Since the hunger crisis has become a major issue for millions of Americans, those in poverty should receive government support to have sufficient food supplies, which also considers their specific dietary needs.
Detailed Outline
- Working thesis in the introduction: Since the hunger crisis has become a major issue for millions of Americans, those in poverty should receive government support to have sufficient food supplies, which also considers their specific dietary needs.
- Hook with descriptive statistics on hunger among Americans.
- Introduce two concerns: national health and national well-being.
- Source: Houseman on statistics of the hunger crisis in the US, paragraph 1
- Hunger crisis as a matter of survival.
- How COVID-19 deepened the hunger crisis.
- Hunger crisis and its impact on vulnerable groups.
- Source 1: Houseman on hunger among adults working in healthcare, food service, and public works due to COVID-19 economic crisis, paragraphs 7, 10, 11
- Source 2: Houseman on “No Kid Hungry” initiative, paragraph 11
- Source 3: Ziliak and Gundersen on hunger among older people in the US, page 4
- Source 4: Broughton et al. about hunger among college students in the US and SNAP initiative, paragraphs 1, 52, 53, 54
- Solving the hunger crisis to sustain a healthy nation.
- Stopping hunger as a national preventive measure in healthcare: CDC and Healthy People aims and progress.
- Programs aimed at stopping hunger: SNAP initiative, “No Kid Hungry” initiative, Thrifty Food Plan.
- Source 1: CDC explaining the concept of food security, paragraph 1
- Source 2: Healthy People on food insecurity and hunger elimination goals, home-delivered meal services for older people, access to foods that support healthy dietary patterns, reducing household food insecurity, eliminating low food security in children, and adolescent health workgroup, website
- Source 3: US Department of Agriculture on Thrifty Plan, paragraphs 1, 2, 3, 4
- Potential benefits of healthy diets and food security.
- Benefits for society and economic benefits.
- Benefits of healthy diets for vulnerable groups.
- Source 1: Cena and Calder on types of healthy diets, paragraph 1
- Source 2: Yu et al. on cardiovascular disease prevention through dietary interventions and benefits of a healthy diet for vulnerable groups, paragraphs 17, 18, 25, 32, 33
- Global hunger crisis and agricultural sector.
- US agricultural potential for solving hunger crises.
- Deficiencies in the food distribution system are deepening the hunger crisis and require innovations.
- Source 1: Cheo on sustainable agriculture and SDG-2 Zero Hunger international efforts, page 8
- Source 2: Siegner et al. on the potential of urban farms and agroecology, page 566
- Counterargument.
- Reforms in agriculture aimed at meeting SDG-2 Zero Hunger goals are too globalist.
- Potential dangers of stigmatization of vulnerable groups associated with governmental support.
- Source: Ross and Lundälv on the concept of stigma and food insecurity, page 2689
- Conclusion.
- Summarizing benefits of overcoming the hunger crisis in the US.
- Benefits of food security for national health and governmental spending on healthcare.
- Source: CDC on benefits of disease prevention through early interventions, webpage
Reflection Questions
In the process of searching for information, the most difficult thing for me was to stick to the chosen line of the plan and to change the plan of the future essay in view of new information. Equally important, given the breadth of the topic I am going to cover, it is difficult to be 100 percent sure that the selected aspects are the most important and characteristic. Arranging information in accordance with a single future storyline also causes certain difficulties due to the need to constantly weigh the relevance of certain subtopics that affect their order.
My thesis statement argues that despite all the odds, Americans who are food insecure should receive help from governmental programs that also consider their dietary needs. The following arguments try to convince the reader of the scope of the problem and present information on how different groups of society suffer from food insecurity. The current thesis statement identifies the problem and takes the position, it also adds some nuances like specific dietary needs and the governmental nature of support programs. The thesis also implies that the hunger crisis first strikes the most vulnerable groups.
At the moment, my detailed outline looks nice since it covers all the issues I wanted to discuss and introduces additional sources with new information regarding the topic. In the introduction and first section, I discuss the scope of the hunger crisis in the US, and the actual programs that exist to help vulnerable groups. In the second section, I show that the hunger crisis and food insecurity have long been issues of governmental concern. Here I also discuss the progress of programs and initiatives. In section four, I discuss the issue from the dietary perspective, and in the fifth section, I introduce some information on agricultural practices and initiatives (Cena & Calder, 2020). In the counterarguments section, I discuss how global agricultural initiatives are not sufficient and how stigma can become a problem. In the concluding section, I summarize the benefits of overcoming the hunger crisis.
After immersing myself in the issues related to the topic, I realized that I needed some feedback on whether I have chosen the right angle to present the problem. There are also plenty of articles on agricultural ecology and environmental protection, but it seems to me that the hunger crisis should be overcome in the first place by meeting people’s needs, and the focus should be on people.
Reference
Cena, H., & Calder, P. C. (2020). Defining a healthy diet: Evidence for the role of contemporary dietary patterns in health and disease. Nutrients, 12(2), 334.