MovieChat Forums > A Place at the Table (2013) Discussion > All Too True

All Too True

posted 11 years ago by jondorn1
3 replies | jump to latest

Far, far too many Americans are going hungry. That's bad enough right there. But what's worse is the fact that far, far too many Americans DON'T CARE that their fellow Americans are going hungry. In fact, many on the right feel more legitimate outrage toward the existence of the food stamp program than they do about people who are going hungry in America.

This country is falling headlong toward a scary, neofeudalistic existence where the rich and powerful rule absolutely in their castles and gated communities, while the rest of us toil away in the fields to keep those castles supplied with produce. That's not as far fetched as it may sound.

The food stamp program has saved literally millions of Americans from starving. Charity alone can't do that. Charity couldn't do it during the Great Depression, when children (yes, children) went door to door, asking for food, and were often harshly turned away by adults who told them not to come back. Most of the people on food stamps WORK -- that's a fact; a fact often overlooked by those on the right who gripe about "those freeloaders on food stamps". This film is wonderful, it was rightly hailed as a masterpiece recently by Jon Stewart, and I predict it will have a profound impact on how most Americans feel about food stamps.

[–] creatorof2002 11 years ago

We also have a DIFFERENT kind of starvation than places like Ethiopia and the Sudan. Instead of rail thin people who are obviously starving you have people who are starving in the sense that they do not have the proper nutrition but they are FAT because they are forced to fill up on empty carbohydrates but most people LOOK at them and just make the flippant assumption that they have PLENTY to eat TOO MUCH in fact but sadly a big ass bag of potato chips is less expensive than a green salad and high fructose corn syrup filled soda is cheaper than fruit juice.

[–] jondorn1 11 years ago

I was disappointed recently when I noticed Hunts ketchup had reintroduced high fructose corn syrup to their product.

[–] oneseat 10 years ago

It is all too true, but here I am signing in almost a year after the OP wrote this post, and hardly anyone has seen A Place at the Table. I vaguely remember hearing about this documentary when it was in the theaters here in the foodie-centric Bay Area and thinking I wanted to see it, but for whatever reason I didn't and forgot about it entirely until yesterday, when someone on Huffington Post linked to the trailer.

Thank God he or she did that because I might never have seen it otherwise. That is the terrible pity of it. This is an extremely well-made and moving film, and one that authoritatively knocks down conservative stereotypes about the poor, but no one has seen it. I hardly ever post on my Facebook page, but I did post about this, urging people to view it on Netflix or Amazon. If anyone reads this, please do the same.