Feeding Our Children

Children are hungry in Ohio.

Not in Africa. Not in South America. Not in some out of the way pocket of the world where I will never ever travel in my life. But right here in Ohio.

Feeding America, a hunger-relief charity that has established a nationwide network of food banks, including the Mid-Ohio Food Bank in central Ohio, just released a report, "Child Food Insecurity in the United States: 2005-2007." "Food insecurity" is defined as "what we consider hunger or risk of hunger."

For children under the age of 5, Ohio ranks third in the county for the most children who are food insecure. 23.8% of the children here, or almost a quarter of our very young, fall into the "insecure" column.

When I read the results of this report, I felt like I did in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the federal government stood by idly while people went hungry and thirsty and without shelter. I am embarrassed that we are so high on the list. (We're not much better on the overall list (youth 0-18); Ohio is 16th.)

It's not that I wish the hunger were elsewhere in this country so that Ohio would have a more "respectable" ranking. I don't want the hunger elsewhere; I want it gone. Learning that we almost lead the nation though in the under 5 category brings the issue into my hometown and right to my doorstep.

Nationally, 1 in 8 Americans are hungry or at risk to be without food on a regular basis. In Ohio, that rate rises to almost 1 in 4 for out our youngest and most vulnerable citizens.

Locally, we have an agency that works to help keep hunger at bay. People in Need (P.I.N.) runs our county's emergency food pantry. Last week, P.I.N. just launched a capital campaign so it could move into new, larger quarters that would expand its food bank capacity.

Some may question a capital campaign in the middle of the Great Recession. But it is exactly for that reason that P.I.N. needs to expand.

Presently, a family seeking emergency food help can only visit the P.I.N. food pantry 5 times a year. You read that right. 5 times a year. That is because the present headquarters, an old residence, lacks the storage space or loading areas for a larger food pantry. Because of these limitations, P.I.N. is limited in what it can purchase from Mid-Ohio Food Bank. The new facilities will allow P.I.N. to enlarge its capacity and serve more people more frequently. A family will be able to visit 12 times a year, or once a month, in the new facilities.

Hunger is very much on my mind because of my husband. Warren is the executive director of the Central Ohio Symphony, our local symphony. A little less than a month ago, the Symphony put on a benefit concert for P.I.N. as part of the "Orchestras Feeding America" campaign by the League of American Orchestras. I wrote about that concert in my April 20 post, "Last Night We Fed Ourselves." I didn't know it at the time I blogged, but the amount raised locally, 2160 pounds of food and other items, appears to have set a national record for the most food donated at a single concert as part of the national campaign, beating out larger symphonies in bigger cities. That night will long stand as a shining example of our community coming together to take care of its own. What the new report on childhood hunger reminds us is that we need to continue to come together to take care of our own.

We have all heard that it takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to feed a child as well. In these difficult economic times, they are all our children.