Imagine that the nation's food banks all closed their doors.

That's the provocative and unsettling idea from the country's leading hunger scholar, J. Larry Brown. Brown, a faculty member at the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the National Center on Hunger and Poverty, spoke at a conference on hunger in Augusta last week (the edited text of his speech is published on the opposite page).

Brown's suggestion was borne of frustration. For decades, he's been one of the nation's leading anti-hunger advocates, but he despairs that hunger has become a stubborn and accepted fact of life in America.

"Our job is not going well," he said. "Nobody really expects that our nation's leaders will bring an end to hunger."

Instead, said Brown, we have lowered our sights, and "hunger is no longer considered intolerable."

Brown is correct: We don't try to conquer hunger, we simply address hunger. We help the hungry. We make a huge charitable effort to alleviate hunger. Food pantries are springing up everywhere. In Maine, the number of pantries has grown from 430 five years ago to 600 now.

But as we said in our seven-part series last summer, "For I was hungry," hunger cannot be dealt with largely by charity -- as goodhearted as those giving the charity may be.

Charity is a stop-gap measure. It fixes an immediate problem. But it is an essentially conservative approach: It does not change the reality that hunger is a growing, intractable and endemic problem in our country.

To rely on charity to fix hunger means hunger will never end. As Brown says, charities simply do not have the resources that the federal government has to actually end hunger.

So he says we should close all our food pantries. Send the hungry to the streets and into the halls of Congress, where they must be joined by hunger advocates, who will "no longer be likeable."

Those who want to help the hungry must move from being nice and cooperative players to being noisy advocates, and to do that they must no longer accept, in Brown's words, "timid political leadership."

They must, he says, hold "the collective noses of the new president and congressional leaders to the grindstone."

We agree.