Very low description security
"Hell has three doors: lust, rage, and greed." -Bhagavad Gita
Recently the USDA began using the phrase "very low food security" in place of the words "hunger" and "hungry". The official statement of this change in verbiage is here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/labels.htm
I'll be the first to say that Americans have very different ideas about scarcity than do most people in the world. On this particular chunk of rock that everyone you know calls home, 1.2 billion people lack access to something as basic as safe drinking water. http://www.un.org/ga/president/57/pages/speeches/statement030605-EnivornmentDay.htm
If you don't have access to safe drinking water in America, you're not just in the vast minority, you're just not taking advantage of the resources available to you. We give away water that more than exceeds of the World Health Organizations standards for safe drinking water in public places in every city in America. When was the last time you didn't see a drinking fountain in a public library or public park? In America, resources which other people in the world fight over are simply taken for granted.
With that in mind, there is still hunger in America. I think many Americans are understandably appalled that, in a nation where the average CEO (of companies with more than $1 billion dollars in annual revenue) makes $42000 per *day* http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/news/companies/ceo_pay_epi/index.htm
that some people have trouble procuring even one balanced meal a day.
No one likes to be appalled, but in response one can either continue to be appalled, fix the problem, or hide the problem. This Orwellian change of language from "hungry" to "very low food security" isn't just bureaucratic jumble-speak that destroys precision by substitution of vague terms for well-understood terms, it is a replacement of visceral language with gilded, torpid verbiage that dummies up the whole problem and in so doing helps to make it less immediate and less threatening such that people have less impetus to remedy it. That's bad.
What was wrong with the term "hungry"? It is evocative. Hearing it, you can visualize the problem and imagine the frustration of people that know they're not eating enough, or are not eating right even though people in their neighborhood are throwing perfectly good food away. "Hungry" is hard to ignore. Even hard-boiled asshats like yours truly who think that seeing perfectly able-bodied (and cleanly shaven) men standing on the street corner with signs that say "Hungry. Please Help" is amusing in some vague way, are compelled to help when confronted with genuinely hungry people.
On the other hand, "very low food security" doesn't evoke squat. (When was the last time you heard a child whine, "Mommy! My food security level is low!"?) It's easy to ignore the problem when it has the label "very low food security" because the term evokes no thoughts, no images, and no desire to help.
The USDA, and other government agencies in general, should spend the money they take from us to help fix problems not help hide them.
Recently the USDA began using the phrase "very low food security" in place of the words "hunger" and "hungry". The official statement of this change in verbiage is here: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/labels.htm
I'll be the first to say that Americans have very different ideas about scarcity than do most people in the world. On this particular chunk of rock that everyone you know calls home, 1.2 billion people lack access to something as basic as safe drinking water. http://www.un.org/ga/president/57/pages/speeches/statement030605-EnivornmentDay.htm
If you don't have access to safe drinking water in America, you're not just in the vast minority, you're just not taking advantage of the resources available to you. We give away water that more than exceeds of the World Health Organizations standards for safe drinking water in public places in every city in America. When was the last time you didn't see a drinking fountain in a public library or public park? In America, resources which other people in the world fight over are simply taken for granted.
With that in mind, there is still hunger in America. I think many Americans are understandably appalled that, in a nation where the average CEO (of companies with more than $1 billion dollars in annual revenue) makes $42000 per *day* http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/news/companies/ceo_pay_epi/index.htm
that some people have trouble procuring even one balanced meal a day.
No one likes to be appalled, but in response one can either continue to be appalled, fix the problem, or hide the problem. This Orwellian change of language from "hungry" to "very low food security" isn't just bureaucratic jumble-speak that destroys precision by substitution of vague terms for well-understood terms, it is a replacement of visceral language with gilded, torpid verbiage that dummies up the whole problem and in so doing helps to make it less immediate and less threatening such that people have less impetus to remedy it. That's bad.
What was wrong with the term "hungry"? It is evocative. Hearing it, you can visualize the problem and imagine the frustration of people that know they're not eating enough, or are not eating right even though people in their neighborhood are throwing perfectly good food away. "Hungry" is hard to ignore. Even hard-boiled asshats like yours truly who think that seeing perfectly able-bodied (and cleanly shaven) men standing on the street corner with signs that say "Hungry. Please Help" is amusing in some vague way, are compelled to help when confronted with genuinely hungry people.
On the other hand, "very low food security" doesn't evoke squat. (When was the last time you heard a child whine, "Mommy! My food security level is low!"?) It's easy to ignore the problem when it has the label "very low food security" because the term evokes no thoughts, no images, and no desire to help.
The USDA, and other government agencies in general, should spend the money they take from us to help fix problems not help hide them.
posted by Minotaur at 8:41 AM
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