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When Americans think about hunger, we usually think in terms of mass-starvation in far-away countries, but hunger too often lurks in our backyards. In 2006, 35.1million people, including 12.4million children in the United States did not have access to enough food for an active healthy life. Some of these individuals relied on emergency food sources and some experienced hunger.
Although most people think of hungry people and homeless people as the same, the problem of hunger reaches far beyond homelessness. While the number of people being hungry or at the risk of hunger may be surprising, it is the faces of those hungry individuals that would probably most shock you. The face of hunger is the older couple who has worked hard for their entire lives, only to find their savings wiped out by unavoidable medical bills, or a single mother who has to choose whether the salary from her minimum wage job will go to buy food or pay rent, or a child who struggles to concentrate on his schoolwork because his family couldn’t afford dinner the night before.
At December 2006 survey estimated that 48 percent of those requesting emergency food assistance, were either children or their parents. Children are twice as likely to live in households where someone experiences hunger and food insecurity than adults. One in ten adults compared to one in five children live in households where someone suffers from hunger and some food insecurity. Child poverty is more wide spread in the United States than in any other industrialized country. At the same time, the US government spends less than any industrialized country to pull its children out of poverty. We have long known that the minds and bodies of small children need adequate food to develop properly. But science is just beginning to understand the full extent of this relationship. As late as the 1980s, conventional wisdom held that only the most severe forms of malnutrition actually alter brain development. The latest empirical evidence however shows that even relatively mild under-nutrition produces cognitive impairments in children which can last a life time.
