'A Place at the Table'

Tom Colicchio in "A Place at the Table." (February 27, 2013)




And they visit the hungry themselves —11-year-old Rosie, in rural Colorado, a bright kid living with three generations of her family, all of them working, in a tiny house. She's struggling in school because there isn't enough to eat, because school lunch programs are decades behind inflation in their budgeting. Her teacher is sympathetic, because she too endured this sort of childhood.

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We learn about food deserts, those corners of rural and urban America with no access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Millions live in those. Millions more pay the price for having to eat cheaply. Their calories come from the most affordable, most available and least healthy foods out there, leading to obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

And there are villains, an outdated farm subsidy program that lobbyists have engineered to serve only giant agri-businesses, which focus on corn, soy and wheat, the products used in the vast array of cheap, unhealthy processed foods. And then members of Congress, in Big Agra's thrall, show up to hearings about the subject and whine about the (tiny) cost of school and senior citizen breakfast and lunch programs. Colicchio's "Top Chef" show had its contestants try to prepare meals based on the money allocated, per pupil, for such lunch programs. They couldn't.

"A Place at the Table" revisits the 1968 TV documentary "Hunger in America" that prompted President Richard Nixon and the Democratic Congress of the day to declare a "war on Hunger." By 1980, hunger was all but vanquished in "the richest country on Earth." Then Ronald Reagan was elected on a platform of "the hungry deserve it," one expert says. Thirty years later, 1 in 6 Americans can be classified as hungry.

"We're in denial about this," says Bridges, who helped found the End Hunger Network in the '80s. Expert after expert points to the real costs of this short-sighted approach to hunger — underachieving kids who grow into underachieving adults, fresh burdens to the health care system because of poor diet.

It's a beautifully shot and reasonably balanced film, but one that struggles to find a hopeful note to end on. Perhaps if every member of Congress did what House member Jim McGovern attempted — live for a week on what food stamps and food assistance programs provide — objections to offending Big Agra and its lobbyists would turn into solutions.

'A Place at the Table' -- 3 stars
MPAA rating:
PG (for thematic elements and brief mild language)
Running time:
Opens: Friday