[frankthetank]

Local story out of La Crosse. I wonder if this will be a reality someday soon in many cities, but instead of the Salvation Army handing out bag lunches, it'll be the Department of Defense or FEMA? Watch the kids come running for that van. I wouldn't want to be a lunch delivering employee in the chaos that is soon to develop in many areas.

http://wxow.com/News/index.php?ID=11594

Click on the little red video icon in the right corner. I don't know how to embed video in this forum?? If that is even possible?

[Aaron]

[web]http://wxow.com/Streamer/stream.php?url=/Video/playlist.php?ID=11594[/web]

[Jack]

Actually, you'll find a number of school systems already fulfill the role. Quite a number provide free breakfasts, with no assessment of need. An evolving trend is for the school to fill a backpack with various foods on Friday afternoon for use over the weekend.

How long that will last as prices go up and budgets get crunched is a question...

[I_Like_Plants]

I think it's great of the Salvation Army to have the balls to do this.

Remember it's illegal in many states to feed the hungry.

Also, I remember summers being long and hungry when I was a kid because you'd not get that free lunch from school. Breakfast, forget about it, though, and then they wondered why the academic standards were so low.

But bread lines are a fact of life in the US. The church across from the Federal building in downtown San Jose had a food program for the homeless and I see them lining up to get food bags. There's also a program in Palo Alto. There are programs all over the place, really. Again they're a fact of life in the US.

[Tyler_JC]

Every country has an underclass that requires assistance from everyone else.

Fortunately, America is a rich country that could give adequet food aid to all of its citizens if only the people would demand it.

The food aid we currently give to other countries could be redirected to feed Americans, making the proposal cost-neutral.

[lawnchair]

School breakfasts do more for educational outcomes, statistically, than any educational policy short of much smaller class sizes. The number of students who are nutrient-deprived (even if calories are adequate) is very sad. Usually it stems from a parent with a meth problem or a video-lottery problem (the drunk parents can usually afford to feed their kids).

[I_Like_Plants]

In my own family's case it started with Dad being a goddamned computer programmer instead of something honest like a plumber. He was not able to make money for us to live on and felt so ashamed, he stopped coming home (he died in DEEP debt and poverty). We ended up on welfare and food stamps, and this would afford us a Spartan existance and food to last the month but my mom knew nothing about soaking beans and making a potroast last the week and so on, and I as a kid really didn't know how to teach her or take over the family finances. I did become good at going out and earning (literally) a few dollars to buy dinner on, and would get cheap filling stuff like eggs, milk, bread, etc.

What happens when you're at about 5% bodyfat and sub-100 lbs as a teenager is your mind kind of goes dead. Your body's doing the best it can to keep your brain going, but essential fats have to go for the rest of the nervous system, the whole body has to be able to forage, fight, etc.

The lunch program kept a lot of kids going but we didn't have a breakfast program.

The simple truth is that under predatory capitalism, you're going to have a lot of kids growing up malnourished, with stunted growth, uneducated, etc. You're going to have whole industries hyping certain job fields like high tech when in reality it's carpenters and shoemakers and tailors and various blue collar things that are needed. In the US you have a lot of people taught to aspire towards high tech careers but there are no jobs, and those people would be better off learning to do landscaping or getting into some type of Union job, any kind of Union job, they can.

It's not meth in most cases, it's not "welfare mothers popping out more kids", the average family on welfare has an absent father due to the father not being able to find work, the kids do not increase, and the family is not on welfare all that long - generally as soon as the kids grow up everyone does the American family thing and splits up, never talk to each other again, and as single people generally can't get welfare even if they wanted/needed it.