by Monica Palmer
What does hunger look like in Missouri?
Try to pull up an image in your mind of a person suffering from hunger. If you remember the eighties, you may picture the malnourished children in the TV ads featuring Sally Struthers. Or perhaps, you’re picturing the folks with the cardboard signs broadcasting their need. Hunger—or food insecurity— in America is actually a lot harder to spot.
I grew up in rural Missouri, and my parents divorced when I was very young. That divorce changed my mom from a full-time mother of five into a single mom with a full-time job that earned her a whopping $12,000 a year. When my father couldn’t pay child support, our family of six lived off of my mom’s income alone.
Because mom’s retail clerk job put her face to face with our neighbors, she would tuck her financial woes away every morning and put on her “public” face for work. My mom has a real gift with people. She’s got a quick-wit, a gorgeous smile, and the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. Everyone in our small town loved her and considered her to be one of the happiest people they knew.
At home, though, it was a different story. The long days of standing on a concrete floor, stocking shelves, and dealing with customers took their toll, and she’d leave work exhausted. Home welcomed her with an impossible amount of housework and five hungry kids asking, “Mom, what’s for dinner?” There were many times when she honestly couldn’t answer that question.
Being a very strong and independent woman, Mom didn’t want to ask anyone for help. Her pride battled with her survival instincts to do what she needed to do to feed her children, and she finally humbled herself and confessed our situation to members of our church family.
The ladies of the church would often discreetly give paper bags of food to Mom after the service. I remember my mother’s grateful smile. I also remember the subtle hint of shame in her eyes. Even though the assistance my family received was given with love and kindness, the humiliation of needing and accepting help became yet another weight on my mother’s shoulders.
One in six households in America is struggling with food insecurity right now. This fact is often heard or read with incredulity, because this is America—the land of plenty. People are shocked by the statistic, because they don’t recognize the face of hunger in America. Often, we can’t see that face, because it’s hidden. It’s quite possibly hiding behind the beautiful smile of the clerk who laughs with her customers all day and cries herself to sleep at night, because she doesn’t know how she’s going to feed her children.
The food banks in Missouri and their partner agencies (the pantries, soup kitchens, etc.) do an outstanding job of feeding the hungry. More importantly, they do it with discretion and respect in order to protect the already compromised pride of those who must ask for help. It’s a perfect system except for one problem…. If the faces of hunger are hidden and the heroes are working discreetly to help those in need, how can the rest of us know how greatly our help is needed too?
The USDA just released a new study last month about food insecurity in America, and Missouri was ranked SEVENTH in the nation for Food Insecurity and SECOND for Very Low Food Insecurity. Now, challenge yourself to see beyond the statistic, and see the faces instead of the numbers.
The face of hunger in Missouri could be sitting in the next cubicle at your work or sharing a lunch table with your child at school. Understanding that hunger is a hidden problem in our country is the first step in our journey to ending it.