Editorial: A hefty helping of ignorance

Friday, Nov. 17, 2006 | 6:57 a.m.

The Agriculture Department released a report on the number of people in the United States who don't have enough to eat, and it turns out that the government no longer calls that "hunger."

According to the department's new terminology, these people merely lack "food security."

The report shows that 35 million people lacked "food security" last year, which means that they didn't have enough money to buy food. That is fewer than the 38 million who lacked "food security" in 2004. Of course, in 2004 these people were still referred to as hungry. The Agriculture Department's spin insults the tens of millions of Americans who still are hungry by refusing to say that they are.

President Bush may have finally lived up to - exceeded, even - the example set by President Ronald Reagan, who in the 1980s sought to increase the produce intake by poor children simply by declaring that ketchup was a vegetable.

Bush's officials have sought to eradicate hunger from the United States by taking the word out of the vocabulary used to describe people who can't afford to eat.

In this case, semantics do matter. The Rev. David Beckmann, president of the anti-hunger group Bread for the World, told the Associated Press that deleting "hunger" from the discussion "is a huge disservice to the millions of Americans who struggle daily to feed themselves and their families."

It certainly is. It also is unconscionable that 35 million Americans go hungry every day. Removing "hunger" from the government's discussion of the problem will not hide hunger's reality from those whose bellies are empty.