Features > March 26, 2008

Blue Collar, Bare Cupboards

By Sasha Abramsky (ALVADORE, ORE.)

Reliance on food pantries has grown in Alvadore, Ore., as well as in other small towns across the country.

Ten miles outside Eugene in west central Oregon, little wooden houses and mobile homes make up the town of Alvadore. The homes are too far apart to give the town—population 1,358—the appearance of a city, yet too close together for it to come off as true countryside. Old, domestically manufactured cars line the streets, as well as a few rundown mom-and-pop convenience stores.

Small farmers, mill workers and construction people live here. And they work hard—or at least they do when they can get employment. There’s a dry nuts and prunes plant just outside town, as well as a Country Coach facility that manufactures motor homes. Many of the residents hold down several jobs to make ends meet. Yet for an increasing number of people in Alvadore, getting a paycheck—or even several paychecks—is not the same as earning enough to put food on the table.

Schools throughout the counties of central Oregon, the state’s hunger belt, report that kids come to classes hungry on Mondays—and endure the long summer vacation months when no free school lunches exist.

Alvadore, like many dilapidated towns in modern-day America, is at the wrong end of an array of economic changes—from globalization to higher energy costs—and many of its citizens are falling through the social safety net. The result: increased hunger.

Payday loans and food boxes

Many of the town’s residents turn to the corner of 8th and B Streets, where the large wooden Alvadore Christian Church stands. On the fourth Thursday of each month, a sign is staked in the churchyard: Food Pantry.

During the winter months, around 40 families show up to receive bread, muffins, applesauce, canned soups, canned vegetables and other staples. In the summers the number of families served increases.

In one corner of the church is a table of food provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The rest—the vast majority—comes from donations by the local community. It’s a model that works during flush times, but it isn’t a particularly effective way of feeding the hungry during down times, when more people are struggling to make ends meet and fewer are able to donate food to charity.

Becky Darnall, 34, volunteers at the pantry and also relies on the food boxes from it. She says that when the pantry first opened two years ago, “we had 26-to-28 families. Within the last six months, it’s gone up to 40.”

Becky’s husband is a cook at a restaurant in nearby Springfield. In 2006, he earned $24,000. Last year, $27,000. This year, with a pay raise, he hopes to earn $30,000. As for Becky, she works part time as house-help for one of her neighbors, which brings in $8 an hour.

They have three kids, are raising a nephew and are living in a 30-year-old mobile home with a leaky roof and dubious electrical wiring. They drive an old Chevy Blazer with a malfunctioning engine that they cannot afford to repair, and that reduces the vehicle’s fuel efficiency to a ludicrous—and prohibitively expensive—seven miles per gallon. Becky’s husband spends $15 per day just driving to and from work.

Until this year, the family was unable to afford co-payments on the health insurance offered through her husband’s work. As a result, the Darnalls were saddled with $1,000 in emergency room bills when Becky came down with asthmatic bronchitis last year. The bills got sent to a collection agency, and the family is now struggling to pay them off. This past November, Becky’s husband needed an MRI, which landed the family with an additional $1,200 to pay off.

“We can get by,” Becky says cautiously, “but the difference between volunteering [at the church] and not is vegetable soup with macaroni thrown in. … It’s more like a real dinner.”

Before she started coming to the pantry, she says her family jumped through hoops to qualify for food stamps, and still ended up with hardly enough food to survive. “There were a few times it was really tight. But we got by.”

At first, Becky says, they borrowed from friends. Then they started borrowing against their future income. “The payday loan thing, which is a nightmare,” she says, referring to the practice many low-income Americans have resorted to in recent years of borrowing against their paychecks in order to make it through the last days of the pay period. It’s an exploitative—and usurious—financial trap that, over the years, has contributed to the economic crippling of America’s poor.

“It took us almost a year to get out of it,” Becky acknowledges. “But without it, we’d have been S.O.L,” she says, laughing bitterly.

The Darnalls have been married 17 years, but only in the last year have they had to decide, month to month, which bills to pay and which services will get shut off.

“And my husband’s worked the whole time,” Becky says. “We didn’t sit back and live off the system.”

JELL-O, but no fruit

Across America, close to 40 million people are listed as being “food insecure,” according to the USDA. That means that even if they don’t actually go hungry, they constantly worry about how to put food on the table.

The Darnalls fit this category. So, too, does 83-year-old widow Helen Wagy, a retired laundress who worked for 35 years and now receives $912 a month in Social Security—her entire retirement income. Wagy lives in a mobile home in the town of Corvallis, Ore. She gets boxes of food from a group known as Gleaners that gathers unpicked produce from local fields and persuades supermarkets to donate produce that is damaged or has exceeded sell-by dates.

“I have rent to pay, electricity to pay, telephone to pay and the luxury of a TV to pay,” Wagy says, bundled in a fleece jacket and purple trousers, as she sits in a chilly wooden building owned by the city’s park department, in a little park off the highway. The building—not much more than a shack crammed with fridges and freezers—serves as a distribution point for Gleaners.

Her friend Roberta Coulter chips in. Without Gleaners, she explains, “I’d probably lose a lot of weight. They help me very much. Without them, I could make the JELL-O but I wouldn’t have the fruit.”

And they are the lucky ones.

Of the nearly 40 million who fear going hungry, an estimated 11 million-plus Americans occasionally miss meals, according to the USDA. They include many adults in a family who sacrifice their own portions to ensure their children are fed.

In most countries, such people would be defined as being “hungry.” Bush’s America uses a more Orwellian term.

In 2006, the USDA instructed government agencies to no longer refer to this group as being hungry. The change came about after a Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies reported it could not conclusively determine whether people who couldn’t afford to buy food actually experienced “discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation.”

As a result, the 11 million Americans who cannot afford to stock their houses with food are now classfied as experiencing “very low food security.”

In the decades since the Great Depression of the 1930s, this category would have been made up largely of the long-term unemployed, the homeless, perhaps the mentally ill and other marginalized groups.

These days, however, increasingly it is the working poor—whose wages have stagnated, whose cost of living has gone up with higher gas, food and healthcare expenses, and whose time is now spent standing in line at food banks.

A 21st century depression

Over the past decade, the percentage of food bank clients in Oregon who are members of a family with at least one person employed has gone from 30 percent to 47 percent—an increase that translates into tens of thousands of Oregon families.

But this problem is not exclusive to Oregon, where the local economy has been decimated by the collapse of the timber industry, and the threat of going to bed hungry absent the aid of food charities is constant.

Throughout the United States, a startlingly raw form of poverty has entrenched itself within the bottom tier of the economy. In Appalachia, where hunger has never been far from the surface, states such as Virginia and Tennessee continue to see high levels of hunger.

In parts of Texas, especially border regions dotted with the colonias of immigrant populations, food insecurity swells.

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• Reader Comments

  Have you checked the voting record of Alvadore?

  Have you checked to see if Alvadore was part of the overwelming rural vote to ban gay marriage?

  Have you checked to see if Alvadore was included in the round of suckers that voted for Measure 37 and completely screwed up the land management system so that they could capitalize on selling off their trailers for suburbs someday?

  How do you reconcile the po’ folk of Alvadore with the stats that make Oregon more racist than Mississippi?

  Rural Oregon continues to vote in wars and developers and vote away social services and civil liberties. Oregon Legislature has never seen a social service it didn’t like but for rural Oregon, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and supporting the arts are all considered part of the homo eco-terrorist plan.

  The article neglects the irony that the people of Alvadore are surrounded by organic farms in the most fruitful and diverse year-round growing region in the U.S. Which would mean that they would have to interact with those freak hippies.

  Better, I suppose that they hide in their trailers, hungry, and voting for Bush, ignoring their communities, and perpetuating a racist homophobic agenda; praying that a developer will buy their trailer and lamenting the days when a man could earn a living by cutting down all the old growth and raping the rivers.

  Posted by skidmore212 on Mar 26, 2008 at 8:24 AM

  When I first came to Oregon twenty years ago, I noticed the rural poverty.  This isn’t news to people who live here.  Also, not all of Alvadore is poor.  There is a good portion of it’s middle class.  If you want to paint a dour picture of Oregon, you should go to Eastern Oregon.  Now there’s some poverty.

  Posted by ecotopian on Mar 26, 2008 at 8:05 PM

  The problem is largely due to massive immigration, both legal and illegal.  Take Juan Cortez -Villa, for example.  He has a job that should have gone to a native Oregonian.  He needs things like an interpreter, has 4 kids in the school system, and probably has a family unit that is draining its share from medical, educational, social and other programs.  The financial cost of these programs is born by those who were here legally long before he came here. and have either been displaced by his kind or had their wages reduced.  This is a sweet deal for him and his family.  It also would be a sweet deal for millions of others living in Latin America and elsewhere who would love to come to the States and improve their lives immensely.  And many American companies would prefer to lure and pay immigrants lower wages than they would have to pay to American citizens.  Ironically, the gain that corporate America receives in its lust for immigrant workers is but a fraction of the cost and harm meted out to the middle and lower classes.  If Cortez-Villa has 4 kids in school, his family is receivng at least $20,000 a year in educational benefits; undoubtedly his family is picking up many other benfits---even if he is here illegally, his kids are legal (if born here) and qualify for minority status and privileges above other native born children.  Our country would be better off by providing such companies free workers (American), which of course, would be insane.  Nothing will change until corporations stop bribing politicians.

  Posted by jay smith on Mar 27, 2008 at 5:32 PM

  Wake up, folks!

  This is not by happenstance or greed or mismanagement but BY DESIGN:

  The EU and the coming North America Union are products of the 1940s GATT formulations, and very few analysts are aware of it.

  My missive to Ron Paul’s staff, regarding my view that this financial crisis is not by happenstance nor mismanagement—but BY DESIGN!:

  The Honorable Ron Paul is ignorant of an ongoing conspiracy to topple, financially, the West, in order to equalize the world’s economies; for building one-world government under GLOBAL ECONOMIC SOCIALISM. // The conspiracy began in the 1940s with the GATT formulations. // Ask why Greenspan had violated his chairmanship duties by advising prospective home-buyers to take out an ARM. // Ask why Greenspan had sent out fed regulators to warn banks that they’d be charged with RACISM if they didn’t loosen home-loans for minority, HIGH RISK home-buyers. // Ask why Greenspan recently, TRAITOROUSLY, had advised OPEC oil producers to de-link from the U.S. dollar. // Greenspan - the FEDERAL RESERVE - has embarked on a purposeful set of monetary policies designed to destroy the West’s financial underpinnings. // Read about the WHO, the HOW, and the WHY of it in my below article (first one): Planned Destruction of America: http://planneddestructionofamerica.blogspot.com/ // Corporate America: What Went Wrong?: http://corporateamericawhatwentwrong.blogspot.com/

  This helps to confirm efforts to PURPOSELY trash America’s financial underpinnings: http://www.321gold.com/editorials/engdahl/engdahl031808.html

  Posted by Deacon on Mar 29, 2008 at 1:17 PM

  The poverty in much of rural Wisconsin is severe, yet we don’t have massive immigrant labor here. If there really is a problem of too many migrant workers in a particular area, the answer is to require companies to comply with the law, imposing harsh penalties for those who don’t.  But our economic crisis has little to do with our economic crisis.

  On illegal immigrants taking jobs, one must fill out a job application form which requires information about citizenship. The employer is required by law to verify this information.  If they don’t they are breaking the law, and yet I have never heard of one being held accountable. If employers met their legal obligations, there would be few illegal workers.  The demand for illegal labor would be eliminated if there were legitimate efforts to ensure that no workers were paid substantially lower wages than others doing the same type of work. This would remove the incentive to use illegal workers.  As for immigrants in general, remember, they have been a problem ever since the first Europeans came here, slaughtering Native Americans and taking their land.

  US corporations seek skilled workers from foreign countries, where people (even the poorest) have access to higher education, and where government, in the interests of the common good, ensures that real job skills training is available to all capable people, regardless of economic status.  Most Americans simply can’t afford the training and education needed to create a strong, competitive workforce in the US.

  On the tangle of factors that have brought the US to this point, we got what we allowed.  We embraced “government is not the solution”.Step by step, government raided the public treasury, taking an ax to the New Deal policies that, until Reagan, turned this into the richest, best educated, most productive nation on Earth .  We “reformed” welfare with the knowledge that it would result in tremendous suffering, because we (naively) thought thought there’d be something in it for us (lower taxes). Of course getting rid of the New Deal policies includes wiping out surplus food supplies, or selling it overseas.  It also meant attacking fundamental rights that protected job security, wages, the right to strike, etc. Reagan started the ball rolling on “deregulation”, which essentially means giving big business carte blanche, putting it above the law, accountable to no one.

  All of these issues intertwine, and all are a result of the public losing control of the government.  When that happens, government takes control of the people. No foreign government needs to bother with “destroying the US”; the marriage of government and big business is doing just that.

  Posted by dhfabian on May 16, 2008 at 10:53 PM

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