THE FOLLOWING story is making the rounds at the Boston Medical Center, where Dr. Deborah Frank rescues poor children from the effects of hunger every day:
Three doctors are sitting on the banks of a river when a baby floats by. One of the doctors wades in and rescues it. Then another baby floats by, and another doctor manages to drag it to shore. But soon there are too many babies rushing by to save. Finally, one of the doctors starts walking away upstream. Frantic, his colleagues call after him. “Where are you going?’’
“I’m going to find the bastard who’s throwing them in.’’
Frank, who runs the hospital’s Grow Clinic for undernourished children, is one of those doctors on the banks of the river, but she is trying to move closer upstream. If childhood hunger can be caught earlier or prevented, so too can its sad accompaniment of physical and cognitive ailments: infections, anemia, allergies, poor motor skills, behavioral problems.
On a recent morning in this season of abundance, Frank is checking in on Taliah, a 3-year-old on her way back to health. When she first visited the Grow Clinic at 14 months, Taliah had “pretty severe nutritional wasting,’’ according to Frank. Now her skin is clear and smooth, no longer cracked or prone to rashes. She is able to run and jump. Gone are the chronic infections and colds associated with poor nutrition.
Taliah’s mother is attentive and caring, and she has a job working at a neighborhood YMCA. But whatever she earns can’t cover the costs of heat, rent, healthy foods, and transportation. This is typical of the working poor; 41 percent of families receiving food stamps have a working adult in the home.
Taliah is one of the 49 million Americans who the US Department of Agriculture estimates did not have access to sufficient food at some point during 2008 - a year with the worst deterioration in family food security since USDA began its annual survey in 1995.
Local numbers are more recent, and the trend is worsening. Children’s HealthWatch, the research arm of the Grow Clinic, found that food insecurity among families with young children seeking care at Boston Medical Center rose from 19 to 26 percent between the first half of 2008 and the first half of 2009. Even fairly mild cases can start a child down a spiral of health and developmental setbacks.
The Grow Clinic subsists almost entirely on private philanthropy. No insurance plan or government aid pays for the team of nutritionists, physical therapists, and social workers who follow the children, or the food pantry Frank began at the hospital, or the special high-calorie formula poor parents couldn’t possibly afford on their own. The giving urge is strong during the holidays, and donations are welcome. But of course, the children are hungry all year long.
“It’s a very silent problem,’’ says Frank. “They’re not going to march in the streets, these kids.’’
One thing the USDA report doesn’t make clear enough is the connection between food insecurity and the obesity epidemic, with all of its costly health woes. Because junk foods - from sugary sodas to corn chips - are cheaper calorie-for-calorie than fresh vegetables and fruits, many of the same poor children who are underweight in Frank’s clinic will be obese by the time they are adolescents.
The seeming paradox of overweight kids and hunger has given an opening to conservative critics of public aid programs. The Heritage Foundation, for example, answers the USDA report with a statement titled “Hunger Hysteria,’’ denying any “hunger crisis’’ in America.It’s too bad the critics don’t visit the Grow Clinic, where they could meet a little boy who is making good progress. He was so malnourished when Frank first saw him, at age four months, that she had him hospitalized with the same cluster of ailments that afflict babies in the developing world. He was so weak he couldn’t lift his head. Now he is standing on his own chubby legs.
His name, if you can believe it, is Justice.
Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
