paterick..we already do.
adam—Blighted urban areas do NOT have mega-stores with beans or produce. Beans are not a complete protein unless mixed with a starch.

When the govt stop subdsidizing corn (for fat cows and corn syrup) and making schools pay for everything by making a deal with Pepsi, and urban areas have more than liquor stores, maybe i’ll listen. Until then, youre just insensitive. If you were “smart with your budget” you wouldnt live in the US. If I had the money, Id be long gone.

Of course, Americans are hungry. Bifurcation of US
society into coexisting first- and third-world
populations has been underway for three decades. We
have a Gini coefficient of .47 for God’s sake! If we
look at the global population of 6.8 billion, about a
billion are suffering dire hunger, while some 3 billion
are moving up to better nutrition, or at least more
energy and land-and-water-intense foods such as farmed
meat. One in seven hungry? I’d say national inattention
to the issue of food insecurity pretty much matches the
international norm of blithe indifference.

“24.9 percent of American children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent. And once born on the wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there than their counterparts in Europe. Those born to better-off families are more likely to stay better off. America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and a serfdom of the poor - the inevitable result of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract.”
(Will Hutton)

“Cuba has ... been condemned for not allowing its people to flee the island. That so many want to leave Cuba is treated as proof that Cuban socialism is a harshly repressive system, rather than that the U.S. embargo has made life difficult in Cuba. That so many millions more want to leave capitalist countries like Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, El Salvador, Philippines, South Korea, Macedonia, and others too numerous to list is never treated as grounds for questioning the free-market system that inflicts such misery.”
(Michael Parenti)

“America’s punitive and reactive response to crime is an integral part of the new social Darwinism, the criminal justice counterpart of an increasingly harsh attack on living standards and social supports, especially for the poor ... America [is] a society in which a permanent state of social disintegration is held in check only by the creation of a swollen apparatus of confinement and control that has no counterpart in our own history or in any other industrial democracy.”
(Elliott Currie)

“Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike.”
(William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969)

Poor people living in third-world countries are not the only victims of the so-called new world order. At the heart of this “new” order is a troubling paradox: Poor people within the United States, and the country as a whole, are getting poorer at the same time as the rich within the United States are getting richer.”
(Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer)

... “the United States is slipping into a category of countries - among them Brazil, Britain, and Guatemala - where the gap [between rich and poor] is the worst around the globe.”
(United Nations’ Human Development Report)

“When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint.  When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.”
(Archbishop Helder Camara, Brazilian liberation theologist)

They don’t even know how bad it really is, and if they did they wouldn’t say.

Further in the article:“The survey suggested that things could be much worse but for the fact that we have extensive food assistance programs,” Vilsack told reporters. “This is a great opportunity to put a spotlight on this problem.”

What an asshole…yeah, its “great” Vilsack…

What a disgrace, in view of the recent colossal Wall Street bailouts and bonuses!  With that, plus the torture scandals, the money-and-life-gobbling wars, murders, rapes, suicides, a continuing taste for capital punishment and the dimwitted fight over universal health care, Americans must look like a bunch of self-destructive idiots escaped from a nut factory!