Four years after the United States entered the so-called second world war, Gen. Lewis H. Hershey, head of the Selective Service System — the draft – in an appearance before the U.S House of Representatives Agriculture Committee, stated that, in the words of The New Yerk Times, “as many as 40 percent of rejected draftees had been turned away owing to poor diets.” According to Hershey, “Whether we are going to have war or not, I do think that we have got to have health if we are going to survive.”

A year after Hershey’s 1945 warning, the House, in a bipartisan move, approved the National School Lunch Act which affirmed that it was “the policy of Congress, as a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and wellbeing of the nation’s children.” The National School Lunch Program was born.

In the ensuing 60 years or so, several federal programs have been implemented to help low-income families cope with food insecurity and do so with healthy diets. They benefit families at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line which, for this year, ranges from $19,720 for a family of two to $32,470 for a family of five and include free school lunches.

Yet, after six decades, the military was still having trouble finding well-fed young American men and women to serve in the armed forces. By 2009, more recruits were being turned away, this time for obesity than for any other medical reason, according to the Department of Defense. A letter signed by dozens of retired generals and admirals said the potential recruits were “too fat to fight,” The Times reported.

This issue has taken center stage with the refusal by 15 states, including Florida, all run by Republican governors, to enroll in the new and permanent Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer Program for Children (Summer EBT). They rejected money to pay for lunches for a combined 8.5 million low-income children during summer when classes are out and free or subsidized school lunches are unavailable. Each state would have received $120 for each eligible child.

In Florida, the Ron DeSantis administration took a pass on $259 million, even though, as Sky Beard, Florida director of No Kid Hungry, told WUSF, “More than three-quarters of Floridians reported it was harder to buy food this year than last, due to the increasing costs of food and other essentials.” Thirty-five states, all five U.S. territories and four Indigenous nations which opted in will receive a total of $2.5 billion.

But rejection of Summer EBT, callous as it was, is merely symptomatic of the attitude of some politicians towards poverty in general.

The national poverty rate is 12.4 percent — 45 million people – which is an increase from 7.4 percent in 2021 and the child poverty rate is around 14 percent, up from nine percent. For more than half the Southern states, the child poverty rate is at least 18 percent. As for the 15 states that boycotted the Summer EBT program, Mississippi has the highest child poverty rate in the nation, 27 percent, and 19.1 percent overall, followed by Louisiana, with 27 percent for children and 18.6 overall. Florida’s child poverty rate is 20 percent, numbering 753,000, and 12.7 percent overall.

Providing aid for food-insecure Americans is one way to address poverty – and the Summer EBT is intended to help minimize that problem – but there is more to it than just food insecurity and obesity, which are merely symptoms.

Medicare, the federal program introduced in 1965, helps those who cannot afford health care. But it does not cover millions of poor people, a problem which the 2010 Affordable Care Act is designed to address. The law allows the federal government to provide states with billions of dollars to expand their existing Medicaid program. However, the governor of 10 states, including Florida – again – and some who rejected the Summer EBT have refused to apply for the Medicare funds, thus depriving millions more of their citizens the opportunity to access to affordable health care.

Then there is the federal minimum wage, which was set at $7.25 an hour 15 years ago. Some states have refused to increase it to the so-called “livable” amount of at least $15, even though, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch, “there is a direct link between child poverty in 20 states which have not done so and child poverty.” Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee have no set rate and, for Georgia and Wyoming, it is less than $7.25 per hour. Thirty states and Washington, D.C., have minimum rates above the federal level.

Inevitably, African Americans are especially hard hit. Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told the Iowa Capitol Dispatch that “lawmakers made political deals to omit African Americans from the 1930s labor rights gains, which benefited Southern Democrats of the time,” as the newspaper put it. Zipperer blamed it on the “legacy of racism.”

So, too, does Harvard health expert Sara Bleich, who sees the specter of “institutional racism” hovering over official policies dealing with poverty and traces it back to the nation’s “original sin” of slavery. She shared her views during a discussion on obesity with Paul Massari, a Harvard communication official.

Bleich defines as obese a person fivefoot four-inches tall who weighs 174 pounds or more and those “carrying about an extra 100 pounds.” Millions of Americans fall into that category, costing the healthcare system billions of dollars annually, according to Bleich, a professor of health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She served as a nutrition adviser with the Obama and the Biden administrations.

Studies have shown, Bleich said, that 57 percent of today’s 2-year-olds will become obese by the time they are 35 and it would be “higher among Black and

brown kids once they became adults, versus white kids.” The primary cause, she said is “too many calories,” not genetics. Those unwanted calories result from “laws and rules and practices that are sanctioned, and even implemented, by various levels of government and potentially embedded in the economy and social norms.”

Disparities seen in obesity and other diet-related diseases “are associated with decades of structural limitations to retail food outlets that sell healthier foods,” Bleich said. “If you just drive through various neighborhoods, you can easily see the differences in the types of grocery stores that are available.” Flood companies, she said, “directly target Black and brown populations with marketing for unhealthy food.”

Bleich also pointed to “real and perceived systemic racism when care is sought.” For example, Medicaid provides health insurance to about 80 million low-income people annually and is federally funded. But states administer the program and “only a handful of Medicaid state agencies cover all the components of obesity treatment and only some cover bariatric surgery” to treat obesity.

Medicaid agencies, Bleich added, “are required to cover nearly all medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration but anti-obesity medications have been excluded from this requirement. As a result, “coverage remains optional and sporadic” even though there is “strong evidence about effective obesity treatments” and endorsements by major professional associations.

Explaining why he rejected Summer EBT for his state, Nebraska’s Gov. Jim Pillen told the Lincoln Journal Star newspaper, “I don’t believe in welfare.” Iowa’s Gov. Kim Reynolds proclaimed, “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”

Such protestations would ring less hollow if governors are promoting effective anti-poverty policies. But that will mean going against their ideology and it will not happen in this time of acute partisanship. They should be criticized for rejecting Summer EBT but so also should all political leaders who snub the poor. As for those who profess to be Christians, they should remember what the Bible says in Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Or a woman.