[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 15 (Wednesday, January 30, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S483-S484]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            FOOD INSECURITY

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, we are the wealthiest nation in the world. 
Yet American children go to bed hungry, and American seniors choose 
between food and medicine, between food and heating their home. 
American families stand in line at food banks stretched too thin to 
serve them.
  There is a term for what millions of Americans face every day. It is 
called food insecurity. It means children are not getting the food they 
need to grow up healthy in too many cases. It means mothers and fathers 
foregoing food for themselves so they can feed their kids in too many 
cases. It means seniors who are rationing their food to one meal a day 
in too many cases.
  I stood on this floor as long as a year ago telling the story of 
Rhonda Stewart who testified in front of the Agriculture Committee 
about food stamps. Ms. Stewart has a 9-year-old son. She has a full-
time job, she is president of her local PTA, she is involved in the Cub 
Scouts for her son, and she teaches Sunday school. Yet she is squeezed 
at the end of every month because her food stamps simply do not go far 
enough. She gets about $6 a day from food stamps. The average food 
stamp in this country is $1 per person per meal. She told me that early 
in the month, she makes pork chops for her son because that is her 
son's favorite meal. They might do that once or twice early in the 
month. By the middle of the month, maybe the second or third week, she 
said she takes her son to a fast food restaurant, once, maybe twice. 
But at the end of the month, she often sits at the kitchen table with 
her son as he eats. She sits there not eating, and her son asks: Mom, 
is there something wrong? Are you sick? She says: I just don't feel 
like eating tonight. She runs out of food month after month.
  Food insecurity, not having enough food, to put it bluntly, affects 
one in six seniors in this country. Our Nation letting children and 
seniors go to bed hungry is as shortsighted as it is heartless.
  An hour and a half ago, from 6 o'clock until about 7 o'clock, I was 
in a call with more than two dozen people in Ohio who run food banks 
and food pantries from all over the State. Let me tell you some of the 
things they told me.
  They told me they have pretty much about the same amount of dollars 
to run their food pantries as they had a year ago or 2 years ago or 3 
years ago. A woman by the name of Tina Ossa in southwest Ohio, 
generally a pretty affluent part of the State--Butler County, Claremont 
County, that area--said she is running out of food in part because the 
cost of frozen chickens--she used to be able to buy a tractor trailer 
load of frozen chickens--has gone up almost 50 percent. She said a 
tractor trailer load of egg noodles has doubled in cost in the last 
year or so whether they are buying it wholesale or buying it directly 
from the food manufacturer.
  Others told me on this call that the food banks are always sort of 
the last stop, an emergency safety net. The food stamp benefit is 
limited to $1 per meal per person. The cost of energy to heat their 
home has gone up. The cost of going to work has gone up with the cost 
of gas at $3 a gallon. And the last emergency stop for so many people 
is to go to a food bank because it is a safety net. Yet these food 
pantries are running out of food.

  One food pantry told me typically this time of year they have 1 
million pounds of food on hand. Now they have 400,000 pounds of food on 
hand. The lady, Ms. Ossa from Fairfield, OH, in Butler County, told me 
she started that food bank in 1983. It has never been close to as 
difficult a situation as today. They are getting fewer donations partly 
because the Government has not stepped up and partly because the people 
who have given to them--charity--in the past, who have given dollars 
for food, are hurting themselves and not as likely to contribute or 
contribute as much.
  She said the companies, the supermarkets and food manufacturers, are 
more efficient and squeeze any waste out of their system. Any slightly 
damaged cans, any kind of items they might have given to a food bank 
before they are not doing so. They are more in tune to Wall Street and 
the bottom line, so they are less likely to give these charitable 
contributions.
  One person on this call from Cleveland said there is a large bank in 
Cleveland where a woman at the bank organized other employees for a 
dress-down Friday. You can wear jeans on Friday if you give $5 to a 
local food bank. It has raised significant dollars for the food pantry 
as a result.
  The husband of this woman who organized this drive at this major bank 
in Cleveland lost his job. She is now barely making it. They together 
are barely making it. The father-in-law has moved in because he has had 
problems, and she now is going to this food bank. She is a full-time 
worker with a good job in Cleveland, and she is going to this food bank 
because she cannot make it.
  There is story after story. The most amazing story took place in 
Logan, OH, in the southeast, probably the most hard-hit Appalachian 
part of the State. It looks a lot like the area of the Presiding 
Officer in western Pennsylvania. This is southeastern Ohio.
  In Logan, OH, on a cold day in December 6 weeks ago, people began to 
line up at 3:30 in the morning to get food from this food bank which 
opened at 8 o'clock. By 8 o'clock, cars were snaked all over the city 
streets in the town of Logan, a county of about 30,000 people. At 8 
o'clock, they opened the door. By 1 o'clock in the afternoon, 2,000 
people had been to this food bank, in a county of 30,000; 7 percent of 
the residents in this country had gone to this food bank, and many had 
driven 20 and 30 minutes to get there because it is a rural, pretty 
spread-out county.
  I might add, Mr. Dick Stevens who runs this food bank told me that 
probably half of those beneficiaries who visited that food bank at the 
United Methodist Church in Logan, OH, were employed. Imagine that: You 
work hard every day, you play by the rules, you work as hard as any of 
us who dress this way in this institution do, many harder in some 
cases, you are working hard for your family, involved in your 
community, and you have to go to a food pantry to get enough food to 
make it through the week. Something is wrong that we in this body allow 
that to happen.
  Another person involved in food pantries told me 90 percent of the 
people who come into food banks in Warren County, an affluent county 
straight northeast out of Cincinnati, the first county out of 
Cincinnati, 90 percent of food bank recipients are employed. In some 
places, it might be 30 percent employed or 90 percent. The fact is, 
nobody who has a full-time job ought to have to go to food banks, 
especially since those food banks, in most cases, are giving enough for 
1 week, not 2 or 3, and they don't let them come back as often because 
they are running out of food. They have the same amount of

[[Page S484]]

food or less trying to serve more people.
  It is pretty clear this is as bad a situation as we have seen in 
recent memory. One of my constituents told me that he and his wife for 
years have donated time and money to Cleveland area food banks and soup 
kitchens. Over time, as his wages did not go up and with the higher 
cost of transportation, the cost of heating their home and the cost of 
food, Tim and his wife quit donating money but donate their time to the 
food banks.
  Today, Tim is going to the food bank for food. Tim said: It took 
great humility in that food bank to ask for food. He said: I used to 
consider myself middle class, but the salary and cost of living don't 
make it anymore. The Emergency Food Assistance Program that helps fund 
our Nation's food banks is the quickest, most efficient way to get food 
into the hands of people as their last stop emergency measure. But 
since 2002, because the President has had other priorities--tax cuts 
for the wealthiest Americans, a $3-billion-a-week war--the President 
has flat funded these food banks. Its current level of $140 million 
does not come close to taking care of these problems. Think about that. 
We talk a good game about personal responsibility, we talk about family 
values, yet for the basic level of nutrition, one in six seniors does 
not have enough food, and even a higher percentage of children in this 
society do not have enough food, and people who work full time in this 
society--forget about health care; we know many of them don't have 
health care--do not have enough food. Yet the President, because of the 
$3-billion-a-week war in Iraq, because he insists, even in his State of 
the Union Message, on more tax cuts, as Senator Casey, the Presiding 
Officer, was talking about earlier today, more tax cuts for the richest 
people in the country, we continue to spend exactly the same shrinking 
dollars for the last 5 years because you cannot buy nearly as much food 
on $140 million today as you could 5 years ago. We worked with other 
concerned colleagues to increase funding for food banks to $250 million 
in the farm bill. There has been bipartisan agreement there. 
Unfortunately, the President has threatened to veto this bill, in part 
because of increased spending on nutrition.

  We have also seen the President flat-line funding of the Women, 
Infants and Children program, which is about as pound-foolish and 
penny-wise as you can imagine. We are going to spend less to keep women 
who are pregnant, low-income women, healthy, spend less on nutrition 
for them, so we will have more low birth weight babies, more children 
not getting what is most important after they are born--at the most 
important time in their lives, in utero and after they are born--having 
the kind of nutrition they need--we are not going to fund that? What 
kind of priority is that?
  It is all a question of priorities. Do we give tax cuts to the 
wealthiest people in this country or do we take care of low-income 
women who are pregnant and children after they are born? And are we 
going to fund this $3 billion-a-week war in Iraq or are we going to 
look at some other priorities to take care of the 1-in-6 elderly people 
who have to choose between food and heat or food and the medicine they 
take? Are we going to continue to do these tax cuts for the wealthy at 
the expense of the middle class, at the expense of people who can't 
always help themselves?
  Again, most of these people who go to food banks are people who are 
employed. They are working hard and playing by the rules, and they 
simply can't quite make it because their incomes haven't kept up with 
the cost of gasoline in getting to and from work; the cost of heating, 
to stay warm in the winter; and the increasing cost of food.
  The President hasn't called for emergency measures to aid hungry 
Americans. He has consistently, as I have said before, tried to cut 
nutrition programs that target populations in desperate need. 
Indifference to human suffering is a moral failure, a moral failure 
that obscures our Nation's values and dampens our Nation's potential. 
Think about that: children in this country who don't have adequate food 
growing up, pregnant women who don't have the right nutrition. 
Considering what our other priorities are and how much we are spending 
on those other priorities, it is clearly something we should be doing 
in this body and in the House of Representatives.
  In the stimulus package that is about to pass the Senate, we have an 
amendment to provide an increase of $100 million for emergency food 
assistance. I know the Presiding Officer supports that, and I know most 
of my colleagues do. We also fear the Republicans will filibuster that 
because they do not think we should spend money directly on food 
programs. Some don't, some do. We know the President has threatened to 
veto anything in the stimulus package that wasn't his idea.
  There are few things in our country more important than making sure 
seniors, people who have worked all their lives, and children whose 
parents are working hard and playing by the rules and doing their best 
should be adequately fed and adequately housed. So I urge that this 
Congress, in the next couple days, amend the stimulus package to 
include this food assistance.

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