Soucheray: Nobody thought to ask, where are the hungry children?

Joe Soucheray, Pioneer Press
·3 min read

Where are the hungry children? Who are they?

More importantly, have the hospitals been overrun with malnourished children? The Feeding Our Future food fraud scam, currently standing at the theft of $250 million of our money, making it the largest scam of its type in the country, was supposed to feed all these supposedly hungry kids.

Tens of thousands of kids, come on, tens of thousands. FOF just kept getting the checks until it got too big to ignore. And yet, not one word of curiosity was spoken, not one printed word or broadcast word. Not one bit of bureaucratic oversight to wonder who exactly were all these starving kids.

The money starts at the United States Department of Agriculture. They get calls all the time, or petitions or applications or whatever means is used to pretend the petitioner is being responsible.

“Hi, USDA?”

“Yes.”

“This is the Minnesota Department of Education calling. We need, oh, we don’t know, about $25 million to start. We need to fund a program that is feeding our hungry Minnesota children.”

“OK.”

It got all the way up to $250 million. The alleged ringleader, somebody named Aimee Bock, apparently got her dough through kickbacks from all the alleged Somali co-conspirators who suddenly and supposedly owned restaurants that were supposed to be feeding sites, not to mention alleged co-conspirators who were suddenly flashing jewelry and driving expensive cars. The fraud might still be raking it in but a Somali activist took a video of one of Bock’s employees at a wedding in January where one of the gifts was a large amount of gold that the activist, according to the Star Tribune, said he heard came from food vendors who were getting rich from the money they collected from Bock’s nonprofit, FOF. He blew a whistle. The FBI became involved.

The government said they had to keep quiet about it so the fraudsters didn’t get wind of the FBI’s involvement. Keep quiet about it for almost a year. OK.

Yes, there are many questions, the most telling among them, is there really this much government incompetence? Nobody wondered about the children, who were they, where they were. No mayor or city council member tried to take credit for this wonderful new program that was supposed to be saving our children from hunger. No photo-ops.

And all the while, tens of millions of dollars are pouring in?

Strange.

Plus, this is Minnesota, not Yemen, where children are truly starving. We feed children in schools, churches, park and rec programs and neighborhood coalitions. We have food banks and food shelves and food drop-off sites.

We might be a passive-aggressive lot of us and our politics are unfortunately and essentially one-sided and too terribly expensive, but we will not let a child go hungry. We would be horrified to see a child with a distended belly and we would do something about it.

So why then, when this new outfit sprang up out of whole cloth, taking advantage of relaxed USDA red tape rules during the pandemic, were no questions asked? And will anybody at USDA or MDE be disciplined, fired, receive at least a stern talking to?

Maybe this happens all over the country.

Thank goodness the IRS will hire 87,000 new agents to check up on us, the people who actually do feed children.

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