I recently read a post on Foodista telling people to take the United Way's Hunger Challenge, which is basically trying to live for five days on the budget people on food stamps get. I'm not against hunger charities or educating people about hunger, but the Hunger challenge is just bogus in a number of ways.
Let's start with the pledge: "I pledge to join the Hunger Challenge starting April 20 and experience firsthand how it feels to survive on $7 a day." Plainly and simply, you can't experience firsthand how it feels to survive on $7 a day in the space of five days, mostly because it's only five days.
In my freshman year of college, I took a class on civil rights and the disabled to satisfy a humanities requirement, and the professor said something that stuck with me. All those experiments where you try to put yourself in someone else's shoes for a day or two are fine and dandy, but they miss one very important part of the experience... the knowledge that this isn't going to end anytime soon. You can spend a week in a wheelchair, but when it gets really hard, you have the knowledge you'll be able to get out of the wheelchair in X days as well as the choice of saying "I quit" and getting out now.
The hunger challenge is the same. If you're hungry or unhappy with the food on Wednesday, you know that you'll be able to go to your favorite sushi bar on Saturday night when it's all over. And if it gets too hard, you have the option of quitting and calling for a pizza. You can't know "firsthand how it feels" because you know exactly when this will end, you can quit it whenever you want, and you're never faced with the depressing situation of having it stretch before and behind you for months.
But the 5-day outlook makes things artificially harder too. This challenge has the fallacy of trying to buy all your spices and oils on a budget of $7 a day for five days. You cannot build a monthly budget that allows you to take a longer term outlook and stretch purchases like that (or a 10-lb bag of rice, or a large bag of beans, or a large sack of sugar) over a longer horizon.
I'm not saying that you can eat like a king on this budget, but that the 5-day period makes your situation both better and worse than people who have to live like this and it gives you a skewed concept of what it's like to be on food aid. It's basically dipping your toe in the coldest part of the pond and saying you know what it's like to swim in it.
A home economics class, where you had to prepare shopping lists for a family of four on this budget for a month, would give you a better concept of the rigor and planning that has to go into living like this. A five-day experiment like this just makes me think of upper middle class people who think they know what it's like to be poor because they drove through a slum and saw all the sad little people who just broke their hearts.
This is the foodie form of limousine liberalism and it just annoys me.
Entries (RSS)
Probably not surprisingly, I disagree with you. First, I firmly believe that even a partial experience of someone else' circumstances can be transformative...it is the basis of sympathy. In families with children, I think this experience would do a lot more to help them gain some understanding of poverty than some abstract concept.
More importantly, the issue is more complex than monthly budgets. As I'm sure you know, one of the biggest problems with hunger in America isn't one of calories, but rather nutrition. I spent part of my childhood in an environment where this challenge was very real in my home, fortunately my mother understood the importance of nutrition. Many of my friends in rural Upstate New York had even less means than us and little understanding of the importance of a balanced diet. Though they weren't hungry, as in an empty belly, they suffered a wide variety of serious physical ailments due to eating too much pasta and white bread and too few fruits and vegetables. Having people with more money work on the problem of figuring out how to create nutritious meals on a budget could yield some useful recipes and ideas.
In the end, I think more understanding, even if imperfect, is a good thing. It certainly seems better than doing nothing.
@Barnaby: I think it creates a false sympathy by going through a warped version of what these people are going through. It's also insulting to see someone who has advantages you don't take a token dip into your life to "get a feel" for what it's like to be you... especially if they're doing it just for the experience.
Honestly, why not harness all this energy with a more concrete outcome? Sympathy is completely intangible. Jesus, man, you've got an MBA from a top school. You of all people should know how to define goals and measure results.
I'm a diabetic. Do I want people to spend 5 days checking their blood sugar 6 times a day, avoiding sugary foods (or having to take an extra shot when they don't), and injecting themselves with saline to get a taste of what my life is like? No. If people were going to commit that much energy to diabetes, I'd want it focused on solutions, not a half-assed taste of the experience.
Results, not experiences.
I think that it often doesn't hurt and is better than nothing.
the knowledge that this isn't going to end anytime soon. -- that is the most grinding part.
Currently, as part of a diet I've been on for three and a half years or so, I eat a lot of yogurt. If you build a diet around yogurt in the United States, living on seven dollars a day isn't so bad. Bland, perhaps, but I've lost about 85 lbs or so (170s from 260s).
But for most people ...