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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

The Rev. Timothy Murdock, Albion Christian Church.

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

IT TAKES CAREFUL PLANNING: Sandy Kalloch says she has just enough food in her refrigerator, freezer and cupboards before the next food pantry delivery in a week, but it takes careful planning to make it.

enlarge Staff photo by Jim Evans

enlarge Staff graphic by Sharon Wood

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Second in a 7-day series

We should not have to ask others for food.

We should not have to ask others to feed our children.

We should not have to line up at food pantries or at soup kitchens to be given food by kind strangers.

We should all have the dignity of being able to feed ourselves.

Imagine a mother who must drop her 8-year-old off at school with only a brownie for lunch, because that’s all that was left in the house. Imagine a father who must bring half of his lunch home for the family to share for dinner because the checking account is empty until payday. Imagine an elderly man who has fought in this country’s wars, who has put his life on the line, who has worked hard every day of his adult life — and now only has two eggs in the refrigerator and a lot of half-empty bottles of salad dressing. There is no money for anything else. And there is little dignity left.

You do not need to imagine these things.

These things happen.

They are called hunger.

Hunger happens every day in Maine. It happens in Augusta, where the parents of 61 percent of the children at one school can’t afford to buy them lunch. It happens in Jefferson, where an elderly woman sat alone one day recently, staring into space in her kitchen, with nothing to eat in her home. It happens in apartments and double wides and old farmhouses all over the state. Some of your children’s classmates are hungry, one of your co-workers in the office is hungry, the old woman in the checkout line at the grocery store — the one who’s audibly adding up her groceries to make sure she can afford it all — is hungry at the end of the month when her Social Security check runs out. They guy at the cash register in the gas station has no idea how he’s going to pay for his family’s next bag of groceries.

With a 3.3 percent increase in the number households experiencing hunger, Maine had the highest percentage growth rate of hungry people in the country between 2000 and 2005. Five years ago, we had 430 food pantries in this state; now we have 600. According to the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, from 2002 to 2005 the number of Maine households receiving food stamps increased by almost 50 percent; nationally, food stamp use increased by only 26 percent from 2000 to 2004.

In the past four years, the proportion of students eligible for free and reduced school lunch increased each year on a statewide basis as well as in most counties. More than one-third of the state’s school children were eligible during the 2005-06 school year for the free and reduced school lunch program. Almost half of all students in Somerset, Washington and Piscataquis counties were eligible.

The state’s food pantries are playing an even more critical role for Maine’s hungry. “What I’ve heard is that there’s been a 25 percent increase (in demand) the last two years at the food pantries,” says Jason Hall, who works at Auburn’s Good Shepherd Food Bank supplying the state’s 600 pantries. “I haven’t heard people say ‘We used to serve 50, and now we serve 10.’ There’s need everywhere, from the far north to the far south.”

SIMPLY WRONG

Just in case your heart isn’t big enough to feel that it’s simply wrong that hunger happens to others, then consider this: The hunger of others can harm you, too.

Hungry children disrupt classrooms and take more tax money to educate. They are also likely to develop serious and lifelong developmental problems that cripple their ability to learn and will stop them from being fully contributing members of society. Hungry seniors get sick and tax dollars are spent to provide them with medical care. Hungry poor people can only afford to eat cheap calories that make them fat and cause lots of health problems that we may very well end up paying for.

In practically every Maine school, there’s a teacher who buys food for her students, a school lunch server who sneaks seconds and thirds to the kids who always beg for more, a school nurse who calls the local food pantry to let them know she’s got another student whose family clearly needs help but is too proud to ask.

Our world here in Maine is filled with hungry people and with people who are just this side of hungry, who each day don’t know where their next meal is going to come from and who are one minor problem away from real hunger. Every day in Maine, people make choices between medicine and food, between paying the electricity bill and food, between feeding themselves adequately or feeding their children adequately. For far too many of Maine’s families, one nutritious family meal a week is an accomplishment.

The demand is growing, a huge cadre of saintly volunteers has formed to answer it — yet still, it’s not enough.

That’s because there are just too many hungry people. Even with a job these days, you can be hungry. One third of the people in Maine on food stamps are working. “We’re seeing high percentages of working people,” says Johnnie Buchanan, who coordinates western Maine’s food pantries.

Eighty percent of the people on food stamps live in families with children. Eleven percent of those on food stamps are elderly, a low number that experts believe reflects the fierce pride of older people who can’t bear to ask for help.

And it’s not enough because in America we should not have to feed people through charity and public assistance. This is not India. This is not some Third World country with a literacy rate of 40 percent. This is not even 19th Century industrial America where soup kitchens were legion and poorhouses were the norm. This is the richest country in the world and this is a place where by all rights we should all be able to feed ourselves.

Yet many of us can’t.

A QUIET SHAME

For a problem that afflicts so many, we spend an astonishing amount of time not talking about hunger. Yes, we discuss it now and then and we answer the call for charity now and then as well. We’ll clean out our pantry shelves by contributing cans of beans to food drives. We’ll drop a quarter or two or even a dollar in a contribution jar at a cash register. Some of us will work at a food pantry. And lately, hunger has been more popular as a discussion topic because of efforts at the federal level to publicize just how inadequate food stamp benefits are. When a congressman and his wife publicize the meagerness of the average food stamp allotment by eating only $21 worth of food a week, we’ll pay attention for a little while.

But not for long.

Hunger is invisible in part because it’s considered so shameful to be hungry in America that even those who need food don’t like to talk about it in public. Ironically, they collude in covering up the problem. In many of our state’s food pantries, there’s one door to enter — and another door to exit, so that the next people in line to get their food don’t witness your shame. If everyone who was hungry or didn’t know where their next few meals were going to come from had to wear a red hat one day, we’d know how many of our friends and neighbors and colleagues were hungry. But what parents want to admit that they can’t feed their children?

And we don’t talk about hunger because it’s physically invisible to most of us. Hunger in America isn’t skinny, rickety children or gaunt adults with sunken cheeks. It’s not starvation, the way it is in many other countries.

Instead, hunger in America is obese children whose parents can afford to buy calories, but not nutrition. It’s seniors ill with a vitamin deficiency whose symptoms mimic Alzheimer’s — but who, unlike Alzheimer’s patients, can be cured by eating less canned food and more fresh food. It’s working parents debilitated, humiliated and discouraged by the daily, unmeetable challenge of feeding their families.

Hunger is just too big an issue for any one of us to solve and thus for us even to talk about, it seems.

It appears to be too big for government to solve, too.

In 2002, the Maine Millennium Commission on Hunger and Food Security issued a vast list of proposals for ending hunger in Maine. With moving language and strong emotion, the authors declared that “it must become the policy of the state of Maine to end hunger.”

Yet not one single substantive proposal in the report has been implemented.

This year, Gov. John Baldacci issued a proclamation declaring Maine Hunger Awareness Day. Full of moving language and strong emotion, just like the millennium commission’s report, the proclamation didn’t exhort Mainers to undertake detailed actions. It just told them to end hunger.

We don’t talk about hunger because solving it is so big and complex. Its solutions entail making a college education more affordable and accessible; revamping our national farm policy to favor production of nutritious foods; promoting economic development to raise wages that currently cannot support families. We will need to reform a federal public assistance program that is insufficient and, paradoxically, creates dependency by penalizing recipients for trying to get ahead. Each of those is a serious challenge that will take years to accomplish.

NOT "US AND THEM"

Before we can even begin to work on these solutions, we have to make hunger a part of all our lives. Not that we should all be hungry, but we must become aware of it, know who among is us hungry and begin to talk about it among ourselves. As Pastor Tim Murdock of the Albion Christian Church says, “We cannot talk about hunger as ‘us and them.”

On these opinion pages this week, we will bring you stories of Maine’s hungry. We will take you into schools and food pantries and government offices and kitchens. We will propose ideas for alleviating or at least mitigating some of the worst problems faced by Maine’s hungry.

But our real goal is take hunger out of the shameful shadows and bring it into the light. That there are so many hungry people in Maine is a problem for all of us, morally and economically, and it properly belongs in every major discussion of our state’s present and future. Our elected officials must make hunger a real issue of concern and action – and we must work with them to end it.

We must not be satisfied with palliative moves to feed people, no matter how good-hearted. That will never end hunger. Ending hunger must move from being the work of the blessedly charitable to being the work of a determined nation and state.

Tomorrow: Margot Caswell’s box of food

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