Childhood Hunger
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Summary:
Children in Maine aren’t hungry because we lack food or because we lack effective food and nutrition programs. They are hungry because they lack access to such programs.
September 3
Maine Children Hungry Because They Lack Access to Food Programs
Kennebec Journal (Portland, ME)
Bill Shore
September 1, 2009
Like elsewhere on the Maine coast, the slice of land beyond our window at Goose Rocks Beach is in constant flux. Every 12 hours, incoming tide reshapes and remakes the beach, depositing shells, snails, driftwood and an occasional lobster trap. With the sun in a different position during each day’s high- and low-tides, the effect is of an exquisitely sensitive kaleidoscope offering a unique view each time one returns to it.
The subtidal stretch of ocean floor, always submerged though just barely at low tide, remains ankle deep hundreds of yards from shore, and is rich in both life and drama if one’s willing to look for it. We always take guests out to search for everything from the prized wafer-thin sand dollars and hermit crabs to the large coiled moon snails whose domes are barely visible above the sand.
If you dig up a moon snail that has anchored itself to the ocean floor with a large purplish squishy suction-cup-like foot, you often will find that it has completely enveloped a large clam upon which is it feeding. The snail secretes an enzyme to soften the clam shell and uses its razor-like tongue to drill a hole in the shell through which it can digest the clam.
Such struggles for survival can be found on almost every inch of ocean floor, near shore as well as out where lobsters, crabs, eels and sea stars scramble to survive. This is nature at its most remarkably routine.
Just as struggles of the subtidal are hidden from view unless we go looking, so are other struggles in Maine that remain below the surface. But there is nothing natural about them.
One in five Maine children lives in households facing hunger. Only 44 percent of children in Maine receive the free school breakfast for which they are eligible, and only 15.5 percent get summer meals when schools are closed.
Between 2000 and 2005, Maine had the highest percentage growth rate of hungry people in the United states. More than one in eight Mainers uses food stamps.
A state known for catering to tourists in search of simple pleasures like sailing, kayaking, hiking and camping is permanent home to many for whom pleasure has become a distant dream.
Childhood hunger, however, is a solvable problem. Children in Maine aren’t hungry because we lack food or because we lack effective food and nutrition programs. They are hungry because they lack access to such programs.
That’s one reason that Share Our Strength, which I founded, funds organizations like Preble Street, Cultivating Community and Maine Equal Justice to ensure that more children and families can connect to the healthy and nutritious food they need.
Maine, of course, is not alone. A record 34 million Americans are now on food stamps. Understanding the challenges they face depends on our willingness to dig beneath the surface.
Because of the recession, we need not dig as deeply as we once did. But all social change begins with a commitment to scratch away the veneer of comfort and complacency and stare unblinkingly at hard truths.
Just as nature manages to camouflage its harsh realities, so too does our culture with its penchant for journalism as entertainment, celebrity trials and deaths, political scorekeeping and the latest fads in fashion and technology.
That’s why a commitment to bearing witness remains such an indispensible ingredient of any effort to end hunger and poverty.
Whether on the beach or on the front line of the fight against hunger, there is wisdom in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s words that “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Bill Shore is founder and executive director of the national anti-hunger organization, Share Our Strength, and has a home in southern Maine.
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