Posted on 08/18/2011 8:57:12 PM PDT by matt04
A national poll has found that approximately 25 percent of Springfield households with children report a hardship in affording food.
The report by the Food Research and Action Center, based in Washington, D.C., ranks the Springfield metropolitan area as having the 37th highest food hardship rate among the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country.
The rankings are based on data gathered in 2009 and 2010 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index project, the center reported.
The food hardship rates in Springfield for households with or without children are unconscionable, said Andrew Morehouse, executive director of The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, in a statement. These new data reaffirm what weve been seeing in our communities that more than 108,000 people in Western Mass. continue to struggle with hunger in these economic times, and that approximately one in three of all people served by the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts are children.
The poll showed that 25.4 percent of households with children in the Springfield metropolitan area report food hardships, and 19.1 percent of the households without children report hardships, according to the center.
The specific question asked was: Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?
Morehouse said the data gathered reinforce the fact that this is not the time to make our safety net weaker.
Morehouse said Congress and its recently established deficit reduction congressional committee, should protect programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), free and reduced price school meals, the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Nutrition Program, and federal emergency food assistance.
(Excerpt) Read more at masslive.com ...
extreme sarc/
Priorties have really changed.
A family member fell on hard times a while back. I was trying to help financially. I was told he had cut back to the bone.
Since I had paid several of his bills, I knew that he had a $175 cable bill and a $125 cell phone bill.
I was like..really dude? I don’t have those things myself. It hurt...but I cut him loose.
Pure unadulterated BS. Beans, rice, cornbread and grits is a perfectly adequate diet, and I have seen the time would have compared them to gourmet haute cuisine doings.
Hell, I am 72 years old, still have my grits and eggs for breakfast, love my cornbread and beans at least once a week.
And just in case of SHTF, have 100 lbs of rice 200 of beans, 50 each of corn meal and grits stored. Consider it cheap insurance, all dated, rotational used and replaced.
Having seen some real hard times makes me frugal to the nth degree.
I have seen her buy up to 70-80 lbs at a time. Some store's will try to limit her amount, but she will argue like hell if they did not have a limit advertised.
A national poll of a small city, what am I missing here.
I call BS, lift the covers and you’ll find the usual free lunch for kids, 365 days a year.
Do these people not know that one can actually put these little tiny things in the ground and - lo and behold! - food will magically appear in a few months?
Nonsense, there is a “childhood obesity epidemic.”
13 of those things on your list we don’t have.
“I used to find beef was cheaper at Costco, but not any more.”
Same here.
So 0.4% of the population do NOT have a refrigerator? Who are these people? There can’t be THAT many Grizzly Adams’ out there.
MAybe they could ask BO to donate a couple of those extra hudred thousand dollars he said he has to the hungry.
Still wondering what he did with Nobel Money?
Oh, my! Love those stand-alone freezers!
I’ve stocked up on charcoal. Never know when the power grid will go down. Hee, hee.
“But the bigger point is that food prices are thru the roof.
Anyone that has been to a supermarket lately knows that.”
It is a good thing that items like food, clothing and shelter don’t count on the inflation index, or we would have some serious inflation. I guess they just count essentials like budgie grit, styrofoam packing peanuts and pine straw.
If their diets are being funded with money taken from you at gunpoint, they should be. Non-working "poor" people should not have higher standards of living than actual working people.
it’s such a hardship shoving the last twinkie from the box in your fat mouth for lunch!
These stories are pure bs. Nearly everytime I see an obese person or child they are poor.
You don’t know what I appreciate!
You don’t know what I appreciate!
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