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June 10, 2012

EDITORIAL: Helping feed the hungry

Startling stats show children suffer most

The Tribune-Star

On this day when many of us eat to our fill around what used to be called the Sunday dinner table, this statistic should punch us in our collective gut: More than 41,000 of our nearby Hoosier neighbors live with what hunger specialists call food insecurity.

Worse: More than 13,000 of them are children.

These Hoosiers live in the seven counties — Clay, Greene, Knox, Parke, Sullivan, Vermillion and Vigo — that are served by the Terre Haute Catholic Charities Foodbank, one of 11 such food banks in Indiana that are allied with the national Feeding America organization. Collectively, across those seven counties, 23.2 percent of children are deemed food insecure, a term the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as the “lack of consistent access to adequate amounts of food for an active, healthy life.” Statewide, the food insecure percent for children is 22.7. (More specific stats can be found at Feeding America’s website, feedingamerica.org/mapthegap).

That anyone goes hungry in a still-prosperous America is startling. But, even more so, that one-fourth of our children go hungry is deplorable. Children, to be sure, are innocents in this crisis, victims, lives in jeopardy, our hope for the future. They did not create their reality. Hunger — right here in River City — can only make for children who grow up in ill health, who are inattentive students, who become resentful and abusive, who are disproportionately tempted by crime and drugs, and who themselves later produce children destined to repeat the cycle.

Caring people can help ... and they already do. Just a few weeks ago, mail carriers collected tons of nonperishable food that patrons had left at their mailboxes. Soup kitchens — remnants of the Depression — abound. Many churches and charitable agencies have food banks. Civic groups and businesses stage food drives and turn the bounty over to Catholic Charities or some other hunger-fighting entity.

Government, often thought to be heartless, cares too, by funding in-school meals on free and reduced-price basis. In Vigo County, more than half of students are on such programs, rising as high as 98 percent in one Vigo school. The problem is not abstract or distant — not a TV commercial of children with distended stomachs on a continent far way. Some will say, correctly, that education is the way to lift these children out of the poverty (or neglect). But, as teachers and school leaders tell us often, children cannot concentrate, or even care, about learning with growling bellies and insufficiently nourished bodies. They will lack energy, they will lack alertness, they will act out. These in-school meals often are the best food the students will receive.

Most recently, as our Sue Loughlin reported in Thursday’s issue, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church donated $2,000 from a church rummage sale to the Salvation Army’s food bank, in large part to help fill a gap for children who normally get meals at school.

Still, all of these laudable, valuable efforts seem not to be enough. Much, much remains to be done as long as so many kids are growing up hungry.

What to do against such a gigantic problem? It has built incrementally, a family at a time, and so it must be attacked incrementally, a hungry family at a time.

You, and we, are the solution. Those of us who have more than we need to eat — look at the obesity statistics and you will see many of us are killing ourselves by poor eating — are the solution. Not only at the holidays should we share our bounty.

Let us suggest a simple, modest goal. Each week, each of our families can donate five canned goods to a food bank in our community. It doesn’t matter to which agency we donate as long as the food gets where it can help the hungry, especially hungry children. We can’t calculate how much food that would be — maybe significant, maybe a drop in the bucket. But it would be more than is being donated now.

Much more needs to be done, but at the least this is something all of us can do — to help our children.

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