The first day of October

Last Wednesday's installment of Community Food Systems left me with a whirlwind of emotions. A lot of what I felt was tied deeply into my personal experience with an economically imbalanced society.

Myself, my two brothers, and my sister were raised by my mother. My mother graduated college with a bachelor's in Early Childhood Education and has never been unable to find work. As soon as we were old enough for daycare, my mother has worked and continues to work to this day as a full time Head Preschool Teacher. Despite being hardworking, educated, intelligent, and motivated, my mother has never been able to fully support herself and her four children alone. Because of this, our family has received an insane amount of charity. She has been provided a share from local food pantries since we were babies till now. The first house we've ever owned was built for us by Habitat for Humanity about seven years ago. Even though my older brother and I have left home and have become financially independent does not mean that our family has escaped poverty. My mother has, since having children, lived just below the poverty line, despite working a full time respectable job while supplementing her income with part time work for catering companies and church nurseries.

What I wonder, these days, is how unfairly this charity has been distributed. Because we were so fortunate to belong to the socio-economically dominant race and be able to move to a town that was majorly upper middle class (Ipswich, MA - median income: $57,284), we were considered a novel representation of the 4.1% of Ipswich families living below the poverty line. Because we were white and well educated, we were given the help that the immigrant Latino population of Ipswich is refused.

Andrew Morehouse talking about food stamps, pantries, and other food service programs created this eruption of hot shame while I sat and listened to him in class. This feeling could be attributed into an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness. I felt like I was an invader in this discussion, because we were all talking about a population that I have come to UMASS to represent. What was being discussed was a population that existed not within the classroom, not within the context of that insightful discussion, but entirely on the outside. Even though this was not something mentioned, the feeling I had was of division: us (the upper-middle class college educated) and them (the impoverished in need of assistance).

There is no us and them when it comes to class barriers and economic injustice. There is, rather, cause and effect. Obese black and Latino children in closed off urban food deserts is the effect of socially ambivalent lawmakers and monoculture surplus. Uneducated and drug addicted urban youth is the effect of a corrupt and racist society. The amount of charity bestowed on my family to ease the hunger and homelessness we experienced is a direct effect of a predominantly white sense of guilt and responsibility to relieve suffering, if only minutely.

Why is it that Habitat for Humanity (an organization very much so based around Christian principles) is able to construct a home for the white working single mothers of affluent North Shore communities, while there are still so many displaced victims (impoverished and mostly black) of Hurricane Katrina waiting three years after the fact for some sort of compensation for that disaster and the government's apathy towards their entire community?

After class, I called my mother while she was on her break from work. I told her the class had left me feeling upset and overwhelmed with my own memories of experiencing poverty and hunger. We talked a little about the bail-out plan. My mother laughed and told me that she isn't worried about it, because it just means that there's more people who are going to have to live the way we always have.

I have been thinking much more on the subject of social and environmental injustice. I saw the film 'Trouble the Water' on Saturday, which addresses this very topic of racism and injustice. This movie impacted me in a way that I cannot formulate into words. In my adult life, I have devoted two summers to working with urban youth in the port city New Bedford. The people in this movie, the children and families that I worked with: these are the people that need the most help, the most nutrition and education but they are always the last people on the mind of our country. My mother, white and educated, was able to raise her children vegetarian, emphasize the importance of healthy eating, activities, and the utmost importance of our educations. What about those people who are kept under the thumb of society, without even enough wiggle room to question why this is happening to them?

Yes, our national food system is in shambles. But one of the biggest issues that needs to be addressed before we can go about changing the way we eat is who is being hurt the most by this system, and why is it that they are being kept ignorant about this. Is it because (like Kanye West famously said) President Bush doesn't care about black people?

Go see 'Trouble the Water' and visit downtown New Bedford or Holyoke or Springfield. The answer should be obvious.