Mariana Chilton's "The Painful Truth about Hunger in America"

Mariana Chilton is Professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She served as the Co-Chair of the bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger. The commission was tasked with advising Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture about how to end hunger in America. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives numerous times and has served as an advisor to Sesame Street and to the Institute of Medicine.

Chilton applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know--and Start Again, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the crux of the Painful Truth About Hunger in America. It’s the culmination of three chapters that carefully bring the reader to understand how trauma is underneath hunger. My narrative moves from people’s lived experiences revealing the transfer of violence and hunger across the generations to a segment called “violence in numbers.” I show how qualitative and quantitative research intersect and support each other to provide the incontrovertible proof that the greatest adversity at the root of hunger is lovelessness. It’s true that page 99 is the best single page to land. But be careful. I’ve invited you to the edge.

The page is like a simultaneous prism and contraction. It is a prism that shows how generations of adversity can land in a single interview at a single moment in time. I refer people to the appendix that shows an image of how a family’s five generations of adversity land in a single report of hunger. I explain,

This depth of experience that people described helps us to begin to see that violence across the generations is associated also with historical, social, and political experiences, which I address in the following chapters.

It is also a contraction, where I show how quantitative research, which reduces people’s experiences to numbers, can sometimes squeeze out people’s humanity. Describing how our quantitative interviews work in the emergency room at the children’s hospital, I say

Often, full stories emerge; sometimes there are tears—mom’s tears or the baby’s—but the survey instrument is a tight mesh sieve, straining out anything quantitative researchers consider extraneous, tears included.

Here, I demonstrate that the suffering of hunger often gets missed or disregarded, because people focus on food access rather than listen for deeper clues. Or they refuse to understand people’s pain. What I found in the numeric research was that people who reported they were depressed and had multiple adverse childhood experiences such as abuse, neglect, or family hardship, are more than thirty times as likely to report hunger.

That contraction creates tension that pushes people to turn the page, where one drops into the middle of the book to learn that one adversity in particular, emotional neglect or feeling unloved, was most associated with hunger.

Because of that lovelessness, we are summoned to find great inner strength and collective courage to bring more love into the world. We can do this through political approaches, such as reparations for slavery and universal basic income, through personal work, by ending our tendency to try to dominate or discriminate against people, and spiritual growth, where we strive to act with compassion and equanimity.

So, yes, please come to the edge with me on page 99. We can leap into action from there.

Visit Mariana Chilton's website.

--Marshal Zeringue