American Kids Eating Rats For Dinner

Yes – It’s happening in America…Our Trickle Down System in Action

To Six Year Old Girl…”How did you feel about having to eat rats?”…”Sad.”

 … by Jim W. Dean, VT Editor

No folks, I would not pull your leg about something this serious. Hungry kids are not on my satire writing list. I’m still in a bit of shock myself…me, who is not shocked by anything anymore, but I was.

Having no kids I was not up to speed on the school lunch programs. A nurse friend from North Georgia told me once that they even had breakfast programs.

This was back before the crash, in the boom times, which surprised me. And are you ready for this?

The kids were sometimes bringing relatives to eat lunch with them on the school program. The land of food and plenty was upon us. Names were not taken, as none were required…only that X-number of meals were served. Neither the kids, parents or grandparents were eating rats then. That would come later I learned yesterday.

The flip side of this was when I would treat myself to a lunch buffet during the week, taking my fifty cent senior discount, I would not only see Mexican blue collar workers by the ton, but even families going out to all you can eat buffet…on a week day.

If I looked around I would even seen Hispanic mom’s and their kids (two families), no dads, going out for lunch. I never experienced this even once growing up as a kid. Despite my dad having a lumber company and a Buick dealership at one time, I never ever KNEW a family who did such a thing.

When my mother and I both had pneumonia together when I was about six, the doctor who came to the house everyday to check on us just had to walk across the street where he came home for lunch every day.

But fast forward to the 2012 recession and here were are in Las Vegas, not the backwoods somewhere, and rats are on the menu when the cash runs out.

There were many Mexican kids, families working in the textile mills in Dalton Georgia where the $15 to $20 an hour jobs got pulled down to $10 to $12/hr…or zero if you got replaced by someone south of the border.

It seems that because the Feds were paying for it all the schools did not mind loading up the numbers. It pumped more money into the local economy as the families had more money to spend in the stores. So that had me thinking that kids going hungry was impossible with parents only have to cover dinner.

But the British Panorama show had a segment up today called ‘We don’t have dinner at home’...and it was a heart breaker. They were shooting in Las Vegas where cafeteria managers were describing how kids were loading up on ketchup packets to take home to make tomato soup for dinner.

Weekends were another tough time for them and groups have stepped in to put weekend care packages together for the kids to get them through to Monday. Unfortunately a lot of it looked like your usual unhealthy processed food.

The clip below is not long, just a few kids describing about sometimes there is nothing to eat for dinner and they go hungry till school the next day.

I had thought that everybody would have some crackers, rice with onions, or beans stashed away for ‘really’ tough times, but it seems not.

My mother grew up on a farm where they thought they were poor because they made their own clothes and went barefoot to save their shoes for school and church.

She would walk there barefoot and then wash her feet and put her shoes on before going in. But on a 120 acre farm there was always food, and a smoke house to die for.

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