Letters

Out to Lunch

Editors:

I was struck by the Spring issue dedicated to “Food,” where there were seven articles but not one that addressed the subject of food and hunger or poverty. This extraordinary omission, especially for a leading periodical of the Left, does raise some questions of what worlds your editors are living in these days.

Dissent had a myriad of hunger-related food subjects to cover from the nearly one in five Americans who experienced food hardship because of inability to purchase sufficient food this past year, according to a national survey released in February by the Food Research and Action Center (www.frac.org) to the increased right-wing attacks on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly Food Stamps) to the unfulfilled potential of the national School Lunch and Breakfast program (see Hunter sociologist Janet Poppendieck’s recent book, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America) to the fact that seven of ten Americans support federal nutrition programs and don’t want to cut them to reduce government spending.

Your issue did a nice job of covering the mostly popular, middle-class concerns around food and nutrition. Maybe a future issue ...