My wife and I conduct a Vacation Bible School outreach from our Church to an inner city church in Chattanooga. You would be surprised at the number of malnurished kids that attend VBS just to be there for the snacks. Many of these kids have parents in jail for drug offenses. If the parents are not in jail, they are spending upward of $1,000 per week, or more, for illegal drugs. That doesn't leave much for groceries for the kids.
I don't know what the answer is, but I sure as hell know that The war on drugs is part of the problem.

I agree completely. When I see a bunch of skinny people in line at Wal-Mart using their food stamps, then I might believe crap like this. But when I go to Wal-Mart and see poor looking people in line at McDonalds, I can't help but cry foul on these stats.

Let me tell you what happened in my house. I went to the grocery store and bought over $300 of food. We were supporting six......3 were teens.

The entire back end of the station wagon was filled with sacks. It took over an hour to put the food away. I was preparing dinner.

The teens came home from school, opened the pantry and announced.....there was nothing to eat!

I remember other studies with similarly misleading conclusions. One was talking about the number of children who don't konw where their next meal is coming from. I don't know where my next meal is coming from! Maybe Wendy's, maybe CPK, maybe I'll go get Rudy's BBQ. I guess I must be a charity case.

Dinesh D'Souza's dad came from India
to observe the horrible conditions of
the poor in the US of A.

After a few weeks of observations
and discussions with the poor he
was surprised that "Unlike the poor
in most countries of the world where
they are generally skinny or starving, the Poor in the US are generally fat
or overweight!

After that revelation, the D'Souza
family migrated to the US.
the US---

You hit the nail on the head! Most teenagers will say they are hungry about 1 hour after their last meal! Seems to me we would all be better off if we allowed ourselves to be a little hungry every day!

The real peoblem being overlooked - about children in public schools - is not that they are hungry.

It is that the schools no longer require them to exercise. They don't even require them to take PE. When I was in school, we were required to take PE and exercise each day. There was even a presidential exercise program.

Today, kids don't have to take physical education each quarter. They also have soft drinks available via vending machines and some schools even have a fast food restaurant inside the cafeteria.

So the kids don't exercise and they have fast food for lunch, and a large percentage of them are on antidepresants and/or ADD drugs. There are so many fat kids - and people wonder why.

It really should be that kids are getting a better education than in years past. That is not the case. In years past, education included teaching kids to take care of their bodies via exercise. I was mostly educated in public schools - but they were much better back then.

Schools now-a-days are breeding grounds for obesity and drug use.

As Neal says correctly, "Sending your child to a public school is child abuse".

I was reading the Houston paper where they run the daily "sob story" in December. One of the recent ones was a single mother who was "a stay at home mom" If you are a single parent, you CANNOT be a stay at home mom. Get a damn job and stop making me pay for your illegitmate kids.

how can we have "hungry" children when America has by far the highest obesity rate among kids?

Like Robbins Mitchell, I have seen "hungry children" ads on TV as far back as I can remember.

What happened to those children we were supposed to send in money for? Did they die? Did they grow up on the $21 per month we sent in? Are they business executives? Are they the parents of the hungry children we are supposed to send in money for now?

If we knew 20 or 30 or 40 years ago that there were starving children, why are people still having children, apparently so many that it is a world crisis now as it supposedly was then?

I could probably muster up some "give a crap" if I wasn't sure their parents had satellite TV, smokes, a six pack, and mobile phones.

I'm all for feeding kids. No kid should starve. However, if I have to take care of your kid then your kid is mine, not yours. Any parent unable to care for their children, and that includes financially, needs to forfeit their parental rights.

but I can't eat a whole one.

Since he is a wrestler, he has to closely watch his weight. So once the season starts, he is hungry almost every night.