Tuesday, November 21, 2006
NY Times Editorial: "Brother, Can You Spare a Word"
The federal government has decided to drop the word "hunger" from its vocabulary, according to a new report released by the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture). The reason? it claims that the term "hungry" is not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey. The USDA will now use the term "very low food security."
Editorial -- New York Times
Brother, Can You Spare a Word?
Published: November 20, 2006
First the good news: the government’s annual hunger report shows a slight decline last year in the number of citizens in need of food. Now the bad news: the annual hunger report has dropped the word “hunger.”
Instead, there were 35 million Americans last year suffering from “low food security,” meaning they chronically lacked the resources to be able to eat enough food. Of these, 10.8 million lived with “very low food security,” meaning they were the hungriest among the hungry, so to speak.
Bureaucratic terminology about food security has always been a part of the hunger report, but so was the plain word “hunger.” The Agriculture Department decided that variations of “hungry” are not scientifically accurate, following the advice of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies. The specialists advised that being hungry was too amorphous a way to refer to “a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation.”
The government insists that no Orwellian plot is in the works to mask a national blight. The goal has been to cut what we’ll call the hungry households to no more than 6 percent of the population. But hungry people persist at nearly twice that rate, despite the slight drop last year. To the extent that more public empathy is needed to prod a stronger attack on low food security, we opt for “hunger” as a most stirring word.
For more information, go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601403.html
Also see http://a.abcnews.com/WNT/story?id=2659818&page=1 (“Gov’t: Hungry Americans No Longer ‘Hungry,’” abcnews.com, November 16, 2006)
::Shelley
Editorial -- New York Times
Brother, Can You Spare a Word?
Published: November 20, 2006
First the good news: the government’s annual hunger report shows a slight decline last year in the number of citizens in need of food. Now the bad news: the annual hunger report has dropped the word “hunger.”
Instead, there were 35 million Americans last year suffering from “low food security,” meaning they chronically lacked the resources to be able to eat enough food. Of these, 10.8 million lived with “very low food security,” meaning they were the hungriest among the hungry, so to speak.
Bureaucratic terminology about food security has always been a part of the hunger report, but so was the plain word “hunger.” The Agriculture Department decided that variations of “hungry” are not scientifically accurate, following the advice of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies. The specialists advised that being hungry was too amorphous a way to refer to “a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation.”
The government insists that no Orwellian plot is in the works to mask a national blight. The goal has been to cut what we’ll call the hungry households to no more than 6 percent of the population. But hungry people persist at nearly twice that rate, despite the slight drop last year. To the extent that more public empathy is needed to prod a stronger attack on low food security, we opt for “hunger” as a most stirring word.
For more information, go to:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111601403.html
Also see http://a.abcnews.com/WNT/story?id=2659818&page=1 (“Gov’t: Hungry Americans No Longer ‘Hungry,’” abcnews.com, November 16, 2006)
::Shelley
