gional price differences within a region, and irregular income.

The self-contradiction arises out of the ostensible purpose of serving those in greatest need, while in actuality those poor families with the highest incomes can benefit more from food stamps than those with lower incomes.

This brings to light still another contradiction: most families in the food stamp program do not receive food value considered by the Department of Agriculture as the absolute minimum necessary for an adequate nutrition. Under the Department of Agriculture's "Economy Food Plan", which forms the basis for current projections of poverty, a minimum adequate diet is estimated to cost $22.50 per person per month or $90 per month for a four person household. Nutritionists say increased costs of living make $107 per month a more appropriate figure. As an example of this point, the maximum allowable income for a four person household in rural Virginia to receive food stamps is $150 per month. For their $150 a month, the Virginia household pays $52 and receives $74 worth of stamps-$16 less than the $90 a month the Department of Agriculture says is necessary for a minimum adequate diet. The same situation applies in South Carolina and Louisiana where the maximum is respectively $160 and $165 per month for a four person household. Families in these States also receive $74 in food buying power. In Alabama and Mississippi, where the income limits are $175 and $180 respectively, a four-member household receives $78 in total food value still $12 less than that required for a minimum adequate diet.

Food Supplements

A promising but so far limited program of supplemental foods for infants, young children, and expectant and nursing mothers is being conducted in approximately 65 counties. The program, which it is hoped will reach 225,000 persons by the end of the summer and one million persons a year later, provides evaporated milk, iron-rich cereal, and corn syrup for infants, and a variety of canned fruit juices, canned vegetables, and canned meats for young children and mothers. The program is operated in conjunction with the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through health clinics and medical centers. Since the determination of need is a medical one, clinic staff decide what items are necessary on the basis of individual need.

A program of nutrition education is being imple

mented through the Cooperative Extension Servic system. Using approximately 4,000 nonprofessiona aides, it is hoped that 140,000 low income families ca be reached with this necessary information. The pro gram will bear close scrutiny especially in Southern rural areas where discrimination in extension service is a widespread problem.

School Lunches

The major child feeding program is the Nationa School Lunch Program.

Almost 20 million of the Nation's 50 million schoo children receive a school lunch. But for the 6 million children from families in direst poverty (earning les than $2,000 annually), fewer than one in three re ceived a free lunch before this school year. Thanks to a one-year Congressional appropriation of an additiona $45 million in 1968, it is estimated that the number o free lunches to children in poverty will increase to 4 million. Two bills, H.R. 515 and 516, which would authorize an added $100 million a year for the schoo lunch program and which would require additiona State matching funds and other important program reforms, will be considered by Congress during the

current session.

Federal cash contributions to the School Lunch Pro gram are approximately 4-1/2 cents per lunch. States must match the Federal cash contributions on a 3 to 1 basis. Some States exceed this ratio, but the vast ma jority of "State" contributions comes from the price children pay for their lunches. In New York and Loui siana, State and local funds provide one-half of the non-Federal contribution. In Alabama, State and local governments contribute nothing. Perhaps this explain why 86 percent of the children from the lowest incom families receive free or reduced price lunches in New York, but only 15 percent of such children receiv them in Alabama.

There are still more problems. In many areas, es pecially urban ghettos, there are no facilities for pre paring lunches. In addition, many poor children fac humiliation by being made to work for their lunches stand in separate lines, or eat in separate areas al though such practices are specifically prohibited b Federal school lunch regulations.

Discrimination in Food Programs

Hunger and malnutrition is not a minority grou problem alone. Nearly 70 percent of this country' poverty persons are white. Hunger and malnutrition recognize no color line and no regional boundaries

or ethnic origin do affect participation. In the school lunch program, for example, a study of school lunch participation in Cambridge, Maryland, schools in January 1964 showed that 46.4 percent of the white children, but only 18.1 percent of the Negro children, were receiving school lunches. A similar study in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Virginia during the 1962-63 school year showed that average white participation was 62.1 percent while Negro participation was only 25.7 percent. Although more recent data is not available, the Committee on School Lunch Participation report, Their Daily Bread, which covered 40 States, detailed instances of racial discrimination and concluded, “There is enough evidence of discrimination in the school lunch program to warrant a thorough study by agencies staffed and equipped to do the job." In the needy food programs, prior to Department of Agriculture action to increase the number of participating counties, 256 of the country's 331 lowest income counties without food programs were located in 10 Southern States: 188 of these had Negro or Mexican American populations higher than the State average. These scattered findings justify the necessity of requiring the Department of Agriculture to collect information about its food program participants which would enable it to assure that race or ethnic origin are not factors in the food programs.

No Room For Doubt

Many people refuse to believe that Federal food programs are not meeting the needs of the Nation's poor and hungry. They remain unconvinced in spite of reports such as Hunger U.S.A., published by a private group of concerned citizens, which stated:

We found concrete evidence of chronic hunger and malnutrition in every part of the United States where we held hearings or conducted field trips. . .(We) are convinced that chronic hunger and malnutrition are not confined to those places we visited personally but are national in scope and distribution. This preva

...

lence is shocking. A thousand people who must go without food for days each month would be shocking in a wealthy nation. We believe that, in America, the

number reaches well into the millions. And we believe the situation is worsening.

At hearings held in rural Alabama last spring, Dr. Alan Mermann, a professor of pediatrics at Yale Medical School, told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that some 80 percent of nearly 500 school age children. from Lowndes County, Alabama, he examined “had anemia sufficient to require treatment in any doctor's office anywhere in the country." The basis for such medical findings was supported by responses given to a group of Southern Rural Research Project volunteer interviewers who visited 900 low income rural Alabama homes in the summer of 1967 and found:

71 percent of the families had meat twice or less during the week, and 23 percent had no meat.

80 percent had fresh fruit twice or less during the week, and 44 percent had no fresh fruit.

53 percent had fresh milk twice or less during the week, and 30 percent had no fresh milk.

Dr. Mermann, concluded:

There is another area which is a little more sophisti cated, a little more subtle, but which I think is very, very critical If the parent cannot feed his child, or her child, as parents feel a child should be fed, this produces a certain apathy and perhaps a mistrust or maybe a real distrust of the adult world when those earliest crying infant needs are not being met properly. This, I think, has profound influence on the way one sees the world from then on.

Statistical studies and testimony before Government agencies reach a limited audience. But a CBS television program brought the reality of hunger in America into millions of homes.

CBS Reports' "Hunger in America" examined four areas of poverty and hunger: the Mexican American barrio in San Antonio, Texas; the marginal existence of white tenant farmers in Loudoun County, Virginia; nutritional problems on a Navaho Indian reservation in Arizona, and the situation of rural blacks in Alabama. CBS reporter Charles Kuralt concluded: "The families we have visited tonight are, sadly, more typical than unique. Hunger can be found many places in the United States-too many places. Ten million Americans don't know where their next meal is coming from. Sometimes it doesn't come at all. . . . We are talking about 10 million Americans. In this country, the most basic human need must become a human right.”

...

The response to the CBS documentary indicated that millions of Americans had been visually exposed to, and emotionally moved by, this report of hunger in

their own land. The response of some segments of Congress, however, differed.

The House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, chaired by Jamie L. Whitten (D-Mississippi) arranged for FBI-detailed investigators to visit places where hunger was alleged to exist, and to interrogate those who had agreed to CBS filming. Father Ralph Ruiz, who accompanied CBS cameras into poor homes in San Antonio, stated before a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hearing in San Antonio last December, that government agents had attempted to discredit, even harass, some of the poor persons who appeared on "Hunger in America."

The House Agriculture Committee, chaired by W. R. Poage (D-Texas), sent a letter to county health officials in 256 counties mentioned in Hunger U.S.A. asking them to:

advise me whether you have any personal knowl edge of any actual starvation in your county (or) personal knowledge of any serious hunger in your county occasioned by inability of the individual to either buy food or receive public assistance.

Although a fair portion of the responses admitted to some hunger problem, it would seem obvious that no official would want to be in a position of not seeming to do his job. On the basis of the responses, the House Agriculture Committee attempted to discredit the previous reports of hunger, stating that hunger conditions were caused by ignorance and laziness rather than lack of food programs.

Other Congressional committees, like the House Committee on Education and Labor and the Senate subcommittee on Nutrition and Human Needs assumed that there was a problem and sought to determine its extent. The Department of Agriculture responded by increasing the number of its surplus commodities, liberalizing the purchasing power of food stamps, and, with additional funds voted by Congress, expanding the number of available free school lunches. The Department of Agriculture, however, is not the only villain in the story of hunger. It depends on funding and legislation authority from Congress, which depends on the will of its constituency. The people of America who tolerate such conditions are ultimately to blame. But it is Congress, which has the

WINTER 1969

power to do something about the problem, that must

act now.

Since the National Nutrition Survey was released in January, there is no longer any doubt that we have a serious problem of hunger and malnutrition in America. One person without an adequate diet is too many. Millions, in the words of Steinbeck, constitute a failure that topples all our success.

When will the Nation believe? When the doctors' report regarding Mississippi first came out, few persons believed that this was indicative of a serious problem. When the school lunch report, the rural Alabama report, the Hunger U.S.A. study, and the CBS documentary were presented, some people began to wonder. Others sought to discredit the reports. We now have the first findings of a systematic, medically documented survey which confirms the earlier reports. There is no longer room for doubt.

The question facing all of America now is, are we yet ready to believe? If we do believe, what are we as a Nation which prides itself in being able to respond to all situations going to do about it. Nothing short of a national commitment, on the scale of the effort we mounted in World War II, in producing an atom bomb, and in sending men to the moon, will suffice.

That national commitment must result in a guarantee that every American, regardless of his standing, will have an adequate diet to insure his maximum potential as a human being. The crime, the sorrow, and the failure must be acknowledged by all and the growing wrath must be shared and the commitment made by all.

Until the Nation listens and acts, Steinbeck's words, written over 30 years ago, will stand unrefuted:

and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

WILLIAM PAYNE

Mr. Payne is a Program Analyst for the Office of Federal Programs of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

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