Representative Jim Hagedorn, a Republican from Minnesota, spoke at the Noon Kiwanis Club meeting at the Worthington Fire Hall.  He was praising American agriculture, as he serves on Agriculture Committee, and is from a agriculture heavy state.

According to the news coverage:

“Agriculture is a national security issue,” he said, noting that he feels that dependence on importing food is a threat to the security of the nation.

“Nobody (in America) goes to sleep at night wondering if they’ll be able to feed their families,” Hagedorn commented while speaking about the availability of food in grocery stores, and America having a food supply that is abundant and nutritious in stark comparison to other counties. He added that agriculture is what makes this possible.

He said that to sustain agriculture, he calls for good government, taking care of farmers when times are tough and enabling international trade.

Ilhan Omar just could not let that go.

She Tweeted this:

?? @RepHagedorn in your home state of Minnesota:

2.2 million households are
“food insecure” in 2017

Nationally, 15 million households are “food insecure” in 2017

No excuse for ignorance, food insecurity is real in MN & the nation, hope you will work with us in addressing it! https://t.co/sflbn7ztup

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) April 30, 2019

There are only 5.6 million people and 2.1 million households in the whole state of Minnesota, so Omar’s math is wrong.

I don’t care about that.  She’s not so much being “precisely, factually, and semantically correct” as she is “morally right.”

But she’s not that either.

According to the USDA there are four categories for food security:

Food Security

High food security (old label=Food security): no reported indications of food-access problems or limitations.

Marginal food security (old label=Food security): one or two reported indications—typically of anxiety over food sufficiency or shortage of food in the house. Little or no indication of changes in diets or food intake.

Food Insecurity

Low food security (old label=Food insecurity without hunger): reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet. Little or no indication of reduced food intake.

Very low food security (old label=Food insecurity with hunger): Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.

Look at the details for food insecurity.  Low food security says “little or no indication of reduced food intake.”  So even low food secure people are not starving.  The suffer from “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet,” which means they are not happy with what they are eating day to day, but are not going hungry.

The fact is, according to the CDC, 39% of people around or below the federal poverty level are obese.

Sure, obesity is an issue, but think about that for a second.

American agriculture is so efficient and so powerful that the poorest people in America are more likely to be over weight than hungry.

For the first few million years of human evolution, starvation was one of the leading causes of death.

The the US, it is almost impossible to starve to death if you are not totally insane.

The last few news reports I’ve read of children dying of hunger in the United States were not poor people dying form a lack of food but middle class vegans forcing their food ideology onto their infant children.

Compare this to Venezuela where the “Maduro diet” has caused Venezuelans to lose an average of 24 lbs per year from starvation and people are eating out of dumps.  No where in America do you see a mother carrying the body of her child who starved to death through the streets.

Why?

American agriculture and the American economy.

Think about Ilhan Omar.  She is from Somalia.  She is from a nation that we sent some of our best and bravest warriors to die to deliver food to the people in the middle of a man made famine.

You would think that someone from a country where children have the skinny arms and swollen bellies of kwashiorkor, she would appreciate that in America we have enough to eat.

Nope.

She can’t let a Republican say anything nice about America so she has to bring of food insecurity.

“Reports of reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet.”

That’s like saying that the poor in America have “entertainment insecurity” because they have televisions with basic cable but reduced quality, variety, or desirability of entertainment because they don’t have HBO, Showtime, Cinamax, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

This isn’t a real problem.  This is a made up problem that these people created so that they could create another program that gives them more authority.

You would think as someone from Somalia, she would understand what hunger really is and how little of it we have in the Unites States.  But no, she’s a Leftist, so she has to figure out a way to make the poor resent the abundance that they have and cut America down just a little bit more.