Don’t tell Veronica Maz who’s hungry in America. She runs McKenna’s Wagon, a Good Humor ice cream truck turned Good Samaritan. She sets up shop in it in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, and serves free sandwiches to Washington’s street people, who loll on park benches 150 yards from the Oval Office.

No longer does Maz serve only the skid-row alcoholics she saw when she started feeding the hungry 15 years ago. Today, she judges that about half of her customers are mentally ill, people who have been allowed to “re-enter” society by the institutions that used to care for them. There is another stripe that shows up today, not at the mobile wagon, but at Maz’s soup kitchen, called Martha’s Table. This is a better class of poor, if you will—people who seem more motivated and employable; people who seem only temporarily without work; people whose food stamps have ended before the month has.

There are many people like Veronica Maz, and the lines at their kitchens have grown over the winter. That is why it seemed to be particularly insensitive for presidential assistant (now attorney general) Edwin Meese to say, as he did recently, that maybe these people aren’t all that hungry, and that despite all the stories about bread lines, no one really knows how many truly hungry people there are in America.

The fact is, nobody really knows how many truly hungry people there are in the U.S. The General Accounting Office, the nonpartisan investigative agency of Congress, has concluded that “an official national hunger count does not exist. No one knows precisely how many Americans are going hungry or how many are malnourished.” The last nutrition survey aimed at the poor is now six years old, and the next one will not begin until 1985.

How To Know Who Is Hungry

Nutrition monitoring is the main method of determining whether people have enough to eat, and this is done by a variety of federal offices within the Departments of Agriculture (USDA), and Health and Human Services (HHS). Efforts to coordinate these surveys into a comprehensive National Nutrition Monitoring System have been on the drawing boards since 1978 and were approved by Congress in 1981, but they have made little discernable progress since then.

The delay has been caused by personnel turnovers, confusion over who is in charge, and, in the words of Republican Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, “sheer neglect.” Even if the monitoring system worked, it would not answer key questions about the condition of poor Americans. Bob Reese, chief of USDA’s Food Consumption Research Branch, said that “national surveys are not efficient tools for conducting studies of situations that are infrequent or narrowly bounded in terms of segments of the population.”

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That is why a new survey is supposed get under way next year. But even before that horse is out of the gate it is already hobbling on three legs. The funds for the project have been cut in half, to just $1 million. That means USDA will be able to survey only one population group—women between 20 and 50 and their young children—using a very small sample of 1,200 respondents. The USDA’s Robert Rizek says that if the survey were properly financed, other high-risk groups could have been included, such as the elderly, food stamp recipients, and people with below-poverty incomes.

President Reagan has long been saying that his cuts in the federal food assistance budget have not disturbed the “safety net” of federal help for those who are truly in need. But other cuts, such as the deep slash in the money for the nutrition survey, are rendering it impossible to tell whether any people are slipping through that safety net. “If budget cuts aren’t hurting [the needy], reliable statistics would show it,” says William Hoagland, a former Reagan appointee now with the Senate Budget Committee.

So although Meese may be correct when he says no one really knows if hunger is a significant problem in the United States, Reagan must bear responsibility for stemming the flow of information and implying that some in bread lines may not be hungry.

Hunger Versus Poverty

It is a whole lot easier to tell who is poor than who is really hungry. There is an official definition of poverty. It is based on whether a family is able to purchase enough food with about one-third of its income. In 1982 the poverty level for a family of four was $9,862. Since 1969 that level has been tied to the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index. Controversy over just how to define income (Should food stamps be included? Medicaid? Housing assistance?) and the basic issues of whether something like “poverty” should be defined monetarily have kept people of differing philosophies from working together.

A “relative” view of poverty—that is, a person is poor if he has a whole lot less than most people—characterized the Carter administration. Reducing poverty using this definition usually entails redistribution of income as a solution. This approach not only characterized the Carter White House, but it is still part of the Democratic party’s program. It envisions a day when the war on poverty actually could be won.

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Reagan, however, leans to the simpler, “absolute” definition of poverty. Reagan expects the number of poor to decrease as the economy rebounds, but he does not anticipate an end to poverty altogether.

Poverty was first measured by the government in 1959, when 22 percent of the population fell below the official poverty level. The Great Society programs of the Johnson White House caused the number of poor to decrease steadily until 1970. For a decade it remained stable at between 11 and 12.5 percent. In 1979 the rate began increasing again, reaching 15 percent in 1982.

A report by the House Ways and Means Committee found that a rather large portion of the population—nearly one-fourth of all citizens—is poverty stricken at some point in life, but that it is usually temporary. Long-term poverty is much less common. The poor are disproportionately black, female heads of households, and elderly people.

Reagan formed his understanding of poverty when he was governor of California. He believed there should be rigid standards of eligibility for welfare, that programs should be run by state or local government agencies instead of the federal government, and that recipients should have to work if they can.

All of Reagan’s goals became law in California. And when that happened, the number of people on welfare dropped, many former welfare recipients re-entered the work force, and benefits to the needy actually increased.

In 1972, Reagan testified before a congressional committee in Washington to draw attention to the success of the California program. A number of California state officials moved to Washington as a result, and, according to Edward D. Berkowitz of George Washington University, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now HHS) became a battleground between those trying to institute the California ideas and those defending the status quo.

When Reagan was elected president in 1980, his commitment to the California approach was firmly fixed. However, ideas about “workfare” and local control of welfare programs—“new federalism” as it was called—encountered severe opposition on Capitol Hill. In January 1982, Reagan called for the federal government to withdraw from the largest welfare program, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, as well as from food stamps, leaving those initiatives up to the individual states. In response, there was criticism over how the new approach would work, the vast institutional changes it would require, and worry about possible unfairness to the poor as laws changed from state to state. There was so much resistance that the proposal never materialized in Congress. It faded completely from public view until this January, when Reagan’s Task Force on Food Assistance completed its work.

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The Task Force Controversy

Last year, Reagan appointed a blue-ribbon committee to investigate the extent of hunger in America and to answer in particular the perplexing question of why people still seem to be hungry in the face of massive government efforts to feed them. Its work came under biting attack from Democrats and food advocacy groups who felt the task force was stacked with people too prone to see only Reagan’s views on hunger and poverty. Robert Greenstein, an effective spokesman for the outsiders, pointed out that the only members of the task force with any academic, research, or administrative background in federal food programs were those who had worked in the White House with the specific assignment of cutting the programs. Greenstein is the director of a nonprofit research center on federal budget policy. During the Carter administration he was administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service in the USDA.

The political climate surrounding the work of the task force grew so sour that, as it debated and approved its final report during a public meeting in a Labor Department auditorium, the atmosphere was that of a three-ring circus. Members of several advocacy groups roamed the aisles, distributing press releases and analyses of the draft report. During coffee breaks they held court for the television cameras, refuting task force findings and proffering studies of their own about the problem. Greenstein infuriated the task force chairman, J. Clayburn LaForce, by passing notes to a task force member who was raising questions about the report’s conclusions during the final session.

Later, at joint congressional hearings on the report, most of the critics turned down the volume on their objections and agreed to support many of the task force recommendations. Curiously, the White House has been silent about what the task force had to say, leading some policy experts to conjecture that the recommendations go well beyond what Reagan expected from these like-minded appointees.

The final report of the task force maintains an uneasy tension between endorsing federal hunger programs and recognizing their shortcomings. “Although social programs relieve the symptoms of poverty,” the report said, “we have come to see how these same programs also help to perpetuate the very poverty they were created to relieve.”

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Its conclusions are tentative: “Since general claims of widespread hunger can neither be positively refuted nor definitely proved, it is likely that hunger will remain as an issue on our national policy agenda for an indefinite future.” The task force made recommendations on four issues. They break little new ground, but they have at least reinvigorated the desire in Congress for government to be more responsive to whatever hunger does exist. Legislation has been introduced in Congress to convert all four of these proposals into law. The recommendations are these:

• Giving states the option of running their own food-assistance programs, financed by federal “block grants.” This has been rejected before by Congress on grounds that states would not be as uniform in benefits as is the federal government. Bureaucrats in the federal “hunger establishment” of the poverty agencies also object to losing control.

• Increasing food stamp benefits allotments by 1 percent. The report also urges government to raise the amount of assets a family may own and still qualify, and says food stamp recipients should not be required to have fixed addresses. The report also asks that the disabled and the elderly receive cash instead of stamps to help relieve the social stigma attached to food stamps.

• Encouraging the private sector to help out by having the IRS clarify rules under which corporations can gain greater tax deductions for donations of food, as well as allowing military commissaries to give away food.

• Better monitoring of who is going hungry and why, and a more generous definition of the official poverty level.

Other Voices

The federal task force and the federal government generally are not the only centers of information on the state of hunger in the United States. A variety of other organizations also exists to cope with the problem. These organizations often disagree with the White House about the scope of hunger, particularly when they perceive that the President and his staff are skeptical about its extent. Here is a summary of what some of these groups have been saying:

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit research organization in Washington run by Greenstein, surveyed 181 privately run food assistance programs nationwide. More than half reported 50 percent more people requesting help in February 1983 than a year earlier.

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Clinical tests conducted by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found 9.8 percent of children in low-income families suffering from chronic malnutrition—more than twice the number that was expected, based on national norms.

Agnes Lattimer, a pediatrician at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, testified before a congressional subcommittee about a study of inner-city children entering the hospital’s emergency room. From 1981 to 1983, she said, admissions of children with symptoms of malnutrition, such as “failure to thrive,” diarrhea, and dehydration, increased 24 percent. Nearly half the children in a designated “high-risk” group were found to have poor diets, beginning with infants younger than six months who were receiving inadequate amounts of formula.

Thomas Brush, mayor of Cincinnati and a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Task Force on Joblessness and Hunger, described the squeeze his city is facing: The food stamp case load increased by 10 percent to 36,964 households last year; clients served by private food pantries and soup kitchens have doubled in number, and 78.3 percent of them are unemployed; the city has donated $125,000 in general funds to keep the private efforts afloat.

Local chapters of Bread for the World conducted “Hunger Watch U.S.A.” to document how low-income people are faring. They conclude that hunger is on the increase.

Many of these nongovernmental hunger groups tend to see hunger in economic terms—if someone is poor or hungry, the government ought to give him money for food. One of the task force members is John Perkins, a black evangelical who founded the Voice of Calvary Ministries, an outreach to poor blacks in Mississippi. He takes a different tack on the question. He says that merely looking at one’s purchasing power is not enough. “I come from a justice perspective,” he says. “Does welfare provide justice? We have to ask the victims. I see our people being destroyed, because welfare is not adequate. Folks have been dehumanized by it.” Breaking poverty cycles that trap whole families and neighborhoods requires “creatively involving the poor in the distribution process,” he says, by giving them control over their surroundings.

In his book, With Justice for All, Perkins describes an inner-city Philadelphia family he observed: “The welfare system encouraged them to have more kids, to live together without getting married [broken homes qualify for more aid], and to lie to qualify for more food stamps. It gave them no incentive at all to get out of their situation.… Designed to assist when there was no father, the welfare system stepped in and replaced the father.”

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The government’s occupation with questions of quantity—how many people are hungry, how much spending is enough, what is the extent of fraud and waste—belie, to critics, an absence of concern about a more basic question: What quality of care do poor people need, and how will they get it? Reagan’s full-steam-ahead approach to cutting the federal food assistance budget without making sure there is a usable safety net under the truly needy and his appointment of what has been generally regarded as a politically partisan task force make many of his critics more strident.

But they may find the task force report more helpful than they first imagined. It has finally fixed attention on hunger as a national issue, and it has generated congressional legislation in all four of its areas of recommendation. That alone is an encouraging sign of determination on all sides to address finally the question of hunger in America.

BETH SPRING

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