The White House created its first conference to explore hunger and nutrition in the United States in 1969. Since then, hunger has not only remained, but it’s regularly surged to staggeringly high levels.
Now, in the wake of the social, health, and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden-Harris administration is getting ready for another conference on hunger, nutrition, and health this upcoming September. The mandate is ambitious: “End hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.”
More than 38 million people in the US, including 12 million children, struggle with food insecurity, meaning they’re unable to get enough food to be healthy, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. During the pandemic, more than 53 million Americans turned to food banks as bank accounts dwindled and fridges emptied.
Barbie Izquierdo, food security activist and consultant and the winner of the 2022 Global Citizen Prize: Citizen Award USA, is all too familiar with the deprivations of hunger, having struggled with it for much of her life. She’s been sharing her lived expertise in listening sessions that are aimed at feeding into the White House conference process.
Article by July 5, 2022 at GlobalCitizen.org.
