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JEFFREY BROWN:Next, we turn to a problem plaguing one in four children in the United States today: hunger.
A film opening nationwide today profiles some of the hardest-hit.
Ray Suarez has our conversation.
RAY SUAREZ:It's a bitter paradox. The United States produces more food per person than any other country in the world, but still has a major problem with hunger, a hardship that only grew worse during the recession and its aftermath.
The government estimates some 50 million people are living with food insecurity, meaning they don't always have adequate nutrition for an active and healthy life. A new documentary called "A Place at the Table" challenges the viewers' assumptions about who is hungry and why. Here's an excerpt.
WOMAN:Hunger definitely impacts my classroom. I have had students come to me upset. And it's definitely a huge issue in our small community.
One student in particular, Rosie, I just really felt she wasn't really applying herself in the classroom, and I couldn't figure out where that attitude was coming from. So I felt that she just really didn't care about what I wanted her to learn or that school wasn't that important. And what I realized when I brought her in one day was the main issue was that she was hungry.
ROSIE:I struggle a lot. And most of the time, it was because my stomach is really hurting. And my teacher tells me to get focused. And she told me to write—focus on my little sticker. And every time I look at it, I'm like, oh, I'm supposed to be focusing.
I start yawning. And then I just don't—and so I'm just looking at the teacher, and I look at her, and all I think about is food.
RAY SUAREZ:Joining me now is the film's co-director, Lori Silverbush.
A baby can't tell you what's wrong with them. They know something's wrong, but they don't know what it is. An adult can sometimes pull up their socks and do something about their predicament.
LORI SILVERBUSH, Co-Director, "A Place at the Table": Sometimes.
RAY SUAREZ:Rosie was old enough to know what was wrong, but too young to do much about it. And when she was talking about being hungry at school, that was awful.
LORI SILVERBUSH:It's pretty awful.
And you have to ask yourself—you know, we're in a nation where 17 million children face food insecurity, which means that at any given time, their families don't know where their next meal is coming from. We're investing all of this money and energy into teachers.
And yet we're setting up our kids for failure if they show up to school too hungry or too malnourished, even if they are not feeling hunger pangs. But if all their family can afford is the empty calories from a pack of ramen noodles or some chips, or whatever the cheapest calories are that they give their kids to eat, because that is, sadly, what many, many millions of Americans can afford, what are we saying about our aspirations for our nation's kids putting them in front of teachers, but unable to learn, and then frankly also blaming them for the situation?
A hungry kid isn't always easy to recognize. It could be a kid who looks like everybody else, but is acting out or isn't able to sit still or isn't listening or isn't absorbing. And that could even become a social and a behavioral problem and a disciplinary problem.
So we're really not serving our kids well by not paying attention to this. And, quite frankly we're being, I think, a little irresponsible with our taxpayers dollars by spending money on schools, but not giving them—delivering children who can learn.
RAY SUAREZ:We meet families that are working hard and working a lot, and still not making ends meet, and the gruesome story of Barbara Izquierdo in Philadelphia, who after a long spell of unemployment, gets back to work and automatically loses a lot of the programs that were helping her keep her—keep food on the table.
