Are You Low Food Insecure?

Once, when someone returned from war mentally and emotionally wounded and scarred, we called it shell-shocked and treated them as though they ahd something very serious that we needed to be sensitive to and to treat. Now we call it PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder nad we try to gloss over the true absolute, unspeakable horror suffered by these people.

Now come another word we are watering down. Hunger. Yes, hunger. Now, the U. S. government, in an effort to keep the offiical numbers of people without nourishing food three times a day on a daily basis.......is calling it LOW FOOD SECURITY.

Approximately 12% of U.S. citizens doe snot have nourishing thrice-daily meals, or the economic means to purchase and prepare the necessary food for those meals.

Makes you sick, doesn't it?

From the New York Times:

November 20, 2006
Editorial

Brother, Can You Spare a Word?

First the good news: the government’s annual hunger report shows a slight decline last year in the number of citizens in need of food. Now the bad news: the annual hunger report has dropped the word “hunger.”

Instead, there were 35 million Americans last year suffering from “low food security,” meaning they chronically lacked the resources to be able to eat enough food. Of these, 10.8 million lived with “very low food security,” meaning they were the hungriest among the hungry, so to speak.

Bureaucratic terminology about food security has always been a part of the hunger report, but so was the plain word “hunger.” The Agriculture Department decided that variations of “hungry” are not scientifically accurate, following the advice of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies. The specialists advised that being hungry was too amorphous a way to refer to “a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation.”

The government insists that no Orwellian plot is in the works to mask a national blight. The goal has been to cut what we’ll call the hungry households to no more than 6 percent of the population. But hungry people persist at nearly twice that rate, despite the slight drop last year. To the extent that more public empathy is needed to prod a stronger attack on low food security, we opt for “hunger” as a most stirring word.