If you think a person making $35,000 or even $15,000 a year is struggling for food then you vastly over estimate how much food costs. Yeah a family can spend $2,000 a month on food but a single person can get by on $100 a month for food in everywhere but the most expensive places to live in the US. Add in government assistance and "starvation" in the US is very over sensationalized. Yeah if you make $15,000 a year you might not be able to buy $8 sandwhiches from panera bread everyday, but don't assume that is the baseline for warding off starvation.
As for fresh drinking water being abundant in the US and Canada, yep that is cause for great happiness . We are a bit wasteful with it but we can afford to be a bit wasteful with it. Seriously, where I live it rains almost enough where I don't have to water my garden. Don't worry though, there is a lot going on in homesteading circles to figure out ways to maximize water conservation in case a situation ever arose where water wasn't that plentiful.