Hungry? Be Thankful for your Feast.

Not everyone will feast this Thanksgiving

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the latest rates of domestic food insecurity and hunger (labeled by the department's experts as "very low food security").

In 2007, the numbers stood at 12.1 percent of all Americans, about 36 million of our brothers and sisters.

On November 16, the department announced that 49 million Americans were now food insecure, the highest figure since the department started measuring domestic hunger in 1997. It was a figure so appalling that it even shocked long-time anti-hunger advocates.

The revelation that there are that many hungry Americans will no doubt prompt government agencies to tout the safety net virtues of the food stamp program and the Department of Agriculture's other 14 food assistance programs.

Now giving more than 36 million Americans (yes, also a record) a not terribly generous $1.30 per meal, food stamps will again be revealed for what they are and are not: a pretty good way to keep people from starving, but a failure when it comes to addressing the root causes of food insecurity, namely poverty.

Sure we do. As grim as these statistics are, they are sure to be trumped by the Thanksgiving symphony orchestrated by the nation's 205 private food banks, including Upper Des Moines Opportunity and churches and other groups around our community. Their pleas for help over radio, cable, church and school announcements and big boxes in the entryways of businesses tell us that demand is up, the shelves are bare.

I have come to believe that continuous growth in these efforts are dramatic and expensive failures. Not only do they not end hunger, they operate in illogical defiance of the principles of American individualism and self-reliance.

As if asking the victims of our failed national and global food systems to accept their fate--to be poor, to be hungry--isn't enough, we also ask them to forgo their innate human desire to challenge that fate. "Don't worry," say the agencies and the charities, "Do as we say; fill out the forms, stand in the lines, and you shall be fed."

These programs do have virtue -- they have so far prevented food riots in this country, but they do not lift their clients out of poverty.

Nor do they help people find their democratic voice, build confidence and wealth, or otherwise take a stand against their poverty.

Instead, most food programs implicitly encourage people "to shun the rugged battle of fate," as Ralph Waldo Emerson admonished us not to do 150 years ago.

When faced with the annual Thanksgiving appeal and the knowledge that hunger runs rampant, even here in our bucolic Lakes area, donating canned goods to Upper Des Moines Opportunity becomes the obvious choice.

When we balance compassion with thoughtful analylsis and a desire to create a sustainable world, new choices emerge.

As citizens of communities, let's look for programs like City Fresh in Cleveland:

http://cityfresh.org/

the Sustainable Food Center in Austin:

http://www.sustainablefoodcenter.org/

or the Food Policy Council in Boulder:

http://www.bouldercounty.org/openspace/a...

to support.

Instead of enabling the continuation of poverty, they empower people to help themselves.

As citizens of a country whose gap between rich and poor exceeds that of most developed nations, let's hold our government accountable for its failure to address our gross economic inequalities.

Remember, food stamps only manage poverty, they don't end it.

And as consumers of products and services, let's also hold our low-wage corporations accountable.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt took no prisoners with his warning that, "No business which depends on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country ... by living wages I mean the wages of a decent living."

As our common day of grace approaches, and as we learn more about the dire circumstances of those left out of the American dream, let's ponder again the ways we might end hunger by ending poverty, and the ways that the voiceless among us can be heard.