Writer's Journal: Putting hunger on the map
Kennebec Journal & Morning Sentinel Monday, July 23, 2007

When I talk to my friends and acquaintances, they’re all interested to hear that I’m working on a series on hunger. Hunger, here? That was something our mothers reminded us about when we didn’t want to eat our dinner as kids. Finish your dinner, we were told, sternly. There are starving children in Africa.

Hunger here in our own backyard is not a daily part of our conversations or our consciousness. Unless we’re part of one of the organizations or institutions that deals with it — schools, churches, the folks administering food stamps or welfare — our awareness of it is peripheral, and our engagement is limited. We go to the store and at the cash register there’s a box in which we can drop a coin to contribute to a food bank or soup kitchen and often we do. There are food drives where our children come home from school with a note and we respond by going through our kitchen shelves and filling a bag with canned beans, pasta and something else we’re either unlikely to eat or unlikely to miss eating.

But hunger remains in the back of our minds, not the front — that’s no fault of ours, really, because it’s so hidden. “It’s hard to understand that there’s a problem even though it’s right in front of you,” one food pantry volunteer told me. “In our own town there was upwards of 80 people being served by another town’s food pantry — retirees, veterans, people who though they’d done it right. And we said, ‘that’s not right.’”

Given the stories I’m encountering, of children who eat a subsidized or free lunch at school and don’t eat again until they come back the next morning, of older folks who proudly say they’ll “get by” without the food pantry’s monthly donation — but have little more than salad dressing and a couple of eggs in their fridge by month’s end — I wonder what it will take to move this issue from the background to the foreground?

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