Letters

Out to Lunch

Editors:

I was struck by the Spring issue dedicated to “Food,” where there were seven articles but not one that addressed the subject of food and hunger or poverty. This extraordinary omission, especially for a leading periodical of the Left, does raise some questions of what worlds your editors are living in these days.

Dissent had a myriad of hunger-related food subjects to cover from the nearly one in five Americans who experienced food hardship because of inability to purchase sufficient food this past year, according to a national survey released in February by the Food Research and Action Center (www.frac.org) to the increased right-wing attacks on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly Food Stamps) to the unfulfilled potential of the national School Lunch and Breakfast program (see Hunter sociologist Janet Poppendieck’s recent book, Free for All: Fixing School Food in America) to the fact that seven of ten Americans support federal nutrition programs and don’t want to cut them to reduce government spending.

Your issue did a nice job of covering the mostly popular, middle-class concerns around food and nutrition. Maybe a future issue might make access to nutritious food for low-income people a priority.

JONATHAN M. STEIN
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The Editors respond

We invite our readers to follow other articles relating to food at www.dissentmagazine.org and to look for future pieces in the print magazine.

CORRECTIONS

We regret some copyediting errors in Joanne Barkan’s “Hired Guns on Astroturf,” Spring 2012. The original version of this article stated, “Three candidates ran as a ‘reform slate’ for the three open seats on the seven-member board.” Three candidates did run on a “reform slate,” however only two of the seats were open; the other was contested by an incumbent. The quote by Jonah Edelman on p. 49 is cited from Education Next, Winter 2012, but is from the Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2012. Henry Gordon is the president of Strata Capital, not Strata Resources (p. 52). Corrections have been made in the online version.