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By Root 1356 0

alone, at about 45 cents per meal, are not enough to supply an adequate diet.22 The Department of Agriculture concluded that the diets of 91 percent of those families whose food spending is at the level of the food plan on which food stamp allotments are based are nutritionally deprived.23 If they possibly can, most people supplement their food stamps with cash. But if you are trying to support a family on $400 a month, that means you’ll probably have to squeeze some food money out of the rent or heating bill.

Other evidence exists to prove the reality of hunger in America. Poor children have actually been shown to be physically stunted compared to their middle-class counterparts. A Center for Disease Control study in the mid-1970s documented that up to 15 percent of the poor children examined showed symptoms of anemia and 12 percent were stunted in height.24 Dr. Robert Livingston of the University of California at San Diego told us that “poor children have measurably smaller head circumferences than those in families with adequate income.”25

Our infant death rate is another powerful indictment of our society. Because the infant mortality rate (deaths of babies less than one year old per 1,000 live births) in part reflects the nutrition of the mother, it is often used to judge the overall nutritional well-being of a people. Even though per person spending on health care has leapt tenfold in less than 20 years,26 our infant mortality rate ranks 16th in the world, almost double that of Sweden or Finland.27 In the United States, 14 babies die for every thousand born alive. This national average is “not enviable,” the journal Pediatrics sadly notes.28 But averages do not uncover the real tragedy. Among nonwhite babies the infant death rate is 22 per thousand, about the same as that of an extremely poor country like Jamaica.29 Even assuming much better reporting of infant deaths here, this comparison should alarm us.

Even averages among nonwhites mask the extreme deprivation in some communities. In the Fruitvale area of Oakland, California, just across the San Francisco Bay from my home, the infant death rate is 36 per thousand. And in the capital of our nation the rate is 25 per thousand, approximately that of Taiwan.30

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of hunger amid abundant production comes from the few people who have the courage to go into our communities to meet and talk with those who are suffering from lack of food. One such person is a woman I met five years ago when we both participated in a Philadelphia “hunger radiothon,” 24 hours of commercial-free radio in which all the breaks were used to tell people about hunger and its causes. Investigative reporter Loretta Schwartz-Nobel spoke about people starving in Philadelphia. As I was writing this book, I heard from Loretta again. This time she sent the manuscript that documented the hunger—even starvation—that she had witnessed. Her evidence includes many passages like this one, quoting an elderly former civil service worker in Boston:

I’ve had no income and I’ve paid no rent for many months. My landlord let me stay. He felt sorry for me because I had no money. The Friday before Christmas he gave me ten dollars. For days I had had nothing but water. I knew I needed food; I tried to go out but I was too weak to walk to the store. I felt as if I was dying. I saw the mailman and told him I thought I was starving. He brought me food and then he made some phone calls and that’s when they began delivering these lunches. But I had already lost so much weight that five meals a week are not enough to keep me going.

I just pray to God I can survive. I keep praying I can have the will to save some of my food so I can divide it up and make it last. It’s hard to save because I am so hungry that I want to eat it right away. On Friday, I held over two peas from lunch. I ate one pea on Saturday morning. Then I got into bed with the taste of food in my mouth and I waited as long as I could. Later on in the day I ate the other pea.

Today I saved the container that the mashed