Hungry in Tennessee

The Chicago Tribune today ran a Washington Post story about a bus in Tennessee that drives around poverty-stricken areas giving free food to children during summer vacation - when they're not getting free food at school.

I believe a lot of these children's home situations are miserable, but I wonder how reliable the story is. I was struck by two examples, from a single paragraph.

One young lady was described this way: "Desperation had become their permanent state, defining each of their lives in different ways. For Courtney, it meant she had stayed rail thin, with hand-me-down jeans that fell low on her hips."

Here's her picture, giving Mountain Dew to her baby sister:



Would you call this young lady "rail thin"? For a 13 year old girl, she appears, to me, to be at a perfectly healthy weight.

As for jeans that "fell low on her hips", I don't think that's because her hips have wasted away. They're hand-me-down jeans. I bet they never fit her in the first place.

Here's the next sentence: "For Taylor, 14, it meant stockpiling calories whenever food was available, ingesting enough processed sugar and salt to bring on a doctor’s lecture about obesity and early-onset diabetes, the most common risks of a food-stamp diet."

So, a "food-stamp diet" causes obesity and early-onset diabetes? What is a food-stamp diet? It's whatever food the stamp-recipient wants to buy, isn't it? There's really no such thing as a food-stamp diet, is there?

And can you really become obese from not having enough food around?

Of course, being hungry is perfectly compatible with being obese. Obese people, statistically, are often hungry.

I have a hunch
that providing free lunch
does less good
than you'd think it would.