The Packing Problem, Hunger in America, and Sesame Street's new food insecure Muppet.

I just finished reading The Packing Problem proposal and I really hope that the book actually gets released, because it was a very engaging read, which I think is a hard thing to do when talking economics.  As I was taking a break to eat with my family, a story about Sesame Street on the local news caught my attention.  It seems that Sesame Street will be introducing a new character, who is food insecure, during a special that will air this Sunday.  This story caught my ear because it highlighted the fact that there are 17 million hungry children in the US.  That figure was staggering to me and I wondered why, if so many children here are hungry, why there aren't late night commercials pleading for their care.  One of the things that I often think about, especially in the context of this class, is the fact that we share a common internalized myth about life in this country, that kind of dictates that issues like domestic hunger are not directly addressed very often.  When I returned to The Packing Problem, I wondered how living with food scarcity for the sum total of one's life would affect how that person opperated as an adult.  I think that it would affect how they approach most everything, since gaining money is not always a cure for a scarcity mentality.  I wonder if this idea may be feeding the common conception that the poor in America are in the position they are in because they are ineffective managers of money.  In other words, it appears to those who are not scarce of money, but are scarce of time, that people who are poor have created their own deficit, when they may, in fact, just be reenacting behaviors that they have needed to survive over long periods of time.

Anyway, here is a link to an article about the Muppet: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/sesame-street-special-on-hunger-introduces-new-muppet-character/