I live in the state of New Mexico.
New Mexico's children under five suffer America's fourth highest rate of food insecurity; 23.3%, or nearly one in four New Mexicans under five cannot be certain of their next meal.
New Mexico, has the fourth highest rate of childhood poverty, surpassed only by the District of Columbia, Mississippi and Louisiana.
You can help! For just $36, you can feed a hungry child for the whole summer. What a lovely Mother's Day gift!
Noweasels wrote about the Feeding America summer food campaign this morning.
Fed but not Nourished
I live in one of the poorest counties in New Mexico. Rio Arriba County is approximately the same size as Massachussettes, with rugged mountains and a population of 41,190 people. And until recently, the people of Rio Arriba (most of whom are either pre-Mexican-American War Hispanics or Native Americans) grew their own food.
Many of my community's current social problems are related to the way America eats, even problems such as land use and homelessness.
Fifty years ago, Rio Arriba's diet consisted of locally grown beans, corn, rice, wild spinach, chile and range fed beef. Today, in the town of Espanola (fewer than 9,000 residents), we have two Sonics, two LotaBurgers, a Dandy Burger, a Stop-N-Eat, a Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, Arby's, Long John Silver's, Dominoes, Pizza Hut, Home Run Pizza, Subway, Little Ceasar's...well, you get the point.
One hundred percent of the children in the Espanola School District qualify for school lunches. Since the district relies on processed foods it receives from the USDA Commodities Program, school lunches can be filled with foods dense in calories but poor in nutrients. Our rates of diabetes and obesity are far greater than those of neighboring, and much wealthier Los Alamos and Santa Fe Counties.
We have a Wal-Mart and a Super-Save but we don't have a grocery store that sells decent produce. The nearest one is in Santa Fe, a forty minute drive. Our expanding farmer's market, and a few local fruit stands, are the only places in town where we can purchase high quality food. Fortunatly, unlike the farmer's market in neighboring upscale Santa Fe County, it is affordable. It accepts EBT cards. Unfortunately, because it is only open on Mondays, people who work out-of-county cannot take advantage of the opportunity it offers.
Why would it be that an agricultural community has lost its access to food? Why do we have some of the highest overdose drug death rates in the nation? Why so much obesity and diabetes?
Rio Arriba’s poverty rates exceed neighboring counties. In 2004, 18.1% of Rio Arriba residents lived below poverty compared to 12% in Santa Fe and 3.2% in Los Alamos.
In 2004, 23.3% of Rio Arriba residents under age 18 lived below poverty, compared to 15.2% in Santa Fe, 1.8% in Los Alamos, and 24.6% statewide.
In 2004, the Median Household Income in Rio Arriba was $32,935, compared to $43,727 in Santa Fe and $94,640 in Los Alamos. The Median Household Income in the United States was $44,334.
Many residents of southern Rio Arriba commute long distances to low paying jobs in Los Alamos and Santa Fe. They are unavailable to their communities during the day.
Only 28% of our land in Rio Arriba is privately owned, further diminishing the already low tax base. As a result, there are few afterschool programs available to children.
Too many children remain inadequately supervised.
Most of Rio Arriba's arable land lies along river banks. In Southern Rio Arriba, much of this land has been subdivided into suburban style housing. Some of the owners are local. Others are commuters from neighboring counties who relocated because land was more affordable in Rio Arriba. The resulting suburban sprawl removes arable land from agriculture, drives up housing costs, and forces more people to join are already swelling ranks of low wage commuters.
Hence, the high concentration of fast food outlets. Tired people who can't find good produce stop for a cheap, convenient quick bite on their way to or from work.
I recently learned something about my county I didn't know. In Rio Arriba, you don't see homeless people on the streets. Extended families shelter needy relatives. We had always assumed we had no homeless population.
We do, however, recognize an ever-expanding jail population, and a group of residents who habitually seem to inhabit our emergency room. I recently began providing behavioral health assessments to our jail inmates to better understand their needs.
I was not surprised to find that many of our inmates suffer from untreated mental health and substance abuse issues. I was not surprised to learn that we have extremely high rates of dropped referrals (meaning that patients have difficulty accessing services). I was stunned to learn, however, that 70% of our dropped referrals appear to involve homeless individuals.
We are cycling substance abusing and mentally ill homeless people, who cannot access needed health care services, between the jail, the ER and various relatives' couches. The referrals are dropped because they move from relative to relative, quickly rendering their contact information obsolete.
We are emptying out our community of able-bodied adults during the day. The kids come home from school (stopping at Mickey Dee's on the way), and into contact with the substance abusing relative on the couch.
As the economy worsens, low wage commuters from Rio Arriba will be the first to lose their jobs, exacerbating the problem.
This is the fall-out produced by the sudden imposition of a wage economy upon an indigenous agrarian community. We must stop this cycle by increasing food security through food banks as a temporary fix, and by changing our food policies to favor local growers and local markets over the long term.
Please donate to the Feeding America Summer Lunch Program today.
Or, if you would like to mail a check, send it to:
Feeding America
Philanthropic Programs
35 East Wacker Drive, Suite 2000
Chicago, IL 60601
This Weekend's Hunger Diarists:
Saturday (10 am EST): noweasels
Saturday (1 pm EST): TheFatLadySings
Saturday (4 pm EST): boatsie
Saturday (7 pm EST): Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse
Saturday (10 pm EST): Hardhat Democrat
Saturday (midnight overnight): jellybeardemmom
Sunday (10 am EST): rb137
Sunday (1 pm EST): Norbrook
Sunday (4 pm EST): srkp23
Sunday (7 pm EST): blue jersey mom
Sunday (10 pm EST): Timroff