TIME GOES BY | GRAY MATTERS: Hunger and Shame

By Saul Friedman
My mother, may she rest in peace, would have called this a shanda, the Yiddish word for a shame, something you’re not proud of and that you’d rather your neighbor doesn’t find out.

So shame is what I thought about and felt when I read the latest survey by academic researchers for the Meals on Wheels Association of America. It found that in 2008, at the beginning of this Great Recession, nearly six percent of Americans over the age of 60 - more than 2.7 million - suffered from hunger. Not just the lack of enough food, but hunger. In the United States of America in the 21st Century.

But the deeper shame was in the 2009 survey which found that the trend upward was especially discernible between 2001 and 2007 - the years of tax cuts for the wealthy and a couple of pointless wars - when the number of older people (especially women) experiencing hunger rose by 700,000 to upwards of 3 million.

Now, as a result of the recession, when many programs for the aged and poor were reduced, partly to pay for those tax cuts, that figure has reached to over 3 million and with unemployment more than 10 percent, the figure is still climbing.

The highest concentration of hunger risk among older people are in those states with low or no income taxes and fewer social insurance programs: Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina and Oklahoma. These states, most of them conservative, also have higher concentration people with only a high school education, plus a higher number of blacks and Hispanics and older people living in poverty. The south remains the most ignorant and badly-led part of the country.
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