From 11am - 2pm today, our AB YSOP team raised funds for our service trip by selling cookies and root bear floats at UCSD's Library Walk! Thank you to all who came out and supported us!
Familiarizing ourselves with the unknown tends to be quite the task when we are often not handed exposure opportunities to the issue. Often we dismiss an issue as nonexistent due to lack of awareness and therefore cut back on the value of its importance. Hunger is a social justice issue very prevalent in America that Congressmen, politicians, and regular citizens like us tend to underestimate the circumstances of. We forget that chronically starving Americans exist because 1) we commonly associate hunger with underdeveloped countries, and 2) because we immediately see an over abundance of food that is fairly easy to obtain here at home. The truth of the matter is that the American population of people suffering from hunger continues to rise along with healthy food prices and lack of strong political support towards the solution.
Food stamps, food banks, and public assistance prove to be of some help, but as emphasized in the documentary, political red tape proves to stand as a barrier to families for example who aren't rich enough to afford adequate amounts of healthy foods everyday, but simultaneously aren't poor enough to receive public assistance.
Both the flaws and large part of the solution to this social justice issue lies within the power of the federal government. One flaw for instance is that they increased funding for a larger budget for each public school student's lunch, but cut Food Stamps in order to do so according to the documentary. However the federal government has the power to be a primary driver of the solution by creating policies that require all supermarkets to sell healthy foods, or for those on public assistance, provide an additional incentive for gaining employment opportunities as opposed to minimizing existing federal aid for example. I additionally believe that pride of wealth amongst various politicians is a large contributor to the increasing American hunger population.
More Americans need to be aware of the highly problematic social justice issue of hunger and this documentary is a great educational source for it. Most of us think that the problem does not exist because most of us do not regularly see it. An INEXISTENT and for some, an IMPOSSIBLE solution is created via out of sight, out of mind. Once you view this documentary however the issue becomes very much of EXISTENCE, and so does the belief of a POSSIBLE solution. Written by: Valerie Juguilon