Editorial: At what price hunger?

Friday, June 8, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

A new report says the United States loses more than $90 billion annually because nearly 35 million Americans don't get enough to eat.

The analysis - commissioned by the Sodexho Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to ending hunger in the United States and conducted by researchers at Brandeis and Loyola universities and the Harvard School of Public Health - shows that people going hungry costs $66.8 billion in medical care, $14.4 billion a year in charitable donations and $9 billion in lost productivity.

Based on figures from 2005, the most recent year for which figures were available, the report says that by "all known standards, the U.S. is the only industrial democracy where hunger impacts nearly 13 percent of the entire population."

About $500 million is spent annual ly in Nevada to offset hunger-related medical care costs, charitable donations and lost productivity, the report says.

Even in the prosperous Las Vegas Valley, many people struggle with hunger. In January the nonprofit Conrad N. Hilton Foundation announced the creation of Three Square, a collaborative community project that plans to initially serve 5,000 meals a month to needy Southern Nevadans to test its food and delivery system.

Within three years Three Square plans to double the estimated 4 million meals that 150 other local charities deliver here each year. Earlier this week the Hilton Foundation announced that as part of the Three Square program it is opening a $40 million food production and distribution center in Las Vegas to help deliver meals.

Although the federal government callously defines hunger as "a painful sensation" caused by insufficient food, the researchers said people who are hungry may not feel such pangs but still suffer in other ways. They catch more colds and other ailments and experience higher-than-average rates of depression, anxiety and suicidal tendencies. They also may miss work and school more often than people who get enough to eat, researchers say.

Without a more comprehensive definition for hunger, funding shortfalls likely will continue in such federal programs as food stamps and those that offer free meals for children in schools and during the summer. Researchers estimate that the federal government could prevent a substantial amount of these losses with a $10 billion to $12 billion increase in federal food programs.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., co-chairman of the House Hunger Caucus, has introduced legislation to approve $20 billion over the next five years to expand federal food programs.

It is distressing that hunger persists in the United States. As residents of one of the world's most technologically advanced and wealthy nations, Americans should not be going hungry.