Something to Mull Over, or, How I Learned to Love Dried Peas

The AP reported yesterday that a government report has renamed the phenomenon of hunger; it is now to be known as "food insecurity." I had to address this latest installment in the backwaters (Blackwaters?) of governmentese, as I'd addressed the issue of hunger in America in a previous post (Let Them Eat Cake).

I can understand the impulse to replace such a nasty word with a cleaner sounding, commodities-type term. It is now like a "debt insecurity"--you might sell short today, but you're back in the game tomorrow, when you can buy more securities. Feeling this insecurity, the report says, may result in "discomfort," but it is is only the discomfort of the insecure. Buck up.

The Agriculture Department has now deemed that hunger is "an individual-level physiological condition that may result from food insecurity." I presume that the urge to get up and tap dance might be another physiological state that would equally arise from "food insecurity".

Further, the word hunger "should refer to a potential consequence of food insecurity that, because of prolonged, involuntary lack of food, results in discomfort, illness, weakness or pain that goes beyond the usual uneasy sensation." The usual uneasy situation of what? Living in these United States? Perhaps, they mean like what you feel after reading a government report.

What in the heck are they talking about? Don't the consequences of food insecurity sound a lot like the administration's convoluted definition of torture? Under the new Military Commissions Act, I thought that kind of stuff was the new normal.

Jim and Lisa