Essay On Food Insecurity

In the past, the phrase “food insecurity” meant enough to me to donate canned goods to a local food drive, to donate time to bringing awareness to the phrase on my alma mater’s campus, and to donate manpower to help provide low-income members of the community valuable staples. I never thought it would come to mean the same to me as it did to the people I helped. I never imagined that for the last half of 2015, it would be my family for which the phrase “food insecurity” would describe. However, as schedules needed rearranging in order to fit pantry giveaway times, the phrase “food insecurity” became an ever-present force in my life. The phrase no longer represented a terrible aspect of society that needed to be eradicated—some abstract idea, something outside of my everyday life. Instead, “food insecurity” dominated my world, taking time, energy, and health into its grasp. For many persons in the United States and across the world, the phrase “food insecurity” means what it does to me now. It means deciding whether to buy food or pay bills; it means wondering how to observe a prescribed diet when one cannot afford the foods required for it; it means trying to make this or that item last for four weeks. It means keeping track of
More than this, we should, as a society, recognize the struggle that those with food insecurity face on a daily basis. We need to understand the fear that food insecurity brings to the insecure. We need to combat not only the nutritional fear of food insecurity by giving away food; we must also combat the emotional fear and shame that food insecurity may cause the insecure. It is society’s responsibility to say to the food insecure that they are no lesser of a person because of this insecurity while also providing access and opportunity to become food secure in order to diminish the power food insecurity has over those it