Food struggles

In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “middle-class Americans struggle to put food on the kitchen table.”

At a town hall meeting in Denver, John McCain said Arab oil sultans are getting rich, while middle class Americans “struggle to put food on the table.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m a middle class American and I’m struggling to keep food off the table.

I didn’t get to be 30 pounds overweight struggling to keep food on the table. Food is ubiquitous (for slot machine players, that means it’s everywhere.) It’s like we’re surrounded by food. There’s food where we work. There’s food in our cars, there’s food in our houses, lots of food in my house. Food, food, food.

If I drive to work down Wyoming Avenue to Main Street, I pass, like 14 mom and pop restaurants. No chains restaurants, family-owned joints, most of them long established and none of them going out of business. It’s only five miles and I pass fourteen, including the one where Barack Obama stopped for a banana cream pie not long after his VP pick lamented how we are “struggling to put food on the table.”

From what I saw, it didn’t look like anybody in that diner was struggling to put food on the table.

And, oh, I didn’t mention that on my 14-restaurant ride to work, I didn’t count two donut shops, two ice cream joints, or Modern Market in Exeter, where you can get hoagies for a buck, or a supermarket and four convenience stores stocked with, you guessed it, wall to wall food.

Wait, I have to admit there is a class of people who struggle to put food on the table – the waitresses who have to carry it. Like when you’re out with a group of friends and a 110-pound teenage waitress hoists one of those gigantic trays on her shoulder and brings it to the table next to you and the people at your table elbow each other in the side, hide behind the menu and whisper stuff like, “Wow, look at the size of that bowl of pasta, it looks like an SUV hubcap,” or, “that’s a salad, it looks like my neighbors garden,” or “why is she serving them a football, or is that a baked potato” or “that anti-pasta serves two, two what, sumo wrestlers?”

This summer I went to at least seven church bazaars and festivals. At one they made 10,000 pierogies. Talk about struggling to put food on the table. The volunteers nearly broke their backs lugging those 50 pound bags of flour.

I also went to the Pittston Tomato Festival and the Italian Festival in Scranton where regular middle class folks who presumably struggle to food on the table struggled to get to the front of the line to pay six bucks for three raviolis.

I have to admit I struggled to put food on the table at the Pittston Tomato Festival 25th Anniversary party. Yea, Dente’s put out a buffet and I have only two hands.

The federal food stamp budget this year was $36.7 billion, but we’re struggling to put food on the table. (By the way the $36 billion is for low income families and the $.7 is for Michael Phelps.)

The federal government also gave away $90 million worth of food in the last fiscal year, yet we’re struggling top put food on the table.

The federal government runs 26 food and nutrition programs operated by six different agencies, but we are struggling to put food on the table.

The Department of Agriculture estimates that 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of food available to be eaten in 2007 were thrown away and the EPA estimates that tossed food is 12 percent of the waste stream, but we’re struggling to put food on the table.

By the way, one percent of that wasted food fell out of Michael Moore’s beard.

The U.S exported $89.9 billion of food and agricultural products, $8.5 billion of wheat, $11.2 billion in corn, but we are struggling to put food on the table.

Food companies and restaurants spent an estimated $12 billion on advertising last year, but we’re struggling to put food on the table.

It is estimated that Americans spend $30-$40 billion a year on weight loss products and services, in others words they spent 40 billon struggling not to put food on the table, but somehow we are struggling to put food on the table.

It is estimated that 65 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, about the same percentage are on a weight-loss diet at any given time and 18 percent are on a permanent diet, but we are struggling to put food on the table.

Political rhetoric will be, I suppose, but please, guys, cool it with the struggling to put food on the table routine.

When Joe Biden and McCain travel around country meeting people, speaking at rallies and all, don’t they notice how fat we are?