Karen Heller: Expert: Hunger has more to do with opportunity than with food

In the richest country in the world, in the fertile agricultural state of Pennsylvania, people go hungry.

In Philadelphia, where 5,000 rowhouse-size parcels at 1,200 locations have been made verdant by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, some neighborhoods resemble green acres.

Gardens of produce thrive in Kensington and West Philadelphia. Urban farmers, almost all women, harvest crops while teaching teenagers the value of dirty hands and fresh nutrition. There appears to be enough arable land to feed the city.

"It's very hard for us to wrap our brains around this problem," says the Food Trust's Yael Lehmann, one of many inspiring Philadelphians grappling with the issues related to hunger. "We live in a country where there's a lot of food, so how can this be happening?"

I thought Mariana Chilton, the Drexel public health professor and a national authority on poverty, might champion a campaign for a more agrarian Philadelphia as a solution to hunger while potentially providing jobs.

"Eliminating hunger has nothing to do with food," she tells me. "If you really want to treat hunger, you have to make sure that every poor child has the same opportunity as every other child."

By the time people need the food pantry or soup kitchen, the system has failed.

The ravages of poverty begin early. The Inquirer's Josh Goldstein reported Monday an astonishing discovery: In 2008 in Philadelphia and surrounding counties, there were more infant deaths than homicides.

And there were far too many homicides.

Those 410 preventable deaths during a child's first year were due to a fury of societal ills - inadequate diet, health care, safety, and education, all enveloped by crushing poverty.

It's unforgivable, a statistic more common in the developing world than a region blessed with great hospitals.

We're coming to the close of a punishing political campaign season. Many candidates and their supporters have unleashed their wrath at the government spending our money when voters have less.

And in hard times, the poor make convenient targets. They're easy to blame. Almost three of four Americans, according to a Pew Research Center study, believe "poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs."

But poverty, as I've noted before, is the problem we all own. We end up paying for poverty through increased demands on health care, education, and public safety. You can't wish the issue away.

Poverty is the enemy of progress and growth, holding America back. It holds back our region, too. When nearly a quarter of Philadelphia's residents are mired below the national poverty level, we neglect the issue at our own peril.

The macro solution - the great cure for poverty and, indeed, most current economic woes - is providing jobs.

"When you save lives, you save money," says Project HOME's Sister Mary Scullion. "With homelessness, you pay for it with prisons, police, and shelter. It's less expensive, and you get more payback, to house people. We need an educated workforce for our region to thrive. More jobs means more tax revenue for the city."

We're about to enter the holiday season, the traditional time for food drives. Again, Chilton is blunt about making a difference.

"I hate this season of Thanksgiving and Christmas," she says, "giving so much for a few months, then forgetting about the families for the rest of the year."

Food is always welcome, but much more must be done. "We need to find opportunities to get to know people who are poor, rather than throwing money at a turkey."

Poverty isn't eliminated by a two-month solution. "People are going to have to get a little uncomfortable, and start losing sleep over this," Chilton says. "Spend four hours a week teaching a young child to read, or an adult to use a computer. We need to bend all our talents and give whatever we can. We need to connect with these families."

Nor does Chilton believe that poverty is inevitable, the underclass a persistent presence in American society.

"People are not poor alone. It's not a state of nature," she says. "One of the biggest barriers for the poor is the belief that they're always going to be there and are therefore expendable."

I've been thinking a lot about these issues as candidates offer sound-bite solutions of cutting taxes and advocating smaller government.

No one likes taxes, but systemic cuts don't solve socio-economic problems. They just spill out and tax us in even greater ways. You can't cut your way to a solution.

"There are 44,000 very young children in Philadelphia living at the federal poverty level or lower," Chilton says. "That's about the number of seats in Citizens Bank Park. What if the Phillies got interested in poverty?"

With poverty, "there's not a silver-bullet answer," she says. "It needs to be a major partnership that's not just government, business, banks making loans, individuals."

For all the despair Chilton witnesses, she remains hopeful. "Poverty is a human creation. If you can make it happen, you can undo it."