Editorial: Hunger all around us

Sunday, Nov. 18, 2007 | 1:14 a.m.

Teachers and visitors to classrooms can spot them in a heartbeat - children who haven't been getting enough healthful food.

They're not the ones eagerly raising their arms to answer questions. More typically, they're using their arms as a headrest.

A study released last week by Chicago-based America's Second Harvest, the largest hunger relief group in the country, found that more than 13 million American children from 2003 through 2005 were hungry or in families where hunger was knocking at the door.

That represents 18 percent of all American children. Twenty states, including the Western states of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah and Washington, had child-hunger rates exceeding 18 percent.

Of Nevada's yearly average of 595,981 children for 2003-05, an average of 93,866 - or 15.7 percent - were found to have been, in the vernacular of the study, "food insecure."

Authored by John Cook, a pediatrics professor at Boston University, and co-sponsored by Omaha-based ConAgra Foods, the study was based on analyses of Census Bureau data.

In reporting on the study, USA Today noted that nearly 15 million low-income children receive free school lunches and 7 million receive free breakfasts.

Yet hunger among children persists at high rates throughout the country, even with other forms of assistance, such as the federal food stamp program.

And it's not just children. USA Today also referred to a statistic from the Agriculture Department - 35.5 �million Americans of all ages (12 �percent of the country's population) were "food insecure" at some time during 2006.

Such statistics show the reason behind community food drives and why they are so important - and not just at Thanksgiving and other holidays.

Hunger in America is real, a fact we hope is remembered all year when people encounter opportunities to donate money or food to help fight it.