At a special summit meeting in Washington, Vice President Al Gore delivered a speech in which he decried hunger in America. Declaring that "All is not right with America," Gore announced that there are "millions of Americans ... who are simply not getting enough to eat" because they cannot "figure out how to make ends meet, how to get food on the table." What's more, chronic hunger routinely causes children to lay awake at night, tormented by a "sore pain." This problem is "appalling," a "tragedy," a "blight on our nation's soul." Gore concluded, "We cannot stand by and let people in this nation starve." Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman likewise determined that one in three children "live in families that do constant battle with hunger" and are "at constant risk of malnutrition and the lifetime of chronic illness that can accompany it."

But the Centers for Disease Control's "National Health and Nutrition Survey" has found no significant nutritional deficiency in any segment of the nation's population. Another CDC report notes that life expectancy is at an all-time high, with infant mortality at a corresponding low point—considerably less than half what it was in 1970. Even the poorest Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than middle-class Europeans. The CDC also notes that obesity is a growing concern, its rate having roughly doubled among children and increased to 35 percent for American adults—up from 25 percent. Other federal statistics consistently establish the prevalence of obesity among poorer Americans. Chronic malnutrition is statistically almost undetectable, and is correlated not so much with poverty but with alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, and child abuse.

The study that prompted the hunger summit—what Gore called "the first-ever baseline study of the scope of hunger in America"—was a joint project of the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services. However, the authors of the study did not claim it measured hunger per se, since by their estimation, measurements of the "physical sensation caused by a lack of food" do not provide "sensitive indicators" of any problem as it is "primarily experienced in the U.S. context." Instead, a sample of American households was asked 58 questions designed to measure "characteristic affective states"—anxiety and uncertainty—involving food budgets and consumption. At any point in the past 12 months, did you have time to restock the refrigerator before running out of essential goods? Did you ever eat "less than you felt you should," or a low-cost meal for purposes of economy? Bolstering reports of budget anxiety was the fact that the survey was administered from April 16 through April 22, right after tax time. Not surprisingly, the report concluded that there are 11.9 million "food insecure" households in the United States, comprising a whopping 34.7 million citizens living with "resource-constrained hunger"—about one in seven Americans.

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