Going to bed hungry

Posted Sep 22, 2009 by Donna Koehn

Updated Sep 22, 2009 at 11:40 AM

My daughter used to play with a sweet little girl who stealthily ate food out of our kitchen cabinets. I didn’t mind, but I asked her grandmother what was going on.

She and her husband had taken in the four siblings after a chaotic home life in which the kids ended up at a homeless shelter one Thanksgiving. The grandparents saw them on a TV news story and rescued them.

She said all of the children had issues with food, seemingly because they had spent so much of their childhood hungry. One child would sneak into the refrigerator and stuff himself with a whole package of cold hot dogs, even if he’d already eaten. All of them stole candy and other food from convenience stores, and were terrified of “the cops.”  Their kind and generous grandmother assumed the parents had encouraged it to keep their children from starving. Snacks at the grandparents’ house were available in a big bowl in the kitchen, but the children had trouble curbing their instincts. If food was available, they gorged.

I thought about them as I read a study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, published this month. The good news is that about 84 percent of American households have enough food to keep their families healthy. Of those who don’t, most times it is the parents who sacrifice their own food intake to provide for their children.

But in more than 300,000 families, children either skipped meals or didn’t eat all day simply because their family didn’t have the money to buy food.

It may surprise some to learn that 85 percent of the “food insecure” households had at least one working adult, most full time. Kind of dispels the preconception of a welfare mother neglecting her kids.

Fewer than half of the families without enough food included an adult who graduated high school. The conclusion of the study is that job opportunities and wage rates for less educated workers are important factors in whether a child goes without eating. How heartbreaking to be a mother or father working full time at a minimum wage job, only to send a kid to bed without dinner.