But the facts don’t lie. According to the Multnomah Food Action Plan, adopted by the County Board of Commissioners in January 2011, there are 36,000 people in the county who access emergency food boxes each month. Over half of county adults are overweight or obese. Nearly one-third of county children rely on food assistance programs.
Portland faces the same food security issues as the rest of the country, even the rest of the world. However, most people aren’t aware that it doesn’t really cost all that much to end world hunger, depending on your perspective.
We're Talking About Peanuts
The United Nations has determined that by 2015, $195 billion per year will be needed to ensure everyone around the world has enough food to eat. This is a lot of money—more than everyone you’ve ever met will see in their entire lifetimes combined. However, consider that the gross domestic product of the world is $63 trillion, and perhaps now your perspective has changed.
In other words, it takes peanuts to feed the world peanuts.
Granted, we would need that $195 billion each year. Still, $30 billion dollars is less than one-quarter of President Obama’s stimulus plan. It’s barely half of Wal-Mart’s total net sales in 2010. It’s such a pitiful amount that it’s embarrassing hunger persists on this planet.
Although there is enough food on the planet to provide for everyone, we have seen food riots in recent years—both in developing and developed countries. Commodity prices have risen as speculators consider food to be the next “bubble.” The oil deposits that fuel the petro-chemical fertilizer industry—not to mention shipping products in our global, “just in time” food system—are becoming scarce, while aquifers dry up and soil loses its fertility due to generations of what Wes Jackson refers to“petri-dish capitalism.” And as a burgeoning middle class in Asia develops a taste for meat, global hunger makes sense.
Demand for Dietary Assistance is the 'New Normal'
So, Portland is not immune to the food security issues that impact the rest of the globe. But, considering the number of stores, markets and gardens in the area, there is enough food to feed everyone. The problem, of course, is economics. At a recent anti-hunger conference in Corvallis, it was repeatedly pointed out that people who are unable to provide for themselves go hungry. And with unemployment at 8 percent in the Portland metro area, a lot of people are unable to provide for themselves.
Of course, the metro area’s unemployment rate is better than the state’s rate of 9 percent, and with such a high jobless percentage, it is easy to understand how the Oregon Food Bank recently passed the mark of one million emergency food boxes distributed statewide last year—that's one million emergency food boxes in a state with a population of less than four million. Such an increased demand for assistance by Oregonians to meet their dietary needs suggests that it is inappropriate to refer to this assistance as emergency.
“It’s indicative of a new normal,” Shawn DeCarlo, Metro Services Manager for the Oregon Food Bank, explained after presenting at the anti-hunger conference in Corvallis. “The number of food boxes doesn’t even represent the number of people who need help, because that’s basically half the population anyway.”
The line between what’s considered a “food emergency” and a normal state of affairs is dissolving. “We have a lot of folks having a hard time having enough food in the house for tonight, let alone the three days that Emergency Management strongly recommends,” says Jeremy O’Leary, webmaster for The Dirt!, which is the website for Transition PDX, a group devoted to planning for a post-peak oil Portland. O’Leary is concerned about food access in East Portland where “a startlingly large number of grocery stores have closed,” exacerbating food distribution issues on the city’s edges.
If There's Enough Food for Everyone, What's the Problem?
“Oregon suffers from the same problems with the food system as anywhere in the U.S.,” says Andy Fisher, the former Executive Director of the Community Food Security Coalition. “High rates of childhood hunger, higher than average rates of diet-related diseases among minority populations, rural deserts, and much more. Yes, there is sufficient food to feed everyone. By and large, hunger is a result of a lack of resources—whether they be monetary, land or access to safety net programs.”
And according to Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland, up to half of our country’s food is lost to waste. While the numbers are not likely that high in the Portland metro region, a substantial portion of food ends up in our area’s landfills.
“Residents and businesses in this region dispose an astonishing 206,172 tons of food annually,” says Jennifer Erickson from Metro’s Sustainability Department. “That’s nearly 20 percent of what goes into the landfill.” Erickson decries the lack of respect for the tremendous resources that went into producing the food that is wasted. “This is especially egregious when considering how many Oregonians don’t have access to healthy, wholesome food—many of them children and the elderly.”
Financially, very little money is needed to address hunger in Portland, and Neighborhood Notes will examine the progress of the plans to confront economic factors and create a hunger-free Oregon. We will check in with individuals and organizations who are taking the necessary steps to tackle overlooked issues of the local food system. And we will meet with the activists and advocates who are pushing for a systemic overhaul of how we produce and distribute food as they seek sustainable solutions to local food security issues.
Our monthly food security series, Food for Thought, will examine these and other local food system issues, so we invite you to leave your comments, concerns, and topics you'd like us to explore below.
Correction 1/30/2012: The article initially stated that the Oregon Food Bank distributed one million emergency food boxes per month. It distributed one million emergency food boxes from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011.
Please check your numbers. The OFB Network distributed over 1 million emergency food boxes statewide last fiscal year - NOT monthly. Thanks
Good eye, Jill-O. Correction made and noted.
Here's another perspective on hunger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKr4HZ7ukSE and http://www.veganvideo.org
great article- I am wondering if there is a city harvest program like we have in NYC?
Great article, Kyle! Slow Food Portland hosted a panel discussion for Oregon based small meat producers & processors last week & it was quite informative. While I agree that it might not take a lot of new money, it will require a complete food system overhaul. We must reorient ourselves so that we are supporting local ranchers and producers. There are a lot of moving parts, and I for one, am very glad to hear that NN is starting a monthly "Food for Thought" column. I look forward to checking in. @
@Jill, thanks for catching that flub.
@Winston, Portland may have a city harvest program like NYC. Care to explain more?
There are some huge caveats to this issue. From unsustainable family sizes (esp. in developing countries) to the panhandlers here in town who take cash for poker machines and liquor, there are a lot of unnecessary reasons for people to have a "need" for food assistance. I just have a hard time reading this and not thinking about the families in line with me at the grocery store, spending their assistance dollars on Doritos, soda, and microwave pizza.
@John: It's incredibly easy to disparage people who make choices or have poor habits that we disapprove of. It's a bit more difficult to understand the rationale behind that behavior. Of course it would be super if everyone on SNAP- and with 46 million, that's an awful lot of us- only used these benefits to purchase healthy, organic produce and other foods. But when you go into a low-income neighborhood, how many health food stores or co-ops can you count? (You'll typically be lucky to find a full-scale grocery store.) Consider that 20 years ago $9 million of food stamp purchases were made at farmers markets, while in 2007 only $3 million of food stamp purchases were- even though the number of food stamp users increased exponentially during that time. This indicates learned behavior resulting in the impact on purchasing behavior of those on SNAP. This could be explained by the switch from paper food stamp to plastic EBT cards- resulting in generational learned behavior. People on food stamps were excluded from farmers markets and instead needed to use their benefits at brick-and-mortar stores which, more often than not, were mini-marts that offered little more than low-cost, high-caloric processed foods that, literally, kill those who eat them. At the same, farmers market vendors responded to this change in customers, who were now mostly comprised of cash-carrying customers willing to pay premium prices for premium products. As a result, even though SNAP can now be used at farmers markets, we have a generation of SNAP users unwilling to shop there as the prices are too high, and vendors don't bring bulk food to sell to low-income shoppers at affordable prices- as they did 20 years ago. This example of circumstances that create learned behavior is just one that helps explain the actions you describe of SNAP users. Ultimately, it boils down to incentives. If you are familiar with the Freakonomic books, the case is made that incentives drive our actions. And why wouldn't low-income shoppers on SNAP- who are trying to maximize their food dollars- purchase the cheapest foods available, such as soda and Doritos. The idea of dictating what people on SNAP can purchase seems awfully Soup Nazish to me- "No microwave pizza for you, you must buy the three-dollar tomato!"- it's also unrealistic and we are venturing into issues of freedom of choice. The best option would be to provide incentives for people to use their SNAP for the purchase of healthy food- which is so great about farmers markets that are providing SNAP incentive programs, matching a certain amount of dollars which results in a subsidy for low-income shoppers to not only purchase healthy food, but purchase them directly from our local farmers and not out-of-state corporations like Kroger, or, gulp, Wal-Mart. But this is only one small step. John, if this is concern of yours, perhaps you would be willing to be involved with efforts to expand incentives available for SNAP users to purchase healthy food, either by helping secure funds to increase the matching amount or even expanding these incentive programs to corner stores or even supermarkets throughout the area?
1 likeIn reading through the discussion above about the use of SNAP benefits, I thought folks may be interested to see a study released last week by Share Our Strength's Cooking Matters program. The study is called "It's Dinnertime: A Report on Low-Income Families' Efforts to Plan, Shop for and Cook Healthy Meals" and it's available at http://www.strength.org/cmstudy/.
Cooking Matters, the nutrition education curriculum used by Oregon Food Bank's nutrition education program, is a national program dedicated to providing education on food safety, food resource management, nutrition and hands-on cooking to low-income community members in partnership with volunteer culinary and nutrition instructors.