A nation, its food and its morality

There's a line linking the gutting of global aid with our complicated approach to food

What might a loaf of bread reveal about our nation’s priorities, and its morality? (Unsplash photo by Yael Hofnung)

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A bakery the next county over sells an organic whole wheat sourdough bread that is my current favorite. So when we went grocery shopping the other day at the start of a vacation out West, I grabbed a loaf that looked familiar, figuring I would see how the local craft bakery there stacked up alongside ours. Only after we got back to our rented condo did I notice the pricetag: I had paid $16 for the bread — about a buck-fifty a slice, I figure.

Everybody’s got to make a living, you know, and I’m willing to pay extra for good food. I mean, the chemically-enhanced factory-produced white bread that you can pick up at Trader Joe’s for less than two bucks a loaf is not my idea of healthy eating, and I frankly resent the fact that the farmer’s share of that purchase is probably less than 12 cents, according to a recent Kansas study. We all deserve better than that, thank you. So, yes, I had parted with a lot of dough for a pound of dough. But it was really good bread.

The next morning, though, as I was enjoying my slice of expensive-and-tasty toast, I came across a report that the United States government had ordered the incineration of nearly 1.1 million pounds of high-energy biscuits that had been intended as food aid for hungry children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I laid aside my jam knife and read on: The biscuits could have fed 1.5 million children for a week, but they had gone stale while sitting for months in a Dubai warehouse, apparently a result of the Trump administration’s shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development and, as ABC News put it, “other logistical hurdles” linked to the Department of Government Efficiency.¹

It's not just USAID foodstuffs that are going to waste. President Trump wants to eliminate both the Food for Peace and the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education programs, which buy grain from American farmers to feed people around the world. A couple of farm state Republican senators held up the shuttering of those programs a couple of weeks ago, since their constituents’ grain was beginning to rot in Midwestern silos. But don’t for a minute think that those food aid programs aren’t still on Trump’s slash-and-burn list. This president doesn’t let little encumbrances like the law get in the way of what he wants, and the Republicans who run Congress always eventually cave, anyway.²

Yet amid all the insults to thoughtful leadership of this 47^th presidency, you’ve got to especially wonder about cutting off food aid to people so desperately in need around the world. None of the explanations we’ve heard from the Trump administration clearly explain why that’s in America’s strategic interest. And in the context of human decency, no argument can justify it. It is an objective that is obscenely selfish.

The president’s explanation when he gutted USAID — the nation’s main agency tasked with improving health and education and fighting poverty and hunger globally — was that it was run by “radical left lunatics” who allowed “tremendous fraud” to go on. Facts don’t back up that claim.³ Sure, USAID probably could have done a better job. After all, if aid programs had adequately kept up with the need, nobody would be going hungry just now.

But they are: Up to 757 million people around the world face chronic hunger, according to the World Food Program, and perhaps 43 million are on the brink of starvation or worse. It’s not that we don’t produce enough food; in fact, the world’s food system can feed billions more people than are alive today. But that food often doesn’t reach the hungry and starving who are in need. So they are abandoned, victims of poverty, conflict and infrastructure challenges.⁴

Blame can be spread around. Armed conflict frequently stops food deliveries because one side doesn’t want the other getting credit for providing help. Some 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted every year. And the growing demand for meat and dairy as nations develop takes land out of production for plants, which provide most of the nutrition for three-quarters of the world’s population; that is, the land is turned over to producing food for the richer people, rather than the poorer.⁵

So the main driver of hunger isn’t inadequate food production; it is a lack of equitable and efficient distribution. It is a failure not of science, but of politics.

Our political decisions are, of course, a reflection of our moral sensibility. The way we choose to govern ourselves springs from what we’ve decided we value. In that light, it’s hard not to see the decision of the American government to incinerate food rather than share it as anything less than an abject moral failure on the part of the American people.

I went back to my buck-fifty slice of toast. Like a lot of mornings when I’m reading the news these days, I felt ashamed. And angry.

Americans have a complex and often unhealthy relationship with food. Nutrition scientists say many of our most troubling health conditions — heart disease, obesity, diabetes — are linked to a diet that includes too much saturated fat and sugar. That happens as nations get wealthier, and the United States has had a lot of time at the top of the global wealth heap. Almost half of U.S. adults (46 percent) have a poor quality diet, meaning they consume too much salt, sugary beverages and processed meat, and too little fish, whole grains, vegetables and fruit. American kids are even worse off: 56 percent have a poor diet.⁶

Some people make healthier food choices; research reveals that they tend to be better educated and earn higher incomes. A higher share of Black adults have unhealthy diets than white people; also, food from fast-food or fast-casual restaurants offer worse nutrition compared to food from full-service restaurants, and even better nutritional outcomes are found in meals from grocery stores. This isn’t to demonize the poor or less educated Americans: It’s hard to take time to cook healthy meals, after all, if you’re working two jobs or struggling to support a family on a meager income.

So the solution to America’s unhealthy diet may be found, at least in large measure, in the same remedy that would combat many other social ills: more equal wealth distribution, so that the plague of poverty isn’t exacerbated by bad nutrition. It also could develop if we had better nutrition education. In the same way that smoking over time came to be viewed as an unhealthy choice that carries social stigma, a diet of unhealthy food might someday be seen as a bad decision. But that will only happen if healthy food is affordable and available for all — which would require an adjustment to the social contract that is contrary to the Trump administration’s disdain for programs that would enhance equity.

Let’s not confuse the issue: Wanting to make Americans healthier doesn’t mean we need to be skinnier. In fact, the nation’s obsession with weight is likewise perilous. Too many young women, especially, push themselves into unhealthy choices, in terms of both physical and mental health, by striving to look like Fox News anchors, and in this, too, the Trump administration plays a role. The president has made quite clear that women who aren’t white and thin are “not my type,” and there’s even a term, “the Mar-A-Lago face,” reflecting the idealized look represented by such Trump acolytes as Kimberly Guilfoyle, Kristi Noem and, of course, the First Lady. Some people apparently consider it attractive.

So eager are Americans for a solution to what they perceive as a weight problem that roughly half of the people who are prescribed GLP-1 drugs, which were initially approved to treat Type 2 diabetes, now use the injections to reduce obesity. That number has risen by 600 percent over the past six years. The longterm effects remain to be seen for a drug that already has been used by 12 percent of American adults.⁷

Many people may see a singular positive development of the Trump administration in the focus by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on promoting healthier eating habits. Kennedy is urging more scrutiny of food additives and ultra-processed foods, and is encouraging the food industry to adopt healthier options — though his impact is so far limited to jawboning. There’s danger, of course, in Kennedy’s wacky notion that diet changes can supplant the need for vaccinations, and his initiatives could disproportionately affect lower-income households in the absence of any support for them.

Besides, an administration with an agriculture policy that continues to encourage corporate farming, with its reliance on chemicals and nutrition-robbing production techniques, isn’t one that will truly make America healthy again — nor will the dirtier water and air that will inevitably result from Trump’s environmental deregulation make our food better or safer.

No, a president who serves Big Macs and Quarter Pounders to White House visitors isn’t about to produce a healthy food policy for the United States, any more than a president who sees every relationship as a transactional opportunity related to wealth will find any benefit in working to reduce hunger around the world. What’s in it for him, after all?

For all the shortcomings of American food policy, we remain the luckiest nation on earth. We have a rich and productive agriculture sector that feeds the nation and can produce much more. Vast food choices from around the world are plentifully available. And we spend a far lower share of our income on food than other developed nations: In 1960, we spent on average 17 percent of our disposable personal income on food, a figure that is now at about 10 percent.⁸

That cumulative figure masks the reality of food costs for lower-income Americans. In 2023, households in the lowest quintile of income spent one-third of their after-tax income on food, on average, while in the highest quintile, food took just 8 percent of income. And in the high-tariff world that is being shaped by Donald Trump’s economic policies, food costs will rise, putting added pressure on those least able to pay.⁹

You would think that the nation with the world’s largest economy would be able to simultaneously make better food choices available to all its citizens, not just the wealthy, and support the unprecedented need for food aid around the world. And we could — if we had the political will.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current calamity in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of people are facing catastrophic hunger; roughly one-third of the population of 2.1 million has gone multiple days without food, and dozens died of malnutrition in July. Starvation is an awful way to die. The World Health Organization says “a worst-case scenario of famine” is gripping the territory. This is the fault of the State of Israel, a political ally of the United States, which was drawn into war in Gaza by unspeakable violence but is now violating international law by using famine as a tool of that war. By inaction, our government is complicit in this crime.

The failure of America to act to end politically-induced famine in Gaza is of a piece with our turning away from providing food aid to countless other nations. It is a moral choice that our government is making on our behalf. Rather, it is an immoral choice.

Ultimately, of course, this requires a political solution, one that rests in the power of our democracy, which is now under assault. If we want change, people of good will need to care more and work harder. We need to summon the considerable energy that it will take to turn out of office all the weak people who feel no compunction about leaving fellow humans to die of hunger in a world with plenty of food.

A nation that produces a $16 loaf of bread owes humanity no less.

1. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Food/state-department-addresses-decision-destroy-500-tons-emergency/story?id=123837748

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/07/us/politics/trump-farmers.html

3. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/07/g-s1-46239/why-is-the-trump-administration-targeting-usaid

4. https://www.wfpusa.org/news/10-quick-facts-hunger-wfps-work/?ms=BlogPosts_GRNTSRCH_GGSA_BlogPosts_10Facts_10Facts_AD&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19905016045&gbraid=0AAAAADvz5nb39ZTQbAWRjN8DdmQbotvfn&gclid=CjwKCAjwy7HEBhBJEiwA5hQNouuJ3LCdQn7ICAlYm87L8yYELfdNA8b6BFzrJkRm-CvRj2rnPEROuxoC4XkQAvD_BwE&utm_source=google&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign={campaign}&utm_content=652699296420&utm_term=global%20hunger&utm_placement=&utm_adname={adname}

5. https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/feeding-a-growing-population-do-we-really-need-to-produce-more-food

6. https://theconversation.com/a-nutrition-report-card-for-americans-dark

7. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/27/american-glp1-use-weight-loss-increasing

8. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-share-of-income-spent-on-food-in-the-united-states-remained-relatively-steady-from-2000-to-2019

9. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=58372

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ENDNOTE

THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. I love to hear from readers.

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