Food & Society

IN CLASS: Working in groups, use the questions in Figure 8.1to develop your own categories of household food security. What should the categories be? How would you use responses to put households into those categories? Compare your proposal to that of other groups and the method used by the USDA (described in Coleman-Jensen et al. 2015). Which classification method would you favor if you were an anti-poverty advocate? Which would you favor if you were a budget-minded senator, interested in shrinking the SNAP program?

FOR DISCUSSION: What do you think would happen if, overnight, all emergency food providers in the country closed their doors? What would be the consequences for the different groups Poppendieck describes: recipients, individual donors, corporate donors, government, and service organizations?

ONLINE: Choose a country in the global South and see what you can learn about its food security situation from reputable online sources. Start with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (fao.org) and the World Bank’s Millennium Development Goals. How many in this country are food insecure? How many food calories are produced per person in the country? Which foods are imported? Which are exported? What seem to be the direct and indirect contributors to food-security problems in that country? What would food sovereignty activists want to see changed?