Real Life Application

Last semester, I volunteered for Terps Against Hunger in College Park. This organization focused using student and community volunteers to package together nutrient rich meals to those that struggle with food security. They also focus on educating their volunteers on the issue of food insecurity and its causes and effects. This problem is especially present in Washington D.C. despite the district’s high median income. Terps Against Hunger constructs nutritious meal packs that can feed one family for multiple days that can supplement federally subsidized meals that often times do not provide substantive nutrients for low income families.

​

            The issue that Terps Against Hunger is trying to solve is hunger in the greater Washington D.C. area. Food security is defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as “The availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food, or the ability to acquire such food, is limited or uncertain for a household” (The Issue).  The problem of food insecurity is especially prominent around our nation’s capital. Four percent or approximately 37,000 Washington D.C. households are food insecure with an additional 11.4 percent of D.C. households with low food security (The Issue). While the federal nutrition program commonly known as Food Stamps is meant to alleviate food insecurity, many households still go hungry. The federally subsidized means of obtaining meals is not encompassing enough for all of these families to receive the necessary amount of nutrients to remain healthy. To contextualize the problem faced in this area, the percentage of households in Maryland that are food insecure is around one percent (The Issue). Even though Washington D.C. is a much smaller area, their percentage of food insecurity is ten times that of the entire state of Maryland. Another fact that shows the depth of this issue is the racial disparity when it comes to food insecurity. In Washington D.C., the median income for African American households is approximately $90,000 less than the median income for white families (Milloy). This data presents that African American families are more at risk for food insecurity because of their economic disparity. This also leads to less grocery stores being present in predominantly African American neighborhoods and living in a food desert can drastically limit their access to healthy eating options.

​

            This problem can be more clearly illustrated by looking at specific effect of food insecurity on these households. According to Beverley Wheeler, director of D.C. Hunger Solutions, parents skip meals so their children can eat, and older siblings skip meals so the younger children can eat (Milloy). Because they cannot afford for everyone in the house to eat nutrient rich meals, older members of the family have to sacrifice so the young can eat. By not eating, the adults of the family will have less energy and be less productive at work and the teenagers skipping meals will be less successful in school because they are not eating enough. Even with families that have government subsidized food plans, the households are not receiving nutritious meals. When Wheeler used to work in the D.C. charter school system, she said she would see many children come to school with orange fingers and tongues which indicated a breakfast of Cheetos and orange soda (Milloy). The more affordable food that can be bought with government help does not lead to healthy eating practices.

​

            Just from my experience volunteering for Terps Against Hunger, I observed all of the tangible work they are doing to help those families that are dealing with food insecurity in the D.C. area. Specifically, they host food packaging events on campus so they can use student volunteers to get as much packaged as they can. At the event, there were many tables that had an assembly line where volunteers were filling bags that would provide a family with six meals, with vitamins and minerals, vegetables, protein and rice. They bags were then weighed, sealed and put into boxes. In the middle of the room, there were people opening bags of the ingredients and filling up the tables that were low on ingredients. They then send these boxes of meals to different local distributors like the Salvation Army and the Capital Area Food Bank. This offers the short-term solution of sending out these meals to families in need quickly. It also presents long term solutions by getting students and the community involved, as it raises awareness for food insecurity. This could potentially lead to people to continue to volunteer in the future as well as influence their future decisions when it comes to policy making. After seeing first-hand, the hard work it takes to put all of these meals together at the rate at which they did, they may feel more inclined to vote for somebody that runs on the platform of food security reform.