Journal article
THE POLITICS OF HUNGER: Ten Years of Leftovers with Many Hungry Still Left Over: A Decade of Donations Under the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act
Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Vol.5, pp.455-797
01 Oct 2006
Abstract
Despite the United States' great wealth, our country has one of the highest rates of poverty and hunger among industrialized nations. 3 In the past decade, statistics show that the number of Americans threatened by hunger has incresed to nearly thirty-eight million. 4 Yet, the hungry (or those who are "food insecure") in the United States are not so because our nations lacks food--an average of one-fifth of food procedured in America goes to waste. 5 Food "waste" signifies the organic residues generated by the handling, storage, sale, preparation, cooking, and serving of foods. 6 Food waste frequently means there is an abundance of food that is not consumed, including food that is thrown away by farmers in the field, farmer's markets, corporations, restaurants, commercial kitchens, and individual citizens. 7 In the late 1990s, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimated that about ninety-six billion pounds of food, which comprises 27 percent of the 356 billion pounds of the edible food available for human consumption in the United States, were lost to human use by retailers, the foodservice industry, and consumers. 8 Despite this large amount of edible food that is thrown away, there are still large segments of the American population that are hungry. Individuals who are food insecure have been defined as having "limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate foods, including involuntarily cutting back on meals, food portions or not knowing the source of the next ...
Metrics
1 Record Views
Details
- Title
- THE POLITICS OF HUNGER: Ten Years of Leftovers with Many Hungry Still Left Over: A Decade of Donations Under the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act
- Creators
- Jessica A. Cohen
- Publication Details
- Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Vol.5, pp.455-797
- Publisher
- Seattle Journal for Social Justice
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology
- Identifiers
- 991021862374704721