“It’s time for America to get very serious about food security and hunger.” That comment came from U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, in response to a USDA report that more than one in seven American households struggled to get enough to eat in 2008. That’s about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of American households, and a 31 percent increase over the previous year. We’ve become accustomed to seeing pictures of starving kids in faraway places, but can you imagine? Americans, including 17 million children, not getting enough to eat, in what used to be called the land of plenty.

If that’s not bad enough, the report emphasized that the numbers from 2009 are almost certain to be worse. A survey of food banks last summer showed another 30 percent increase in demand.

Experts say the biggest culprit is unemployment, abetted by rising food prices. President Obama called the USDA’s findings “unsettling,” and said “the first task is to restore job growth, which will help relieve the economic pressures that make it difficult for parents to put a square meal on the table each day.” Meanwhile, Secretary Vilsack is pressing Congress to expand programs such as food stamps and free school lunches, which currently consume about 70% of the ag department’s budget.

To a homesteader who doesn’t have much use for high-fallutin’ academic economics, but who greatly appreciates common sense and simple solutions, this “Establishment” reaction is both typical and self-defeating, to say nothing of being unnecessarily complicated.

Restore job growth? Doing what, making more stuff that uses up energy and resources, then overloads landfills, and which nobody really needs anyway? Or would they be the kinds of jobs where workers don’t actually produce anything… like maybe on Wall Street?

As for “free” lunches, how can it be that some people still don’t realize that there is no such thing, when most of us learn that in grade school?

While the daily newspapers were all headlining the ag department report, and the Establishment response, a little quarterly magazine from the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association arrived with what would seem to be a very logical alternative. Justin Mog’s essay in the Winter 2009 On Wisconsin told how he and his wife had worked for three years in agriculture and nutrition in the Peace Corps, in Paraguay. On their return home in late 2008, they thought it would be fitting to send a letter to President-elect Obama, “urging him to plant an organic kitchen garden on the White House lawn as a model of sustainable living and healthy eating. To our delight, we weren’t the only ones who thought this was a good idea, including the Obamas themselves.” The Obamas broke ground on the garden in March, 2009. And not incidentally, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack started a “People’s Garden” at the USDA.

Mog went on to say that in today’s world, “poor” can mean a dizzying array of things. “Helping people get out of ‘poverty’ requires the opposite of the all-too-common, one-size-fits-all strategy. But thankfully, one thing was universal in my Paraguayan community: no matter how poor, no one goes hungry.”

The reason, of course, is that they have food security, by producing their own, on a surprisingly small amount of land.

Americans do not.

How much imagination, or even common sense, would it take to put all this together? For those who still don’t get the picture, we could add tons of details: the amount of water, gas, fertilizer, and time and labor, wasted on useless lawns; the vacant lots and other unused spaces that could become community gardens; the joys of gardening, or raising chickens, or learning to cook “from scratch,” compared with the depressing and dehumanizing effects of being unemployed, and on and on. Obviously it’s not all that simple. And yet, the more data I apply to the problem, the more ways I connect the dots, and the longer I play with the pieces, the more sense it makes. (I could go on and on, but I already wrote a book about it: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living will be out in December.)

There should be no need to worry about unemployment — or hunger — for anyone involved in self-sufficient living, even if it’s not beyond the sidewalks.

—Jd Belanger