Author to address ‘hidden scandal’ of U.S. hunger

Thursday, March 4, 2010 | by stacey palevsky

After weeks of interviewing people who couldn’t afford to feed their families — or who could afford it only if they skimped on medication or mortgage payments — journalist Sasha Abramsky had an epiphany.

It came while he was watching Gregory Peck in the 1947 movie “Gentleman’s Agreement.”

The journalist Peck portrayed was writing about anti-Semitism in New York. His non-Jewish character decided that in order to get the full story, he needed to experience it, and so passed himself off as a Jew for the duration of his research.

Two days later, Abramsky similarly threw himself into the middle of his research — for a book about how low-income families get by.

He decided to put himself on a figurative McDonald’s employee’s salary, and live for seven weeks on the $8.23 an hour ($17,118 per year) the average worker makes.

“What most of us don’t know is the sort of ongoing hunger, the desperate nervousness about food and cash that shuts down your horizons, limits your social circles, embarrasses you into invisibility, shames you when you venture out in public,” Abramsky writes in his book’s prologue.

“Yet that is the sort of boundless hunger, the unpleasant fear that tens of millions of working Americans today face on a daily basis. And that is what I felt I had to know to write this book.”

During the seven weeks of his experiment, Abramsky gave up extravagances such as lattes, cocktails with friends and decadent meals out. He didn’t want the rest of his family to go hungry, so he designated one shelf in his refrigerator and one in the pantry for his limited supply of food.

Shopping on a severely reduced budget, he found he could afford mainly processed and salty foods — items such as generic cereal, frozen pizza and “the nastiest, cheapest chicken noodle soup in the store.”

The results of his experiment are one part of “Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It.” Abramsky weaves his own narrative in between chapters about high gas prices, rising health care costs, urban development and low-wage employment.

He will speak about the book 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, at the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Community Library in San Francisco.

“Americans are not hungry because of a shortage of food,” Abramsky said during a phone interview.

Rather, as he illustrates in his book, hunger in the United States is the result of policies (fuel, health care, aging, employment and welfare) that squeeze the budgets of middle- and working-class Americans — so much so that some families find it nearly impossible to afford food.

“I don’t talk very much about food [in the book],” Abramsky said. “What interests me more is how do you change other things — health care, unemployment benefits, job training to low-skilled workers — that provide a social infrastructure so that people can feed themselves and their families.”

Abramsky, who lives in Sacramento and teaches writing at U.C. Davis, traveled to California’s Siskiyou County (near the Oregon border), the Texas panhandle and many other locations to gather information for his book.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that 35 million Americans were “food insecure” in 2008, the most recent year data is available. Of these, about 7 million had “very low food security.” These people skip meals, skimp on their own portions to feed their kids or struggle to find the money to restock empty cupboards.

Abramsky’s low-income food experiment was a stark contrast to his childhood in London, England, where his great-grandparents had ended up after escaping the pogroms in Russia. Abramsky’s grandparents grew up poor in England, but as adults, they relished big meals with matzah ball soup, roast chicken and duck, potato pancakes and creamy desserts.

As he writes in the book: “That sense of life-expressed-through-food is something I imbibed from birth, and it is something I will take with me throughout my life. Not just food-as-survival-material, but rather food-as-social-sustenance.”

Sadly, the dining room table as a social magnet is one of the first things to fade when families are food insecure.

“If you’re calculating to the penny how to feed yourself and your family, then having a guest or another family over for dinner can double the cost of the meal — which for a middle-class family is no big deal, but for a person calculating their meals down to the dollar, you can’t afford to feed any more people,” Abramsky said. “That’s part of the collateral damage. It breaks down community bonds.”

Abramsky is a non-practicing Jew, and is somewhat skeptical of organized religion. But he realized while conducting research for his book that faith-based organizations play an important role in reducing food insecurity in the United States.

“People who can’t afford [to have people over for dinner] are priced out of the ability to do something as basic as invite someone over to socialize,” Abramsky said. “But religious charities’ [free communal dinners and soup kitchens] provide something of a fallback.”

Sasha Abramsky will speak about his book “Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It” at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 9, at the BJE Jewish Community Library, 1835 Ellis St.,

San Francisco. Free. Information:

(415) 567-3327 or http://www.sashaabramsky.com.