“How does your body know you’re full?”, a TED-Ed video by Hilary Coller. Animation by Oleh Shcherba.
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Yesterday at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (R, WI-1) addressed the faithful and told them of his new platform. He wants to steal school lunches from poor kids.
Mr. Ryan told a story he says he got from Eloise Anderson, but the story was stolen, too.
“She once met a young boy from a poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. But he told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch—one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.”
“The left is making a big mistake …. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity, they want a life of self determination.”
Mr. Ryan’s policy is neatly summed up by Paul Krugman: “Let Them Eat Dignity.” Oh, and the book the story was swiped from? A portion of sales goes to a campaign that “connects kids in need to effective nutrition programs like school breakfast and summer meals” and opposes Ryan’s cuts to food stamps.
Mr. Ryan knows nothing about lunches for the poor, but he’s an authority on a poor lunch. Nutrition-poor, anyway. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “One of his summer jobs in college was as an Oscar Mayer salesman in Minnesota, peddling turkey bacon and a new line called ‘Lunchables‘ to supermarkets.” He once drove the Wienermobile for Oscar Meyer, and that was his last honest job. He’s peddled his bologna as a DC political hack ever since.
More:
“Paul Ryan accidentally makes the case against means-testing,” Ned Resnikoff, MSNBC
“Paul Ryan’s Soul Food,” Ed Kilgore, Political Animal
“A story too good to check: Paul Ryan and the story of the brown paper bag,” Glenn Kessler, Washington Post Fact Checker
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Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Congressional Republicans want to starve food stamp deadbeats while rewarding hard-working American farmers with a Farm Bill. That’s a noble story, but it has a few holes in it. Most “farmer” recipients of those rewards are Agribiz millionaires, and the ‘help’ they get is ‘insurance’ for artificially high prices and big profits. And those SNAP ‘deadbeats’? Most are elderly, children, or disabled; the rest are the working poor who need help to get adequate nutrition because GOP politicians routinely defeat Living Wage bills. Further irony: Many of those low-wage workers are in the food industry. These facts don’t alter Republican plans to bring back the Victorian workhouse.
Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher (R, TN-8) wants to cut $4 billion from the SNAP food subsidy program for the poor. Since Mr. Fincher’s political party crashed the economy, 47 million people — one in seven Americans — get this meager food aid, but the Congressman wants them to go hungry. He thinks God does, too, and backs up that assertion by quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.”
Given the record of this obstructive do-nothing Congress, it really sounds like the Bible wants us to shut down dining services in the U.S. House of Representatives.
As Americans enjoy food and family at Thanksgiving dinner today, many will have an image of a Norman Rockwell painting in mind, an image of domestic warmth and plenty. But that painting was commissioned as a magazine illustration for a 1943 Saturday Evening Post issue based on one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. The painting’s name: “Freedom From Want.” It was paired with an astounding essay by poet and novelist Carlos Bulosan, whose work and life deserve more attention.
FDR’s speech had been delivered two years earlier, while the country, still emerging from the Depression, was burdened with the expense of providing support for allies in a war the U.S. had not yet entered. Today the speech is remembered for the Four Freedoms, but it also recognized that “there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.”
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources plans to process tons of fish and donate it to area food banks. The fish: Asian carp, several aggressive, invasive species bent on world domination. They can weigh over 50 pounds and jump 8 feet in the air, knocking over fishermen. They also destroy underwater habitat, vacuum up plankton and algae, crowd out other fish species, and have no natural enemies.
DNR pays commercial fishermen to take Asian carp out of the Illinois River. The result: Asian carp haven’t taken over Lake Michigan yet, and the state has a heap of dead fish, 150 tons in the last year.
World food prices are rising at a frightening rate, resulting in uprisings, hunger and death. U.S. government policy diverts food into the nation’s gas tanks by subsidizing production of corn ethanol, and not enough American farmland is planted in corn to meet demand. Millions go hungry or starve, governments are destabilized, and world food prices continue to rise.
How does American industry respond? It turns corn into kitty litter.
The logo for the Vegan soup kitchen movement “Food Not Bombs” is remarkably similar to symbols for British chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution crusade and Mark Bittman’s old New York Times blog. Coincidence?
Logo-napping is small stuff to the veggie volunteers who run the “Food Not Bombs” soup kitchen. They will stoop at nothing, even feeding the hungry homeless within slurping distance of a sacred national shrine, Walt Disney World in Orlando. For free, until vigilant Orlando officials and courts stopped such sacrilege. The FNB conspiracy is spreading to other cities. We blame Al-Qaeda.
NotionsCapital 