Hunger In America

Hunger in America

From NPR on 11/18/09

ROBERTS: Let's hear from Russell(ph) in Linville, North Carolina. Russell, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.

RUSSELL (Caller): Thank you. I just wanted to make a comment about an observation. I work on an inpatient psychiatric unit and we frequently and more so, day to day, are seeing people in a situation where they have to choose between food and medication. And the choice is pretty much always food, of course, and this is resulting in a lot of admissions due to lack of medication compliance. And secondly, we discharge many, many people who - we can discharge them somewhere, but we have so few resources to help them meet that food need that it's a very big problem.

ROBERTS: Russell, thanks for your call. Alfred Lubrano, Russell brings up this idea of sort of collateral damage around hunger issues that goes beyond the actual lack of food.

Mr. LUBRANO: Yeah. I mean, for a lot of experts, hunger is an indication that the family's overall budget is inadequate, which is in turn forcing tradeoffs between food and other basic needs. That's why when people who look at hunger, they're also looking at housing, health, living wage, things like that that have nothing to do directly with food but are all, as researchers are finding, all of a piece in a home that's in this kind of crisis.