ABOVE: Charles “FU,IGM” Lane
If there is anything viler than a plump, well-fed, rosy-cheeked white guy getting all huffy about a USDA study on food insecurity because he sees poor people who are fat, I really can’t imagine what it would be. Well, maybe Jay Nordlinger describing the act of teabagging, but that’s an entirely different story.
Charles Lane, who took refuge at Freddie Hiatt’s House of Horrors after his unsuccessful stint at the New Republic as the editor for Stephen Glass, has decided that his effort to make the world a better place as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday is to argue that poor people need less food, not more. It is, perhaps, enough to make me wish that, if Lane should start choking on a huge-ass mouthful of turkey and dressing from his prodigiously over-burdened Thanksgiving spread, no one will know how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.
But is “hunger” widespread in America these days? That is the misleading impression created by press coverage of the USDA study. Headlines … made it sound as if famine stalks the land.
I think it should be a rule that before any person on the Washington Post editorial board writes a column on hunger they have to have spend as much time working in a food bank or at soup kitchen as they’ve spent eating during just one day. That would certainly have had at least a chance of stopping Lane from writing nonsense like this:
When you crack into the data, however, they don’t support this dire portrayal. The USDA report is based on a survey of 44,000 households. They were asked if, and how, a lack of funds affected their eating habits. The first question was whether the respondent had ever “worried” about running out of food in the previous 12 months — not actually run out of food, just worried about it. A “yes” answer counts as “food insecurity.” Adults are asked if they ever lost weight due to a lack of food money — but not how much weight, or what they weighed before. In theory, a 300-pound man who lost a pound could count as “food insecure.” Similarly, the questionnaire asks whether parents “cut” their kids’ portions at any point in the last year — without specifying what the portions were before and after.
For starters, this was just an out-and-out lie. Answering one of the questions, such as whether one worried about running out of food, wasn’t enough to be classed as food insecure. Nor would one fall into that category just because they served their kids two less strands of spaghetti as Lane falsely implies. There had to be positive responses to at least three questions. Oops. Ultimately, after having his ass shredded into tiny pieces by the commenters on his article, Lane issued a “clarification.” Ahem. “Clarification” — his word — means he stopped short of admitting that he just made the shit up out of whole cloth, evidently an extremely touchy subject for Lane.
To compound the elitist hackery, Lane also completely neglects the most significant parts of the study, which were the findings relative to households that were not just “food insecure” but which had “very low food security.” Of course, he couldn’t talk about the latter category when trying to create the impression that poor people were feasting on foie gras, cream sauces, and Kobe beef. To be “very food insecure,” you had to answer six of the ten questions affirmatively. And by the time a household has answered that many questions affirmatively that household is unlikely to include folks who have simply been forced to switch from beluga to ossetra caviar or to give up adding white truffles to their risottos.
Here are some of the things the study reports about households with very low food security
- 98 percent reported having worried that their food would run out before they got money to buy more.
- 96 percent reported that the food they bought just did not last and they did not have money to get more.
- 94 percent reported that they could not afford to eat balanced meals.
- 97 percent reported that an adult had cut the size of meals or skipped meals because there was not enough money for food.
- 88 percent reported that this had occurred in 3 or more months.
- In 93 percent, respondents reported that they had eaten less than they felt they should because there was not enough money for food.
- In 66 percent, respondents reported that they had been hungry but did not eat because they could not afford enough food.
Worse yet, households with very low food security jumped from 4.1% to 5.7% between 2007 and 2008, the highest jump in the last ten years. Figures for families at the poverty level are even more problematic. Between 2007 and 2008, the percentage of families at the poverty line that had very low food security jumped from 14% to 19.3%.
Never mind all that, Lane dismissed the whole problem because he sees fat people on the street.
Look at the people on the street today: Based on that, would you say that America has a hunger problem or an obesity problem?
Again, if Lane had read the study that he is so busy dismissing, he might have noticed that there is a connection between obesity and food security. Indeed, two of the questions in the food security survey focus on the inability of respondents to buy balanced meals. More on the connection between poverty, nutritious foods and obesity can be found here. People who have little money to spend on food aren’t able to buy nutritious foods, both because such foods are more expensive and because poor people often live miles from grocery stores, meaning that they have to buy most of their food in convenience stores where only three food groups are featured — soda, candy bars and snacks.
So, Mr. Lane, scoff all you will at people who are poor and fat. Prop that up in your own feeble mind as a justification for ignoring issues of food security, hunger and nutritional health among the poor. And, please, sir, go ahead and have a second helping of everything on Thanksgiving. Have another glass of that $60 bottle of Merlot. After all, you deserve it for all your hard work.
