Hungry Children in Rich America (Common Dreams)
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Sarah is three years old. She and her six-year-old brother, Bryce, are inseparable except when it’s time for him to visit the summer food program that provides meals at a school near his Ohio home for children who otherwise would go hungry. Sarah’s too young to make the trip. One morning after Bryce had his fill of food for the day he made a detour before heading home. He walked to the trash cans and began rummaging through food others threw away. Winnie Brewer, the Food Services Supervisor in Marion City Schools, noticed the little boy and tapped him on the shoulder to ask why he was sifting through the garbage. “My little sister,” he explained. “She’s hungry.” Bringing her leftover food was the only way he knew to help.
“We run into a lot of situations where kids will come and say they have younger siblings at home,” Brewer says. “They always want to know if they can take something back.” After Brewer spoke with Bryce, staff members followed him home with a care package for little Sarah. This was a temporary solution to a huge problem Brewer worries about every day. “Until we see that child digging food out of a trash can, it doesn’t hit home,” Brewer says. “Once it does, you know you have to do something.”
Nearly 220,000 Ohio children under six are poor and young children of color are more likely to be poor. More than half (55.5 percent) of Black children, 40.3 percent of Hispanic, and 19.1 percent of White children under six in Ohio are poor; 21 percent of them live in families where at least one parent works full-time year-round; 47 percent have at least one parent working part of the year or part-time; and 32 percent have no employed parent. Nearly one in four Ohio children lacks consistent access to adequate food—that’s 653,410 Ohio children of all ages in every corner of the state. Nationally, 15.3 million children were food insecure in 2014. The majority live in families with one or more working adults—but are still unable to consistently afford enough food to keep the wolves of hunger from their door.
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Food insecure children are more likely to be behind in social skills and reading performance in kindergarten. By elementary school they are four times more likely to need mental health counseling. Risks keep accumulating: malnutrition from childhood food insecurity has been linked to adult diseases including diabetes, hyperlipidemia and cardiovascular disease. The stress and anxiety of early childhood hunger also make it harder to learn skills that help later relationship development, school success and workplace productivity.
cont'd...
Link: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/31/hungry-children-rich-america
Not just the U.S.:
Hunger in Canada
= new reply since forum marked as read
while some things have improved...the story above proves much is still the same.. very very sad.... 
A book about the invisible nature of poverty in the United States..in the 60s and now..
(my note: by "invisible" Harrington meant that it was hard to see because the poor do not wear a sign. Their clothes and manner are of the middle class. We don't know they have no food, or live in a car or totally unsuitable places to live ..here in the U.S)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_America
published in 1962 by Macmillan
A widely read review, "Our Invisible Poor," in The New Yorker by Dwight Macdonald brought the book to the attention of President John F. Kennedy. The Other America argued that up to 25% of the nation was living in poverty. Many (such as historian Maurice Isserman[1]) believe that this book is responsible for President Lyndon B. Johnson's "War on Poverty." The Penguin Books paperback editions have sold over one million copies.[1] The Boston Globe editorialized that Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps and expanded social security benefits were traceable to Harrington’s ideas. With the book's acceptance, many believe Harrington became the pre-eminent spokesman for democratic socialism in America. By 1980, Harrington considered a run for President himself, though he threw his support to Democratic candidates instead. [1]
