The Jerusalem Post
Food Insecurity
June 25, 2004

By Larry Derfner

The elementary school kids have already eaten their charity lunch - hot dogs, noodles, cooked vegetables, salad, bread and fruit-flavored drink. Now they are learning and playing calmly in the after-school program run by the Rishon Lezion Hesder Yeshiva. The children are sensitive about their poverty, especially when it comes to food, so it is suggested that I relay my questions about what they eat at home to a young woman doing her National Service with the program, and she will ask about a half-dozen kids.
Do their mothers give them a sandwich to take to school for the morning break? "They said, 'Sometimes yes, sometimes no,'" says the National Service volunteer, Miri Laufer.
What do they eat for dinner? "One said he eats bread and has something to drink.
Another said he has meatballs, pasta, rice..." Are they hungry in school? "They said some of the kids in school are... No, they didn't say anything about themselves," Laufer adds.
Einat Levy, who oversees the after-school program, tells of kids going for days on nothing but cornflakes or pasta and ketchup. When the daily hot lunches arrive at the classroom - delivered by the food charity Hazon Yeshaya, which provides some 4,000 meals to schoolchildren in Rishon Lezion and Jerusalem - she says, "The kids wolf the food down."
Can it be said that these children - except maybe the lucky one who gets meatballs for dinner - suffer from hunger? Not by Sierra Leone or Bangladesh standards - they're not starving to death for want of what to eat.
"It's what we define as 'food insecurity,'" says Dr. Dorit Nitzan Kaluski, director of the Health Ministry's Food and Nutrition Administration. "They get enough calories; in fact we've found that poor Israelis eat more calories than those who aren't poor. But it's empty calories, with insufficient nutrients - bread, pita, rice, potatoes, corn. They eat it because it's cheap."

A JDC-Brookdale Institute survey published last August found that 22 percent of Israeli families suffer from food insecurity, meaning that they cannot afford to eat nutritiously - with a healthy amount of meat, vegetables and dairy products - on a regular basis.
"The rate of food insecurity in the US, according to yearly studies by the US Department of Agriculture, is half of ours," says Dr. Roni Kaufman, a social work lecturer at Ben-Gurion University who has researched the problem in Israel.

AT THE beginning of this month, Kaufman and two BGU colleagues published a survey of 2,357 parents in the Negev. Seventeen percent of the Jewish parents surveyed said they don't always have two pieces of bread and some sort of filling at home to give their kids for the morning break. Among Beduin parents, 48% said they were in that predicament, the study found.

Aside from obviously making it hard to concentrate in school, undernourishment in the young can lead to iron deficiency in the blood, which, when it occurs in children up to age 3, can retard the development of the brain and reduce the IQ, says Nitzan Kaluski. Food insecurity thus can perpetuate a "cycle" of poverty and academic failure, she notes, adding that studies show a 20-40% rate of iron deficiency among poor Israeli children, compared to a 7-15% rate among children of the middle-class and wealthy.

"When you talk about 'hunger' in Israel, it distracts people's attention from the real problem, which is food insecurity. A lot of people say, 'What are you talking about, there are no children going hungry here.' But if a kid is eating bread and margarine every day, is that enough? Is a diet of potatoes and pasta sufficient for a child's development?" asks Dr. Dorit Segal-Engelchin, who headed the BGU study.
"We see a lot of cases of children with problems stemming from poor nourishment - iron deficiency in the blood, low body weight," says Dr. Eytan Hyam, director of Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba.
"We see it more among Beduin children, but also among Jewish children. In recent years, the incidence of such cases has been rising."

Hazon Yeshaya founder Avraham Israel, the charity's volunteer social worker Devorah Cohen, and a teacher at a Jerusalem-area high school which receives lunches from the charity, all say they first noticed the problem among children about three years ago - when the intifada-fueled recession began.

"It wasn't a problem five years ago," says Kaufman, "but then you started getting high unemployment, and salaries were cut, and there were very deep cuts in child allowances, single-mother allowances and income supplements. People can't live on what they've got."
The most blatant evidence of children in need of nutritious food is the urgency of their response when they see it.

"When we give out containers of hot food to families, sometimes a child will ask for a piece of chicken right there in his hand - he can't wait until he gets home," says Cohen, who works at the charity's soup kitchen in Jerusalem's Mekor Baruch neighborhood. (Hazon Yeshaya operates seven soup kitchens nationwide, and also delivers hot meals daily to 18 schools in Rishon Lezion and 12 in Jerusalem, including four in the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem.)

"At one school we brought the kids cottage cheese with olives in it, and it was like we'd brought them caviar. They were jumping for joy," says Israel. "I bring the meals in my car to the schools, and when the kids see me driving up, they get happy. They gather around me, they follow me, they kiss me," says Wafa Istanbouli, Hazon Yeshaya's volunteer food distributor in east Jerusalem.

MANY ISRAELIS find it hard to believe that there are families who, without wasting their money, do not have enough money to provide their children with the basics of healthy eating, but Cohen says she sees them all the time. "They don't have the money to pay for all the medicines they need, they come in here with their gas, electricity and water cut off because they don't have the money to pay their utility bills, so where are they going to get the money to feed their children properly?" she asks.

She describes a Ukrainian immigrant and mother of five in Jerusalem who admitted to traveling regularly to Mahane Yehuda produce market at the end of the day to "pick up food that had fallen on the ground." The family, which receives daily hot meals from Hazon Yeshaya and sends two children to the charity's free daycare center, lives on the minimum-wage salary the husband earns as a security
guard (about NIS 4,000 a month), plus National Insurance Institute income supplements.

Out of that they pay $520 in monthly rent for a 1-1/2-bedroom apartment in downtown Jerusalem while they wait for one of the coveted, low-rent, government-owned flats to become vacant. A municipal social worker referred the family to Hazon Yeshaya, writing in her report, "The family's income is not enough to meet their most minimal needs. Provision of hot meals would be of great assistance."
Says Cohen: "The mother told me they save money to pay their utility bills, and about all she can afford to buy for her kids is pita. Without charity, there's no way those kids would ever see red meat or chicken."

Cohen also tells of a 14-year-old girl referred to the charity by her teacher. "The teacher told me the girl came up to her crying one day after class, and said she hadn't tasted cooked food in three months, and had been going on bread and white cheese every day."
Her father's acute heart disease, Cohen explains, had forced the family to spend much of its little income on medicines, and the increasing pressure had brought the mother to the point of breakdown, leaving the girl to survive basically on her own.

Until the program was phased out in the 1970s, Israeli public schools provided lunches to pupils. Now it appears that this policy is going to be resumed - to a greater or lesser extent. In the wake of mounting media attention on poverty and hunger, in March the Knesset overwhelmingly agreed to reinstitute school lunches, and a committee headed by MK Avraham Hirschenson is now studying how best to do it.

There are two competing proposals: Labor MK Yuli Tamir's and Shinui MK Etti Livni's program would give a hot lunch to every pupil, to be funded mainly by their families, who would pay NIS 100 a month regardless of how many children they had in school, and with payment exemptions for families earning less than NIS 7,000 a month. Likud MK Ruhama Avraham's plan would provide the lunches for about 300,000 children living in poor neighborhoods, with the money coming from charity foundations and the government.

Meanwhile, the government continues to intervene in Israeli eating habits by way of tax exemptions and price controls on certain basic foods, yet if the intentions are good, the results are mixed, says Nitzan Kaluski. On the good side, she says, no Value Added Tax is charged on fruits and vegetables, and a low maximum price is set on liter bags of milk. But the price controls set on white bread and equally "empty" black bread, as well as on butter, margarine and even certain chocolate puddings, lead many budget-conscious Israelis, especially the poor, to fill their children's diet with far too much of this stuff, she emphasizes.

Says Kaufman: Everybody ran away from the problem [of children too poor to eat decently]. They said, 'It's not a problem, it's not a problem, it's not a problem.' Now the problem has caught up with us."
Says Nitzan Kaluski: "Good morning, Israel."

High School Confidential
By Larry Derfner

More and more Jewish Israeli school children are going hungry, harming their school performance – among other things, reports a Ben Gurion University research paper on poverty.

“Hanna,” a teacher at a Jerusalem-area high school, insists repeatedly that her school not be identified for this article out of fear that it will get around that about 30 of the school's 250 students are receiving daily charity lunches.

"The kids won't talk about being hungry - their pride won't allow it," she says. When Hazon Yeshaya began delivering hot lunches in February of last year, teachers and administrators told students that they were simply a gesture from a friend of the school, and that any pupil in the mood for a meal could show up in the cafeteria at 1 p.m. No mention whatsoever has been made of charity, poverty or hunger.

"One day a rumor went around that the meals were for poor kids who didn't have enough to eat, and on that day nobody showed up for lunch," she notes.

Teachers have a good idea who the hungry kids are.
"We talk to their parents, we see what the child brings from home on a bus trip - we put two and two together," Hanna says. "We see that sometimes they don't bring a sandwich in the morning, or during lunch they'll watch while the other kids are buying food from the machines, or maybe they'll buy a sandwich with one of their friends and split it."
At lunchtime the teachers steer these youngsters to the cafeteria.

"We'll ask them to help set up the tables, or serve the meals, and then we'll say, 'Look, as long as you're here, you might as well eat lunch.'"

The families of the student body are "mainly middle-class, with some below that," Hanna says. She estimates that one in five pupils are hungry. The school lets out at 3 p.m., and there are kids who go all day on a sandwich at 9 a.m. "And there are kids who don't even have that," she adds.

In many cases, peer pressure keeps pupils from eating well even if they could afford to. Bringing breakfast or lunch from home is considered a sign of undue attachment to one's parents - and/or of poverty - so many kids whose parents can't afford to give them money for the machines go hungry instead, says Hanna.

"I'll call up a mother to ask why her child didn't bring food from home, and she'll say, 'I beg him to take a sandwich, but he only wants money.'"

Then there are pupils from poor families who work after school but spend their money on fashionable clothes and other items instead of on their diet. "The most important thing with the kids is to have what everybody else has," she notes.

A teacher at the school for 15 years, Hanna says she and her colleagues first began noticing signs of hunger in the pupils about three or four years ago. "In the last two years it became blatant," she adds.

Now that there are hot lunches for hungry pupils - or at least for 30 of them - she says, "You feel the difference in class. They're a lot calmer, they can sit quietly, they don't get up and ask to leave class every few minutes."