‘We could wipe out hunger if the Pentagon took two weeks off.’

If you had a mother, she told you not to play with your food.

And if she was like many American mothers, she added something like, “There are children starving to death in China who would love to have those peas.”

Or maybe it was Africans who would adore the squash, or Bengalis famished for broccoli.

Dubious though it sounds at first to most 8-year-olds, a mental connection nonetheless is commonly established between frivolous use of foodstuffs and thoughtless extinction of emaciated tots in the Third World. The connection becomes an ingrained reflex in most Americans. A little voice in the back of the head, where mother’s dictums lurk like cobras in the attic, forevermore warns: “Build a mashed potato castle/go to hell for killing an Ethiopian.”

But the age of rebellion against traditional mores is not over, so it should be no surprise that another sacred cow was slain recently in Tarzana.

Not only slain, but its flesh openly toyed with, in the name of feeding the starving.

The End Hunger Network helped sponsor a series of contests in which people played with food. The co-sponsor was Tony and Luigi’s Restaurant, which was looking for publicity.

There was pizza decorating and pizza twirling, but the centerpiece was the contest for sculptures of presidential candidates.

The medium was meatballs.

Ten entries were displayed for judges, a meatball Mt. Rushmore on a table decorated with red, white and blue crepe paper and small, crossed American flags.

The entry instructions, which clearly said “presidential contender,” were bent to include President Reagan, who contends no more.

Sandi Roberts of Sherman Oaks entered a Reagan sculpture that, like the original, was topped by an impressive shock of hair, real and black. Most entries used other food for such touches. Robert Lia of Reseda used garbanzo beans to give his George Bush a bucktoothed mouth that cried out for cosmetic orthodontics. The hair was spaghetti.

Coffee grounds darkened the complexion of a Jesse Jackson entry by Eneida Rivera of Long Beach. Eggshells provided teeth. Others used sliced olives to create the effect of curly hair or eggplant leaves for smooth hair.

The Tarzana Chamber of Commerce provided four judges. End Hunger and the restaurant provided the other two.

The winner, USC film student Jeffrey D. Phillips, went beyond the bas relief faces of the other entries. He packed together a 15-inch-high bust of Jesse Jackson, with eyes of hard-boiled eggs and olive slices, hair and mustache of broccoli and crowned with a leafy wreath of the type seen on figures of Roman emperors.

Phillips molded the bust around a steel frame hastily welded the night before. He decided at the last moment to compete for the top prize of $200 in free restaurant meals because he needs them to entertain friends coming to his graduation next month.

He used 12 pounds of meat, mixed with raw eggs for texture. Because he lives near USC and entered late, he bought $15 worth of meat himself and the restaurant reimbursed him. Other contestants were issued a standard 5-pound batch of Tony and Luigi’s meatballs--spices, crumbs and all.

The restaurant issued 80 pounds to 16 would-be entrants. Some of them simply vanished with the free meatballs.

After being displayed at the restaurant, the meat sculptures probably will be thrown away, said Fred Lack, district manager for Collins Foods International, which owns Tony and Luigi’s, along with the Josephina’s and Gino’s East restaurants.

“Since a lot of people have touched the meat, the health department would have our tails if we tried to serve it,” he said.

The waste “may offend some people,” conceded Jerry Michaud, executive director of the End Hunger Network.

The Network describes itself as “a Hollywood-based nonprofit organization that explores innovative uses of mass media, celebrity involvement and publicity to educate Americans about hunger.” It produced fund-raising TV spots for the Live Aid concert for Africa in 1985.

“But the point is, there’s more than enough food,” he argued, as the insouciance with which the contest wrote off 92 pounds of ground beef and assorted edibles should demonstrate. The problem is that the food is not properly distributed so that it reaches the hungry, he argued.

“It’s a matter of awareness. Hunger could be ended in this century with the political will. We could wipe out hunger if the Pentagon took two weeks off.”

Sculptress Lavern Farley of Van Nuys said she thought of the waste. “But then I thought, if it works, why not? If this increases the awareness of hunger and touches peoples’ hearts, well, whatever works.”

But she wondered how many people the hamburger would have fed.

According to a captain at the Salvation Army shelter in Van Nuys, about 120.

However, the captain said, he is not critical. “I sympathize with those people. Their motives were pure. They were trying to draw attention to the problem. Those restaurant owners probably know that they throw that much food away every day anyway.”

The next event on Tony and Luigi’s calender was a meatball sculpture contest for children.

“Children and meatballs should create quite an interesting mess,” promised the news release from the End Hunger Network.