Everyone reading this forum has probably never come close to actually dealing with the poverty levels that afflict a surprisingly large amount of people in America. The level of accepted inequality with almost no social welfare net is atrocious.
Food insecurity is not starvation -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing concern, because starvation went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost, badly. I literally count as food insecure unless I attempt to defeat that conclusion by lying to the survey. You don't have to worry too much about me, and if you knew my situation when I was a kid (and squarely within the intention of the definition, in those days), you could be excused for not worrying all that much.
I'm about to say something which is indelicate, but probably true.
Poor Somalis look like poor Chinese look like poor Brazilians look like poor peasants from the Middle Ages, because human physiology reacts to starvation in predictable ways. Poor Americans do not resemble any of the above, because to the extent they have a problem with food, it is that they consume far too much of it. You can measure the nutritional consumption of poor Americans. We have. It is statistically virtually indistinguishable from that of rich Americans. Poor American kids? Same story.
(Some people might phrase poor folks' food problems as "too much of the wrong food", but I think this conflates the problem with a moral judgment about food-as-values-signaling. One of the reasons we stigmatize e.g. Coke over e.g. fresh squeezed orange juice is precisely because poor people drink Coke and rich people drink fresh squeezed orange juice. Both would be better off with switching more of their beverage consumption to tap water.)
Pointless pedantic distinction from the well-fed. Try it for a month and then we can talk. I have some friends in MS that beg to differ. Not to mention that it comes with tons of other stuff like lack of health coverage, housing, bad sanitation, etc.
>* -- it is a metric created to justify ongoing concern, because starvation went up against science/capitalism/etc and lost, badly.*
You have to see the TCO, so to speak. Because capitalism (as practiced, not some theoretical model) in the US and Europe also created massive famines, lack of development and poverty elsewhere, on societies forced to structure themselves and produce for the benefit and under the design of their colonial overlords. The western economy, for example, feeds on cheap oil, which it gets by preying on oil producing countries.
A 6' man eating a consistent 1900 cals/day is hungry. His equilibrium weight at age 30 is 135lb. He likely suffers serious health problems due to malnourishment.
Now consider a different man, who eats 3500 cals on a typical day. However, he is bad at budgeting, so one day out of every 7 he eats nothing (averaging 3000 cals/day). This man is food insecure. He also weighs 250lb and is morbidly obese.
The latter case is far more common in the US.
Incidentally, doing the latter mode of "starvation" deliberately is called intermittent fasting and many people do it.
I strongly suggest divorcing your argument that, e.g., "concern over food insecurity is important" from "patio11 was not food insecure." In addition to improving the quality of the discussion, debating the second argument will be mildly embarrassing for me and very, very embarrassing for you, so let's skip it.
Well, you got a point there. It's not being X is a necessary conclusion of you stating Y --you can take them apart and answer any of them you like.
I just assumed that it is so, because that's how privileged people I know talk (conversely, having had days searching for scraps myself --mainly as a self-employed student--, I wouldn't even think of dismissing the importance of food insecurity).
Everyone reading this forum has probably never come close to actually dealing with the poverty levels that afflict a surprisingly large amount of people in America. The level of accepted inequality with almost no social welfare net is atrocious.