
          Southern Hunger in the Eighties: Win this one for the
Reaper
          By Tullos, AllenAllen Tullos
          Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 6-11, 13-16
          
          
            "There's no basis for this demagoguery that somehow we
have punished, and are picking on, or trying to get our recovery on
the backs of the needy. . . there is not one single fact or
figure. "--President Reagan.
            "It must be recognized that the needy are and always have been
consumers, and they would have purchased cheese had it not been given
to them."--Robert F. Anderson, executive director of the National
Cheese Institute.
          
          Back in February of this weary year, after fifteen months, of field
investigation, public hearings and data confirmed a fact of living in
the Reagan Era. Hunger and malnutrition, 

on the decline in the United
States since the early 1970s, were again on the rise. "We are
shocked," said Dr. Larry Brown, chair of the Commission, "at how
widespread hunger and malnutrition are in New England. I think the
thing that worries us most is the degree to which hunger is a
relatively better economy and fairly extensive health care system,
particularly in a state like Massachusetts."
          The Citizens' Commission, composed of health and social service
professionals, was called into being by the Harvard School of Public
Health at the request of religious groups and emergency food providers
in the six New England states. Food kitchens have strained (some have
collapsed) in the effort of the last few years to provide for larger
and larger numbers of people in need. The question was put: Why the
increase in hunger?
          "Perhaps the most shocking thing we have found," the Commission
members answered in their report, American Hunger
Crisis, is that the return of hunger to America is the result
of conscious policies of our federal government . . . Hunger returned
as a result of governmental will and the weakening of the programs
that once worked so well."
          For its part, the Reagan Administration has not only denied the
existence of a hunger problem, it has initiated a war against the
poor. "We've had considerable information," said presidential
counselor and attorney-general nominee Edwin Meese at the height of
the recent recession, "that people go to soup kitchens because the
food is free and that's easier than paying for it."
          During its first four years, the Administration and its allies in
Congress (including a critical number of Southerners) cut more than
4.6 million low-income Americans from federal food-assistance and
dropped 3.2 million needy children from school lunch programs. During
these same years the percentage of Americans living in poverty has
grown to the highest level in twenty years and the number of poor
people has increased by more than six million. About 35 million people
are now officially poor ($10,178 annual income for a family of
four). Another twelve million Americans live near enough to the
poverty line to be eligible for food stamps. As Reagan's second season
begins, Meese, White House chief of staff James A. Baker, budget
director David Stockman and a group of domestic advisors have prepared
plans for another assault on food and nutrition assistance, health
care services and the benefit levels of federal payment programs.
          In a lapse into social Darwinism, poverty and hunger have once
again become fashionable tools used by government and business to
engineer conformity, resignation and despair. Instead of enforcing a
commitment to all citizens' right to a just and decent life, we see
the executive power of the federal government employed to starve and
strong-arm the poor.
          "I think we don't pay enough attention to the fact that when we're
talking about poor people in this country, we're taking about
children," says Dr. C. Arden Miller, chairman of the University of
North Carolina's department of maternal and child health. "Children
make up about fifty-one percent of the US poor. The public image is of
the shiftless, lazy, able-bodied male who could be working if he was
enterprising enough. That's not the problem. Since the mid1970's, an
increased proportion of children live in poverty."
          In addition to children, many of the poor are elderly. Others are
people in chronic bad health. May live in the rural South where there
are few jobs to be had. Over thirty" six percent of female-headed
households live in poverty. Among non-white, female-headed
households, the rate is higher than seventy percent.
          Many of the poor hold steady jobs and remain poor the "new poor,"
the working poor in fast food restaurants, in janitorial, maintenance
and service work, in non-union factories. The punitive nature of
current federal policy toward the poor combined with the everyday
workings of capitalist economics result in young black women locking
their hungry children in unheated apartments while they piece together
a schedule of part-time work that best suits the needs of the burger
masters at the Golden Arches.
          Among the poorest forty-percent of the US population, purchasing
power has declined every year since 1980. At the other end of the
spending and accumulation ladder, we see 

the rewards--as well as the
widening gap between rich and poor. This spring's Congressional Budget
Office report shows that the Reagan budget cuts and tax-law changes
which have been enacted so far have resulted in an annual loss of $390
for households with incomes of less than $10,000 a year, an annual
gain of a thousand dollars for households making between $20,000 and
$40,000, and an extra helping of $8,300 a year for households with
annual incomes of $80,000.
          Among the affluent and the pretenders to affluence (for consumer
debt, like the Reagan budget, stands at record levels), the pursuit of
private interest now justifies our detachment from the demands of a
just society.
          The current chasing after the signs and sighs of success is
capitalized upon by merchandisers in roadside billboards that pitch
such goods as "the most expensive beer around." Media ads foreground
particular items even as they pique desire for an ensemble of
convivial accessories. "So worldly, so welcome!" "A man with a good
car needs no justification." As a critic notes about the current crop
of favorite television shows, "On TV, everyone is rich." In reality,
unlike primetime, forty-three percent of the nation's personal income
goes to only one-fifth of US families; the poorest fifth receive five
percept.
          As the climate of Reaganism seeks to make both hay and example of
the poor, our deeply irrational military spending binge provides a
bounty for an intricate web of Pentagon and foreign forces,
contractors, sub-contractors and research institutions. Monied strands
of this web wrap themselves throughout every congressional district
and municipality--perhaps making impossible the cutting of our ties of
destructive dependency. Any discussion of hunger and poverty, of
housing and health care, of the arts and education--in the South and
the nation--must reflect upon the ransom we pay the Pentagon to hold
ourselves hostage.
          
            Let 'Em Eat Anecdotes
          
          Early in l984, prompted by the findings of the Citizens' Commission
on Hunger in New England, Dr. Larry Brown of Harvard's School of
Public Health helped to organize the Physician Task Force on Hunger in
America. With support from the Field Foundation, the Task Force began
to assess the extent of hunger in other sections of the country,
including the South. Historically the nation's most impoverished and
malnourished section, the South of the 1980s finds eighteen percent of
its people living in poverty. This compares with fourteen percent in
the West and about thirteen percent for both Midwest and Northeast.
          "Our nation has a serious problem to deal with," Dr. Brown has said
at press conferences wherever the Task Force has travelled during the
past year. "We are reporting our findings along the way to the
American public and to Congress. We will present a national report in
February of 1985."
          In May and June a dozen members of the Task Force on Hunger began
the Southern circuit of their tour with visits to Alabama, Tennessee,
Mississippi and North Carolina. Among the group were Rev. Kenneth Dean
and Dr. Aaron Shirley, veterans of the Southern hunger surveys
coordinated by Rev. Dean and Leslie Dunbar with the Southern Regional
Council and the Field Foundation in 1967 and again in 1977.
          In Mississippi, the Task Force on Hunger spent several days in
Jackson and in the Delta--where poverty has increased from thirty
percent in 1980 until it now includes over fifty percent of that
area's population. "The hunger and malnutrition I saw in Mississippi
are the worst that I've come face to face with," said Dr. Naomi
Kistin, a veteran inner-city pediatrician from Chicago's Cook County
Hospital who travelled with the Task Force.

          About 800,000 Mississippians, a third of the state's entire
population, have incomes which make them eligible for food
stamps. Only nineteen percent of the population is actually receiving
federal food aid. This puts about 300,000 Mississippians at highest
risk of hunger. The maximum monthly AFDC payment in the state is $120
for a family of four--the lowest amount in the nation.
          Despite the well established fact that feeding programs for the
elderly dramatically improve their health, and the fact that in
Mississippi 118,563 elderly are officially poor, only 12,300 receive
any federal food assistance.
          Most elderly Southerners suffer from one or more chronic diseases
which require special diets. The Task Force on Hunger heard many
stories like that of Mississippian Laura Jane Allen, age seventy-six,
who couldn't afford the diet her doctor had prescribed: "They tell me
what I should eat. I'm supposed to have fresh vegetables and fish and
stay away from that pork, salt and cheese--but l just can't buy the
right food with the money I have."
          In Tutwiler, Mississippi, a social worker reported that of every
hundred hospital in-patients she sees each month, about one-third are
malnourished. A nurse in Greenwood said, "it's a vicious cycle. Before
you know it, they're in the hospital because their blood sugar dropped
too low or they had an insulin reaction from not being able to eat. We
have patients eating the wrong things because those are the only
things they can get and they wind up in the hospital with strokes."
          At a Task Force hearing in the Delta, four hundred people crowded a
hall. "There were enough people present who wanted to testify," says
Joie Kammer of the Catholic St. Francis Center, "to have had the
hearing go on indefinitely. and there were telephone calls from the
elderly asking the doctors to come to their homes as they were unable
to come to the hearing."
          Many of the hungry in the Delta are victims of the long-term
unemployment which has accompanied the mechanization of Mississippi
plantations.
          Joyce Stancill, a home health nurse serving the elderly of
Greenwood, told the Task Force, "Most of my clients have been maids or
'yard-boys' or field workers on a plantation, for white people, and a
lot of them have never had social security payments. They're not able
to get social security now because the man worked them for forty or
fifty years and never paid in a dime. It's horrible to see what our
old people have had to go through."
          
            Rising Infant Mortality
          
          In Alabama the Physician Task Force split into two groups--one
visiting Birmingham and several west Alabama counties--and the other
travelling to Lowndes, Butler and Montgomery counties. They went into
soup kitches, feeding programs and food pantries. They talked to
officials. They collected state and local studies and reports. "Most
importantly," says Dr. Brown, "we went into dozens and dozens and
dozens of homes."
          "Some of the counties we saw in Mississippi and South Alabama are
on a par with the Third World. I have never seen so many empty
refrigerators."
          At the kitchen of the Trinity Episcopal Church in the depressed
steel city of Bessemer, Alabama, Rev. Dean observed that "entire
families are showing up at these soup lines, something unheard of
since the Depression." Vestry members of Trinity Episcopal voted to
begin the soup kitchen in 1982 at the urging of their minister,
Rev. Peter Horn, who had watched a trickle of requests for food turn
into a torrent within a few months.
          The Physician Task Force on Hunger scorns the policies Of Alabama,
Mississippi, North Carolina and a dozen other states that refuse aid
for families with dependent children to families in which both
"able-bodied" parents--although unable to find a job--continue to live
in the same household. This state policy promotes the break-up of
homes: the father often moves out so that his family won't be dropped
from AFDC.
          In Alabama, a maximum AFCD payment of $148 a month for a family of
four requires living on the outskirts of possibility. With food stamps
included, the maximum allotment for a mother and three children is
$400 a month or $4,800 in annual income. The basic welfare grants are
not adequate for "even the most frugal purchase of necessities."
          In Montgomery, Alabama Welfare Commissioner Leon Frazier told the
group that cutbacks in federally supported daycare had left "literally
thousands of low-income children and hundreds of handicapped adults in
the state without the assurance of even one nourishing meal a day."
          In 1982, Alabama's infant mortality rate increased for the first
time in many years for both blacks and whites from 12.9% per thousand
live births to 13.8%. Among black infants the rate increased sharply
from eighteen to 20.1 

deaths per one thousand live births. Yet, as the
Task Force on Hunger's preliminary field investigation summary
(October, 1984) notes, even these figures mask higher rates for areas
that are most affected by poverty and hunger. Hale County, in western
Alabama, has an infant mortality rate of thirty-one, almost three
times the national rate and as high as many Third World
countries. More than ten percent of babies born in Hale County have
low birth weights--a major factor contributing to infants' "failure to
thrive,"--leaving them susceptible to many other health problems.
          "We are all quite shaken at what we have seen," Dr. Brown said at
the end of the Task Force's first foray into the South. "We did not
see kwashiokor and marasmus*--which are signs of extreme malnutrition
that you see in Third World countries, but we did see widespread
hunger--and it was not hard to find. We saw malnutrition that was
altogether too extensive. Children are failing to grow properly, some
are dying.
          
            *Kwashiokor, is an illness which develops from a
combination of three dietary deficiencies: low calories, low vitamins
and low proteins. Under extreme reduction of calories, all the fat
storers are utilized and the body begins to burn its own structural
protein. The result is marasmus. Withhold enough protein and the
brain's cells start to blink out. Dr. Kenneth Dodgson of the Task
Force and of Rochester (NY) Memorial Hospital carefully warns that "we
are not seeing kwashiokor or marismus, but withhold enough food and
down the road we will see it."
          
          "There were three tornadoes while we were in Alabama. The news
media and the attention of the public was on those tornadoes, which
killed seven people. Every week in Alabama twice that number of
children die of infant mortality within the first year of life, due to
nutrition related illnesses.
          "Just this morning I held on my lap a six-year-old child who is the
size of a three-year-old. She is not getting enough to eat. We walked
across the street from this child's daycare center and talked to a
mother out in the yard. There were two more children there who were
small, thin and anemic.
          "In a Salvation Army soup kitchen in Montgomery, the director told
us that the economy, if it is improving, is not improving the lives of
the people that he sees. They were serving more people per month than
they had served in the last twenty-seven months.
          
            Take A Twinkie and Wait
          
          Of the dozen or so recent studies of hunger in the United States,
all--except for the report of President Reagan's Task Force on Food
Assistance (January, 1984)--show clearly that hunger exists in every
state, in every city and town.
          "Members of the Reagan Administration have referred hunger evidence
as 'anecdotal' material," says Dr. Brown. "I can tell you that our
research has not been anecdotal. And I can tell you that looking in a
refrigerator and finding three eggs and a piece of processed cheese
and water--as I have seen--isn't an anecdote for that family, whose
child--a five-year-old boy, has had no milk for three weeks. He eats
Cheerios and water for breakfast. His mother had tried to get
emergency food stamps but was turned down.

          "It's not hard to find hungry people in the United States. It's not
hard at all. First, you go to poor neighborhoods, in the cities, in
the towns, in the country. You talk with the people who live
there. Another way you can find out about hunger very quickly is to
ask the teachers in daycare centers and the Head Start programs what
kind of appetites the children have on Monday morning. What we've seen
across the country leaves no doubt that hunger is a problem for
millions of people in America.
          "When you go into the neighborhoods that we went in and you walk
down the street, you start talking with people, you go in their homes,
you say, "Can we please see where you prepare your food?" And they
take you in the kitchen and open an empty or nearly empty
refrigerator...It might be the refrigerator of a women with two
children, she's pregnant. And she has three sticks of butter in
there.
          "Ironically, people mislead you if you ask them if they are
hungry. But not like Mr. Meese said, as though people were out trying
to get something for nothing. You ask them, 'How are you doing for
food? How are the kids doing?'
          "Over and over again, with only a few exceptions, the response is
'Oh, we're getting by. We're doing all right.'
          "The lady I just told you about, I asked her that question and she
said, 'We're making it. We're doing okay.' When I asked her to take us
into her kitchen, we found the empty refrigerator.
          "People answer that way because of pride. I have children and the
last thing I would ever want to do would be to acknowledge to somebody
that I couldn't feed them.
          "These instances, multiplied over and over again paint a picture in
America which cannot be considered or dismissed as anecdotal and which
doesn't deserve to exist in our nation.
          "What we see is a picture of deprivation, which, while it may not
be as serious in degree as it was in the late 1960s, seems to be more
pervasive. Poverty and the hunger which it generates are no longer
limited to any particular subpopulation groups. Hunger cuts across the
lines of race now, and to some extent it cuts across class
lines. Hunger is reaching the "new poor"--people who have never been
hungry before, people who have not been in poverty before. Those who
have been poor for a long time are worse off now than they were. But
the new poor have appeared as a result of Reagan policies and the
economy."
          The face of Southern hunger looks different than it did twenty
years ago. "We're not seeing the kind of starvation that appears as
thin people and stunted growth," observes Task Force member Dr. Joyce
Lashof, Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of
California at Berkeley. "In their ragged form, the food assistance
programs that America constructed in the 1960s and '70s are keeping us
from going back to where we were. The soup kitchens and the food
stamps and similar programs are helping.
          "What we often see," continues Dr. Lashof, "are people who are
actually overweight because they're eating the wrong foods. They're
not getting the nutrients they need. They're malnourished in terms of
adequate proteins and vitamins."
          "President Reagan's Task Force on Food Assistance," Dr. Brown
points out, "did not engage in an effort which permitted them to
understand the dimensions of the hunger problem in the United
States. The governor's office in Mississippi came and testified before
our Task Force on Hunger when we went toJackson. Mississippi state
officials and private charities gave Reagan's Task Force a document of
testimony five inches thick. None of that was reflected in the
President's Task Force Report."
          Michael Raff, director of the state of Mississippi's Office of
Human Development, agrees that testimony of Mississippians to the
President's Task Force was "totally ignored."
          "I was asked by the executive director of the President's Task
Force," Dr. Brown continues, "if we would cooperate with them--could
they send people to go to our hearing up in New England? We agreed and
they did. They also asked for, and we provided, the names of experts
around the country in nutrition and food policy. Not one of those
experts was ever contacted by the President's Task Force."
          "The President's Task Force didn't even want to come to Chicago,"
recalls Cook County (IL) pediatrician D.T. Kistin. "They chose to have
their hearings in Rockford where it's very hard for the large majority
of people in our area who are hungry or who are active around these
issues to even get to. They made a point of limiting the number of
people that they would hear to very small numbers."
          "The Reagan Task Force" adds Dr. Brown, "ignored the evidence from
its own federal agencies--including the Department of
Agriculture--that show hunger to be a serious problem. They also
failed to collect data and failed to go into the homes of the
hungry."
          As its major recommendation, the report of the President's Task
Force proposed that states be allowed to drop out of the food stamp
and other federal food aid programs and instead receive block grants
to distribute as they saw fit. The proposed block grants, rejected by
Congress, disguised one of the Administration's steps to dismantle
what remains of a national committment against hunger. Block grants
would put an end to uniform eligibility and benefit standards and move
the struggle for food assistance out of Washington--where a weakened,
but still fiesty, welfare lobby is centered.
          In the South particularly, the poor have few friends in governors'
mansions and state legislatures.
          
            Senator No
          
          The very Southern politicians who could best serve their

constituents in need are often the most embittered and
uncharitable. In his tenure as chairman of the US Senate Committee on
Agriculture, North Carolina's Jesse Helms has proved a staunch foe of
poor and hungry people through his opposition to the WIC program
(which provides prescribed foods to pregnant and nursing women and
children under age five) and to the food stamp program. The Charlotte
Observer editorialized that for all his talk of protecting the lives
of the unborn, Helms has done little to support the lives of infants
after birth.
          The attention of Senator Helms fell upon Hunger Task Force director
Brown shortly after the doctor had testified before the Senate
Agriculture Committee in April of 1983. Brown told of malnutrition
studies he had conducted at Boston City Hospital which found
underweight babies and a "failure to thrive" at three times the
expected rate.
          Although Helms was absent during Dr. Brown's testimony, he soon
sent him a seven-page questionnaire.
          "The questions basically were designed to discredit the methodology
of the study," Brown recalls. "He challenged me on the school
breakfast and school lunch guidelines. He wanted to know how they were
set. I said they were set by the federal government."
          Helms' staff insisted that malnutrition was normal among the urban
poor in Boston. Brown suggested that there should be nothing normal
about infants failing to grow.
          
            States of Fear
          
          Throughout this summer and on into the fall, the Physician Task
Force on Hunger continued to visit Southern states and to collect
materials and testimony. Task Force members toured the lengths of
North Carolina and Tennessee before going on to Texas and the
Southwest. In October, the group released its uniformly grim
preliminary field reports.
          Poverty in Tennessee has risen from 16.5~o of the state's
population in 1980 to over twenty percent in 1984. Four-fifths of
Tennessee's poor consist of women, children and the elderly.
          Like Alabama and Mississippi, Tennessee provides no AFDC for
two-parent families who are unemployed. For those who do receive AFDC,
Tennessee has the lowest standard of need in the US--a family of four
must earn less than three-hundred dollars a month to be eligible (the
federal poverty level is $825). The state has no school breakfast
program. It has no relief program for jobless adults who are not
receiving unemployment compensation. Tennessee's state and local sales
tax can range as high as 81/2%.
          Southern state legislatures, searching for revenues for an array of
needs (most recently, public education) and yet lacking the
independence to tax business and the wealthy, have turned increasingly
to sales taxes. The results fall hardest on these states' most
politically powerless people. In Mississippi and Alabama (where the
sales tax rates are six and 6.7 percent respectively), as in
Tennessee, sales tax applies to food and to food stamps and represents
a regressive, direct tax on poor people.
          With the unemployment rate in east Tennessee and western North
Carolina running upwards of forty percent, the Task Force heard United
Methodist Minister Jim Sessions of Knoxville report that in the past
three years, Appalachia has lost one-and-a-half jobs for every one
gained. "There is no recovery here," observes Sessions.
          "With purchasing power down and poverty up," the Task Force writes
in its October field investigation summary of the Southern states, "it
seems unlikely that improvements in the economy which help the
better-off will have any impact on those who are not. Those who are
"recovering" were never hungry, and those who are hungry are not
recovering."
          In North Carolina, Dr. Brown and local representatives of the Task
Force tied hunger to the larger context of health and the Reagan
Administration's general persecution of the poor. Rev. Mac Legerton of
the Robeson County Clergy and Laity Concerned noted that county food
stamp recipients had little money left after paying monthly bills to
pay for medical needs. In mountainous Buncombe County, Task Force
member Dr. Agnes Lattimer saw broader problems: "There appears to be
considerable unmet need here . . . there is greater incidence of iron
deficiency and limited means of prenatal care."
          The percentage of North Carolina's total population living in
poverty rose by forty-two percent between 1981 and 1983, yet,
enrollment in the state's food stamp program during the same period
fell by more than a third. In addition, according to the University of
North Carolina's Nutrition Institute, while some 94,000 women, infants
and children are currently enrolled in the WIC supplemental food
program, at least 145,000 others have household incomes 

which make
them eligible. In North Carolina there are presently 415,000 poor
children.
          While acknowledging that "the desire for self-sufficiency Often
makes people reluctant to seek help," Dr. Brown and the Task Force are
quick to point to deliberate patterns of obfuscation and intimidation
being pursued by Reagan Administration welfare policy makers under the
guise of "greater efficiency" and the pursuit of "welfare cheaters."
New monthly reporting requirements mean that many families must have
their eligibility redetermined every month. This places extraordinary
burdens on the needy, creates more processing errors and leads to
eligible people being denied assistance. In one county, a sixty-four
year-old paralyzed man was dropped from food stamps because he failed
to come into the office for his recertification interview.
          "The focus of the federal government is now based on the premise
that hungry people are probably cheats," says Dr. Brown.
          In some locations, at the behest of federal officials, agents
reportedly are sent out to sell food stamps on the street. The buyers
are caught and the event is hailed as proof of widespread program
fraud--even though no food stamp recipient was involved as buyer or
seller.
          Charges linking the food stamp program with fraud and with criminal
prosecutions generate fear and embarrassment. Virginia Eldreth, food
stamp administrator in Buncombe County (NC) notes this effect: "An
elderly woman who had been hungry for weeks finally came in to apply
for stamps. She ,was trembling as she filled out the forms. I asked
her if she was all right. As it turned out, she was fearful she might
make an error and be thrown in jail for fraud."
          Task Force members found some North Carolina food stamp offices
decorated with posters announcing prosecution of persons incorrectly
filling out their long and complicated applications.
          As a food stamp administrator in Montgomery County, Alabama told
the Task Force this summer, "The name of the game at the federal level
is dollars and not people. We are under pressure about some elusive
thieves that we are not finding. We are wasting money on
administration that should be going to people."
          "Food stamp administrators," Dr. Brown adds, "have told us they
have had to divert workers from providing services and put them to
work setting up thirteen and fourteen-member fraud units that pore
over tremendous amounts of paper to see if people are getting overpaid
three or four dollars a month. To do this paperwork, they have closed
the food stamp outreach units which once tried to let hungry people
know about the program. A lot of people who are in need are being
missed."
          "There is a state of fear," says Rev. Kenneth Dean, a Task Force
member who once headed the Mississippi council On Human Relations,
"among the people running federal programs because audit reviews have
been used principally to harass the programs."
          "Over and over again," adds Dr. Naomi Kistin, "we heard from people
working on the food stamp program who said they had to spend all this
money being careful not to have too high of an error rate. Finally we
asked, "Is there any attention paid to the error rate in the other
direction? How many people should be on those programs who aren't? How
big is your waiting list? How many people could benefit from this
program if you could expand your services? Every place we went the
waiting list held from a third to a hundred percent of the population
being served."
          People who are persistent and lucky enough to get through the
application forms, verifying documents, and bureaucratic intimidation
are rewarded with an average food stamp benefit of forty-seven cents
per meal. In addition, 

they soon learn that the food stamps they
receive won't carry them through the month. "The problem is not that
people don't know how to spend their stamps," a Texas food stamp
administrator told the Task Force, "it's just that no one can live on
that amount." Most recipients run out of food stamps a week or more
before the month ends.
          "Nor," says Dr. Brown, "is there any way that the millions of tons
of food taken from hungry people through federal budget cutbacks over
the last four years can be made up by business, the for-profit sector
and the non-profit sector. Businesses are not set up to feed
people. And the churches and social service agencies can't do
enough. We need to immediately expand the food stamp program and
provide it with adequate resources to reach people who are needy."
          "Why should the richest country in the world, asks Helen Wright,
director of Urban Ministries in Raleigh--one of many North Carolina
church groups trying to feed the hungry--"put the eighteen percent of
the people in this state who live below the poverty line in the
position of begging for food?"
          By the time that the Physician Task Force on Hunger completed its
Texas visit this fall, the group had become convinced of the
pervasiveness of need everywhere they had travelled. In Houston,
emergency food demand in the city's soup kitchens has increased this
year by one-thousand percent over 1980. To the southesast of Houston,
in Pasadena, the Task Force considered the "irony of a middle-class
neighborhood with neatly kept lawns, where people don't have enough to
eat. We saw a lot of once-stable families now in shaky
circumstances."
          In Texas, New Mexico and the Southwest--as throughout the
South--the hunger problem is substantial, especially jeopardizing the
health of the most vulnerable population groups among the poor: the
elderly, pregnant women, infants and young children.

          
            Greed and the War Against the Poor
          
          At a time when many Americans have settled into a steady diet of
flag-eating, sword swallowing and credit card consumption, the notion
that we all must share responsibility for the extent of hunger and
poverty in our region, country and world does not go down
easy. Unwilling to acknowledge the reality of a political and economic
system which produces and is sustained by poverty and the fear of
poverty, the fortunate blame the poor for their own plight. The
apologists for greed--one thinks of the likes of William F. Buckley,
George Will, Clarence Pendleton--encourage our blindness to social
justice.
          Toward the last week of each month, when the food stamps run out
and the lines at the soup kitchesn grow longer, we begin to see the
shape of America's current hunger crisis. The immediate need--the one
being addressed by the Physician Task Force on Hunger--is genuinely
modest: to eliminate hunger and malnutrition in the US. Task Force
members believe this need could be satisfied within six months, and
for the total cost of one naval attack carrier. Given, however, the
prevailing American spirit, the Physician Task Force's aim appears
unattainable for years to come. Instead, we will see the Reaganites
attempt further cuts in assistance for the poor.
          Outside the necessary focus of the Task Force on Hunger stand the
implications of the draft of the recent Catholic bishops' letter on
the US economy judging the inequality of wealth within America and in
the world as "morally unacceptable." "The fulfillment of the basic
needs of the poor," write the bishops, "is of the highest
priority. Personal decisions, social policies and power relationships
must all be evaluated by their effects on those who lack the minimum
necessities of nutrition, housing, education and health care." The
bishops argue for redress within a reformed capitalist structure.
          That the bishops' advocacies--which would essentially shore-up
humanitarian features of the modern corporate welfare state--have
provoked outraged cries of "meddlers" and "liberal lobbyists" suggests
not only what may be in store for the Hunger Task Force, but just how
far our present slide into laissez faire social Darwinism has carried
us. Yet, there may be no better time than now, with liberalism in
disarray, to reckon and sound the fundamental injustices of the white,
men's club that holds capitalism as its sacred faith. There may be no
better time than now to put forward alternative futures to the
corporate world vision. Discussions of a caring society, of economic
democracy, of our bondage to militarism, of persisting racism, of the
reasons that women-headed households make up the largest poverty
group--all these discussions should simmer with the soup kitchens this
winter, and in the coming months.
          
            Guide to Published Sources
          
          Kenneth A. Briggs. "Catholic Bishops Ask Vast Changes in Economy of
U.S. New York Times, November 12,1984. Also in same
issue, "Excerpts From Draft of Bishops' Letter on the
U.S. Economy."
          Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. End Results: The
Impact of Federal Policies Since 1980 on Low Income
Americans. Washington. September, 1984. The Comined
Effects of Major Changes in Federal Taxes and Spending Programs Since
1981. Washington. October 1984.
          Citizens' Commission on Hunger in New England. American
Hunger Crisis. Boston. 1984.
          Congressional Budget Office. The Combined Effects of Major
Changes in federal Taxes and Spending Programs Since
1981. Washington. April, 1984.
          Steve Curwood. "Through the Safety Net. Boston
Globe, April 15, 1984.
          Barbara Mahany. "Hunger in America" series. Chicago
Tribune, Summer/Fall 1984.
          Joan Oleck. "Doctors find evidence of malnutrition among some
children in Eastern N.C." Raleigh News and Observer,
June 8, 1984.
          John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill. The Reagan Record: An
Assessment of America's Changing Domestic
Priorities. Washinton: The Urban Institute. August, 1984.
          Physician Task Force on Hunger in America. Preliminary Field
Investigation Summaries: "Hunger in Tennessee and North
Carolina"; "Hunger in Mississippi and Alabama"; "Hunger in New Mexico
and Texas"; "Hunger in Illinois and Missouri." Boston. October,
1984.
          Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. The New Class
War. New York: Pantheon. 1982.
          U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Money
Income and Poverty Status of Families and Persons in the United
States: 1983. Washington. August, 1984.
        