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Food for Thought

Are you smarter than a first-grader? A six-year-old shows the rest of us how to help the hungry.

Abby Stark’s backpack comes home from school stuffed with homework and register tapes. The Peace Dale Elementary School first-grader has been collecting Shaw’s grocery receipts for about a year to support the Johnny Cake Center’s food pantry. So far, she’s raised $2,000 from the grocery retailer, which returns one percent of each receipt to qualified non-profits under its Receipt Rewards program.

Abby’s one-girl hunger campaign began as a conversation with her mom, Missy. It was time for Abby to think about how she would give back to the community, Missy said. Abby prayed for an answer and it arrived the next day—a newspaper announcement for a community conversation about hunger. The Starks attended the meeting and Abby found her cause.

“I was really surprised to find out that people were hungry. I thought everyone had a lot of food to eat. And I really like to eat,” says Abby, who, at six, possesses a middle child’s finely wrought sense of injustice. “So that wouldn’t really be fair if people couldn’t eat as much as me.”

The Rhode Island Community Food Bank’s 2007 annual report documents the upward creep of this particular inequity.

Officially, the gnaw in the belly is characterized as “food inse-curity,” meaning families skip meals, eat less or just run out of food before the next paycheck. From 2004 to 2006, 11.3 percent of Rhode Island households were food insecure, of which 3.7 percent reported very low food insecurity. From 1996 to 1998, 10.2 percent of the state’s households reported food insecurity.

The more recent impacts of rising fuel and food prices on hunger have not yet been tabulated, but Elizabeth O'Dea, director of the Poverello Center, which runs the St. Francis food pantry, says it is certainly driving up the need. The number of elderly they serve has risen fourfold, the number of adults doubled and children under eighteen are up by a third.

“I’ve also seen the change in the people who come in. Six years ago, people were overtly suffering with issues,” she says.

“I saw a lot of the extremes. Now I see a lot more middle-class people. With the price of groceries, gas and lack of health insurance, they’ll just make do with food.”

At the same time, more expensive fuel and food tax the Rhode Island Community Food Bank’s ability to supply the state’s 150 emergency food pantries.

“First, supermarkets are much more efficient. There isn’t the waste and the surplus that used to come to food banks,” says Andrew Schiff, the food bank’s executive director. “Second, donated food available through America’s Second Harvest—we have to pay to ship it. It isn’t free. That’s why the fundraising is so important, to pay the freight. Last year, we brought in nine million pounds. The demand for food assistance is up, donations are less and our costs are going up. That’s a nasty combination.”

The federal food stamp program has never commanded the high profile of the state’s food pantries, but government nutrition programs potentially have ten times the reach. Rhode Island, however, has badly lagged behind the national average. Only 56 percent of eligible Rhode Islanders—about 73,000 individuals—were enrolled in the food stamp program in 2005, making the state forty-fourth in participation, according to the latest government figures. It is a complicated program with lengthy, confusing forms and requires trained workers to shepherd applicants through the process.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture demands that states run their programs with integrity—meaning states face stiff penalties if they take too long to process applications or make overpayments or underpayments to recipients.

Three years ago, Rhode Island was fined $300,000 for having a high error rate (the state was not required to pay the penalty because it showed improvement the following year). Last year, the state received an $800,000 “most improved” award from the USDA. The Department of Human Services has also tried to boost participation by launching an online application and by hiring the University of Rhode Island’s Feinstein Center for a Hunger Free America to market the program. Current enrollment is up significantly, by 18 percent, says Robert McDonough, the Department of Human Services’ administrator of Family and Adult Services.

Still, things could be better. Several months ago, the USDA gave Rhode Island permission to offer a combined social security and food stamp application to sign up more elderly—a needy group notoriously resistant to government assistance.

But it’s been slow to roll out. And the department’s food stamp specialists carry heavy caseloads—some with 900 cases, more than twice the amount considered manageable.

The prospect of hiring more workers is distant, at best.

“We are trying to serve the public and we’re doing it with integrity,” McDonough says.

“But I think we’re in a stage where we have to look at different ways of doing things. We’ll be as innovative as we can to get the job done.”

Hunger advocates hope that the state figures it out soon, because frankly, they can’t handle much more.

“This has been going on since Ronald Reagan,” says John Barry, secretary of social ministry for the Diocese of Providence. “A lot of churches opened up food pantries and we thought back then that it was going to be a short-term thing. But we haven’t been asked to stop. And I think they are getting pretty maxed out. The smaller ones are cleaned out in one day. And since December, they’ve been calling us from all over the state to see when the next batch of emergency food money is coming because there has been such a run on them this winter.”

Beyond the moral imperatives a six-year-old can easily understand, there are practical reasons to feed people that policymakers faced with a yawning deficit and stagnant state economy ought to grasp.

“A lot of states have recognized that getting eligible people onto food stamps is a very smart strategy for economic stimulus,” says Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center.

“The benefits are 100 percent federally paid and the administrative costs are pretty moderate. Each dollar of food stamps produces nearly two dollars of economic activity. In downturns, it’s even smarter to support a growing population of struggling people. It should turn the states toward thinking about the program in a way that recognizes the real opportunity it pro-vides to improve the lives of everybody in the state.”

And long-term, the costs of denying vulnerable populations access to enough nutritious food are high—in health care and education expenditures. Dr. Deborah Frank, a researcher and pediatrician who runs Tufts Medical Center’s Grow Clinic, extols food as “a miracle drug.”

“Hunger is a health problem. Malnutrition impairs the body’s ability to fight infection. Underfed kids get sick more often, more severely and have to be hospitalized more often,” she says.

“Hunger is also an early childhood learn-ing problem. If you want your kids to get to kindergarten ready to learn, you have to feed them while they are in diapers, and no amount of high-stakes testing will change that.”

And yet, says Kathleen Gorman, director of the Feinstein hunger center, no state legislator in the leadership has stepped forward to become a champion of food assistance. And advocates worry that DHS could lose ground if budget cuts prevent the department from trimming food stamp caseloads or trying other ways to boost the rolls.

In the meantime, they have Abby Stark, who says she is prepared to collect grocery receipts for a long time.

“Maybe I’ll do it ’til I’m dead,” she says, eyes widening.

Her older brother, John, interrupts to help himself to a glass of chocolate milk and assure his sister that this won’t be necessary.

“Abby, in the future people will be much richer,” he says.

Abby takes comfort in this thought.

“People will be richer,” she declares.

Maybe. But not immediately likely. So, if you shop at Shaw’s, don’t forget to save your receipt for Abby Stark.