Overcast with a bit of ground fog this early Wednesday on California’s north coast — onward we go!

Earlier this month, the US Department of Agriculture reported nearly 50 million Americans live in households with ‘food insecurity,’ or sometimes there’s just not enough to go around.
Via Mother Jones and the bottom line:

All of which underscores my long-held suspicion that we can’t reform the food system along more healthy lines until we reform the economic system—that is, create one that pays decent wages…The real driver of dietary change might turn out to be the burgeoning living wage movement—lately, embodied in the push by fast-food workers to raise their poverty-level incomes

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Frugal Meal’ found here).

Food and bombs — given the warmongering bullshit out of DC, the ability of American children going hungry doesn’t add up to all the warfare plans being hatched by the GOP. Republicans hate hungry people — because it’s not their people.
Number of Americans without food security increased by more than 30 percent due to the 2008 financial meltdown — and the total has remained above 14 percent of all citizens. Despite that, Republicans attempted to side-swipe food stamps by gutting the Farm Bill last year, but the cuts the assholes made last year may not be as shitty as orginally figured.
And the go-around:

The new law says that people can’t get the higher food benefits unless they receive more than $20 a year in heating assistance, which lawmakers hoped would be too expensive for states to pay.
But the governors in 12 states and the mayor of the District of Columbia have said they will find a way.
Most will use federal heating assistance dollars. At least one state, California, will use its own money.
As of now, the cuts will only affect Michigan, Wisconsin, New Jersey and New Hampshire. All but New Hampshire have Republican governors.
There are about 1.8 million households that receive food stamps in those four states, out of almost 23 million households nationwide.

And food for thought — via the Guardian and more on the US Ag Dept. report:

Eighty-five point seven percent of US households had access to enough food for the entirety of 2013, the report found.
The number of households that for at least part of the year did not have access to safe, available foods has hovered in the 14 percent range since 2008 when it jumped from the the 2007 figure of 11.1 percent because of the economic recession.
“At this rate it would take decades to get back to the rate before the recession,” Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center, told the Guardian.
“So the progress that is being made is far, far too slow. The rate was far too high before the recession and we’re not moving very fast at getting back towards that rate.”
Of the 14.3 percent of households that fall into the food insecurity category, 5.6 percent are in the lowest threshold of “very low food security.”
This checks out to an estimated 6.8m households across the US that had to adjust their eating patterns because of lack of money or other resources to get food.
A majority of that group said they had skipped meals or cut down the size of meals because they didn’t have enough money for food.

Or maybe just enough for a big block of cheese.