Let's talk about values and they way values help and hinder finding effective means to alleviate poverty and deprivation.

I'm too tired to articulate this well, but I want to toss it out now, lest I forget or decide it is too much trouble to articulate later.

I'm thinking of a a client with a child in a Headstart program. A number of times she has expressed dismay about the lunches the children in the program receive. I actually think they are very good lunches. But she considers them to be seriously lacking because they are often vegetarian lunches with no meat and light on the starches. She is truly outraged by this. To her, vegetarian chili is an outrage. She sees it solely as cost-cutting at the expense of her child's nutrition.

Her position is certainly partly about ignorance. but it is also about values and past experience. A real meal has meat, and that is all there is to it. In her life and experience (she grew up very poor in rural North Carolina,) if there is no meat on the table, it is because the family can't afford it. And she didn't grow up in a family that had nutritional information, so a meatless meal was also a very meager, unbalanced meal. Her dismay at the Headstart lunches reveals her values about food and nutrition, not merely her ignorance about the same. You can (and I have to a small degree) provide nutrition education, but she ain't buying. Why? Because the issue is one of values and not just lack of information or education.

Janie