the War on Everything (though.... shit... they call this the "war on obesity," don't they?).
Kind of a weird parallax though when you think about the fact that apparently a lot of Americans are starving and yet obesity rates are high
Must be all the junk food or the wasted food somehow going to Lesbian obesity studies instead of more productive ventures like general obsesity studies or simply food distribution
(would say aid but if people are fat and others are starving perhaps its more logistcal)
http://www.epa.gov/foodrecovery/Social Benefits
Feed People, Not Landfills - An estimated 50 million Americans do not have access to enough food. Organizations can donate safe and healthy food to a food bank or food rescue organization and both reduce food sent to landfills and feed those in need.
I have a really hard time believing the US hunger statistics. I've never heard of a state where their food stamp/SNAP program isn't unreasonably generous, ignoring WIC and free/subsidized school lunch. We took SNAP for a few months in PA when we had our daughter and they gave us something ridiculous like $600/mo. Unless you're only buying frozen pizzas at a gas station, I don't know how anyone could go hungry. I'd say there're sure cases where people fall through the cracks due to the income requirements (among others, certainly including citizenship) in some states, but 50M... I just don't see it, and I've lived in poor areas both urban and rural... but furthest South I've lived was in North Carolina.
As a kid, my mom had a rough patch where she wouldn't have qualified for food stamps (as they were back then), so instead, we simply went to a local organization where they bring a semi around each week and let people take as they need - no fuss, and it was decent food, too, not just potatoes and rice. This kind of generosity doesn't exist everywhere, though, surely.
World Hunger claims a more believable 7M figure which I don't mean to suggest is "good" or reasonable given the government has far more than enough money to cover the remaining hungry (which, really, would be an increase looking, relatively, like peanuts compared to US "defense" spending, or the amount we spend on the War on Drugs), but I don't think it's really a matter of money, just assholes in government "taking a stand" (on a very limited number of issues).
There's plenty of fat to be cut in government budgets, too. A few years ago, the local school district received ~$140k to give 6th graders iPads. Outside Apple products having very little market share in business (and their computer tech courses, without reason, spend a large portion of time having kids follow Photoshop tutorials), a large percentage of kids in this rural community don't have access to broadband Internet access. Just imagine the economic opportunity available to kids, and the ability to retain graduates, if the money went toward just expanding DSL access instead (kids here currently, without possibility of remote work, have the options of stripping, cleaning our elders' shit, cleaning horse shit, and working at the local union-hostile factory which treats employees like cattle). I ramble, again, only to suggest it's really not about money, just malice and incompetence.