

The city that ended hunger - sethg
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/the-city-that-ended-hunger

======
yummyfajitas
The tagline ("something US cities have yet to do") is nonsense. Most of the US
has ended hunger and replaced it with gluttony.

[http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2007/11/Hunger-
Hyst...](http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2007/11/Hunger-Hysteria-
Examining-Food-Security-and-Obesity-in-America)

~~~
DrSprout
To call it gluttony is insulting to those who work 50+ hours a week, can
barely get by, and yet are still overweight. Food is not a significant part of
cost of living in the US, especially if you eat poorly. The paradox is that
eating poorly actually ends up being gluttonous if we're looking at it from a
health standpoint.

But many of the people you're insulting do not have the luxury of eating
healthy meals and going for 30 minute runs every other day.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Assuming that the people who are food insecure are also poor (i.e., below the
US poverty line), they do not work 50+ hours/week. 80% of the poor don't work
at all, and are not even looking for work.

<http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf>

~~~
DrSprout
<http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/09poverty.shtml>

Poverty level for a 4-person household (which a single mother with three
children would be) is $22,050/year. 3-person is $18,310.

50 hours a week @ $7.25/hr (federal minimum wage) * 52 weeks/year = $18824.

Although, good luck finding 50 hours a week of work in this economy.

And that only applies to US citizens. Never mind undocumented immigrants.
(Though many do earn minimum wage and pay taxes.) Restaurants will often split
low-income workers to avoid either restaurant giving them more than 40 hours a
week, so they can avoid overtime and benefits.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_...good luck finding 50 hours a week of work in this economy._

First, I cited statistics from 2007, before the economy went down. Second, the
statistics show that 80% of the poor _are not looking for a job_ and that only
10% of them work more than 35 hours a week. Third, only 3.5% of the poor want
to work more than 35 hours/week but are unable to find work.

Lastly, minimum wage is more or less irrelevant. Only 1.7 million workers
(373k of whom were under 19) earned minimum wage or less in 2007. Assuming
everyone earning min wage or less is poor [1], that's only 4.5% of the poor.

<http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2007.htm>

Also, to respond to a statement you made in your previous post: I work more
than 50 hours/week, yet I still manage to find time to exercise and to cook
healthy food. (Yesterday: work from 9 to 7, 3 hours of martial arts, dinner,
work from 12-1.) If I can do it, why can't the poor?

[1] Teenagers earning min wage, but living in a non-poor household are not
counted as part of the poor.

~~~
CodeMage
_Also, to respond to a statement you made in your previous post: I work more
than 50 hours/week, yet I still manage to find time to exercise and to cook
healthy food. (Yesterday: work from 9 to 7, 3 hours of martial arts, dinner,
work from 12-1.) If I can do it, why can't the poor?_

Let me start off by saying that I don't disagree with the statistics you
quoted or your interpretation of statistics. I'm only disagreeing with what I
quoted.

Cooking healthy food and practicing martial arts both come at a cost. This
cost can be a cost in money, in time or effort spent, etc. In my experience,
poor people usually can't afford that cost easily.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The monetary cost of running is about $100/year, biking considerably less. As
for the cost in time, the average person in the bottom 25% of earnings spends
30 minutes/day more watching TV than the average person in the top 25% (2
hours, 6 minutes total). (No breakdown for "poverty" vs "non-poverty" is
given.)

I think the poor could manage some exercise or preparation of healthier food
if they wanted to.

<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm>

~~~
DrSprout
Do you care for a family on your own? I'm talking about a specific class of
people - primarily unwed single mothers - who do not have time for themselves.
Their time is eaten up by making money for their families and caring for them.

Simply making the declarations that poor people don't want to work, and poor
people are generally fat, even if true, ignore sizable quantities of people
for whom exercise and healthy eating are not feasible.

~~~
yummyfajitas
You may be right about that narrow category. But there were only 4 million
such women below the poverty level, circa 2007.

------
tansey
How do articles like this get upvoted so quickly on a site that is supposed to
be filled with critical thinkers?

There are very serious implications to making something a right. Making food a
right in the US would be a disaster.

~~~
josefresco
Since you are such a critical thinker, care to back that assertion up with any
evidence or statistical data? Clearly you've done your research since you are
a HN member but for some reason I don't see any links in your post.

At least expand on why you think it would be a disaster. Would it be a
disaster like the right to health care? Or a disaster because of changes to
our farming system

~~~
lionhearted
> Since you are such a critical thinker, care to back that assertion up with
> any evidence or statistical data? Clearly you've done your research since
> you are a HN member but for some reason I don't see any links in your post.

Okay, I'll jump in and play. First, you could be a little more civil if you
want to stimulate discussion - something like, "Since you are such a critical
thinker... but for some reason I don't see any links in your post" is just
unnecessary, makes him less likely to respond civilly. You can just ask him
why he thanks that way and he'll be more likely to respond. But I'll jump in
and give my take if the OP doesn't mind. Here's what he originally said:

> "Making food a right in the US would be a disaster."

Now, after that, you asked for "evidence or statistical data" - the problem
is, you can't run controlled experiments on government programs because every
nation has different conditions and you can't run and re-run experiments. So,
judging whether a new policy would be good governance or bad governance is
largely based on looking at historically similar examples and extrapolating
that you're likely to get a similar result.

Now, "disaster" is subjective. What's a disaster? You need a criteria for
disaster. One criteria could be someone's views of how a government should
run, which is somewhat opinion. If he believes larger government would be a
disaster, full stop, then there's no discussion - he can say, "This will make
the government larger, and that's bad full stop in my eyes." But that's a
boring argument, there's really nothing to discuss there, it's just his
opinion.

There's much, much more interesting standards to measure disasters by. One
would be - "Does the policy fulfill its own stated objectives?"

I think we can agree that if a policy costs money, uses people's time, takes
energy away from other areas of concern, _and then doesn't even fulfill its
own stated objectives_ , then you can call it a disaster. Actually, you could
go further - you could call it an unmitigated disaster - completely and
entirely bad.

Now, for evidence and statistical data, I would refer you to the United
States' recent track record over the last... well, over the last whatever
timeframe you think is relevant. USG's domestic programs are just ridiculously
incompetent as of late. Now, if you diagree with this and are seriously open
to changing your mind, I might go put in 30 minutes to find statistics and
make a case for you. I say if you're open to changing your mind because many
people aren't, and I've only been sleeping five hours/night lately while doing
crazy amounts of work - and Hacker News is entertaining, but digging through
USG reports is less so at my current energy levels.

But if we wanted to go through stats, the first one I'd look for is what
percent of funding in government programs goes to admin and what goes to
benefits. I forget the number at the federal level, but I remember it's
fucking brutal. In California, 80% of benefits and entitlements go to paying
administrators and civil servants, not to the people receiving the benefits.
On the federal level it's slightly better, but still more than half. IIRC, the
complete amounts spent on welfare, benefits, etc, etc came up to something
like $20,000 PER PERSON in the USA, and obviously that money ain't getting to
the poor people.

Next I'd look at stated objectives on programs and see if there's any
measurable gains. Now, if you're really inclined, you can find a ton of killer
stats easy to find on USG actively breaking things they were trying to solve.
War on Drugs is the easiest with increasing drug and violence rates. Then
there's the Clinton-era reduce-executive-compensation law that prompted the
shift to stock options and increased executive compensation. Then there's FDA
holding off beta blockers from the market 10,000 people per year were dying
that they could've saved.

But maybe the two most similar examples I can think of are the food subsidies
and the Nixon era nutrition campaigns. The food subsidies in corn wanted to
make it affordable for everyone - instead, it led to huge rises of corn syrup
in everything and Americans got increasingly more sick, diabetic, and obese as
a result.

Second, I'd point at the Nixon recommended daily guidelines that pushed
towards simple carbs and away from healthy fats. Which is totally backwards,
and also led to declining USA nutrition. Actually, you can look up the talk
"Sugar: The Bitter Truth" for all sorts of stats and analysis on how and why
that happened and there's lots of stats in there. All sorts of discussion and
stats here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006980>

Man, USG quite sucks. What they touch tends to break far more often than not.
There's many, many examples of this, and very few examples of significant
successes. Especially in terms of making Americans healthier and eating well.

------
Darmani
Keep in mind Belo Horizonte is in an extremely rich agricultural area. This
model would be extremely hard to duplicate in most of the world.

~~~
josefresco
Most of the world, or just parts? Anyone have soil/water data to expand on
this?

~~~
qq66
Rule out anywhere not tropical AND humid. Belo Horizonte's climate is somewhat
like Phillipines, parts of India, etc.

------
lionhearted
It's very hard to respond to a piece like this - there are some fallacies in
the article, but it's such a feel good piece that responding with logic and
historical examples is generally unpalatable to people. After reading such a
nice story with no downsides, who wants to hear that maybe the author missed
some very important points?

Literally every point in the article is not just positive, but overwhelmingly
positive. It shows that there are no downsides, no secondary effects, and no
one is losing. The author paints beautiful pictures of happy people, like how
the program even helps a young military policeman get married and buy a house
-

> “It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-
> looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating
> here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house
> so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

I'm really tempted to just pick and choose my battles and leave this article
alone. If I was going to respond, I'd post some history of how measures like
this start off viable because they only move the equilibrium a tiny bit, but
slowly the bureaucracy and entropy sets in and you've got stuff like the corn-
in-frigging-everything effect in the USA. Or certain kinds of food don't get
grown, because a rival staple is at half price due to subsidies - but then if
a pestilence hits, you've got no backup crop. Or I'd point out that every
attempt to nationalize farms in history - literally every single one without
except that I know of - has decreased food yields and led to famines (Soviets,
Nazis, various empires in states of emergencies all tried to take over farming
- it always leads to lower production, because politicians don't actually know
much about farming)... and the tendency after some successes with a program
like this is to expand it, with many potential dangers.

If I were going to take on this article, despite all the overwhelming positive
emotions, I'd point out a statement like this is pure Orwell:

> The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean
> more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.)

A right to food doesn't mean public handouts? Let me get this straight - the
city government gives money and free rent to farmers and businesses and people
to fund the program, but that's not necessarily a public handout? WTF?

> It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to
> participate.

Can we redefine the "social" in "socialism" to mean you only exchange with
your friends who you know when you choose to? Can we redefine the "commune" in
"communism" to mean that it's all about letting people in communities make
their own decisions?

If I was going to say anything about this article, I'd try to highlight the
propaganda and inherent dishonesty - every point is positive. It doesn't
acknowledge _any_ downsides. It uses blatant doublespeak - "public handouts
don't necessarily have to be public handouts" - it tries to redefine words to
leave the opposition without any way to explain they dislike the position.

If I was going to take on this article, I'd point all this out and ask the
users here - even ones who believe in progressivism - to please tune out and
criticize articles like this, because it's not much better than Fox News. It's
dishonest. It's propaganda and designed to mislead people.

But - I'd be crazy to take on this article which is filled with all these
positive emotions, so I will refrain from doing so and not make any of those
arguments.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
Actually, it's different from what the Nazis and Soviets were doing (forcing
farmers to make whatever they tell them to), and more like what Vietnam and
China do. Their governments deed tracts of land to farmers and say "have at
it, you keep most of the profit, but you're contracted to this township or
hamlet for x amount of produce. Whatever is leftover you charge whatever you
want to whomever you want."

The incentivization of ownership empowered the Chinese agrarian economy out
from subsistence or "the starving farmer" to one where the farmer owned the
means of production but were sharing profit and produce with the state.

I think similar principles apply here, but on the distribution and marketing
side rather than the production side. The Belo gov't allots public space for
private vending of produce direct from the farm, saving the middleman markups
associated. They also have the ABC markets that the farmers bid on for selling
their goods at prices set by the state. I'm also sure that the Belo gov't also
gets a substantial deal on produce in order to run the "people's" restaurants.

Does it work? Well, agrarian-dominant economies don't stand a chance when
every citizen wants to put down the shovel and pick up a laptop to do their
work. But, eventually, there is a happy medium.

~~~
anamax
> Actually, it's different from what the Nazis and Soviets were doing (forcing
> farmers to make whatever they tell them to), and more like what Vietnam and
> China do. Their governments deed tracts of land to farmers and say "have at
> it, you keep most of the profit, but you're contracted to this township or
> hamlet for x amount of produce. Whatever is leftover you charge whatever you
> want to whomever you want."

The difference is that the Nazis and Soviets (supposedly)took it all and these
folks take an absolute amount X.

What happens when a farm produces less than its X? (To be fair, Nazis and
Soviets may have minimum "all" as well.)

> saving the middleman markups associated.

And also forcing the farmer to do sales and distribution in addition to
farming. That's time she can't spend farming, relaxing, etc. Note that other
people are probably better at sales and distribution, so it's economically
inefficient to force the farmer to do those things.

Comparative advantage is a good thing.

------
dkarl
Does it end hunger any better than the U.S. has ended hunger?

* Children neglected by their parents: still hungry.

* Mentally ill or drug-addicted people who are unable to care for themselves (e.g., the homeless): still hungry.

* People who remain persistently unaware of government programs available to them, despite outreach, or who fail to take advantage of them for whatever reason: still hungry (or at least paying more elsewhere.)

* People who spend their food dollars on soda, chips, and pizza rolls, regardless of the availability of cheaper and more nutritious foods: still malnourished.

Giving people easy access to nutritious food only solves the EASY cases. This
program is to ending hunger as driving an RC car across an empty parking lot
is to the Darpa challenge.

~~~
dkarl
Not sure why I was downvoted, but maybe I was unclear. My point is that
they're just providing access to cheap nutritious food, which

1) is not something that has "never been done before"

2) punts on all the hard social problems that make hunger a difficult problem
to solve: neglect, ignorance, mental illness, drug addiction, stigma attached
to social services, and a kind of general incompetence (not meant to be
insulting; nobody is born knowing anything) that prevents people from taking
advantage of existing resources.

------
twoshot
it's so absurd to read these comments here. it's just so laughable... such an
amount of nitpicking... let them do it their way... and don't dare to
interfere... and if you want to hear a reason: any market, even a "political
market" will evolve the best possible way when there is great diversity.

it's just so laughable...

------
Dove
> With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now
> turning to food stamps

That's a pretty silly way to state it. Food stamps are _how_ we publicly
address hunger in the US, so a statistic about their usage has little to do
with the prevalence of unaddressed hunger.

Plus, who uses food stamps has more to do with who qualifies and who's willing
to than who's going hungry.

<http://badmoneyadvice.com/2010/03/food-stamps-are-hip.html>

------
tjmaxal
The emphasis on equality and health here is admirable.

