A place at the table

Sorry I have had a lot going on... I am finally getting around to posting this. 

I attended the showing of the film "A place at the table" at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Kalamazoo. This film is a documentary that investigates the hunger experienced by millions of Americans, something great about this movie though is that it proposes a solution to the problem. It shows America's inability to acknowledge the fact that we do in fact have hunger in our country. The film also talks about food insecurity and how many Americans do not know where they will be getting their next meal. Yet it seems that the leaders of our country think that the poor have it easy, but they are surrounded by food insecurity. Nearly 50 million Americans live in homes that do not have the ability to afford enough food. 
There are now more than 40,000 such programs in America, and roughly two-thirds of them are food pantries, where parents and their children, the elderly, and working people obtain free groceries. But these programs do not have nearly enough supplies to get food out to all the hungry people in the country. The film was quick to point out what is currently being done in the favor of stopping hunger in a country where there's more than enough healthy food to go around. Food banks, charities, and pantries, which have increased from two-hundred nationwide to a whooping 40,000 in thirty years, have been turning up to temporarily combat the problem, but a functional, long term solution is still in the works.  
The documentary also talks about something that we have in class "food deserts," which are areas where places that carry healthy food packing nutrition, vitamins, and necessary fulfillment don't exist for miles on end, leaving the only resources to be from local stop-and-shops that stock up on food filled with unhealthy fats and empty calories. 
This movie was very interesting to watch while at the Alamo because it is a movie theater where we can get food brought to us in our seats. I watch people watch this movie about hungry Americans and they would be eating food through the whole movie like it was nothing. It made me realize how much we don't really even know. Others did this without even thinking about it, the fact that they were watching a documentary about food and they were eating the whole time. 
Overall it was a very eye opening film.