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To get to know her students better, an Olympia-area elementary school teacher recently asked them what they had had for supper the night before.

When his turn came, one little boy said he didn't have anything to eat; that it was his turn to miss a meal because his parents couldn't afford to feed his family.

My thought processes stopped for a moment when Robert Coit, the executive director of the Thurston County Food Bank, related the story to me.

Then I tasted anger.

Don't get me wrong; I am not some bleeding heart liberal in search of a cause.  On the contrary, I have a heart as hard as a blacksmith's hammer when it comes to earning what I want for me and mine.

This doesn't make me a Wall Street lackey - it just characterizes me as ambitious and gives me the ability to provide for others and myself.

But I draw a line at hunger.  No one in this country - the richest in the world - should go to bed hungry.  This is about a human need and right.

It doesn't matter that some adults have made decisions that have put themselves and any children they may have produced at the mercy of hunger.

Stupidity and hunger sometimes share the same ride to work, if you know what I mean.

Unemployment is more than happy to drive the car.

"The unemployed fuel the rising numbers of the hungry we see today," Coit added. 

According to the federal government's numbers, one in six Americans suffers from what is euphemistically referred to as "food insecurity."

What? Insecurity? Please. Spare me the verbal pabulum.

Hunger is hunger, damnit, and calling it anything else is as intellectually dishonest as it is cowardly.

Nationwide, 19.5 percent of Americans live in hunger.  Almost 14 million children go to bed hungry, and over three million of them are under the age of 5.

Hunger is a capricious and growing bastard that cripples lives.

"What we do in society today to address the issue of hunger is a band aid only," Elisabeth Schafer, a retired nutrition professor and volunteer at the Thurston County Food Bank, told me as she helped a young couple with a small child.

"Hunger hurts children; they need nutrition to grow and learn; we all have an investment in this; children are the future."

Cliché aside, Schafer's verbal arrow found its mark.

Helen McGovern, executive director of the Emergency Food Network in Pierce County, drove the point in deeper.

"18.2 percent of the clients we serve are children."  Then to add insult to the tragedy that anyone in this country is hungry, she added, "Another 24 percent of those we help are senior citizens."

Young, old and, yes, for those in-between, hunger doesn't give a damn.

In August, the network served 833,000 individuals.  During the first nine months of this year, more than 12 million pounds of food has been distributed.

That amount - like a person struggling to stay afloat - barely keeps families fed.

In both Pierce and Thurston counties, the number of people needing food continues to rise.

Coit and McGovern both pointed to bad life choices and the train wreck of an economy derailed at 9.2 percent unemployment as the reasons for more Americans needing help to feed themselves and their children.

"This is the front-line of fighting hunger," Marcus Stoll told me as we stood in a small, crowded room at the FISH Food bank at the United Methodist Church in Lakewood.  "Look around you, these people need food."

They did and they do.

I wondered about the little boy who routinely skips supper and goes to bed hungry to help his family.

My anger has a nasty aftertaste.

Want to help? Visit www.efoodnet.org or www.thurstoncountyfoodbank.org.

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