The hunger pains of a pandemic

Have you ever been hungry? Truly hungry? Not the hunger one gets in anticipation of a meal, but the kind that pinches the stomach when you know no food is forthcoming. It is the kind of pang you take to bed with you, the kind that greets you when you rise. It is a bitter physical deprivation that gnaws at not only the gut but the spirit. It makes you sad. It makes you angry.

I grew up having to stay one step ahead of hunger. It was like running ahead of tireless hounds through a dark wood.

When the neighborhood children rode by on their bicycles, I worked and weeded the garden. When they rode by in the bus on the way to school, I was knee-deep in mud and feces trying to get runaway hogs back into their pens.

At harvest time we processed all the food in our garden. We sat in a circle, all of us, shucking corn or shelling peas, well into the nights. I remember doing this when I was as young as 5 years old.

The owners of larger farms would sometimes allow us to come and harvest what was left of what they had grown, after they had taken what they needed. We’d show up before sunrise and pick well into the day, when the sun sat high in the Louisiana sky and chased us into the shade.

My mother would bag and can it all. She used a giant deep freezer as a sideboard next to the dinner table, draping a tablecloth over it and decorating it with ceramic knickknacks.

The entire time I was in school I ate a “reduced price” lunch: 50 cents a day, if

I recall. And I was among only a few that did. Almost everyone else ate free lunch.

We were poor, my family and my whole community.

I now think a lot about children like the one I was and families like the one I had in this era of pandemic, when unfathomable job losses are hitting low-wage workers hardest, when schools where poor children ate free lunches are closed, where there are now regular news stories of food banks being inundated with desperate families in need of help.

As a Brookings report last week detailed: “By the end of April, more than one in five households in the United States, and two in five households with mothers with children 12 and under, were food insecure. In almost one in five households of mothers with children age 12 and under, the children were experiencing food insecurity.”