Food InsecuritySometimes feeding ourselves can be such a pain. First you have to find the right ingredients for the desired food by going grocery shopping. Afterwards you must recreate that delicious sounding recipe you found online. Even something as simple as a sandwich can be annoying to find. However, has it ever occurred to you that perhaps this burden is a nice, even envied, task to have? The people who carry this burden are often annoyed by the amount of work, while others desire the burden to exist in their life.
If you are a member of the latter group, your residential area could indeed by “food insecure.” Food insecurity occurs in regions where either the quality or quantity of food is lacking, and obtaining healthy food is increasingly hard. Many of these areas have a large number of low income households, resulting in consumption of unhealthy and low quality food. Food insecurity is a direct effect of living in an impoverished area, so the solution is difficult to narrow down. However, understanding the problem is the first step.Healthy Communities Need Healthy Foods asserts that in order for people to lead a healthy lifestyle, healthy food is necessary. The article sites that 42.2 million Americans lived in food insecure households. However, out of these 42.2 million, 13.1 million were children. Getting the right food for people who need it most, like children and elderly, is important because eating healthy and leading a healthy lifestyle have a correlation. The article asserts that their organization “Feeding America” aims to bring healthy nutritious food to food pantries. This is important because food pantries are sometimes not enough. What matters is that the people coming in get the nutrition they need in order to live better in general. Essentially, the people must live how they eat.How Foods affects Your Mood provides insight on how a healthy diet chemically affects how a person functions. In his article “Poor as a child, sick as an adult”, Dr. Tony Attwood found that children living in poverty are more likely to experience chronic stress and aggression. There is a very real chance that this is due to a chemical imbalance from lack of nutrition. “How Food Affects your Mood” claims that eating a nutritious breakfast, including fruits, nuts, and cereals, has a huge impact on the anxiety felt throughout the day. This is especially important for kids who attend school for five days a week. By helping the food and mood of these communities, the quality of the area itself should be helped.Food Dayis a fantastic resource for schools who want to get involved in nutrition education. Foodday.com offers a variety of activities that can be implemented in many schools to increase food education. This organization has developed programs in schools where middle school students actually learn how to cook certain foods. While hard to bring up to children, it is important that kids know where their food comes from. Even without being overt about the details, kids can still make a decision based off of knowledge of the conditions of the farms their meat is kept in prior to processing.While the general nutrition is essential for improvement of impoverished communities, nutrition education is equally as essential for children and adults. People deserve to know the potential dangers that exist when eating too much meat, poultry, or other meats. Once the standard for quality food is met, people living in these communities can finally have the LUXURY of food shopping and deciding what to make.
