The Joy of Cooking?

I posted a previous blog a few months back about cooking and how Adam and I cook for enjoyment.  There is an episode of Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" this season where he and a few other people in the food business are sitting around and talking about cooking/food/eating ect.  They talked about going to exotic places, eating fantastic meals, getting into restaurants and such.  I love to cook, I love eating and just the experience with my husband and others who are cooking / eating with me, but I think about it and I realize the sheer amount of people who just cannot afford such luxuries.
First world problems....
There are weeks when our budget is tight, but we have food on the table... we cook together, we can maintain and lately I have realized...there are people who do not have that luxury, but they also live in the First World....here.
I recently watched a documentary on children who live in hotels, who are basically homeless.  Their families, made up of the working poor.  


http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/homeless-the-motel-kids-of-orange-county/index.html

The fact that these kids get scary...scary food provided for the by the school they go to and then that may or may not be the only meal they have the rest of the day, upsets me beyond anything.  If each person who had the funds gave a couple dollars a week to the hungry, would these kids be fed?  Instead of a war on drugs and a war on terror...shouldn't we have a war on poverty?


How do you fight that war?  I understand that our current welfare system is really messed up, but how do we help the working poor, those who cannot make it?  I know people who work one and two jobs at minimum wage and they cannot even ponder getting above ground....  I know people who because of disabilities have to get supplemental help and they cannot even afford to live on their own, they have to rely on others to help and that is hard...that is so hard for them...

I want to help, I know a lot of people who do...I know a lot of people who fight the war on poverty, but for them at this point it is like sitting in a trench on the Somme in 1916.  There are people living in such desperate poverty in America that the rest of the country would rather paint the poor as worthless lazy scum than acknowledge that this sort of suffering sits on all of our doorsteps.

Have we dehumanized poverty to accept it?  How many of us will sleep tonight with a roof over our heads and food in our belly?  How many wont?


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