Into Perspective...

This is an editorial that I have written.

The average grocery bill costs between $140 and $300 per week (nbc11news.com). That doesn’t go very far when you consider that most people don’t just eat meals (a meat, a vegetable, a starch and maybe a fruit) but snacks in between. In a family of four that’s between $5 and $10 a day to eat on. Let’s take a basic meal. (All pricing taken from pricecutter.com and divided by amount of servings.) 

• Sandwich (with no condiments) and basic salad. Our sandwich has two pieces of bread (0.10 a piece in a cheap loaf), 
• one slice of bologna (0.50) and 
• a slice of cheese (0.25). Now for our salad. 
• Lettuce (0.50), 
• three slices of cucumbers (0.17), 
• a tomato (0.25). 

Our very basic meal just took almost two ($1.77) dollars out of our daily allotment for that person. We are left with only $3.23 for breakfast, dinner and any snacks we may eat in the meantime. 

            What if you can’t afford even that? Your options are to steal, go to a kitchen, get government aid or go hungry. Only the last choice does not directly affect our economy.

There may be other options. Providing subsidies and grants to companies like Dole Food Company to lower their costs to distributors would allow for more groups of people to get good food into the home.

I’m referring to the elderly woman who wants strawberries, but can’t afford it. The family of four who eat decent but not great. The teacher who puts food on the table, but not the best food. The student who is living off ramen noodles and frozen pizza.

With lowered healthy food costs, we could better afford to be a healthier nation. What can you do? 1. Go to http://notbigbutbroke.blogspot.com/ and become better educated about the problem. 2. Sign the petition located on the above site. 3. Speak up. Educate others and then take it to Congress.

We live in the most overweight country in the world. But step-by-step we can change that. Get one apple to one person who couldn’t have one before. That’s a small start, but it is a start.