Rising Tide of Hunger and Malnutrition Engulfs O.C. Children

Despite its relative affluence, Orange County has been unable to check a rising tide of hunger and malnutrition among children who reside here, social activists said Tuesday.

While no one knows exactly how many children suffer from hunger, malnutrition or undernourishment, the demand for emergency food has reached record levels, said participants who gathered at a conference to discuss the extent of hunger in the county and ways to combat it.

The one-day conference at the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel drew about 100 representatives from service providers, school districts, churches and county, state and federal agencies.

What is so frightening about the increased demand, said activists, is that more than half of the people who need emergency food on a daily basis are children under 18.

“We need to talk about the fact that in an affluent community like Orange County, there is an underbelly of poverty,” said Dolores Barrett, chairwoman of the Orange County Hunger Coalition, which sponsored the conference. “All agencies are feeling an impact in growth and need.”

Barrett said that at the Salvation Army, where she is the coordinator of social services, demand for emergency services in the last six months is up 70% over comparable 1990 levels.

Elsewhere, food providers and other agencies are reporting a 40% increase in demand for services over last year’s levels, said Mark Lowry, director of the Food Distribution Center, a local food bank.

The food bank had projected that it would serve about 220,000 people this year, but that number has already been surpassed with more than 314,000 receiving food through September, Lowry said.

“As quickly as we can get food in it’s gone,” he said.

According to studies, childrenconstitute the majority of the nearly 380,000 Orange County residents at risk of going to bed hungry at night.

A 1990 study of emergency food recipients by University of California researchers found that more than a quarter of parents surveyed in Orange County reported that they were forced to send their children to bed hungry some of the time.

The study, conducted at 60 soup kitchens and food pantries, also found that families with children account for more than 86% of those seeking emergency food assistance.

While there is no evidence of starvation in Orange County, hunger and malnutrition are growing problems that could severely impact the emotional, physical and mental well-being of the county’s children, experts said.

“It’s not famine or extended stomachs, but in a way it’s more insidious,” Barrett said. “Malnourishment can go on for years before there are any visible signs. The things we can’t see are the things that daily (set up) children for failure.”

The effects of hunger are most visible in schools, experts said. Undernourished children are less physically active, less attentive, less independent and less curious.

In addition, they are more likely to miss school because of illness.

“It is something that directly affects a child’s learning,” said conference participant Joanne Stanton, a member of the Anaheim Union High School District Board of Trustees. She said schools must accept more of the responsibility of addressing the problem.

Stanton said more students in the 23,000-student district are impoverished and hungry than in past years. This year, more than 5,600 students qualified for free or reduced cost lunches.

In the Santa Ana and Garden Grove unified school districts, the growing number of children who are at risk of going hungry are also high. For the 1990-91 school year in Garden Grove, 18,206 students--48% of the enrollment--were eligible to receive a low-cost lunch, up from 11,906 students in the 1986-87 school year. Santa Ana reports that 59.5% of students were eligible, compared to 49.5% in 1986-87.

Because studies have shown that most children from low-income families depend on school food programs for nutrition, expanding and increasing participation in school lunch and breakfast programs could significantly reduce the threat of hunger, experts said.

Currently, there is no requirement that schools statewide provide breakfast for low-income children and conference participants made it a goal to advocate such a program.