FOOD AND HUNGER

Feeding the hungry has been perhaps my most enduring and compelling passion.

My introduction to hunger—not the physical pangs you feel when you skip a meal but deep-down undernourishment—came when I was a child during the Great Depression. Young men who rode the rails looking for work sometimes jumped off the train just before the Mitchell, South Dakota, depot and knocked on our door, asking to trade chores for food. If these “hoboes”—often college dropouts who could no longer pay their tuition—arrived even close to mealtime, Dad wouldn’t just hand them a sandwich, he’d invite them to come sit at the table with us. They ate ravenously, as though chewing were an inconvenience that slowed down the delivery process to their stomach.

A few years later, during World War II, I was leaning against the railing of my U.S. troopship as we entered the harbor in Naples, Italy, when I saw that the docks were lined with children. They were calling out “Hey, Joe” and clamoring for us to toss them candy. To me, flinging out a couple of Baby Ruth bars seemed harmless, but the captain broke in over the loudspeaker ordering us not to throw anything. A few days earlier, he said, soldiers on another military ship had done that and, as they scrambled for the treats, some of the children, near starvation, had fallen off the dock and drowned.

The desperation of that scene stayed with me for a long time. I made a promise to myself that if I ever got a chance to do something about hunger, I would. And sixteen years later the United States government gave me the opportunity.

In 1960, I was a congressman making a run for the U.S. Senate when Jack Kennedy came to South Dakota to campaign for president. Earlier that day he had spoken at a national corn-picking contest in Sioux Falls before tens of thousands of midwestern farmers. He really laid an egg. He didn’t know much about agriculture, and someone had written him an uninspired speech. He knew it wasn’t good. It was raining. The wind was blowing. He was trying to hold on to his notes. Nixon had spoken to the same audience the day before and had roused them up.

My hometown, Mitchell, was the next stop for Kennedy. When we got on his plane, he said to me, “George, what the hell am I going to do? I’ve been told there are six thousand people waiting at the Corn Palace.”

I said, “What I would do, Jack, is throw away the speech and walk out onstage without any notes. Just say, ‘I think the farmers can do more for the cause of peace in the world than any other group of Americans, because food is strength, food is health, food is goodwill in a hungry world. If I’m elected president, I’m going to take the Food for Peace program, name a full-time man to head it, and put him in the White House, where he’ll be close to me.’”

Food for Peace was created during the Eisenhower administration to distribute surplus wheat, corn, and other U.S. farm staples to a billion people in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and to foster new markets for our agricultural products. It was originally known as Public Law 480, or simply as “surplus disposal,” and when I was elected to the House of Representatives in 1956, Senator Hubert Humphrey and I worked hard to give it a new name with some humanitarian oomph.

Kennedy’s speech only lasted about four minutes, but he got a thunderous ovation. He wound up losing South Dakota (though I’m pretty sure he carried those 6,000 people in the Corn Palace) and I lost my Senate campaign. On the Friday after Election Day, Eleanor and I were at dinner at a neighbor’s house in Mitchell. The phone rang, and I’ll be darned if it wasn’t Jack Kennedy. He said, “George, before you make any plans, come see me.” On day number three of his thousand-day presidency, he put me in charge of Food for Peace. And with his strong backing, the program moved ahead with new energy.

Republicans have typically supported Food for Peace because it benefits farm states. Now under the State Department’s USAID umbrella, it not only distributes food from every state in our nation to hungry people around the world but also uses American know-how to teach farmers improved planting and harvesting techniques and distributes free school lunches. To commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, a glossy booklet featured a quotation from then president George W. Bush, saying, “Across the earth, America is feeding the hungry. More than 60 percent of international food aid comes as a gift of the people of the United States . . .”

But as I write, I’m not sure how much of the program will survive the House Republicans’ current budget-cutting extravaganza. And it’s certainly not the only food or nutrition program they seem to want to take the guts out of.

Food and hunger are not partisan issues. They are human issues. Eating is neither an add-on nor a luxury. It is, rather, one of the few basic needs we share, whether we’re talking about Barack Obama or George W. Bush; a Japanese fisherman or a Somali herder; someone who lives in a Dallas mansion or someone who has no home at all. And historically Republicans and Democrats have been able to find broad agreement around food. (The real difference between the two parties in this regard, as fellow Democrat James Carville once maintained, is that Republicans serve better food at barbecues.)

The Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, which I established and chaired, was a case study in bipartisanship. In 1968, I was watching a CBS News special report called Hunger in America  with my wife, Eleanor, and two of our daughters.  It showed students who could not afford to buy lunch as they stood around the edges of the cafeteria, watching their classmates eat. I couldn’t believe that I was on the Senate Agriculture Committee and had no idea that children who didn’t have the money couldn’t get a free lunch. So I went to the Senate floor the next day and made a motion to create the select committee.

Bob Dole, a fellow World War II vet and Midwesterner, was my committee’s ranking Republican. We were often on opposite sides of the political debate, especially in 1972, when I ran for president and he headed the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon. But we found common ground in food. We worked together not only to provide free or reduced-price lunches and breakfasts to poor children in this country but also to reform the Food Stamp Program. Hubert Humphrey joined us to cosponsor legislation establishing the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program, which offers food, infant formula, and health care to poor mothers and their children. (Although WIC received a $504 million cut in the 2011 budget, House Republicans, dissatisfied with their first effort, set their sights on cutting $650 million more for 2012. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this means that up to 350,000 more eligible women and children would lose access to the program’s offerings.)

After we left the Senate, Bob and I continued to work together. In 2002 we pushed Congress to pass legislation that established a permanent international program to feed schoolchildren called the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program. We shared the World Food Prize in 2008.

Sure, the GOP has had some ridiculous food fights. In 1981, Ronald Reagan’s administration tried, unsuccessfully, to reclassify ketchup and pickle relish from condiments to vegetables to save $1 billion in the subsidized lunch program—the one that Bob Dole and I had started.

I’m not going to spend time explaining why we need to worry about hunger and other food-related problems. But let me say this: whether the Republicans are with us or against us on this, allowing anyone to go hungry—either your next-door neighbor or someone who lives on the other side of the globe—is simply not a Democratic option.

And there is work to be done right now. In 2008, when the latest numbers were available, 44 million Americans were “food insecure,” meaning they often lack the money to buy enough food, according to the World Hunger Education Service. Similarly, in 2011, some 44 million Americans depended on food stamps each month, a 10 percent jump from 2010. In twenty-seven states, one of every seven people uses food stamps.

Internationally, a 2010 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations shows that worldwide, 925 million people—almost a billion!—are hungry, most of them in developing countries. Three and a half million children die every year from undernourishment. The global economic crisis and rising food prices have only made matters worse. And drought has left seven million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia severely malnourished.

I’ve seen this type of wrenching hunger many times. My first mission during the year and a half I headed Food for Peace was in a village in northeastern Brazil. I went with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., JFK’s special assistant, and a Brazilian economist named Celso Furtado. We walked into one hut where an emaciated woman, who probably didn’t weigh more than sixty pounds, sat on the mud floor, cradling a baby in her lap. Another of her children had died the day before. She was blank with grief. Furtado asked: How could a wealthy nation like ours not share some of our bounty with this starving mother?

Hunger is inexcusable, especially because it is curable, and the United States can make a major difference while simultaneously helping to sustain our farmers. But there’s also a push by the U.S. government and organizations like former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa to help farmers overseas gain access to better seeds and soil to improve their crop production, an effective way to reduce poverty and hunger and increase economic growth.

We may not be able to deliver good medical care to the world’s population (although the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is trying to do that, along with their international work to help farmers). But with a reasonable effort we can eliminate hunger. We have a surplus of food to feed everyone, computers to track food production and movement, machines to pick the harvest, and faster, more efficient transportation. We have better seeds and methods of growing them.

And all these years later, I still believe that food aid advances peace. Take any family with little kids: if lunch or dinner is delayed too long, they start scrapping with each other. It puts them on edge.

It’s exactly the same on an international scale. An undernourished populace can never be stable, self-confident, or creative. You’re more likely to get severe tensions and conflict in a society that doesn’t know where their next meal is to be found.

One of the most ingenious programs I’ve heard about in years—the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves—came out of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department in 2010. It turns out that when aid agencies provide food to refugees and other people in conflict zones, women still have to search for scarce fuel to cook with, risking brutalization, rape, and other violent attacks. Using clean fuel and efficient stoves minimizes these perils. And it’s hard to believe that in the second decade of the twenty-first century, three billion people still cook their meals on crude stoves or over open fires with solid fuels such as wood, dung, and charcoal. The smoke exposure alone kills nearly two million women and children each year. Now the public-private Alliance is giving stoves—some portable, others built directly into people’s homes—to communities across Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America.

How fortunate we are in the United States that preparing a simple dinner does not come with the same high risks. And yet, here at home, “foraging” for food involves an entirely different set of problems. Some 23.5 million people live in “food deserts”—poor or rural areas with a relative abundance of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores but no supermarkets—and not an apple or a celery stick to be found. A cheeseburger, french fries, and a Coke can be a delicious meal, but day after day this high-fat, high-sodium, high-sugar combo does not make for a balanced diet. It can lead to obesity and, over the long term, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, creating enormous future health care costs for our nation.

This is simply a problem we ought not to have in the wealthiest country in the world. In 2010, President Obama signed the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, giving $400 million in loans, grants, and tax credits to businesses that support solutions, ranging from building a new grocery store to putting refrigerated units in convenience stores and stocking them with fresh fruit. But House Republicans have tried to eliminate this program completely.

Obesity is not something we can afford to sidestep in this country. One in three children in the overall population is either overweight or obese, and the numbers are higher for African American and Hispanic children. First Lady Michelle Obama has set the goal of fixing this untenable health problem within a generation, and I’m certainly hoping her signature program, Let’s Move!, is successful. The Obama administration made an extraordinary deal with Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, to lower the fat, salt, and sugar content in the foods it sells over the next few years.

Any program like this is about creating awareness, and Mrs. Obama has made quite a stir. She’s planted a vegetable garden at the White House, and she goes around the country doing workouts with schoolchildren and talking to them about eating fresh vegetables. Nutrition education is a problem we tried to address on the Senate select committee when we issued the first dietary recommendations to the public and, for the first time, explained the link between diet and disease. We want people to get enough food so they aren’t hungry, but we need to teach them about the right kinds and amounts to eat to stay healthy.

I am sincerely hoping that the rancor between Democrats and Republicans in Washington subsides and that we’ll get back to breaking bread together. But the real point is that the internecine politics playing out in Washington is such small potatoes compared to the greater problem of nourishing our global citizens. In our modern world, it is unconscionable to let one single person suffer over food, whether from eating too little or, eventually, from eating too much of the wrong food. One battle we can win in America is the battle against both hunger and obesity. Few challenges can provide a sweeter, more gratifying victory at so little cost.