I'm in Arkansas this week reporting on the Senate race, and there were two small news items about hunger in the state today.
Wal-Mart, based in the north Arkansas town of Bentonville, announced this week that it would donate $2 billion in food and cash to end hunger nationwide. And on a more local level, Arkansas and Mississippi are both trying to get more students who receive free lunches to participate in the summer lunch programs. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who's in a tough re-election campaign, said she got about $1.47 million to give to providers in the state. The money will be used to see if 50 cents more per meal is enough of an incentive to get providers to offer lunches for at least 40 days during the summer:
Nationwide, about 20 percent of children who receive free or reduced-price meals at school also receive meals in the summer. In Arkansas, however, only 10.5 percent of children eligible for free and reduced-price meals received meals last summer, and in Mississippi only 7.9 percent received summer meals.
As Ann Friedman wrote in TAP last month, hunger is an issue often lost in the food-politics conversations most prevalent today. She wrote that at some point in the past year, one in five Americans did not have enough money to buy food. In 2008, Arkansas was one of the most food-insecure states in the country, with almost 16 percent of families struggling to pay for food. At the same time, Arkansas has had one of the highest rates of obesity in the nation, helping to spur former Gov. Mike Huckabee, who himself famously dropped 110 pounds, in his efforts to curb obesity in the state, including sending school children home with obesity report cards.
Three years after that, the state Health Department reported that childhood obesity no longer seemed to be rising in Arkansas. But the example of Arkansas underscores that much of our nation's health problems are problems of poverty. Wal-Mart may not be an especially profitable firm since (as Matt Yglesias has rightly corrected me before) mass-market retail isn't that lucrative at the margins. But the company still owes a lot to the poor people it employs and sells to, especially in its home state.
-- Monica Potts
