OCTOBER 2006 :: COVER STORY : ECONOMICS

America's 'Hidden Issue'
Hunger Has Defied Solutions, but School 'Backpack Clubs' Try to Help

By Roger Thurow
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Seven-year-old Cody Lozano and his 9-year-old sister Cherokee hurried into their Tyler, Texas, house on a recent Friday afternoon and emptied their school backpacks. On the kitchen table, each child laid out a box of Special K cereal, a carton of milk, a package of peanut-butter crackers, a cup of fruit cocktail, a bag of animal crackers, a carton of apple juice, a pull-top can of beans and franks and one of rice and beans.

Organizers of an Iowa food bank chose plain blue backpacks to keep from drawing classmates' attention to needy children.

It wasn't a weekend homework assignment. It was their weekend breakfast, lunch and dinner.

"Without this food, I don't know what we would do," says their mother, Karen Lozano. In a town where the oil boom once created dozens of millionaires, Ms. Lozano, 41, and her two youngest children sit in a living room beneath a bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling. Family health problems and sporadic work for her husband have reduced their income and increased their expenses, she says. "Last week it was, 'Do we buy groceries or pay the water bill?'" she says. "This week, it is groceries or the gas bill. With the backpacks, I know that at least there's something for the kids to eat."

'Hard Choices'

Cody and Cherokee are members of the Backpack Club at Douglas Elementary School. Every Friday during the school year, just before the final bell, they and 70 schoolmates from low-income families rush into the auditorium and wait in line for backpacks filled with food. In the past year, thousands of other children have begun forming similar lines in schools across 30 states, from big cities to rural areas. The scene in these communities is a snapshot of America's hunger paradox: want amid plenty.

The backpacks are an emergency fix to a problem that has defied solution, despite a rising economy and tens of billions of dollars of government spending on nutrition programs, including food stamps, school lunch and aid to mothers and young children.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says government surveys show that 11.9% of U.S. households-13.5 million in all-were uncertain they could afford to feed their families at some point during the year in 2004. About a third of those, or 4.4 million households, said that at least one household member went hungry at least some time during the year because the family couldn't afford enough food.

"Hunger is a hidden issue, particularly in Tyler, where unemployment is low and there's a lot of economic activity," says Robert Bush, executive director of the East Texas Food Bank. "But every day, we touch people who have to make hard choices about food: pay medical bills or buy food, repair car or buy food."

A recent survey by America's Second Harvest, a national network of more than 200 food banks, paints a portrait of the hungry at odds with common stereotypes: Only 12% of those served by the nation's food banks are homeless; 93% are U.S. citizens; 40% are white; nearly half live in rural or suburban areas; and more than one-third of the hungry households have at least one working adult. In these households, the survey found, parents are often working nights and weekends, leaving children to fend for themselves at mealtimes.

And there are a lot of those children. Second Harvest estimates that of the 25 million people served at its network of food pantries and feeding centers last year, nine million were children.

The federal government appropriates about $12 billion annually for child nutrition programs. For decades, Washington has funded free and reduced-price meals in schools. Last school year, 17.5 million children received free or reduced-price lunch and 7.7 million participated in the breakfast program. In more recent years, the government began supporting after-school snack and dinner programs as well as summer feeding centers-day camps built around lunch. Even so, says Lisa

DeYoung, Second Harvest's director of programs, "there are gaps in the system." Like the weekends.

"On Friday at lunch, I see a kind of panic in some children that I didn't see before. They eat as much as they can," says Kim Matthews, youth-services coordinator in the Chapel Hill, Texas, school district. "Then on Monday at breakfast, they not only eat the food on their tray, but the food on the trays of the five kids next to them."

Why We Wait

The Arkansas Rice Depot, a food bank, started stuffing backpacks with food in 1995. A school nurse at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Little Rock told the food bank she was seeing a growing number of children with dizziness and stomachaches due to hunger. The group sent food to the school, which sent it home with some students. When children carrying food reported they were being teased for being poor, the Depot put the food in backpacks that look like the ones most students use for books.

The teasing stopped, and the food bank took the backpack idea to schools around the state. As word spread, food banks and schools in other states began designing take-home meal packs for the neediest students. Last year, Second Harvest says at least 70 food banks were distributing backpacks-tens of thousands of them in an average week. Those numbers are expected to multiply this school year as Second Harvest rolls out the program nationwide.

The backpacks are for the most part filled with child-friendly food: nutritious, easy to open and nothing requiring stove-top cooking. Empty backpacks are returned by students and refilled for the next week. The food in each backpack costs between $2 and $3, and, once filled, each weighs seven to 10 pounds.

Funding for backpack programs-to reimburse food banks that usually have to buy child-specific food-has mostly come from local businesses, churches and community organizations. In 2003, Hasbro, the toy and game maker, supported pilot programs in eight rural areas. Since then, it has donated more than $700,000 to help 36 programs get started. A few corporations, such as Beam Global Spirits & Wine, are funding programs in areas where they operate.

At the food pantry in Waterloo, Iowa, families stream in for help at the rate of 1,100 a month. Five years ago, it was 500 a month. Throughout the 16-county area of northeast Iowa, 35,700 people a year are served by the food bank. Forty percent are children.

At Lowell Elementary School in Waterloo, children explain why they wait for their backpacks. Fifth-grader Ashley says her parents both work at a bakery and are now facing added expenses after a house fire. Jonathan, another fifth-grader, says his mother works overnight at a hotel and often isn't home in time for breakfast.

Across town, at Jewett Elementary, a mom, Michelle Morehouse, helps fill backpacks with four cups of applesauce, a can of spaghetti and meatballs, a can of beef stew, a jar of peanut butter, two vanilla puddings, three cartons of strawberry milk, a box of Cocoa Puffs and a pack of Scooby Doo baked graham-cracker sticks.

"I don't normally buy these kinds of things," says Ms. Morehouse, whose fifth-grade son Jacob brings a backpack home. Her husband is an hourly worker at a metal-fabrication plant. She says she has about $75 a week left to buy groceries for her family of four at a discount supermarket and, once a month, at a meat locker. The USDA says the typical U.S. household spends $40 per person each week for food.

Ms. Morehouse says she lost her job at a gas-station convenience store in March. "Before then, I said, 'We don't need a backpack, give it to someone else,'" she says. "Now it's a big help."