Still hungry
Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America.
By Loretta Schwartz-Noble. HarperCollins, 252 pp., $24.95.
A U.S. Marine, peeking suspiciously from behind the front door of a run-down military house, surrenders his pride long enough to accept a bag of free food to feed his wife and infant daughter. It's the end of the month, there's no money in the house and the food purchased by food stamps and from WIC has run out. By telling such stories, Loretta Schwartz-Nobel puts a face on the millions of hungry people vulnerable to changes in public policy. Her stories illustrate what hunger advocates have been saying for years--that "hunger in America is far too vast to be contained by charity alone . . . that as federal aid is slashed, suffering and hunger increase among us and that as federal aid increases, hunger proportionately decreases."
Hunger is not a new topic for Schwartz-Noble, an award-winning journalist and author. When her first article on hunger appeared in Philadelphia magazine in 1974, the sophisticated network of food banks and food distribution charities we now take for granted didn't exist. By the time her acclaimed book Starving in the Shadow of Plenty was published in 1981, hunger had come to the forefront of public awareness and both corporate and private-sector groups were organizing to expand charitable feeding programs. Now, despite the Herculean efforts of food banks, churches and charities, the number of hungry people in America is actually higher than when Schwartz-Noble first began writing.
These are grim times for hungry people. The ebbing tide of the economy has lowered all boats. It has especially affected the 33.6 million people in the U.S.--more than one-third of them children--living in households in which access to food is "limited or uncertain." In the coming weeks Congress will make changes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, commonly known as welfare. Hailed by some as a success and condemned by others as a blow to the poor, the landmark legislation that changed welfare from an entitlement program to a block grant in 1996 is now being reconsidered.
