In the midst of plenty, want

One in five Californians struggled to afford enough food for themselves and their families last year, according to a new report by the Food Research and Action Center.

The rate in California was slightly higher than the national average of 18%.

Jim Weill, president of the Washington-based nonprofit, said the figures underscore the need for a strong nutrition safety net - including food stamps and school meals - for families that continue to struggle as the economy begins to recover.

"While the nation's Great Recession may have technically ended in mid-2009, it has not yet ended for many of the nation's households," Weill said in a statement Thursday. "For them, 2010 was the third year of a terrible recession that is widely damaging the ability to meet basic needs."

The report was based on data collected for the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which conducted telephone interviews with more than 350,000 people in 2010, including 35,543 people in California.

Just over 20% of California respondents answered yes to the question: "Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?"

The state with the highest percentage of families who had difficulty feeding themselves last year was Mississippi at 28%.

California, breadbasket to the world, can't feed its own citizens. It's a metaphor for what has happened to a once great state whose bounty has deliberately been curtailed by a government more concerned with animal life than human. Vast swaths of the central valley have been deliberately cut off from irrigation water to satisfy one environmental requirement or another. This has thrown tens of thousands out of work, while high taxes on business has done the rest of the job.

So much for "The Golden State."