Categories: News

Food insecurity today echoes Great Depression-era levels of waste and hunger

With farmers dumping milk and leaving unpicked produce on fields to rot, some experts fear that the world is facing prospects of food insecurity comparable to Depression-era levels of mass hunger. In the early 1930s, Americans took to the street via “hunger marches” to demand financial relief and a stronger social safety net, as well as to protest the related issues of segregation and oppression of Black people. Around the same time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted a New Deal program that paid farmers to scale back production, and ostensibly boost their prices and income, despite outrage from the public at the idea of crop destruction amid widespread hunger. The government also bought surplus foods to redistribute among the people, though just how effective these efforts were is up for debate—kind of like USDA’s Farmers to Families Food Box program today. History, it appears, may be repeating itself. Time has the story.

Related Post
The Counter
Share
Published by
The Counter

Recent Posts

Grist acquires The Counter and launches food and agriculture vertical

Grist, an award-winning, nonprofit media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices,…

6 months ago

Is California giving its methane digesters too much credit?

Every year, California dairy farms emit hundreds of thousands of tons of the potent greenhouse…

3 years ago

Your car is killing coho salmon

Highway 7 runs north-south through western Washington, carving its way through a landscape sparsely dotted…

3 years ago

The pandemic has transformed America’s dining landscape into an oligopoly dominated by chains 

One of the greatest pleasures I had as a child growing up in the Chicago…

3 years ago

California is moving toward food assistance for all populations—including undocumented immigrants

Undocumented immigrants experience food insecurity at much higher rates than other populations, yet they are…

3 years ago

Babka, borscht … and pumpkin spice? Two writers talk about Jewish identity through contemporary cookbooks.

Writer Charlotte Druckman and editor Rebecca Flint Marx are both Jewish journalists living in New…

3 years ago