And that’s the end of the story-except for all the other people in it. This week Second Harvest, a nationwide network of food banks, is releasing a major new study on hanger in America. The results show that more than 25 million Americans, nearly half of them under 17, now make use of food pantries, soup kitchens and other food-distribution programs. That’s one out of 10 Americans forced to eat at least occasionally on the dole-a startling statistic for one of the world’s richest countries. Some poverty experts are skeptical. “I don’t believe that many people are hungry,” says Robert Haveman, an economist at the University of Wisconsin’s poverty-research institute. “People living in poverty are getting food stamps. Maybe they visit a food bank once a year, but that doesn’t mean food banks are meeting a nutritional need in the population.”
But people at the front fines of hunger relief say that the study confirms what they see daily: the effects of widespread unemployment and underemployment. According to the survey, nearly a third of the households making use of emergency food programs have someone working full or part time. “People don’t have the money to pay the rent and the heating bills and buy food,” says Shoshana Pakciarz, executive director of Project Bread, which funds emergency feeding programs in Massachusetts. Second Harvest’s results jibe with previous hunger surveys by organizations like the Urban Institute and the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), as well as poverty statistics.
Christine Vladimiroff, executive director of Second Harvest, says it’s time for Americans to put aside their assumptions about hunger. “The face of hunger has changed,” she says. “It’s no longer just the single man on the street. It’s children, mothers, the newly unemployed, the working poor.”
And it’s families like the Williamses-all 12 of them. Easter and Nathaniel William of Chicago, both 41, and their children, ages 1 to 19, could teach a thing or two about managing hunger to the newcomers in the ranks. Around the third week of the month, for instance, when food stamps run out, you start letting everyone sleep late. “Then you can combine breakfast and lunch,” says Easter. Brunch is rice or maybe oatmeal; dinner is rice or beans. “The trick is to feed them late with a lot of water and then put them to bed,” she says. When supplies dwindle, she and Nathaniel skip meals; occasionally the older children do, too.
American hunger has no poster children, no skeletal famine victims clutching tin plates. Certainly the children in the waiting room of Dr. Deborah Frank’s clinic at Boston City Hospital look healthy and cheerful, if a bit skinny, as they munch on peanut butter and graham crackers. But the giggly toddler isn’t a toddler at all, she is 6 years old. Arid the 9-month-old baby weighs as much as an infant of 12 weeks. Frank’s clinic, which treats severely malnourished children, is one of eight in Massachusetts, set up in 1984 after a state survey found that 10 percent of low-income children under 5 showed signs of malnutrition. “The kid’s whole future is at stake here,” says Frank, who runs her own food pantry so that families can take home the high-calorie foods their children need to catch up. Similar clinics are opening across the country.
But most hungry children don’t show it. “It’s a silent problem,” says Christin Driscoll of FRAC, which surveyed children nationally and found 5.5 million underfed. “Maybe they’re just a few pounds underweight, or a little shorter. It won’t show up in physical exams, but even short-term undernutrition can cause concentration problems. These kids are going to school. But they’re falling behind.”
At Lyndhurst Elementary School in Baltimore, where more than half of the children are eligible for a free school breakfast, hunger is visible chiefly when school has been closed for a while. “With all the snow days this year, we’re sure the children aren’t eating well,” says Lula Sessoms, a regional cafeteria manager. “The day the children came back to school, breakfast was like, ‘Give me something to eat!”’ Stephanie Lambert, 10, says she always gets up in time for school breakfast: on a recent morning it was juice, Frosted Flakes, milk, toast and a fried “breakfast bar” of potatoes, ham and egg. If she doesn’t eat, she says, “I don’t feel like doing my work. I get a headache and my stomach starts hurting.”
Theresa never gets a headache from hunger. At 30, she’s been on welfare much of her life and feeds her four kids by faking residence in several Massachusetts towns, so that she can use their emergency food programs. “I’m street smart,” she says. She knows that the Salvation Army in Salem is generous, and that St. Mary’s Church in Lynn gives out fresh bread on Mondays, but the food pantry is stingy. Often Theresa and her children take home so much food they end up feeding leftovers to the birds. Even the family’s pet iguana is provided for: it gets shredded carrots and escarole.
People like Theresa make it tough for hunger activists to argue for increased federal funds. “You could never spend your way out of this problem,” says Robert Rector, a policy analyst for family and welfare issues at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, who is a strong critic of federal antihunger programs. He maintains there is no evidence for widespread hunger or undernutrition in America, and dismisses the results of the Second Harvest study as a “pseudodefinition” of hunger. “The more programs you have that hand out food for free, the more people will use them, " he says.
“There is some welfare fraud,” agrees J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. But he believes it’s the economy that prompts most people’s visits to food programs, not their desire for free red gelatin. “We could end hunger in a matter of six or eight months,” he says, by expanding the food-stamp program and increasing funding for such targeted programs as WIC (Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children). Research backs up Brown’s view. WIC, for instance, has successfully reduced the incidence of iron deficiency among low-income children-a deficiency that can lead to cognitive disabilities.
But everyone who knows the faces of American hunger knows that food alone isn’t enough. Georgette Lacy, a Chicago welfare mother, remembers seeing two boys, 3 and 5, scavenging for something to eat in her building’s garbage incinerator. “Their mother was strung out on rock cocaine,” she says. Vladimiroff of Second Harvest acknowledges that supplying dinner is only a temporary solution to a problem rooted in poverty and often entangled in social chaos. “Feeding people is one thing, and ending hunger is another,” she says. Her real goal is the latter.
