Hunger Persists in Midst of Plenty

While Bruce Springsteen was appearing in Los Angeles and urging his audiences to support their local food banks that feed the hungry, the City of Orange was prosecuting a disabled man caught foraging for food for his family in trash bins behind a supermarket.

Alfonso Vasquez began scavenging for food after he was disabled in an auto accident and didn’t have the income to provide enough food for his diabetic wife and five of his nine children still living at home. But he ran afoul of an ordinance passed last summer in Orange that makes rummaging through trash bins subject to a $500 fine. Vasquez, without money to pay the fine, faced jail for the first time in his life.

Fortunately the judge had more compassion than the city and, after berating Orange for its action, fined Vasquez one thin dime.

But the case is not closed. There are many like Alfonso Vasquez in Orange County who don’t want their families to go to bed hungry at night, but still cannot put enough food on the table. It’s difficult to measure just how many are living in hunger but, using conservative estimates, 320,000 Orange County residents are “at risk,” according to federal food allotment standards for the county. To most people, the hungry are not visible. But they are here. And part of the daily routine for some of them is scavenging.

Obviously people should not eat food gathered from garbage cans. But the City of Orange showed great insensitivity in prosecuting one whose crime was going through the garbage in desperation to feed his family. Even more shameful is the fact that there are people in affluent Orange County who must resort to such scavenging.

The Vasquez case makes Springsteen’s point that Americans must have greater concern for the poor among them. And it also points up the failure of an estimated 150 agencies in the county serving the poor to get the message out to those in need. Instead of handing out tickets for searching for food, police in Orange ought to be handing out the locations of agencies that feed the hungry.

The real crime is not that Alfonso Vasquez rummaged through a store’s garbage looking for food. It’s that he had to.