Hartford Courant
Kids Going Hungry: Cost To Society
Incalculable
Susan Campbell
March 27, 2011
The e-mail asked: Why do we continue to blindly fund federal food programs like
school lunches that have morphed into breakfasts and even dinners?
I answered the e-mail quickly, but I wish I'd said:
I'm through talking about the morality of this. Your morality may not be mine, so
let's talk bones, teeth and cognitive development.
And let's start the conversation at Middletown's Macdonough School, where,
according to the state Department of Education, roughly 73 percent of students
are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.
More specifically, let's start at Macdonough's gym at last week's kick-off of No
Kid Hungry, a public-private campaign to eliminate childhood hunger by 2015
using established food programs.
Standing behind a table of homemade trail mix is a handful of Hartford students
who attend an afterschool Cooking Matters program — which, like No Kid Hungry
— is a program of Share Our Strength, a nonprofit anti-hunger organization. As
we start our conversation, listen to Jadrien Rodriguez, a sixth-grader, talk about
the benefits of turkey chili, and Romario Plummer, a seventh-grader, describe the
Asian stir-fry he made recently.
By age 5, those students were skipping, jumping and dressing themselves. By
age 8, they were gaining about seven pounds a year, and losing their baby teeth.
Along the way, they were developing cognitive skills, learning to share, learning
to take responsibility.
Or, rather, their chances of doing all that were greater if they ate nutritious food.
And if not? They stood a much higher chance of taking a seat in a special
education class (that the rest of us pay for). By not eating properly, they
increased their risk of not being able to learn, and later, not being able to earn a
livable wage, which increased the likelihood of them relying on public assistance
(on our dime) with maybe — because if you don't have a job you can't afford
health insurance —– a few emergency visits to their local hospital (also paid for
by us).
It's all part of the downward spiral when early deprivation becomes "biologically
embedded," says Dr. Deborah A. Frank, founder of Children's HealthWatch. A
recent study of which she was lead author looked at the long-term physiological
effects of want on children — something that usually gets overlooked when
public policy is seen through the short-term light of a federal deficit.
Money for healthy nutrition among children — all children, no matter their
parents' circumstances — makes good economic sense, and it can't be
considered discretionary spending.
"It's not the deficit in the budget that's going to destroy our economic future,"
Frank said. "It's the deficit in the bodies of the babies. It's not like kids turn bright
orange when they reach a level of deprivation. It's insidious and it can have
lifelong consequences."
Public food programs are already in place, but roughly 127,000 children are at
risk of hunger in wealthy Connecticut, and we're coming up on the hardest time
of year for most — the summer, when schools and their food programs close. In
Connecticut, only 26 percent of eligible children participate in the state's summer
meal programs, and for the past five years, the state has been dead last in the
number of schools that participate in the federal School Breakfast Program, says
Dawn Crayco, deputy director of End Hunger CT!, a partner in No Kid Hungry.
The cost of having children go hungry — or feeding them overly processed,
filling-but-not-healthy meals — is nearly incalculable. How do you measure a
generation's lifelong loss of income due to a lack of mental development brought
on by a lack of good food? How do you measure what that lost generation could
have contributed to the greater society?
Either way, there's always a bill coming due. We can pay now, or we can pay
much, much more later.
Courant staff writer and columnist Susan Campbell can be reached at
scampbell@courant.com.
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-campbell-hungry-kid-032720110327,0,4544896.column