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As unemployment rates in the United States continue to rise as part of the current recession, food insecurity is increasing along with it. In December 2008 Feeding America conducted a survey of food banks across the nation that showed a 30 percent increase in demand for assistance. The latest figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture state that 36.2 million Americans are at risk of hunger, more than a third of which of are children. Even before the onset of the recession, the state of California faced growing food insecurities. Between 2005 and 2007, more than ten percent of Californian residents faced hunger or were already hungry. In terms of federal assistance, last year the state placed dead last in terms of participating in food stamp programs. During the course of his successful presidential campaign, Barack Obama addressed the issue of domestic hunger pledging to eliminate child hunger by 2015. Now in office, his administration’s current stimulus plan seeks to increase funds for anti-hunger programs.

GUEST: Joel Berg, nationally recognized leader in the fields of hunger and food security, author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, and Executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, served in the USDA under President Clinton

For more information, visit www.joelberg.net.

Rough Transcript:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, Joel, your book is called, All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? Most people around the world know the United States for our obesity rates and can sort of picture that in their heads, but most don’t really know or can’t accept that hunger is a big problem in the United States. How hungry is America?

Joel Berg: America has 36.2 million Americans who live in homes they can’t afford enough food. That’s a population larger than the population of the entire state of California. Now hunger in America isn’t the same as hunger in some of the worst off developing countries. It’s not children starving in the streets. Because we do still have a federal nutrition assisted safety net that some of those countries don’t have, despite the cut backs, it’s certainly better than not having it all. So hunger and food insecurity in America are people choosing between food and rent. People choosing between food and healthcare. People rationing food. Parents going without food so their children can eat. Kids not having breakfast and the greatest irony of them all, as you said, we have a lot of obesity in America. But a lot of people don’t realize that food insecurity, hunger and obesity are flipsides of the same malnutrition coin. When low income families don’t have enough money to buy the most nutritious food, which is more expensive, they buy the least nutritious food which feels their bellies and often makes them obese.

SK: So in the United States which is the richest country in the world to have this level of hunger, even if it’s not as bad as some developing countries in the global south, it’s pretty shocking.

JB: It’s absolutely shocking. Last year, this country had more than four hundred billionaires. The number of billionaires was so great that being a billionaire wasn’t enough to get you on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. When I was growing up, there were two billionaires: Howard Hughes and J. Paul Getty. That’s what every kid knew. Now, in a country with that much wealth and let’s say, there’s a little less. There are only three hundred billionaires this year because, oh my goodness, some of them have sunk down–

SK: They only have a few million–

JB: We only have 700 million now. With that much wealth, there is no excuse why families should not be paid enough to be able to purchase all the food they need. My top solution is going back to a time of living wage jobs. And even if you believe a really wealthy person who works hard should have five vacation homes, I say What if, instead of having seven vacation homes, they only have five and using the saving from those two to pay their workers enough so they didn’t have to go to a food pantry or soup kitchen.

SK: And, of course, this conversation is very relevant this week as the firestorm over the AIG bonuses continues, but I think what very few people are saying in the mainstream media is that this is systemic of the problem well before the recession, this income disparity. How much worse has hunger got in the United States and where is it most concentrated? Is there a sort of geographic disparities?

JB: Hunger has shot up in the United States over the Bush years and there are geographic disparities, places like Texas, New Mexico, Mississippi, have the worst rates. That being said, the most shocking thing, is not the disparities, is that it exists everywhere. It’s certainly more concentrated in communities of color, but in white areas in places like APPOLACHA(SP) where there are no jobs and no living wages, there are extraordinary high rates of hunger. And I must say, the chapter in my book about inequality of wealth and about corporate welfare, when I wrote it about a year and a half ago and I actually predicted a financial collapse for the country, I thought it would be the most controversial chapter in the book and in truth it is now the most old hat. It’s the least controversial. I merely say the rich should stop getting corporate welfare and should pay their fair share of taxes. But now when a Republican senator is saying AIG executives should commit suicide, I’m in the moderate mainstream when it comes to equality of wealth—

SK: Joel, the economy has turned a lot more people into claiming jobless benefits, food stamps and other government welfare programs. It’s interesting, as well as tragically ironic that, many people are on these rolls for the first times in their lives, perhaps people who were well off a year ago and may not have supported government welfare programs. How has this increase in foodstamps and other welfare programs been straining the system that we currently have and can it hold up and is it even really the main solution to hunger?

JB: Well, part of the issue is people only consider welfare programs to be something someone else gets. An agri business doesn’t consider it a welfare payment when they get a lot of money from the government. A stadium owner doesn’t consider it a welfare payment. And I must say the mainstream media seems fixated on formally wealthy people who are now in trouble. There’s some of that. But by and large, the people going to food pantries and soup kitchens now, weren’t the wealthy. They were the receptionists at the financial firms. The drivers. The people who worked in their cafeterias.

SK: So working class and lower middle class people?

JB: Yeah, what we’ve had is poor people getting poorer and having more need and people who are near poor or just barely struggling in the lower middle class before now poor. Occasionally a very wealthy person may have drawn down all their savings, but that’s still rare. And it’s fascinating to me that the mainstream media which previously ignored the tens of millions of Americans in these straits now make it sound like all of a sudden it’s an issue because the people they know, the kinds of people they hang out with, people they consider to be worthy, are the kind of people needing help. I don’t think foodstamps are the best long term solution to hunger. I call for revising the federal nutrition assistant safety net and combining existing programs. Meeting the conservative goal of reducing beaurocracy with the progressive goal of spending that money on feeding hungry people. So that is one short term response, but really long term we need to go back to a time when we have living wage jobs, when people working fulltime could earn enough to feed their families.

SK: Let’s take a moment to talk about Los Angeles, a city known for Skid Row. But Hollywood, as well, this is a city that in so many ways mirrors the income disparities in the country at large. How hungry is Los Angeles?

JB: California is a very seriously hungry state, obviously because of it’s population size, it has the most hungry people in the country. The state has one in ten people without enough food. Here in Los Angeles it’s exacerbated because in Los Angeles county, only half of the people eligible for food stamps get them. In San Diego, where I was yesterday, it’s even worse. Only about 30 %. Part of the problem is state government. California is one of the four states in the union where you are actually fingerprinted to get food stamps. My supposedly liberal home state of New York is one of the other four. The other two are Arizona and Texas.

SK: Fingerprinted, why?

JB: Well, people claim it reduces fraud , but that’s hogwash. There are two reasons we have it: Number One, the company that owns the technology, lobbies to make sure they keep getting their millions to do this, and Two, it makes the KJKLJLJ?? sound tough: We’re cracking down on fraud. This doesn’t detect fraud. The four states that have fingerprinting for food stamps have higher rates of error in the food stamp program than the forty six states that don’t. It doesn’t detect fraud. And New York city, two years ago, out of a case load of 1.1 million people, they found a little over 30 cases of potential fraud. And I say potential because these authorities are so tough, that if they really found someone, they would have prosecuted. And to my knowledge they didn’t prosecute a single one. But let’s say that all thirty of those people were fraudulent. A rate of thirty out of 1.1 million is a far lower fraud rate than the United States Senate, the United States House of Representative and most legislative bodies, most governor’s mansions.

SK: Absolutely.

JB: A bill did pass the California legislature a number of years ago to end finger imaging and unfortunately, Governor Swartzenaggar vetoed it, claiming that it was somehow reducing fraud. That’s preposterous. Now I must say, if that was a bad decision a number of years ago, today, when the state is in a standstill because there is just no more state money left, spending millions of dollars of state money to keep away hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money that should be going to feed hungry California families is just about the dumbest public policy decision I’ve ever heard of.

SK: Hm. Not to mention the humiliation that is already involved when you ask somebody for their fingerprints.

JB: A, it’s humiliating and B, just a very practical matter… We advocates have worked with the federal government to reduce the number of times that people have to physically go to a social services office to apply for food stamps. And so we’ve developed systems where you can mail in the information, you can fax in the information, you can go to certain social service agencies, and submit it via online, and yet, when you require people to provide a finger image, even if they would have avoided the office visit for every other reason, you’re still saying, leave work, leave your kids, spend a day traveling by public transportation and sitting on a bench in a social services office just to prove you’re virtuous enough to get that dollar per meal benefit from the government. Even if you’re working.

SK: Joel, you have some suggestions for President Obama on how to tackle hunger and you’ve mentioned living wage jobs as a long term solution as well as some short term solutions. Joel, is this president term going to be the best opening that you’ve seen in recent times to address the issue of hunger, given that Obama has not only talked about domestic hunger, but is probably the, maybe the only President in U.S. history who has taken advantage of food stamps himself in his childhood.

JB: Absolutely. He’s a great example of what food stamps means. A lot of Americans and Californians assume that everyone’s on food stamps for life. The vast majority of folk in the food stamps program are only on it for a few months at a time when they are particularly down and out. I must say as an advocate only once in a blue moon am I ever willing to say Government’s moving in the right direction. I’m happy to say, this is that blue moon. The truth is, this president gets it. He’s the first president in U.S. history to have set a definite goal for ending child hunger. He set the goal of ending child hunger by 2015 as a down payment on ending all hunger in America. His stimulus bill provides over 20 billion dollars, that’s billion with a ‘b’, for anti hunger programs, including the food stamps program, now renamed the Snap program, and his controversial budget proposal would actually increase taxes on the wealthiest. To be really precise, restore previous levels of taxation on the wealthiest and use that money, as well as money saved by eliminating certain forms of corporate agri business welfare, use that money saved to end child hunger in America. It’s an incredibly progressive budget. I laugh when I hear conservative or so-called moderate commentators say, He’s trying to do too much. He’s trying to fix Healthcare. He’s trying to end hunger. How can he do that when he’s trying to get the economy back on track? That’s absurd. You’ve got to do these things. If any of us have seen an old war movie where the battleship is hit and the commander says okay, you people go to this side and fix the fire, you folks go to the other side and bail. He didn’t say Pick One, if you don’t put out the fire, the ship will burn. If you don’t bail the water, the ship will sink. America is a ship that is burning and sinking. We’ve got to take care of all these problems at once if we have any hope of digging ourselves out of this massive hole.

SK: And in fact on that issue then how can it help stimulate the economy to increase Government assistance? How can welfare programs not only, obviously, help keep people fed and healthy and surviving, but also actually put money back in the economy?

JB: A lot of the economists, including conservative economists, say that increasing spending on food stamps or snap benefits are one of the most effective economic stimuluses. Particularly compared to tax cuts for the rich. Let’s say that Donald Trump or Warren Bet(SP) get yet another tax cut. They may save it, instead of spending it. Or they may buy a yacht that is built overseas. Doesn’t do anything to create jobs here in America. Doesn’t do anything to boost America’s economy. When a low income person gets a food stamps benefit, you bet they’re going to spend it almost immediately at a supermarket.

SK: Because there’s no benefit to saving it.

JB: Right, and unlike electronics products or products that by and large aren’t created in the United States, the food that most low income people eat is grown, manufactured, processed, warehoused, shipped, and retailed in America. Every dollar spent on the food stamps program creates a dollar seventy of economic activity. Forget liberal conservative. If you are just concerned about the economic recovery of this country, you should support spending more money on food stamps benefits.

SK: So that’s still a short term thing. It’s the kind of thing that can help families for a few months at a time to get on their feet. Let’s talk about living wage jobs as a long term issue.Unions across the country have lobbied the government and were involved with the compaign to push him to sign the American Free Choice Act which would make it easier to unionize. Many would like that to living wage jobs. So talk about how living wage jobs is a reality that can be achieved in the United States and how that will specifically end hunger.

JB: I mean first I think it’s really important to understand the magnitude of our inequality of wealth. New York City, last year, had sixty four billionaires.

SK: In the city alone.

JB: In the city alone. Those sixty four people had a net worth that was coincidentally sixty four times the annual earnings of 1.7 million New Yorkers who lived in poverty. Now I still basically believe in the Capitolist system very strongly. I think other systems don’t work as well. I believe in a social safety net. Like a more Northern European Social Democrat. My Grandparents were able to come here and build a better world for me and for their children through hard work and determination. That is lost. We’ve replaced opportunity capitalism with croney capitalism. So there is definitely money out there. This claim that if we raise the minimum wage all these jobs will be lost is really ridiculous. Every time that the minimum wage has been raised in the decades and decades it’s existed, business claims it’s going to reduce jobs. I’ve not met a single person, in my whole life, who has lost their job because the minimum wage has been raised. On the other hand, there are millions of Americans, or tens of millions Americans, that every time the minimum wage is raised, get a raise. And in fact it’s not just people working at minimum wage, minimum wage is often a wage floor. So a lot of people have their wage set a dollar or two or three above the minimum wage, either formally or informally, so when the minimum wage goes up, it has a benefit helping lots more people. Now I certainly supported New York state raising it’s minimum wage, I support local wage ordinances, but there is sort of this excuse, oh, they can move elsewhere. That’s why I think the most effective strategy is the federal government doing it. Then someone can’t say, Oh, I moved from California to Nevada.

SK: Although there’s always the danger and really the reality that jobs can move out of a country altogether where one can’t enforce living wage issues. And Obama has stepped back on his critique of Nafta…. What do you think need to happen to keep living wage—to keep jobs here in the United States?

JB: Well, I think that argument is ridiculous about minimum wage, that you’ll send people overseas.

SK: Or you’ll send jobs overseas.

JB: Most of the jobs at the lower wage spectrum are service sector jobs that have to be local. They’re hotel employees. They’re restaurant employees. They’re people picking agricultural products here. People are going to stay in a hotel in the L.A. region, they’re visiting L.A. everyday, they’re not going to go home to Bangalore. It’s a pretty preposterous claim. Bill Clinton says in his memoirs, that he asked a worker once if he was worried that he’d lose his job if they raised the minimum wage and the worker said, I’ll take my chances. I think most workers believe that. And I do think we have enough resources now in the industrialized world to work together to raise wages throughout the world. I do think if we just look within our borders and don’t look at poverty overseas and don’t look at more broad based economic growth overseas we’re always going to have these problems.

SK: Finally, Joel, do you see the Obama administration going further than the welfare programs into proving or to taking action on the federal level to raise the minimum wage to a living wage… Do you see that happening within the next few years?

JB: Well, we certainly saw when in the campaign President Obama did pledge for an increase in the minimum wage. He has supported a lot of anti-poverty initiatives in his background, as a candidate, he had a very significant anti-poverty plan, which was very exciting. When he announced his middle class task force headed by Vice President Biden, he pointed out, he considered the work of the task force, not only helping middle class families but helping low income families struggling to get into the middle class. So I think that Obama would be the first to tell us as a former community organizer that it’s our job to push him to get these things done and it’s also our job to build the public support. Now I do think progressives should stop harping a bit… If we agree with him on 98% of his work. Sometimes we on the Progressive side, focus on the 2 % we disagree with and over coffee shops and call-in shows, we can spend inordinants amount of time, complaining about the things he’s not doing perfectly. There is a major war out between progressives and people who are against progressive change, and I think we have to stand together and fight to get the restoration on taxes of the wealthiest, to fight to get his budget plan in place. It’s not perfect, but if we spend all our time arguing with what we disagree with, we’ll lose the longer term picture that we do have the most progressive proposals in decades on the table and with a real possibility of getting them inacted.

SK: Joel Berg, best of luck with your book and thanks for joining us today.

JB: Thank you.

Special Thanks to Celina for transcribing this interview.