Hunger in America

I first came face to face with the hidden shame of hunger in America when I visited Mississippi in the spring of 1967. I was one of four members of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty, and we traveled to Jackson to "examine the War on Poverty." We went to Mississippi because we were anxious to see how such Federal programs as Head Start and the one-dollar-per-hour minimum wage for farm workers were faring in the poorest state in the nation.

It frankly never occurred to me nor, I believe, to the other Senators on that trip--the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Senators Joseph Clark and George Murphy--that the ravages of American poverty could produce conditions of malnutrition and hunger that were thought to exist only in parts of India, Africa and Asia. (continued on page 158)Hunger in America(continued from page 147) Looking back now to that trip made just two and a half years ago, I still find it difficult to understand how we Senators--and the nation at large--could not have been more aware that poverty breeds malnutrition just as surely as poverty breeds unemployment, bad housing, crime and illiteracy.

Had the bread lines of the Thirties been so easily forgotten? Were we so complacent as to assume that simply because the Department of Agriculture offered surplus foods--and food stamps (at a price)--to the poor, the poor automatically received all the nourishment needed to keep body and soul together? Somehow, we had not made the connection between poverty and hunger, and it took the nightmare of Mississippi to awaken us to the reality of millions of people who simply do not get enough to eat--not only in the rural South but also in the urban ghettos of the North, the Indian reservations of the Southwest, the mining towns of Appalachia and in migrant-worker camps throughout the nation.

Even today, two and a half years after that conscience-searing trip to Mississippi, the full facts on hunger in the United States are not yet in. A national nutrition survey is presently under way, but the chief investigator, Dr. Arnold E. Schaefer of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, already reports that a disturbing picture of hidden hunger is emerging: "We have found more malnutrition than I ever expected to see in a society described as the best fed in the world."

Dr. Schaefer found, for example, that 92 percent of the children in one preschool Head Start program had such extreme vitamin-A deficiencies that they could go blind at any moment--a condition that could be prevented at the cost of one candy bar per child per year.

Dr. Schaefer produced the startling information that until the fall of 1968, the Department of Agriculture distributed nonfat dry milk lacking vitamins A and D as part of its commodities program for the poor, while at the same time, since 1965, nonfat dry milk fortified with vitamins A and D was shipped to six foreign countries by the same department.

The nutrition survey has already confirmed other reports that goiter, rickets and hookworm infestation, thought to have been eradicated decades ago, are still afflicting the poor. One third of the children examined thus far in the survey are anemic. Ninety-six percent of the children require immediate dental treatment involving an average of five decayed teeth. Ten percent of the children show growth retardation and evidence of the related problem of mental retardation.

These preliminary findings have been reinforced by other medical reports from across the nation--disturbing indications of a direct link between malnutrition, especially insufficient protein, in pregnant women, infants and children and brain damage. It now appears that three quarters of mental retardation is found in big-city slums and rural poverty areas.

In "Hunger, U. S. A.," an exhaustive survey of malnutrition across the country conducted by a distinguished group of private individuals who joined together as the Citizens Board of Inquiry, there is further unsettling documentation of the nutrition needs of the poor. In Baltimore, the hemoglobin level of slum children was found to be lower than that of infants in rural Pakistan. In Seattle, half to three quarters of all poverty infants between 6 and 36 months of age were found to be suffering from nutritional-deficiency anemia. In Boston, one out of five children admitted to the wards of Boston City Hospital has nutritional anemia. In posh Palm Beach County, Florida, 97 percent of migrant-worker families failed to consume minimum recommended amounts of milk or milk products and 63 percent ate no green or yellow vegetables.

What makes these reports even more alarming is the fact that the Federal food-assistance programs still reach only 6,000,000 of the nation's 30,000,000 poor--those citizens earning less than $3000 a year. And the situation appears to be stagnant, at best, because the programs now reach approximately the same number of people reached eight years ago.

These Federal food efforts take two basic forms. There is the commodities-distribution program, which distributes specific food items free to needy families; and there is the food-stamp program, in which needy families buy coupons redeemable at retail stores for food products only, at a value in excess of the purchase price of the coupons. Communities may have either program--food distribution or food stamps--or none at all, but never both.

Under the commodities-distribution program, the Department of Agriculture gives away such foods as corn meal, grits, flour, nonfat dry milk, peanut butter, rice and rolled wheat--all surpluses that have been purchased to help support farm prices. The selection from the 22 basic commodities available varies from month to month, depending on what is in surplus. One of the most flagrant shortcomings of the program, therefore, is that these foods are not chosen for their nutritional value nor to provide a poor family with a balanced diet. Rather--by the Department of Agriculture's own admission--commodities merely supplement the family's diet. Unfortunately, many families look to the commodities program for their sole source of food.

On the other hand, the flaw in the food-stamp program is that many families cannot afford the price of the stamps themselves, even when graduated downward, depending on family income. When this happens, they have no source of emergency rations, because commodities are not available in communities where food stamps are sold.

The hard and undeniable fact is that we have a food-assistance system that fails to reach the vast majority of the desperately poor people who need it and fails to meet the needs of those few who are reached.

Perhaps our awakening to this fact took place in Mississippi because hunger, and the awful conditions of disease, filth and hopelessness connected with it, is easier to spot in the ramshackle shanties of the delta than in the stifling tenements of the big cities. Perhaps it all began in Mississippi because in that state and in other states of the Deep South, there are areas that have allowed themselves to become stereotypes of poverty aggravated by the blatant disinterest of local officials. To be frank, it is easy to kick Mississippi in the pants--to tell it to do something about the awful conditions of human degradation that exist within its borders. But it is quite another thing to take stock of what we see in Mississippi and to come away with a lesson that hunger in that state is simply an extreme version of what we can find within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol--or of your own homes. The challenge, then, based on the lesson of Mississippi, is to look for hunger and root it out wherever we find it, with whatever means and at whatever cost required of the Federal Government to do the job.

The committee learned that the most common hunger situation in Mississippi involved an abandoned middle-aged black mother living in a cramped two-room shack and caring for from four to fifteen children. Sometimes the father traveled North to find work and sent checks home periodically to support the family. Often the children were illegitimate offspring of several fathers; and if some of the older children were daughters, one or two of them may have had two or three children of their own, and no husband in the home. Sometimes an elderly man, usually a grandfather who was unable to work, lived with the family.

The diet of such a family consisted of a breakfast of grits, molasses and biscuits. The adults often ate nothing for lunch, while the children at home were given a piece of bread and some Kool-Aid or water. At night, the family ate boiled beans and corn bread, sometimes supplemented with boiled rice, dry peanut butter or a little can of meat from the Federal commodities program. Usually, there was no electricity nor refrigeration. (continued on page 244)Hunger in America(continued from page 158) The surplus commodities were stored in brown-paper bags that were infested with rats and insects.

A few of the shacks had running water, but almost none had toilet facilities. Often there were no outhouses, either; only open sewers and stagnant pools of water surrounded the dwellings. The shacks, worth possibly $35 as firewood, were usually windowless and inundated with the odor of urine that emanated from cracks in the floors and walls. There was usually no table and the little food available was eaten by hand out of a bowl or from a newspaper on the floor. There was also the almost unbearable stench of decomposed food in the cracks of the creaking floor.

Most of the children did not have shoes or adequate clothing to attend school. In one situation brought to the committee's attention, five of the nine children in a family were too filthy to get near or to touch. They had gone unwashed for so long that their arms and legs were a blue-gray claylike color. Kenneth L. Dean, executive director of the Mississippi Council on Human Relations, who described some of the family circumstances to us, said: "This family is actually too poor to participate in a poverty program. This type of situation represents hunger at its worst."

The adults in these families, Mr. Dean said, often "are of such a destroyed mental, physical and emotional state that they are incapable of caring for either themselves or their offspring. They are barely communicative. Some of these people have been destroyed to the extent that they fluctuate between the human and the subhuman level." Mr. Dean, like other community workers the committee heard in Mississippi, attributed these conditions in large part to the many years in which Negroes were considered by many whites to be "just a shade below the human level."

"It is this kind of past," Mr. Dean testified, "that has produced this middle-aged Negro woman, whose only pleasure is found in those brief moments of free expression in sex relations with a partially destroyed male who also has a pattern of behavior that has developed outside the norms of society. This woman, having her intellectual, emotional and social dimensions of personality denied development, has been reduced to the condition of primitive man and cannot be condemned for failing to appreciate or recognize the social norms of the community."

The hearing in Mississippi also provided me with substantial evidence that the combination of state welfare programs and Federal food programs had made little headway against extreme conditions of deprivation and backwardness. The average monthly welfare benefit to a fatherless family of four in Mississippi, we learned, was between $50 and $60. Out of this, the mother would have to pay all family costs, including rent, utilities (if there were any), medical bills (if a doctor could be found to care for her family), transportation (if any public transit serviced her area) and clothing. Rarely was there enough money left over to provide the family with sufficient food for a full and balanced diet.

Mississippi was--and still is--the only state in the nation to have a Federal food-assistance program in every county. But the severe hardships faced by the poor were, nevertheless, compounded, because most of the counties had switched, or were in the process of switching, from the free commodities to the pay-as-you-go food-stamp program.

This led me to ask one of the key witnesses, Miss Marian Wright, a black lawyer who was working in Mississippi as counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, this question: "Is there any feeling that counties have switched to food stamps in order to pressure the very Negroes who needed free food the most?" Miss Wright replied: "That's right, Senator Javits. And many people do feel, too, that it's part of an over-all state policy to not respond to the overwhelming need in the delta in order to force these Negroes out because they don't want them here." She said there was a drastic drop in the number of food-assistance recipients as a result of switches from commodities to food stamps. She gave as an example Jones County, in which 17,500 people had been getting commodities but only 4700 were getting food stamps--a decrease of nearly 13,000--after the county switched programs. The reasons for the sharp drop, she said, were either that needy families could not scrape enough money together to purchase all the stamps, once a month as required, or that state welfare officials had made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to qualify for eligibility.

Echoing statements the committee was to hear from community representatives across the country, Miss Wright said: "People are not treated with dignity when they go into the welfare office, and they are not allowed to be people, and they are investigated and they are threatened, and this is a terrible kind of thing that has to be stopped."

I came away from that Mississippi hearing with several impressions and conclusions that were to shape my thinking on the hunger problem in the months to come. First of all, needy people were not getting enough to eat, because the Federal food programs were not reaching them. The problem seemed to be a combination of local disinterest and Federal lethargy--a combination that might have been tolerable as just another bureaucratic muddle if people were not starving in the process.

Furthermore, from a practical standpoint, food stamps were beyond the means of destitute families, and those who could afford them usually ran out of food before the end of the month. On the average, six dollars in stamps buys ten dollars worth of food, but the value of a month's supply of stamps never approaches the $120 that the Department of Agriculture says is the minimum a family of four must spend each month to achieve a balanced diet. As far as commodities were concerned, not only did the $22.20 worth of food a month for a family of four fail to provide a balanced diet but commodities, like the food purchased with stamps, did not last a month. Also, the month's supply of commodities was too heavy for most families to carry from distribution centers, so families either had to hire or borrow transportation or do without all the food to which they were entitled.

It was clear, then, that some quick Federal remedies were needed in Mississippi that would also apply to other areas of the nation that faced problems of hunger. There was a dire need for free food stamps for those families that didn't have the money to pay for any. There was also a need to get commodities into those areas where people, for whatever reason, had no food. In other words, the law had to be changed to permit the distribution of stamps and commodities at the same time in the same area. Also, Federal authorities had to be authorized to bypass local government when it became clear that people were not getting food because local officials were not cooperating with the Federal programs. Finally, there was a real question as to whether the food-assistance programs would ever meet the nutritional needs of the poor if they continued to be administered by the Department of Agriculture, whose main concern is with farm surpluses, land utilization and supporting farm prices. Obviously, if Mississippi taught us anything, it taught us that the Federal food programs were a matter of life and death--not simply a means of helping the Government dispose of farm surpluses.

If there were any lingering doubts of the seriousness of the conditions in Mississippi, and what it implied for other impoverished areas of the nation, they were dispelled by the report of six prominent doctors. who, after examining children in rural Mississippi, wrote: "We found it hard to believe we were examining American children of the 20th Century." In their report, "Children in Mississippi," they cited case after case of children suffering mental and physical retardation because they came from the wombs of mothers who were unable to provide them with nourishing foods.

The doctors reported "obvious evidence of severe malnutrition, with injury to the body's tissues--its muscles, bones and skin, as well as an associated psychological state of fatigue, listlessness and exhaustion." They related a horror story of anemic, diseased, parasite-ridden children--who cried in pain at the gentle touch of a physician's hand, who moved their arms and legs with the agonized effort of a 70-year-old man suffering from crippling arthritis and who were beyond medical assistance because they did not get enough to eat. The doctors reported finding not malnutrition but children suffering and dying from hunger and disease that they said "is exactly what 'starvation' means." In conclusion, they declared: "It is unbelievable to us that a nation as rich as ours, with all its technical and scientific resources, has to permit thousands and thousands of children to go hungry, go sick and die grim and premature deaths."

Even then--Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman sent the committee a departmental memo that reported evidence of malnutrition and hunger, of families without jobs who could not buy food stamps because they had no income, and of the need for better certification procedures for food recipients. He said that massive layoffs of cotton fieldworkers, resulting from rapid mechanization by landowners who balked at paying the new one-dollar minimum wage, had resulted in 40,000 to 60,000 people unemployed in the delta.

But Secretary Freeman's response to demands by me and other subcommittee members for immediate remedial action in Mississippi served only to point up the Department of Agriculture's traditional inability to recognize or react to the emergency of unchecked hunger. This became painfully clear at a subcommittee hearing nearly three months after our trip to Mississippi. Responding to some heated and persistent questioning by me, Secretary Freeman doggedly refused to declare an emergency in Mississippi, insisting that this action "would make no difference as such and would not authorize the Secretary of Agriculture to do anything he cannot do now in Mississippi and that is not being done now in Mississippi."

Contrary to the legal opinion of the subcommittee, Secretary Freeman contended that his emergency powers under the law did not permit him to issue free food stamps. He ordered instead that the minimum price of the stamps be reduced in Mississippi from two dollars to 50 cents per person, even though he conceded that some families were so destitute that they would not be able to find money even to pay so low a price--they just had no cash at all.

The tragic implications of the Department of Agriculture's position under Secretary Freeman became clear last March, when the Nixon Administration's new Secretary of Agriculture, Clifford Hardin, simply signed an order for the issuance of free food stamps in two impoverished rural counties in South Carolina. Mr. Hardin, who also has made important strides in initiating food-stamp programs in counties that still offered no food programs and in establishing supplemental feeding programs in areas where food stamps have proved insufficient, shows every sign of not being a traditionalist.

His main problems are the same as those of the department under Secretary Freeman: lack of sufficient funds to bring Federal food programs to all the nation's poor and an unwieldy departmental bureaucracy that gives such priority to management of the nation's food surpluses that the fortifying and distribution of these surpluses to the poor may be suffering in the process.

The Nixon Administration at first seemed content merely to place a high priority on initiatives to get current programs to operate more efficiently. There was an apparent reluctance--even among some of the closest advisors of the President--to spend the large sums needed to get these programs to the poor and to educate them on the basics of a balanced diet. The Nixon budget followed precedent by providing more than three billion dollars for farm price-support programs and only $739,000,000 for family food programs--or, as The New York Times so aptly put it--"more than four times as much to make food scarce as to make it available."

But then in May, the President, in a historic humanitarian action, announced that he planned to wage an aggressive campaign against hunger, a campaign that would cost an additional one billion dollars a year.

Under President Nixon's plan, there would be $610,000,000 spent the first year and one billion dollars each year thereafter, to augment and improve the present food-assistance programs. I, and other Senators long concerned with the hunger problem, still had to express doubt that even these additional funds would be adequate to guarantee every poor family, no matter how modest its means, a diet that meets the minimum Federal nutritional standards. The Senate lost little time in following up on the Administration's action by voting to boost the authorization for the food-stamp program to $750,000,000 in the coming fiscal year--more than double last year's $340,000,000 and $140,000,000 more than asked by the Nixon Administration.

But money is only one of the answers to how to establish an effective nationwide food-assistance program. If the Federal Government is to continue using local officials to administer its programs, there must be a major effort to ensure that those officials are concerned with the needs and the problems of the poor and will exercise their authority as contemplated by Federal law and policy. It is not only in Mississippi that you find local officials who resist these programs more than they administer them.

The CBS television report Hunger in America, which did so much to arouse public concern when it was broadcast in May 1968, showed San Antonio, Texas, County Commissioner A. J. Plock being asked about hunger in his community. Plock replied: "Well, why are they not getting enough food? Because the father won't work and I mean won't work. If they won't work, do you expect the taxpayer to raise all the kids? First, let's do something with their daddies and then, yes, take care of the kids." Commissioner Plock is just one of thousands of public officials across the country who feel that way. It is incredible that innocent children are to be held responsible for the "sins" of their fathers.

Referring to the migrant workers who live in squalid shacks rivaling those I saw in Mississippi, one Collier County, Florida, official told the committee: "They're not Collier County people. They're Federal people." Apparently, the fact that these outsiders made it possible for the county to harvest its $40,000,000 citrus crop did not earn them recognition, much less a living wage.

Even in Washington, D. C., I heard food-stamp applicants complain about the difficulty in getting certified. But the complaints at the certification center I visited did not deal with any hostility or abusiveness on the part of officials involved but, rather, with long delays. When I arrived at ten A.M., there were more than 100 applicants waiting to be processed by six clerks--a process that involves a 45-minute interview. Many people were resigned to coming back the next day. There is really no excuse for such delays, especially in Washington, where even now the food-stamp program fails to serve, three quarters of the 122,000 persons eligible for assistance.

And let there be no mistake that hunger stalks the ghettos of Washington, just as it does in New York City's Harlem, Chicago's West Side, Los Angeles' Watts and Boston's Roxbury. Not the blatant, bizarre sort of hunger that you find in the putrid wastes of rural poverty areas; but it is still the insidious malnutrition that is bred of the hopelessness of poverty amid plenty, the malnutrition that saps the energy and ambition of adults and leaves children listless.

On a tour through tenements in the Columbia Road section of Washington, where one of the nation's worst urban riots raged only a year earlier, after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King, I visited the cramped, stuffy, rat-plagued apartment of Mrs. Florence Spain. She had four children and a disabled husband, and her only source of income was a $131-a-month welfare check. Out of that $131, Mrs. Spain was supposed to pay $80 a month rent and $40 for food stamps that entitled her to $78 worth of groceries. That left her $11 to pay for her husband's medicines, the electric and gas bills, clothing and shoes for her children and the monthly installment on the 12-inch television set that no one was watching in the living room. That month, however, Mrs. Spain did not have enough cash left over to buy food stamps.

I asked Mrs. Spain what she had for breakfast.

"Had no breakfast," she replied.

I asked what she'd had for lunch.

"Had no lunch," she replied.

"How about dinner?" I asked.

She replied: "Don't know about dinner. Maybe some neck bones, potatoes and grits." She said her children get lunch at school under the Federal school-lunch program. She told me that the family table hadn't seen beef in eight or nine months, pork chops in a year.

"It's really hard, you know," Mrs. Spain said.

•••

The fight against hunger has presented the Nixon Administration with an opportunity to win a dramatic battle in the War on Poverty. Happily, the Administration appears to have seized the opportunity, and the shame of hunger may yet provide the catalyst for waging a vigorous war on poverty on all fronts.

The Administration has already taken a major step toward reforming the overall welfare system. In his address to the nation last summer, the President began the difficult process of moving away from the present inequitable and degrading system. In his subsequent message to Congress, he charted a course for the Federal Government to adopt minimum welfare standards throughout the nation and to pay a share of the resulting higher payments in states that truly cannot afford them. Clearly, the minimums are only a beginning and are still inadequate to meet the human needs of the nation's poor and the fiscal needs of the states and localities that carry the greatest burdens.

Indeed, the proposed Federal minimum of $1600 annually for a family of four would barely cover the food budgets of the poorest families, leaving little--if anything at all--to cover other such basic costs as shelter, clothing and transportation. The President's plan now favors the states doing the least on their own and penalizes the states, such as New York, that are doing more than their share to help the poor. But with adequate funding by Congress, the President's proposal for establishing national minimum welfare standards would go a long way toward ending the exodus of the poor from rural areas where welfare payments are shockingly low to the cities where assistance is generally maintained at more enlightened levels.

The new Administration has shown itself bold enough to overcome the vicious and degrading stereotypes of poverty. Its welfare proposal, for example, requires that assistance programs be available to all impoverished families, including those that have a man in the house. No longer would able-bodied men be encouraged or compelled to abandon their families so that their wives and children could qualify for welfare assistance. No longer would families be disqualified from receiving assistance if the head of the house were able to find work and yet were unable to maintain the family at a subsistence level.

Ultimately, there must be an assured minimum income for the poor--either through a reverse income tax or through income maintenance by family allowance--but always with incentives to work, to educate oneself, to lift oneself out of the degradation and hopelessness of poverty. Such a drastic step cannot be taken in a vacuum. There must, at the same time, be an all-out effort to provide adequate and effective vocational training, to provide Federal incentives for improving education in our ghettos and rural poverty areas and to provide sufficient day-care centers so that welfare mothers--nearly 1,000,000 of them without husbands to provide for them--can have the opportunity to work while their children are properly supervised.

Such a multifaceted Federal drive to eliminate poverty should not be hampered by state laws and regulations that might inhibit its effectiveness. For poverty is truly national in scope and no one region should be so blind as to selfishly dispose of its poor as it sees fit, at the expense of other areas of the nation.

Another essential ingredient in the drive to eliminate poverty is to bring adequate health care within the reach of all Americans--including those now on Medicare and Medicaid--through a universal health-insurance system. America's capacity for the cure and prevention of illness and disease has never been greater. Yet, our ability to deliver needed health services at a reasonable cost and to provide for the most basic physical needs has never been more in doubt. This crisis is evidenced by skyrocketing health costs, by marked shortages of doctors and other health personnel and by seriously inadequate, obsolete and outmoded health facilities.

In a bill I am preparing for introduction this year, I propose a universal health-insurance system that ultimately would replace Medicare and Medicaid. The medical costs of indigent and dependent persons would be covered by Federal, state and local governments, but the costs of the vast majority of Americans would be financed by employer-employee contributions. There would be freedom of choice among competing plans, but participation in a plan would be compulsory. At the very heart of the system would be the requirement that each plan provide complete health care and that each plan submit itself to realistic cost controls overseen by government health agencies. Thus, everyone, regardless of how much he earns or where he lives, would be entitled to adequate medical care.

The ultimate elimination of poverty--and I am convinced that it can be eliminated--will cost billions of dollars. But for a meaningful and productive start, the Bureau of the Budget has estimated that for an additional one and one half billion to two billion dollars a year, all the nation's poor could be quickly reached by the Federal food-assistance programs. This is considerably more than the three quarters of a billion dollars now being spent on food efforts; but it is a fraction of the 80-billion-dollar defense budget and even less than the four billion dollars now set aside for the space program.

What I am suggesting now is that a new set of national priorities is called for--one that balances internal needs with the requirements of its external security.

At the very least, we must move ahead to provide free food stamps to the poorest of our nation's poor and to lower the price of stamps for those who can barely afford them now. There can be no justification in continuing to compel the poor to pay half to three quarters of their income for food, while the average family in our nation pays less than a fifth. Furthermore, the value of the stamps should be increased to permit at least the minimum level of buying that the Department of Agriculture says a family must do to keep all its members well nourished. Also, extra value should be given to stamps that are used to buy special enriched foods. The cost of this program would be under two billion dollars--a small price for our nation to pay to eliminate the hunger in its midst.

To make such a program work efficiently, and in a manner that upholds the human dignity of the recipient, there must be some basic reforms in the food-stamp program. There should be, for example, a computerized system of preparing and mailing the food-stamp coupons, in much the same way that Social Security and welfare checks are now distributed. There simply is no excuse for continuing the demeaning practice of requiring food-stamp recipients to report each month, often at relatively great travel cost, for what must seem to many a dole grudgingly handed out by an insensitive bureaucrat. Also, the use of food stamps should be extended to permit the purchase of such essential nonfood products as soap, toilet tissue and other items for home and personal hygiene.

It is also essential to provide Federal incentives--including demonstration grants--for developing nutrition-education curriculums and techniques to make clear to parents and children alike what goes into a balanced diet. But education is not enough for expectant mothers. They must also have milk, fortified foods and vitamins, to ensure against mental retardation in their offspring. And the supply of these nutriments must be extended to the newborn as well. For school children from poverty areas, there should be a free school-lunch program to replace the pay-as-you-go program that now reaches mostly children in middle-class neighborhoods and affluent suburbs.

It is important to stress that the attack on hunger should not be limited to the Governmental sphere. Food companies, for example, should be stimulated--with Federal subsidies, if necessary--to produce, package and merchandise fortified foods in new forms--fortified soft drinks, for example--to make them especially appealing to the poor.

There is much more, also, that the medical profession can do in fighting the rigors of hunger. One of the most startling and disturbing revelations before the Senate hunger hearings thus far was that there is a shortage of doctors trained to identify and treat malnutrition. Behind this shortage is a failure of the nation's medical schools to make courses on nutrition an integral part of their curriculum or to encourage students to make field studies of malnutrition in surrounding poverty areas.

All these proposals are contained either in my bill--the so-called Health, Nutrition and Human Needs Bill--or in bills of my Senate colleagues.

Last year, the best that Congress could provide was an extra $55,000,000 for the school-lunch program. This year, Congress plans to authorize $750,000,000 for food stamps alone.

I was particularly gratified that, as this issue went to press, the Senate took the initiative in enacting meaningful hunger reform by rejecting the Food Stamp Bill of the Senate Agriculture Committee in favor of a more ambitious bill cosponsored by Senator George McGovern and me. Our bill, which was passed by a comfortable 54-to-40 margin, would permit the issuing of free food stamps to families earning less than $60 a month. It also would permit the simultaneous issuing of food stamps and commodities in communities that are shifting from commodities to food stamps or establishing food stamps as their first food-assistance program.

The McGovern-Javits Bill also gives the Federal Government power to bypass local authorities who refuse to establish a program and run it adequately: at present, there is no national standard. And finally--recognizing that poor families should not have to spend a greater percentage for food than better-off families--the bill establishes that no family would be required to spend more than one quarter of its income on food stamps.

This was a truly historic action by the Senate--but one that still must be duplicated in the House, where resistance by the tradition-oriented House Agriculture Committee poses a major obstacle.

But there is hope for meaningful action in 1970. There is a bipartisan determination to surge ahead--represented by Senator McGovern, chairman of the so-called Hunger Committee, by me as its ranking Republican member and by the President himself. Most important, the public has been aroused as never before by the specter of starving Americans. A recent national poll attests to this, showing seven out of ten Americans favoring free food stamps for the nation's most impoverished citizens. With this sort of momentum, hunger in the United States may soon be just another conquered American frontier, leading the way toward the final goal of equal rights and equal opportunity for each citizen to his share of the great American dream.