I don’t consider the Hoover people to be speaking for all Conservatives any more than I think that Jesse Jackson speaks for all Blacks or Code Pink speaks for all Lesbians.

I didn’t spot that last bit the first time around, but did you have a particular point in implying Code Pink was a lesbian group? Because they’re a women’s anti-war group, not a particularly lesbian one. I expect there are lesbians in Code Pink, but the group doesn’t identify as a lesbian group, offer membership exclusively or predominately to lesbians, or advocate for specifically gay and lesbian causes. The name Code Pink was chosen as a reference to the color-coded terror alerts, and as a color generally seen as feminine.

Julie, Jim’s been banned, if that helps.

One the one hand, are overweight people on food stamps starving to death and the American version of the strictly rice eating asians?

As the one who brought up the strictly rice-eating Asians (specifically Filipinos) I’ll say that while overweight food stamp-recipients aren’t starving to death, they are likely to be pretty well equivalent to the Filipinos living almost entirely on rice. The people I was talking about weren’t the ones starving in the street (you do get people starving in the street, and they tend to be extremely skinny except for the stomach), but rather people a step above abject poverty who can provide something to eat on a regular basis, but not anything nutritiour. Frequently just rice with sugar or salt thrown in for flavor, and enough meals of real food so they don’t collapse.

They are, like the food-stamp recipients you mentioned, malnourished, with lower life expectancy, more sickness, more child development issues, and periodically hungry, but not starving hungry. And they tend to be visibly overweight. This is a recognized problem in the Philippines, because the number of people starving in much of the country is relatively low, and having a large underclass of the malnourished and sickly poor is bad for the nation as a whole. Aside from the human suffering involved, it leads to increased infant mortality (an unhealty pregnany woman’s less likely to have a healthy baby), more health problems, more health expenditures, damage to the economy (less productivity and less ability to improve their economic situation), and more people trapped in poverty.

The whole reason I brought up the example is to show that the US, the US benefit system, and the overweight poor weren’t a special case. Overweight-but-malnourished poor people are a recognized problem even in countries that provide less of a social safety net.

I just said that (1) someone who is obese is not likely to be desperately poor

According to the WHO, just over 50% of the world’s population is either “overweight” or obese. I don’t remember the exact figure, but something like 60% of the world’s population live on under $2 a day. Notice there’s at least a 10% overlap in those figures (though I bet it’s a much greater overlap). I doubt the folks living on $2.01 a day, the lucky bastards, are living high on the hog either.

There’s another dimension to this issue that I haven’t seen raised directly, also, and that is that food is not simply fuel for the body. Food is cultural — what, how much, when, and why a person eats are determined by factors much more significant (to them) than their calorie and nutrient values. Many poor in SE Asia, for instance, stretch their diets with high-calorie, low-vitamin rice (feeling full is important) and many offer high-status members of the family (like first sons) the choicest foods, leaving lower-status members to get fat on less nourishing food (or, in some places, to waste away for want of calories). Americans get much, much more from a trip to McDonald’s, or from a bag of Oreos, than calories — but little of that “extra” is actually nutrition. Many middle- and upper-class conservatives want poor folks to be food accountants — aside from lacking the actual information and knowledge to do this, the poor are not any likelier to think about food this way than are the rich or well-off (and “think” is itself a poor choice of words — we “feel” about food much more than we “think” about it).

Mythago said to me:

Bruce, unfortunately there are lots of people who want the poor to stay that way–because they’re not “deserving”, or because they offer a convenient outlet for punitive feelings (c.f. the remarks above about food stamps at Whole Foods).

In response, I must say that deserving or not, assistance is not and will never be a way to make someone “not poor”. However, I will certainly grant you the benefit of the doubt that was not exactly what you meant. I certainly understand the punitive feelings part, but I doubt that even the most hardened heart (looking over in Jim’s direction) would want poor people around just to criticize or follow to the pastry dessert section of the store.

Jim did have a point about the limitations on the types of foods and items that may be purchased with food stamps, which did put a hole in some of the arguments here and in the original article, however to ignore the realities of nutrition vs. price vs. monthly food stamp allowance is disingenuous.

I think it’s very easy to get passionate about this issue. So passionate that it becomes easy to inflate the direness of any given situation, pro and con. One the one hand, are overweight people on food stamps starving to death and the American version of the strictly rice eating asians? Of course not. Malnourished, probably yes, lower life expectancy, yes, more sickness, yes, more child developmental issues, yes, hungry at the end of the month when the stamps don’t go far enough, probably yes. On the other hand, are people throwing big parties on the money they’ve saved on food, driving “welfare Cadillacs”, and deciding to quit their job to take the summer off and go on food stamps? Of course not.
This isn’t Europe!

You keep referring to “abject poverty”, how is that different from plain old poverty?

Abject poverty is a global standard for the most extreme poverty. It means less than a dollar a day US. The complication is that when it comes to people in the developing world, there’s a possibility for some of them, under some circumstances to provide themselves the survival basics. This article has an interesting description of a family of six living off about $450 a year, and this one has an account of people doing less well. But because of different food prices, what’s minimally adequate to feed, clothe and shelter six people couldn’t feed one person in the US for a year. So abject poverty, in the technical sense, really isn’t a useful standard to apply to the US.

Poverty in the US is usually less extreme than in the developing world, but that’s hardly a reason to write it off, or ignore it. If over a tenth of the population has trouble providing regular meals, that’s worth addressing.