To the Editor:
I was walking in a section of Clarendon marked by high-end shops and restaurants when a young man asked me to sign a petition to end childhood hunger in the state of Virginia.
“Of course!” I said … but I also couldn’t help but ask: “but isn’t Arlington one of the wealthiest counties in the nation? And isn’t Virginia generally pretty wealthy?” I assumed that surely the state government was sufficiently well-funded to address such a fundamental public health challenge.
However, even in a state which in 2013 ranked 10th among all states in average per capita income, over 300,000 children arrive at school hungry in the morning. The Virginia Fair Share Education Fund petitioner explained that parents feel too stigmatized to apply for the free breakfasts for which their children qualify. Standing there in the street — as people bustled past with fancy shopping bags, eating the finest in frozen yogurt next to gently splashing water fountains — I smelled and felt the school cafeteria as it was in the mornings during the late 1960s in Warren, Ohio. My dad had left our family of six children; we had qualified for food stamps and also participated in the free breakfast program. I remembered how those meals took away that hollow, early morning gnawing; that food did help us concentrate and study. It’s painful to realize the persistence of this issue. I urge readers to find ways to help with this simple cause right here in our state: reaching those children who, stunningly, are sitting at their desks in a wealthy, First World country, distracted by a gnawing pain in their stomach from hunger.
Dolores Byrnes, Ph.D., Arlington