Part Three: Poverty reflects true challenges, not racial differences

We have a serious socio-economical problem that is negatively affecting basic aspects of our children -and we keep masking it with colored tags that do not resolve anything. On the contrary, these problems stereotype, feed discrimination, lower expectations, and fog the important issues that we still need to resolve.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's report "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States" issued September 2009, 39.8 million people were in poverty in 2008. That was an increase from 37.3 million in 2007. The number of people living in poverty has increased by almost 9 million since the 2000 report. This is the highest level since 1960.

What is probably even more alarming is the poverty rate for children (under the age of 18) has increased 1 percent a year to now stand an astonishing 19.0 percent. We know about the various repercussions of poverty in the households: inadequacy of living spaces, issues with health, education, emotional stability, self-esteem, etcetera. But I would like to talk about the basic and fundamental aspect for a quality of life- nutrition.

The department of pediatrics of Boston University School of Medicine states that "it is demonstrable that food insecurity is a prevalent risk to the growth, health, cognitive, and behavioral potential of America's poor and near-poor children. Optimal physiological, cognitive, and emotional development and function in children and adults requires access to food of adequate quantity and quality at all stages of the lifespan".

Lack of adequate food due to constrained household financial resources has been measured by questions assessing "hunger," "risk of hunger," "food insufficiency," and most recently "food insecurity." Food insecurity is defined as "limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways."

The measurement of these concepts has been assessed by the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Department of Agriculture since 1995. Through 18 questions, the Census Bureau obtains the U.S. Food Security Scale (FSS) data in a 10-year time span.

According to the last report, in 2005 there were 35 million people (12.1 percent) living in food-insecure households, 24.3 million in households without hunger, and 10.8 million with hunger. Of the 35 million food-insecure people in the United States in 2005, 12.4 million were children younger than 18 years.

According Boston University Medical Center, "food insecurity can occur and inflict harm at any or all parts of the life cycle.

However, the particular vulnerability of infants and toddlers aged 0-36 months undergoing especially rapid physical growth and neurocognitive development provides a special opportunity for protecting and positively influencing the rest of the life cycle. Moreover, the apparent heightened susceptibility of older girls to the negative effects of food insecurity suggests that decreasing this risk among those who will become mothers of the next generation of children is particularly urgent.

"Of the many interlocking forms of deprivation experienced by poor and near-poor children in the United States, food insecurity is one of the most rapidly remediable by policy changes. Our country, unlike many others in the world, clearly can produce and distribute enough healthful food to all its inhabitants, constrained only by political will."

As previously stated, nutrition is just the tip of the iceberg. We all know about all the detrimental aspects of poverty from mild to desperate self-destructive outcomes. Therefore, every time I see a race-based report showing our children's tests performances and high school dropout indexes, as if it was a matter of color, a sense of despair comes upon me.

Cristina Stumbaugh is a senior. She is majoring in Spanish with a minor in education. Cristina is an incurable optimist whose compasses are justice and human rights. She believes the key for success is believing.