Column: Fighting dying food funding

Food is connected to your health because it nourishes your body with vitamins and nutrients.

It’s connected to the economy because the money you use for food goes toward the vendor from which you bought it.

It’s connected to social gatherings because every meeting is made better by the presence of cookies or drinks.

In a less obvious way, food is also connected to the government.

When you recognize how undeniably, extensively, dependently close this connection is, you can start to understand how detrimental the government shutdown is to the health and well-being of millions of U.S. citizens.

The Women, Infants and Children Special Supplemental Nutrition Program is the platform that provides pregnant women, young mothers and children with nutrition classes, food vouchers and breast-feeding support.

It’s extremely important to the 8.9 million kids and moms it supports, but as a discretionary program, not an entitlement program, it must be reauthorized by Congress to receive funding.

Last week, North Carolina stopped issuing food vouchers to the 264,000 women, infants and young children in the state’s program.

According to the USDA, most states are expected to run out of money by the end of the month.

Low-income mothers’ and children’s need for nutritional sustenance doesn’t seem so discretionary to me.

Food security is also in jeopardy for the elderly because the USDAs Commodity Supplemental Food Program is suspended.

The program normally provides nutritious foods to the elderly who are at least 60 years old with an annual income less than $15,000, but because of the shutdown it has been put on hold.

If you were to speak to some of the almost 595,000 seniors who depend on the program, they’d probably tell you they’re a little hungrier than usual.

However, more than just low-income young mothers, children and the elderly are affected.

The USDA continues to inspect meat and plants during the shutdown. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks food-borne illness outbreaks, is working with a smaller surveillance team than usual.

The country is currently suffering from an outbreak of multiple antibiotic-resistant strains of salmonella linked to raw chicken from multiple Foster Farms plants in California.

More than 300 people have been affected.

As a result, the CDC recalled about a dozen furloughed epidemiologists and other experts, but about 9,000 of the agency’s 13,000 employees remain on
furlough.

Though you can’t claim this is purely a result of the CDC’s depleted staff, you can’t say it isn’t linked.

We live in one of the wealthiest, most powerful countries in the world, but the shutdown doesn’t make it seem that way.

We might not all agree on questions regarding the debt ceiling or Congress’s behavior, but I think we can all agree everyone has a right to well-being, peace of mind and a little food now and then.

­— acarnold@indiana.edu

Follow food columnist Amanda Arnold on Twitter @Amanda_Arnold14.