Last week our group watched the 2012 documentary A Place at the Table. This documentary follows the story of three families and individuals who suffer from hunger and food insecurity. Not only does it focus on these three specific stories but it also looks at how the country has attempted and in most cases failed at coming up with a solution to this ongoing problem, and weaves in many statistics relating to this topic. One of the interesting distinctions that I thought this film did a great job of making was the difference between food insecurity and hunger. One of the men who spoke talked about when people think of hunger they often think of weekend stick thin people in Africa, but hunger has a much different picture in America. Here Hunger often looks just the opposite. It’s often obese people suffering from food insecurity and living in food deserts. Food insecurity is when people aren’t sure where their next meal is going to come from, meaning they aren’t sure where their going to get the money to buy food. No only are about 50 million people hungry or food insecure in the US but many people live in food deserts. A food desert is an area where there is not a fully stocked supermarket for many miles. This leaves people with very little access to healthy foods. One of the stories that was most striking to me was about a woman living in Jonestown Mississippi. She said that her town has maybe one store that sometimes sells a fruit or vegetable and that the nearest supermarket was 66 miles away round trip. In the film they showed the cost of that, it totaled to being $10.68 in gas. Many of the people living in food deserts barely spend that much on all their food. There is no way that they would be able to spend almost $11 on gas and so, they simply don’t have access to healthy foods. This story along with one other were the two that had the greatest impact on me while watching A Place at the Table. The other story that was exceptionally eye opening was Barbie’s. She is a single mother who had struggled with food insecurity along with getting a job. SNAP, the food stamp program in the US, had been her main way of feeding her self and her two young children. Thought the film I remember hoping that she would find a job, and a real feeling of excitement when she did, but only a few minutes later I realized that she was probably in an even worse situation than before. Because of her now higher income she no longer qualified for SNAP, but she was only a dollar over the income that allows you to receive food stamps. Not only did this leave her in the same spot of not being able to buy healthy foods but it also meant that even the smallest bit of security she had, by knowing that she would receive the food stamps was gone. She noted that the programs in place right now don’t allow for people to have time to get back on their feet once they do get a well paying job. Overall this movie opened my eyes to many things that I was completely blind to before. The amount of information that they presented in a impactful and understandable way made the film interesting and educational and was a great background understanding to go into our upcoming fieldworks with.