Hunger

Like most of Northeast Ohio’s kids, the lovely Madelyn Simone celebrated her final day of school last week, although I don’t know if she sang, “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.” (I was tempted to teach it to her, but wasn’t sure that was an appropriate Nana action). According to Madelyn, we now have a second grader in our family. How can that be possible?

It may not officially be summer yet, but summer vacation is in full swing here in Ohio. When summer spread her arms of welcome to me in the 1960s, I embraced her in return, ready for the relaxed schedule and the warmth of the sun. We were outside a lot as kids, playing in the neighborhood, riding our bikes, and checking in with our moms at lunchtime. We were met with tuna fish, fried bologna, or “bread and butter and brown sugar,” and fresh peaches, peeled, sliced, and dusted with sugar. No raw broccoli.

Yes, my mother, like most of the neighborhood moms, was home at lunchtime in the 1960s, and while the nutritional value of the brown sugar is questionable, lunch was always ready and filling. It seems like an ancient world from the perspective of 2017.

In today’s world, most parents of young children work outside the home, so child care centers and the USDA summer lunch program exist to fill the lunch gap. For some kids, home alone all day, packages of ramen noodles are the lunchtime staple. But lack of income also plays a role. Many of those working parents earnings are below 130% of poverty. For a parent of two children, this is $420 per week, $12 per hour when working thirty-five hours a week. When their monthly bills – rent, utilities, car, etc. are paid, there’s little left for food, and they depend on SNAP to carry them through the month.

Looking at the numbers, 44% of all SNAP participants are children, while 76% of SNAP benefits go to households with children, 11.9% to households with disabled people, and 10% to households with seniors. Half of all American children will receive SNAP benefits at some point by the time they’re eighteen. The average monthly amount of a SNAP food card is $256.11 per family. Yet the proposed federal budget makes significant reductions to SNAP, and also assesses a fee to grocery stores who accept SNAP cards – follow that thread to struggling supermarkets in distressed areas.

With the support of SNAP, as well as local pantries and soup kitchens operating across the United States, nearly all Americans will have something to eat today. That is not true for twenty million people living in South Sudan, Yemen, Somalia and Nigeria, as famine threatens their land. Fifty years later, I still remember the photographs of starving Biafran children on the cover of Life Magazine, their eyes silently pleading for relief. It is happening again. According to the United Nations, 1.5 million children are at risk of dying from starvation over the next months.

Bread for the World is a non-profit agency with the tag line, “have faith, end hunger.” Annually, they sponsor an “Offering of Letters” campaign, writing letters to Congress to encourage the investment in and protection of vital policies and safety-net programs – including WIC (Women, Infant and Children), global nutrition, SNAP, and refundable tax credits. They note: “We have made great progress reducing hunger and poverty in our country and around the world, but our work remains unfinished.”

Having worked to alleviate hunger for many years, I understand that government programs cannot end hunger by themselves. As Bread for the World recognizes, “Families, churches and charities, and businesses also have to play their parts. But we can only end hunger if our national government does its part. Our powerful government is a vital force for ending hunger here at home and worldwide.”

So Mr. Gibbs, Mr. Brown, and Mr. Portman, I’m urging you to protect the most vulnerable among us. Protect funding for food security, both here and around the world. Eleanor Roosevelt challenges us: “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery, rather than to avenge it?”