From time to time, the coifed and manicured set raises its head
up in self-righteous indignation at what they see as too much
attention being paid to the lazy rabble who like being poor and who
enjoy suckling the public teat of handouts because, gosh, it’s just
so much darn fun.
From time to time, the coifed and manicured set raises its head up in self-righteous indignation at what they see as too much attention being paid to the lazy rabble who like being poor and who enjoy suckling the public teat of handouts because, gosh, it’s just so much darn fun.
It seems The Pinnacle’s two-part series on hunger that culminated last week with articles that included a profile of one family’s struggle to put food on the table prompted several people in our communities to lift their heads up from their eggs benedict and cluck their tongues at the fact that Maria Arias and her daughter, the subjects of the profile, are obese.
“Hungry? How could you be hungry and look like that?” one Morgan Hill caller lamented.
“Cut their caloric intake and get some exercise,” another Morgan Hill resident suggested.
Now why didn’t the Ariases think of that? Maria could get up in the morning and walk into her cardio room and spend 15 minutes on an exercise bike before shifting over to the elliptical trainer for the last 15 minutes before hitting the weight room. Then she could serve her daughter hot steaming oatmeal with fresh blueberries and high-fiber whole-wheat toast.
The only problem with that scenario, absurdities cast aside, is that healthy food costs more than unhealthy food. McDonald’s hamburgers are a lot cheaper than lean chicken or fish from a grocery store. Whole-wheat toast? Get serious. If Arias gets a 50-count pack of flour tortillas in her Community Pantry bag, it’s a good day. Flour tortillas are pure simple carbohydrates that are metabolized poorly and stored easily as fat.
And then there are the real McCoy kinds of fats that the poor subsist on – ground beef that is comprised of 30 percent of the worst fat for human consumption imaginable.
The common foods stuffed in pantry bags, despite admirable efforts by pantry volunteers to balance food groups, are overwhelmingly based on high-carb recipes – pasta and rice heading the list. If Lovey and Thurston were forced to survive on nothing but starch-based casseroles for a year, I’d wager Lovey may no longer fit in those designer bike shorts and Thurston would undoubtedly lose sight of his toes quickly.
But they don’t have to worry about that, and it’s so very easy to sit in the comfort of their 3,000-square-foot ranchette on a hillside in Morgan Hill and cast aspersions on people that they wouldn’t lift a diamond-incrusted pinky to help anyway.
My personal favorite, though, is the analogy to Africa I heard this week. “Have you ever seen pictures of hungry kids in Africa?” our Morgan Hill cliff-dwellers offered. “Perhaps if Ms. Flores (Melissa Flores, The Pinnacle reporter who wrote the series) were to travel to Africa as I have done …” a Morgan Hill gent suggested, not knowing that he singled out the one Pinnacle staff member who has, in fact, traveled and written extensively in Africa.
Is that the model many of us see for America: Unless our hungry have bulbous eyes protruding from heads that float above distended stomachs perched atop spindly legs, then they should quit complaining? The Thurstons, after all, know best what hungry people look like; they watch Fox News.
But hunger is not always visible. According to Second Harvest Food Bank, which last year distributed 5.3 million pounds of food in the Monterey Bay area, one in four families in our region struggle with chronic hunger. One-third of the families Second Harvest helps are trying to live on $500 or less per month.
Is it truly OK, as these people suggest, that the wealthiest nation on the planet is OK with watching malnutrition send diabetes rates to record heights, while life expectancy among the underclass struggles against higher rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease?
Arrogance and privilege are a dangerous-enough combination, but add a big helping of ignorance to the plate and you have a recipe for the worst kind of obesity.
My hope is that these objectionable people do not represent our community, and that we, as a community and as a nation, have not lost our connection and empathy with our neighbors, who work just as hard as the privileged, but haven’t yet found the utmost component of success – a lucky rabbit’s foot.
