Hunger’s hidden face is looking back at you

Changing of guard in Washington spurs hope for more change

By ROBERT HORENSTEIN

article created on: 2009-01-15T00:00:00

After I take my five-year-old son to his kindergarten classroom at Hayhurst Elementary in southwest Portland, I always cut through the school cafeteria, beyond which is the parking lot. I don’t do it just because it’s a shortcut to my car; I do it because there are always several children sitting at tables, eating a free or reduced-price breakfast.

My detour through the cafeteria, you see, serves as a constant reminder. A reminder that we still have much to do in this country—and, heaven knows, in this state—to eliminate hunger. A reminder that for at least some of these children, the federally-funded school breakfast and lunch programs provide the only nutritious meals of the day. At Hayhurst, located in a solidly middle-class neighborhood, nearly one third of the students receive such assistance.

A while ago, I stumbled onto an on-line article in the Kansas City Star entitled, “Nation’s Unseen Scourge: Hunger.” “Out of sight of most Americans,” it said, “food stamp recipients struggle daily to feed families.”

The title struck me. If indeed hungry Americans, of which there are over 36 million, are largely unseen, isn’t it because we simply don’t bother to look for them? If I had never stepped foot inside the Hayhurst cafeteria, would I even be aware that there are children at my kid’s school from food-insecure households?

Or perhaps we do see hunger, but our conception of it is inadequate, if not altogether inaccurate. After all, when Americans think about hunger, often the first thing that comes to mind is widespread starvation in Third World countries.

Oh, sure, we’re aware that our local food banks and pantries, for which our houses of worship and civic organizations tirelessly sponsor drive after drive, serve the homeless and the chronically jobless. For too many of us, however, our notion of hunger in our own backyard conveniently ends there. The homeless, the jobless—the faceless.

But hunger does have a face. In America, 36.2 million faces to be more precise, and in case you’re not doing the math, that’s one in every eight Americans (in Oregon, alone, 458,000 people live in food-insecure households).

In other words, so many Americans are hungry that we can’t simply discount the problem as one affecting only the miserable looking individuals begging for change on freeway off-ramps or the homeless souls sleeping under city bridges. The face of hunger has changed over time, and it may be closer to home than you realize.

Today, the face of hunger is the child at your neighborhood school who struggles to concentrate on her schoolwork because her family couldn’t afford dinner the night before; it’s the older couple who’ve lived for 40 years on your block and who’ve worked hard their entire lives only to find their savings wiped out by unavoidable medical bills; it’s the single mother you see every Shabbat at your synagogue who is working five days a week but whose low-paying job forces her to choose between buying food, taking her sick child to the doctor, or making the monthly rent.

And with the current economic downturn, there are more of these faces than ever before. Take our state, for example. Last month, the Oregon Department of Human Resources reported that in November, an unprecedented 507,039 Oregonians—or nearly one in seven—received food stamps. Not surprisingly, Portland-area agencies, such as FISH Emergency Services in Southeast and the Sunshine Pantry in Beaverton, report being overwhelmed by requests from families seeking help.

That there are hungry people anywhere in America is a blot on our collective conscience, especially the children who don’t have enough to eat on a regular basis. As Brandeis University’s Dr. J. Larry Brown, an expert on hunger, put it, “By taking youngsters and subjecting them to hunger, we rob them of their God-given potential. [It’s as though] we deliver them to the schoolhouse door with one arm tied behind their back.”

This is simply unacceptable. Hunger isn’t inevitable; it needn’t be tolerated as a predictable part of our national landscape. If we adopt wise policies, it can be dramatically reduced.

For starters, we need to ensure that federal nutrition and anti-hunger programs—food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), School Breakfast and School Lunch, and Women, Infants and Children (WIC)—are sufficiently funded even when tax revenues are down due to a struggling economy (precisely when these programs are most crucial).

At the same time, however, we must recognize that just providing food won’t address the root causes of hunger in a country that has the highest wage inequality of any industrialized nation and where more than 47 million people have no health insurance. In other words, a real key to overcoming hunger is the creation of living-wage jobs that enable people to meet their basic needs and the provision of healthcare for the uninsured.

Ironically, that’s what’s most frustrating about this problem: Measures to help end hunger exist, yet so little progress has been made in part because the public has yet to grasp the prevalence of hunger nationally and because too many policymakers believe the solution lies primarily with charitable organizations.

My hope is that with a new administration and Congress, we can begin to make significant progress—and rectify one of the greatest moral failures of our time.

Robert Horenstein is the staff director of the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland.