Posts Tagged ‘welfare’
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”*…
Back in 2016, Nathan Yau of Flowing Data created a fascinating set of animated infographics illustrating how the American diet had changed over the prior several decades. A few years later, he used an even more comprehensive data set to update the picture…
The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of food availability for over 200 items, which can be used to estimate food consumption at the national level. They have data for 1970 through 2019, so we can for example, see how much beef Americans consume per year on average and how that has changed over four decades.
So that’s what I did.
How long will chicken reign supreme? Who wins between lemon and lime? Is nonfat ice cream really ice cream? Does grapefruit ever make a comeback? Find out in the charts below.
The rankings are broken into six main food groups: proteins [pictured above], vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains, and added fats…
Illuminating: “Seeing How Much [and of what] We Ate Over the Years,” from @flowingdata (where one will find larger, more legible versions of the chart above and its companions).
* Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
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As we contemplate consumption, we might recall that it was on this date in 1953 that the Cabinet-level Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was created under President Eisenhower. Its first Secretary was Oveta Culp Hobby. (In 1979, the Department of Education Organization Act was signed into law, providing for a separate Department of Education. HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services, officially arriving on May 4, 1980.)
They giveth; they taketh away…
The Economist reports that participation in the U.S. Food Stamps program– designed to insure that poor Americans have enough to eat– had, by this past April, reached almost 45 million, or one in seven Americans.
At the same time, Reuters reports that In 11 states, lotteries provided more revenue than the state corporate income tax in 2009… The Rhode Island lottery netted the state more than $3 for each dollar of state corporate income tax in fiscal 2009.
click image above, or here, for larger version
As we strain to think of even more regressive ways to raise revenue, we might recall that it was on this date in 1932 that General Douglas MacArthur, on the order of President Herbert Hoover, led two regiments and six tanks against the Bonus Marchers in Washington, D.C. The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 marchers– 17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups– who gathered to demand cash-payment of the certificates they’d been issued by the government at the end of World War Two as a bonus for their service. MacArthur’s cavalry charged the protestors’ camp, and his infantry entered with fixed bayonets and adamsite gas, an arsenical vomiting agent, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers.
The Bonus Army incident proved disastrous for Hoover’s chances at re-election; he lost the 1932 election in a landslide to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Shacks that members of the Bonus Army erected on the Anacostia Flats burning after the confrontation with the military (source)
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