The Next Fake Hollywood Scare: Child Hunger
The current wave of partisan cinéma non-vérité has become every bit as formulaic and tiresome as Michael Moore's scruffy Common Man routine. Overblown but crowd-pleasing premises (pleasing at least to crowds in the niche markets the filmmakers target), emotionally manipulative techniques and factually-barren narrative lines add up to exultant word of mouth and boffo box office: at least among audiences willing to believe six impossible things before the end credits roll.
The current breed of polemicists masquerading as documentarians have long-since employed gimmicks 1950s schlockmeister (and master salesman) William Castle might have balked at to shill their wares. Still, even by the degraded standards of a field which has taken Fahrenheit 9/11 as its template, it's unsettling to find a documentary chronicling the subject of hunger being marketed much like a latter-day shock-horror mondo film. Yet the forthcoming Hungry in America is doing just that: employing the type of luridly sensationalist hype once used to sell grindhouse exploitation films.
To be fair, hunger -- particularly childhood hunger -- is a topic which does not easily lend itself to dispassionate inquiry. Even one child going hungry in America is one too many and only a moral imbecile would attempt to argue that point. The United States wastes an unconscionable amount of the food it produces -- enough to fill the Rose Bowl every day of the year to co-opt researcher Jonathan Bloom's arresting image.
Yet the producers of Hungry in America -- coming soon to a film festival and, likely a PBS station, near you -- baldly claim that almost a quarter of American children are now haunted by the specter of want. The Great Recession, it seems, is to be the harbinger of a Great Famine. "One in four children lives in the U.S. on the brink of hunger," says the blurb at the film's website. "This film asks why."
Better the film's potential audience ask where that astonishing statistic came from.
It seems to stem from a misreading of data contained in annual U.S. Department of Agriculture studies on hunger. In recent years these reports -- cited in clips from the film posted at its website and in promotional material -- concluded the number of "food-insecure" homes (to use the official bureaucratese) have tripled since 2006 given the onset of the recession and double-digit unemployment.
"Food insecurity", a particularly opaque example of Beltway bafflegab, is actually broken into four categories by the USDA: high food security households are those with no problems about consistently accessing adequate food; marginal food security households have problems at times but the quality, variety, and quantity of their intake are not substantially reduced; low food security households have reduced the quality, variety, and desirability of their diets although the quantity of food intake and normal eating patterns are not substantially disrupted; and very low food security homes are those in which eating patterns of one or more household members are disrupted and food intake reduced because the household lacks money and other resources for food. Very low security homes are the ones genuinely living on the hunger line.
The most recent USDA report, released in November, placed fully 85 percent of American homes in the top category in 2009. However, the remaining 15 percent -- almost 17 million American families -- did have trouble putting food on the table at one point or another during that year. That figure includes an estimated 17 million children -- or something close to a quarter of the total, presumably the source of the figure used in Hungry in America's tagline.
But the same data also revealed only a third of these households fell into the bottom category in which access to food was a chronic problem. In two-thirds of affected homes children may have skipped an occasional after-school snack but they were never going to be mistaken for refugees from Darfur. The one-in-four figure trotted out by the filmmakers isn't so much misleading as it is flat-out incorrect.
Even in those households with very low food security, the USDA says children are usually spared from substantial reductions in their diets thanks to Federal food programs and charitable food banks. According to USDA data -- the same data Hungry in America's producers invoke -- in 2009 some 988,000 children, or 1.3 percent of the nation’s children, actually lived in households with very low food security.
Even one percent of America's children going hungry on a regular basis is one percent too many -- but it's a far cry from the 25 percent living on the knife-edge of starvation claimed by the filmmakers and their publicists.
Interestingly, the plague of childhood obesity which camouflages malnutrition under multiple rolls of belly fat merits nary a passing reference in either the online footage or the Hungry in America press kit. Cheap but unwholesome deep-fried goop is now the sixth major food group in the U.S. And the problem of childhood malnutrition increasingly owes not just to a lack of food but also to the supersized helpings of nutrition-free food substitutes in children's diets.
The long-term health, educational and social consequences of obesity have been exhaustively documented. This epidemic presumably won't be as conspicuous by its absence from the finished film as it is from the pre-release marketing material: the problem of malnutrition as it exists in America today cannot be properly framed let alone properly understood without reference to childhood obesity.
Hungry in America -- the subject of a celebrity-studded preview/fundraising event held in conjunction with Vanity Fair last year -- say they stand on the shoulders of a watershed CBS News documentary aired in 1968. Footage from the program has even been incorporated into the new film.
Drawing on a series of congressional investigations into overt hunger and malnutrition in economically-depressed areas, CBS Reports: Hunger in America was an unapologetic exercise in advocacy journalism -- and a factually impeccable one. The documentary won a Peabody Award and, more consequentially, helped prompt Richard Nixon to launch a second front in LBJ's War on Poverty with his own War on Hunger. Federal efforts to reduce hunger linked to poverty were expanded, became institutionalized and continue to this day.
Hunger in America employed the full resources and personnel of CBS News at a time when it was still the guardian of Edward R. Murrow's legacy. Those who now say they can see further on the subject by sitting astride its towering legacy and claiming it as their own are more modestly scaled talents.
The new Hungry in America is made by filmmakers Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson and is executive-produced by celebrity "chef-activists" (that's what they call themselves) Tom Colicchio and Mario Batali. Silverbush, married to Colicchio, has made one short film along with a barely released 2006 drama. Her collaborator Jacobson does boast a background in documentaries. She has one memorable feature-length project to her name -- American Stand-Off, a 2002 fly-on-the-wall's-eye view of Teamster election skullduggery. Her most recent film was an engaging if ephemeral portrait of her barkeep grandfather Toots Shore, a character who if he hadn't existed would surely have had to be invented by Damon Runyon. But the majority of her credits are for workaday projects she'd presumably prefer the Internet Movie Database not remind the world are on her resume (Tanya Tucker: Country Rebel).
CBS Reports: Hunger in America administered shock treatment to the conscience of the nation by taking a deliberately low-key, just-the-facts approach to the plight of the 10 million Americans then contending with hunger. It engaged viewers minds by making a logically presented case and their hearts immediately followed. By way of contrast, the team behind Hungry in America -- being backed by Lauren Bush's FEED Foundation, the domestic hunger advocates -- seem intent on enraging hearts in the apparent belief that distortion and scare tactics are better suited to promote their cause in this culture of illusion. They grandiloquently describe their film as "the cornerstone of a multi-platform social impact campaign ... the center of an initiative intended to galvanize and empower audiences to take action that could lead to the eradication of domestic hunger in the next decade..."
Although we're almost certainly in reach-exceeds-grasp territory here, it would be churlish to argue with such noble if jargon-couched sentiments. But it's impossible not to take issue with the figure being used as the keystone of Hungry in America's promotional efforts, one which is as supersized as the producers' declaration of principles. If ever the magnitude of a problem did not require selective statistical embellishment, it's this one.
Let's hope the same emphasis on truthiness rather than the copper-bottom truth does not color the entire production or the associated "multi-platform social impact campaign." If it does, Hungry in America could end up partially discrediting the very real issue it hopes to catapult back into the public consciousness. Not that this would be the first time documentarians and activists fell victim to their flawed brand of calculus -- one which as routinely overestimates the surplus population of suckers out there as it does the number of children living on the verge of hunger.