First Draft: Food Insecurity

Kiarra Bowser

Professor Winchester

Eng. 110-07

8 September 2016

First Draft: Food Insecurity

        An issue that I think our community, our nation and our world has struggled with for a long time is a lack of healthy diets, nutrition, and food in general. People all around the world and in our society today struggle with having enough food or enough nutritious food which causes them to be food insecure. Food insecurity is a position of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable nutritious food. Food insecurity, in my opinion, is a major issue for children because adults for the most part get to choose what they eat, and children don’t get to decide what they eat or even where their next meal comes from. For my topic I want to research the defects food insecurity can cause children to have and how our community, nation and world can overcome food insecurity. I honestly believe that America produces more than enough food to the point that it’s heartbreaking to think a kid didn’t learn as well in school or do as good in a sport that they love because they were not or are not given the appropriate amount of food and nutrients a child needs every day.

 I wouldn’t say that any student living on Wingate’s campus are food insecure because while majority of the students here probably don’t eat or get all the nutrients they need we still have access it. My initial thought when I heard the term food insecurity was that it was someone who was anorexic or didn’t want to eat food. I first learned about food insecurity my senior year of high school when I volunteered for a non-profit organization called Out of the Garden, whose main goal was and still is to be a food assistance to struggling families’ primarily in Guilford County. This organization goes to about five different schools in the county, Monday thru Friday to take food that was left over after lunches, separate the food into groups, and then give it away to boys and girls clubs, and after school programs. This is done to one, to limit the food that is wasted day after day by cafeterias, and two, the founders of Out of the Garden - Don and Kristy Milholin - became aware that lunch at school was the last meal that some kids ate every day and after school programs only provided children with snacks after school. This organization also standardly holds nineteen fresh mobile markets a year which really helps families in the community. Fresh mobile markets are when volunteers such as myself get on this giant food truck and we hand out approximately a hundred and fifty cases of food that is roughly sixty-five pounds, normally people who are after the hundred and fifty mark get what is left over in the truck if we have food left over. This organization helped me realize how much my community was struggling to eat and feed their children. I learned that Guildford County, North Carolina is ranked number one in the nation for food insecure families and sixty-seven percent of children in North Carolina receive free or reduced lunch. I feel strongly about this topic because it hurts to live somewhere for practically your whole life and only realizing at eighteen years old that there may have been kids who were my friends, or classmates, or kid who I was just aquatinted with, kids who “seemed” like they were healthy and “seemed” lived with financially stable parents, but in fact were not getting the food and nutrients that people need to grow and learn at a “normal” or above normal pace.