Hunger in America is a very serious problem that many families face every day. This can be due to a variety of reasons including lack of income or societal status. In some places in the world they don’t even have grocery stores with legitimate produce and healthy items because they would just get robbed. The only food that is available is fast food which is leading to an increase in diabetic cases over the United States.

Out of the families that do rely on food banks to put a meal on the table 33% of households have at least one family member with diabetes, while the national average is only 9.4%. That is 23.6% higher than the national average. (USA Today) This is due to the lack of fresh healthy food that is available to them, so families have to resort to paying for a lot of cheap unhealthy food just to keep their families fed.

This is why food drives and food banks are so vital to so many people throughout the United States, and there just still are not enough.

So what does this have to do with BFA?  There are many students at BFA who are signed up for free and reduced lunch.  There are also students who go home and do not have enough food to eat.

Some current students had some thoughts about the subject of food and hunger.

When asked about whether or not people in general donate to the food drive Karyn Montague (‘18) said:  “Not as much as they should.”

She said that the best way to try and entice more people to want to participate in food drives would be to make it some sort of incentive based competition, such as a free homework slip or a parking spot on campus.

Another student said she hadn’t donated since elementary school.

“I did once for Operation Happiness,” Taylor Lavigne (‘18) said.

This really is an issue because most people, especially youths, don’t realize the epidemic going on in a lot of families today because they never see it as an issue. For them food is always on the table so they never see it as a problem that needs to be fixed.

This becomes an even bigger issue when it comes to our military, these men and women have dedicated a part of their life to upholding the laws and morals of this country and 25% of them either need total or at least partial help putting food on the table. That is a total of around 620,000 households. Our soldiers deserve to at least be fed for their service. (USA Today)

Out of all the families in America that depend on the national food bank for food 26% are black, 20% are Hispanic, 43% are white and 11% are “other.” (NPR)

46 million people in this great country still struggle to get enough to eat, 15.3 million of those are children. A bright side is that very few people in America actually die from starvation, though that number is under 7,000 per year. (feedingamerica.org)

This country is a great country, but is it really possible to count ourselves as one of the world’s greatest nations while so many of our citizens don’t know where their next meal is coming from?