Divided We Eat

Ronald Crabtree

Professor Stevens

English 101

28 March 2013

“Divided We Eat”

In 2010 Lisa Miller wrote an article for Newsweek about the gap in the quality of food between the rich and the poor. While “Divided We Eat” is informative, thoroughly researched, and manages to capture many thoughts on the “food insecure”, it doesn’t provide any clear answers or conclusions to fix the problem. What you get are great examples of the issues being faced, but no definitive statement regarding a fix.

Miller opens her article with three stories about her neighbors eating habits. Each one either describes a day’s usual meal plan or it could be a conversation she’s had in the past with one of them about food. Because she lives in a fairly well to do neighborhood in New York her first examples are about the choices the “rich” are able to make. She begins to set the stage for the rest of her article dealing with the subject of “food insecurity” for lower income families. Each step of the way, she uses data collected from different sources, such as: The U.S. Department of Agriculture, University of Washington epidemiologist Adam Drewnoski, British epidemiologist Kate Picket, and French sociologist Claude Fischler. Later in the article she again uses people from her close to her neighborhood to provide examples of the point she’s made about choices of food. Her article ends at her last stop for the day, which is Jabir Suluki’s house in Clinton Hill. He only lives about two miles from her place, but the neighborhood is nowhere near as affluent. His story is pretty much the same as the others in his area with one difference. Even though his income is low he still takes the necessary steps to eat well.

According to Lisa Miller “data released last week by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 17 percent of Americans--more than 50 million people--live in households that are "food insecure," a term that means a family sometimes runs out of money to buy food, or it sometimes runs out...