To donate to the 2023 Food-a-Thon, go here or see below.
In Finland, all students from preschool through 12th grade get a free lunch, no matter where they attend school. Finland was the first country in the world to pioneer the free lunch in 1948. They call it “an investment in learning.” Good nutrition is indistinguishable from a good education.
The investment pays off. Finland’s public schools year after year rank as the world’s best. There are many reasons for that, including a rejection of standardized testing, homework, private schooling and such things as “teacher accountability,” America’s routine insult to teachers’ professionalism. But also central to the success is the peace of mind afforded students through free lunches.
American schools have long ago stopped ranking among the world’s best. But in our quest to make it back at least into the top 10, one of the easiest steps is to enact a universal free meal program in public schools.
The Obama administration got us halfway there when it created the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids initiative (more cumbersomely known in government lingo as the Community Eligibility Provision of the National School Lunch Program). Basically, any school or district that shows that on average 40 percent of its students are food insecure can automatically qualify for free lunches for all students. The average can be calculated on a school-by-school basis or on a districtwide basis. Joe Biden is trying to lower that threshold to 25 percent. It would essentially mean that all public schools in the country, except maybe in Beverly Hills and Bethesda, will qualify. Starting this fall, all Flagler County public schools qualified.
Today’s Food-a-Thon on WNZF, the second annual attempt to raise $200,000 that can be leveraged into $1 million for the Grace Community Food Bank, should make us realize that as wonderful as food drives are, the mere fact that we need them proves that this country is failing its neediest on a larger scale than we admit: the local food bank serves 4,700 families a month. In this land of bounty and freedom we have institutionalized poverty as indifferently as we have mass incarceration.
Step back a moment and take stock of the paradox. On one hand a community can and should take pride in its willingness to rally for those in need (as long as we don’t pat ourselves on the back too much: there’s an unseemly element of self-congratulations and self-promotion when the neon around the giving flashes brighter than Christ’s caution against “all those who exalt themselves.”) On the other hand, there should not be such things as food drives–not in a country that presumes itself wealthy and civilized. There should not be food insecurity, period. Basic nutrition is a human right, as ought to be universal food assistance where necessary and free school meals whether necessary or not.
Biden’s efforts aside, we’re nowhere near that. Instead, we get congressional Republicans pushing proposal after proposal to cut or reduce food stamps eligibility, impose draconian work requirements on recipients or time limits on benefits. None of it would address our hunger problem. All of it retreads ideological cruelty against the poor going back to the days when Ronald Reagan could joke that if 17 million people went to bed hungry every night, “they were all on a diet.” That’s what this deity of the right said of hunger– “hunger, from which it is impossible to escape even in dreams,” as Solzhenitsyn put it around the same time–later to leverage that joke into a war on welfare still taking prisoners today.
The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank run by 14 white men and one white woman, thinks Biden’s free-lunch program is a waste because it also feeds kids who don’t need it. J.D. Vance, the Ohio Republican senator whose campaign “was almost singlehandedly bankrolled” by the billionaire Peter Thiel, and who rode his self-righteous Hillbilly Elegy‘s creation story to Fox-approved fame, spits on food stamp recipients as “living off government largesse” while “speaking on their cell phones,” a stereotype as old and as malicious as Reagan’s welfare queen fabrications.
These days the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank whose mercenaries write copiously and derisively about food assistance for the poor, daily treats its employees “to an elaborate buffet with appropriately white-shoe fare like prime rib, crab cakes and housemade beignets,” according to the New York Times.
You won’t hear any think tanks complaining about tax-subsidized Business junkets centered on gluttony, or how 40 percent of all food produced in the United States is wasted on the assembly line, in restaurant kitchens, on corpulent patron’s plates and in overindulgent households, or how business meals continue to be tax deductible, which reminds me of a line by Ted Kennedy in his famous 1980 convention speech: “Instead of cutting out school lunches, let us cut off tax subsidies for expensive business lunches that are nothing more than food stamps for the rich.”
On the other hand, we can always continue living with mile-long caravans cuing up for the Grace Community Food Pantry every Saturday and Sunday on U.S. 1.
We can donate once a year in summer as we do now, right before election season when we cast votes or shower praise for the likes of Paul Renner and Travis Hutson, who have happily rejected expanding Florida’s federal Medicaid benefits, did nothing to stop 250,000 Floridians from getting booted off Medicare this spring, and ensured that Florida’s unemployment benefits remain the stingiest in the country.
We can applaud Mike Waltz, Flagler’s congressman, who railed against expanding child tax credits and food assistance even during Covid and supports his party’s proposals to curtail food stamps.
Then we can go back to congratulating ourselves for being generously community-minded and caring, leaving it to food banks and the catch-all absolution of thoughts and prayer to pick up the pieces. Finland, of course, can stick it.
Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
The July 14, 2023 Food-a-Thon: Flagler Radio and the Grace Community Food Pantry are partnering to raise $200,000 so the food pantry can buy over$1 Million dollars in food for families in need in Flagler County, with the Food-a-Thon broadcasting across Flagler Broadcasting’s radio stations from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Stop into the radio station and drop off your donation, take a tour, come say something on the air and help raise $200,000 for the Grace Community Food Pantry.
Ways to get Involved:
Online: gracecommunityfoodpantry.com and click “donate”
Text: Your name and Pledge amount to 386-361-4227
Call In: 386-283-6770 or 386-627-5529
Stop By: Flagler Studios at 2405 E Moody Blvd, Bunnell, FL 32110 with your cash, check or card donation.
Check out Facebook for more information:
https://www.facebook.com/FlaglerFoodAThon
dan beasley says
no one should go hungry in this land we call America. If someone works and needs a helping hand then they should be helped. What gets me is the line on US1 every Sat. The amount of 75000 dollar cars waiting in line amazes me. Brother if you can afford to drive a Merceds or Lexus you don;t need a handout. Let the folks that actually need the food get in line and receive it.
joe says
Appearances can be deceiving. Judging by the car they’re driving today doesn’t necessarily reflect their current condition. Several years ago, I was out of work for about 3 years…but I still had the used BMW I had purchased during my time in a week-paying job, along with decent clothes and even a nice watch.
Seeing me use my food stamp card at that time, some likely would have made the same assumption about me. But they would have been just as wrong as you are about the blanket assumption that anyone in what you deem too much of a car is a scammer.
Bill C. says
I have an expensive car and i drove my neighbor who wanted to pickup for himself and his 85 year old Mother. Next time he asks I will be sure to take my beat up Ford. There is an air of pompousness in making judgements based on what a poorer person drives up in or what she has in her shopping cart. his or her choice to stand in a line for food is their choice and since there is so much food is wasted in America, food banks help rescue tons of edibles that otherwise would be tossed.
Pissed in PC says
You would think they would make a list of seniors that need the help but don’t drive or the disabled who can’t sit in a car waiting in the long line (I’m the latter) and would have a way to get them delivered to us. Maybe something to work on soon.
Do you need help??? says
if you need someone to take you over there, I will do it. I tried doing a list but people abused the system so now they require an in person appearance
Pissed in PC says
I thank you but I can’t sit in a car over 30 minutes with my bad back.
Ray W. says
Thank you for your considerate and helpful effort. I am sure that your neighbor appreciates your help and care.
I suppose that every time you drive your expensive car, someone who randomly sees you driving judges you in a negative manner. I am reminded of the thought experiment conducted on numerous people in a statistically reliable manner. People, when posed with a choice of either earning $50k per year when everyone else earns $25k per year or earning $100k per year when everyone else earns $200k per year, more often than not decide that it would be better to earn $50k per year.
Envy, jealousy, desire? Each is a powerful possible motive for those among us who look at others and wish ill on them. When I asked my oldest son which option he would choose, he immediately chose the $100k option.
Ray W. says
I suppose the most apropos response to your comment, and to Greg’s (below), is that your comment says more about you than it says about those who enter a line to a food bank.
Seeing an expensive car on a roadway leading to a food bank proves only that there is an expensive car on a roadway leading to a food bank. It is a serious flaw in reason that allows you to extrapolate what you extrapolate from that simple fact. You don’t know who is driving the car, you don’t know the circumstances of a passenger in the car, if there is one, and you don’t know who owns the car. As other replies to your comment reveal, you might be denigrating the good Samaritan among us, the loving family member and neighbor, the suddenly vulnerable among us.
Gina Weiss says
We can then say to this Heritage Foundation who claim that the free lunch program is a waste because
some students who are more fortunate enough in life than others don’t need it that extremely wealthy people
don’t need to collect social security benefits because they don’t need it too.
Greg says
America is the land of greed and corruption. I’ll bet that 80% of the people in the drive through are only there because the food is free. The other 20% really need the food. I see some pretty new and fancy cars in the food line when we pass the area on Rt 1. It’s sad either way than thanks to the churches that do this service.
Ray W. says
Once again, thank you, Mr. Tristam, for everything you do for the FlaglerLive community.
I am reminded of the quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln (paraphrased): All great problems are unsolvable. If a problem can be solved, it cannot be a great problem.
We, as a community, as a county, as a state, as a region, as a nation, can solve the problem of hunger. We just don’t, somehow, choose to do so in a way that is positive. Any help for the poor among us prompts protest, indignation, angst and worry about creeping communism or socialism.
One of my earliest memories is of my mother crying into my father’s shoulder as he held her in our family kitchen. My mother, a college graduate with a degree in education, had volunteered to teach elementary age minority children in a segregated school in Daytona Beach, beginning in 1960, so I could have been barely three at the time, though I likely was four. She was apologizing to my father because she had spent all the money she carried in her purse once again to buy lunch for some of her students. She said she just couldn’t stand to see the hunger in their eyes; she just knew they hadn’t eaten since the lunch she had purchased the day before. Decades later, after my mother died of cancer, I spoke of this memory with my father. He recalled holding Mom in the kitchen as she cried.
I am not saying I have the answer to this solvable problem, nor do I claim to know what would be the best answer of the many possible good answers that might exist. I am saying that we can solve it. I know that as a young child, I lived during a time when we as a nation felt it acceptable to allow those who are the most unfortunate among us starve, perhaps because that was how things were done, perhaps because callousness reigned, perhaps even malice. These options cannot possibly be the best option; they are not even good options. Yet, somehow, it was accepted as permissible. Allowing people to starve in never anything but a bad choice. No amount of rationalization will ever make such a choice a good one.
The author of Albion’s Seed, a critically acclaimed history of the four migratory pathways from different regions of England to different regions of America, writes of the widely held practice in Puritan communities of enacting a poor tax each year to help those in need. He writes that when compared to tax rates in other regions of early colonial America, Puritan communities had a tax rate some three to four times higher than that of more southern communities. John Adam’s letters, which his family released in the 1950’s for use by historians, reveal that he was elected to his community’s town council almost immediately after he graduated from college. One of his first actions was to participate in the annual discussion and eventual vote on that year’s tax rate to support the poor and unfortunate among his neighbors. He didn’t complain about it; it was an accepted fact of life. It did not cause angst, nor was it either socialism or communism. It was community responsibility.
protonbeam says
Well it’s just like the PLO and Palestinian crisis – I mean Yasser Arafat dies with an estimated 3-5-Billion in his bank account of money that was supposed to build schools and help starving people. There is simply too much political and financial incentive to hold people back so they are forced to be dependent on the Government or a particular organization – because their allegiance is worth more than the dollars – after all power is an ultimate goal of so many
We absolutely have the capability and money to end so many problems – but without them a political party couldn’t “save us”
Ban the GOP says
Clearly tax breaks for millionaires is of more importance to the republicans than starving people they are just a nusance and they dont want or need their votes. People of flagler can say what they want but I remember the homeless camp behind the library; rememeber they had the good ol boy sheriff kick them out and declare they are building a property there even though they didnt, just an excuse to run off the less fortunate. Homelessness is problem throughout America not just in “democratic” cities where there are basic services they can use like public transport or food banks. Theres plenty of money for services like unemployment, food assistance, rent assistance, ect problem is republicans sabatoged them all to prevent anyone getting something they didnt deserve. Screw up the program for 10 million people to prevent 2 individuals from committing fraud.Sound about right? In this state the very first month your unemployed you better get reemployed instantaniously or be asking for money on the corner cause state unemployment doesnt even cover 50% of the average rent let alone food, health care, utilities, insurance, internet, ect… Florida and Mississippi are the two worst states in the nation for unemployment. So you can imagine this problem will get way worse before it gets better as the Rs have every position in the state under lockdown and they could care less about the poor. Companies today have all the rights and can terminate you for being purple or simply cause they can hire someone cheaper or for no reason at all and you have no recourse but to start over and try your best not to fall in down the trap of poverty as it charges interest. But Elon needs another super yacht so forget you poor person who cant afford dinner tonight. If your old and poor at least you get social programs like social security and medicare and thats way more than what the younger poor get. Higher wages you say well good new for us is the republicans have voted that down for nearly a century.
Since 1938 the minimum wage has been increased “23 times” and was raised “21 times during Democratic congresses, and only twice during Republican ones.”
So sorry kids your schools are about to be a whole lot poorer and they cant afford to offer you food, just drink some more leaded water it will be ok or so were told.