6.8 million teens & tweens are hungry in America, girls are trading sex for food

There was a proposal years back which I always thought was quite sensible – there’s some combination of basic foods which are enormously cheap - you can feed a person on that, in bulk, for much less than $1/day; the notion was to have these available at grocery stores, in bulk, free for the taking by anyone. I think it was bulgar wheat, beans, lard, and powdered milk (there might have been a fifth). But the notion was to just have it in a “free” section you could check out for zero money or along with what your budget would allow.

Since probably you’d likely be feeding far <5% of the total calories consumed in the US with such a program (rich people would rarely touch it, the middle class in occasional lean times, the poor much more often, but probably not for all calories), you’d be looking at a program that would cost – at most – a few hundred million per month. A few billion a year. I always thought it was a clever and cheap way to provide a backbone of food security.

Now, it’s not tasty, but it would keep you fed.

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Relax everyone… as long as we can ensure that the ultra-wealthy have an abundance of food, all the “little people” beneath them will be just fine. Just give it a little time for the table scraps to trickle their way down to the mouths of the hungry unwashed masses. Sheesh… this is America… don’t you know that people here only go hungry if they choose to?!?! Perhaps they’re all just watching their figures.

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Putting these together, I can’t help but think of Good Omens.

MEALS® was Sable’s latest brainwave.
MEALS® was CHOW® with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS® you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.
The paradox delighted Sable.

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Was discussing this with my siblings recently. Our mother’s side of the family is very fundamentalist and judgy the lot of them, and generally not very fun to be around.

The least judgy by far? Oddly, my uncle who is a Methodist pastor. It’s almost as if he has read the teachings of Jesus Christ, and what biblical scholars had to say about them, and taken it to heart. Actually, a really nice dude.

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##6.8 million teens & tweens are hungry in America, girls are trading sex for food

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Always thought it was interesting that the people who shout the loudest that they are “CHRISTIANS” and follow Jesus, always quote from the Old Testament rather than the New one. Must be all that helping others and not having possessions that turns them off from that section of the Bible.

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It certainly would if it were true but as @Tor_Berg points out in their comment above, the study itself never asserted that adolescents were trading sex for food. From the article (their emphasis, not mine):

Teens in all 10 communities and in 13 of the 20 focus groups talked about some youth selling sex for money to pay for food. These themes arose most strongly in high-poverty communities where teens also described sexually coercive environments. Sexual exploitation most commonly took the form of transactional dating relationships with older adults.

I imagine it’d be pretty hard to get anyone engaged in such transactions to come forward. Still, that there’s even collective suspicion among affected teens that this is occurring should be a red neon fucking light to Congress critters that we have a food security problem. Well, that and culturally endemic contempt for the poor. That last one is going to take more than just legislation to uproot, though.

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Kind of a mystery, too. The old testament is itself very “un-christian”. And yet, Jews seem far less judgemental (from my experience anyways).

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Even if you cut the title off after the words “hungry in America” it still sucks.

Many people in this country are needlessly hungry, food insecure, or living in food deserts.

That’s not okay.

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no it’s not. And the people in power don’t give a rat’s ass about it since they figure the “Church” will handle it.

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Yeah, 'cause religion in this country has been so great about actually “walking the talk.”

O_O

Fun fact; I attended Catholic school until high school, and I used to be deep into the pentecostal church…

Until it dawned on me one day that the people around me were not living up to the lofty standards they themselves had set…

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Not just the people in power, but also the people in the pews as well.

Unless, of course, the Church actually tries to do something about it, and then the neighbors complain:

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Well of course!! Can’t have them driving down the property values now can we!?

Besides it’s North Carolina, they are not exactly “Christian” in any way (based on the leadership of the state).

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That’s why I suggest calling them Mammonites :slight_smile:

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http://imgur.com/dVC44Yg

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sigh There are certainly judgemental Jews–I left my childhood community because of them–but the Christian “Old Testament” is not the Jewish Tanakh, which consists of the Five Books Of Moses, the Prophets, and the Ketuvim (Writings), plus the Oral Torah [1]. The Christians reordered the books, ignored the Ketuvim, and, this is key, didn’t take any of the commentary and scriptural analysis with them when they split off, and especially didn’t take the Jewish traditions of actually interrogating and cross-examining the text with them either.

So they’re missing the entirety of what we call the Talmud, and all of the commentary on how we, as Jews, reconcile with ourselves, the various aspects and commandments of the Jewish god. Instead, the Christian preference, as I’ve witnessed from an outsider’s perspective, seems to be to examine the text on a surface level and to avoid looking for deeper understanding, or deeper concepts, much less any effort at contextual understanding (which often comes back to bite them for their own books as well; in their context, Jesus was a hella rabblerouser and social gadfly [2]).

Also, there are vast swathes of the “Old Testament” that they also handily ignore. My Bar Mitzvah parsha (weekly reading) was this past week; Ki Teizei, and it’s chock full of such things as, oh, paying your laborers on time and in full and a whole bunch of other policies that, while socially backward by today’s standards, were the very bleeding edge of progressivism from the perspective of people in the Bronze Age, which is one of those little contextual points that we like to examine, learn from, and find ways to adapt to a changing world (I’ve seen the instruction from Deuteronomy 22:4, regarding helping with a fallen ox or donkey on the road, be interpreted as meaning “Help out people whose car has broken down” for the modern world).

From a theological perspective, such Christians are actually in direct contravention of Jesus’ explicit instructions (the so-called “New Covenant,” Hebrews 8:6-13) by holding any part of the “Old Testament” as valid, because the 613 Mitzvot of the Mosaic Covenant [3] are explicitly rendered null and void by Jesus for his followers. They’re, again, supposed to stick with the “New Covenant”, which is, again, Jesus’ teachings–which, as we’ve noted, they fail at. Hard.


[1] The Oral Torah was written down as the Midrash when the Romans were trying to break the chain of the oral transmissionand later analyzed as the Gemara; together, they make up the Talmud.

[2] Such as the passages (Matthew 5:39-40) about turning the other cheek and giving up your coat along with your shirt; for the “turn the other cheek” point, in the time of the Roman occupation, striking a servant with the back of your hand was an assertion of dominance; if they “turned the other cheek”, the person doing the striking had to either hit them with their left (and thus unclean) hand, or strike them with the palm of their hand, which was an admission of “you are my social equal”.

The thing with the coat is likewise subversive, as men of the time wore a shirt and an overcoat as daily wear, and suing was something done for outstanding debt collection, so someone being sued “for their shirt” meant that they were so destitute that the only thing they had left with which to pay was their clothing. However, if they gave up their shirt and their coat, then they’d be publicly naked–in a culture with a strong nudity taboo. In effect, Jesus was instructing his followers, “Okay, if they’re going to be so utterly greedy, cause a public scene and make it very clear that the cause of this scene is because this person is so greedy”–and, if the debt holder accepted the coat, then they were accepting the violation of the nudity taboo as well, or, alternatively, had to make the public spectacle worse of trying to give back the naked guy’s coat in front of the assembled rubberneckers.

That’s the kind of context that I usually end up seeing ignored by Christians when examining their own holy texts.

[3] Said Mosaic Covenant is something which the Jewish people still hold as valid, I wish to point out; we just tend not to be utter dicks about it, due to the scholarly tradition, although exceptions are definitely widespread among my people :disappointed:

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In the wealthiest nation on the planet, this should not be.

RIP 2Pac; Tribute Tuesday

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He did pass away 20 years ago today, didn’t he?

#RIP.

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I have spent a fair amount of time on the streets, sometimes hungry. I am definitely anti-hunger. Although I do support the rights of voluntary consentual sex work, hopefully by people who prefer to do it and not out of desperation as we are seeing here.

Any guesses why there is the gendered split? Boys and girls both resort to theft, but only girls trade sex? Why do the boys trend differently? It seems to me that since a sex transactions are not without risk, but since they are mutual that they are more ethical and potentially less risky than theft. I know which I would choose!

Please do not suggest that because I suppose one recourse might be better than another, that I think disenfranchisement and starvation are OK. I don’t. But having been in some such situations, one naturally thinks of possible contingencies, and wonders how others manage them.

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This would definitely be an improvement.

Although another obvious approach I think is to do away with commerce, then the idea of “income” becomes irrelevant. Who ever said that food or health care even need to be transactional?

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