Dirt Cakes and Recession

When I was a child living in Greenville, Mississippi, I did not have many toys with which to play. A little girlfriend who lived in the small apartment next to us and I used to play for hours in the mud from spring rains. We pretended we were cooking mud pies. Of course, we would not have thought about ever eating them. I was appalled, therefore, last week on NBC Nightly News to see a report from Haiti featuring the dirt cakes that the people were eating due to the high cost of food. According to the reporter, the cakes are made from water, salt, butter, and dirt. One young man said he ate twenty-five per day in order to live. That night on Bill Moyers' Journal, the subject again was food shortages. This time the location was here in America with the statistics that some twenty-seven million people are now on food stamps assistance. Many others go regularly to food banks to enable them to at least eat carbohydrates.

As my sister and I often compare notes on our childhood, we have both come to the conclusion that there was a food shortage in our home in our early years. Today both of us tend to eat all that we have on our plates as if it might be our last meal and often to take food away with us in our purses as if to protect ourselves against future hunger. We do not know exactly where this behavior came from.

One of the African-American men from Alabama interviewed on the Journal said something like, "Aw heck, everybody talks about a recession; we are always in a recession." He said that he feels bad when he cannot provide enough food for his family to eat. I think about dirt cakes in Haiti and recession in America and so much long for a solution to hunger. After all, adequate food is one of the basic needs of our lives in addition to shelter and clothes.

I certainly am not advocating any type of socialism as a panacea to the world's hunger problems, but I have been thinking a bit this morning about Alice Trillin's (wife of author Calvin Trillin) view of life. "She believed in the principle of enoughness," according to an article in The New Yorker. Simply stated, she belived that, after a certain income level reached, the government should take the rest. The problem though is, "When will we get to the belief that we have enough to share with the world's hungry?"