Feeling The Bite Of Lesson On Hunger

Banquet Simulates Wealth Inequities

Consigned to the floor as one of the poor, St. Mary's College junior Jeff Faith sees fellow students, including Elizabeth Mason, left, dine richly at a linen-draped table as representatives of a wealthy group. (Photos By Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)

As he watched classmate Elizabeth Mason take a sip from a glass goblet, Ian Glasgow could stand it no longer.

"There are three empty spots with salads just sitting there," Glasgow moaned, staring at the plastic cup of rice on his lap. "There is so much food over there, and we're getting almost nothing."

Inequity was the theme of the unusual dinner party on the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland on Wednesday evening. At the campus in Southern Maryland, Mason and four other students, randomly selected from the participants as high-income guests, ate a three-course meal at a linen-covered table.

Across the room, Glasgow and eight others chosen to represent the estimated 60 percent of the world's residents who make $3 or less per person per day sat on the floor scooping brown rice out of plastic cups with their fingers. In the center of the room, those representing the global middle class ate rice and beans with forks. The goal: to experience the problem of world hunger firsthand, if only for two hours.

The St. Mary's "hunger banquet" was one of more than 600 similar events hosted on college campuses and by religious institutions across the country this year. The event, begun by the international aid organization Oxfam America 30 years ago, is intended to illustrate that an estimated 24,000 people die every day from the effects of hunger.

The event made an impression on several students, who continued talking about it for two hours after dinner.

"It's very humbling to see the kind of food we're used to eating pass by us," junior Amanda Ingold said. "I have a better understanding of how it feels to be poor."

"I've always been told I was middle-class, but I eat like this every night," Mason said, gesturing to the spread of spaghetti, salad, bread and cheesecake in front of her. "It puts it all in perspective a little bit."

"It made me understand segregation in the U.S.," said Ngozi Okidegbe, who was assigned to the lowest-income group. "Poor people live in different neighborhoods because it makes people uncomfortable to be in the same neighborhoods all together."

Yet student organizers and Oxfam staff members say that motivating students to translate the awareness of inequity into action can be a frustrating effort. "What's hard with college students is they want to do things that have immediate effects," said Nidhi Bouri, a University of Maryland junior who has coordinated two hunger banquets at the College Park campus.

Participation in community service activities is at record levels on college campuses, according to several recent studies, but students are significantly more likely to work on projects that will enable them to see tangible results quickly. Many of the most popular outreach efforts at College Park and St. Mary's involve tutoring younger students or other activities involving children, students said.

"When you have something like a hunger banquet where there's no direct action component, you have to make the next step easy to see," said Nancy Delaney, Oxfam America's fast and outreach manager. "Students in particular sometimes see issues of poverty and hunger as overwhelming."

At St. Mary's, students grilled faculty speaker Zach P. Messitte on what they could do to help solve the world's hunger problem.

"Most of us are not going to be able to go to Ethiopia to actually hand food to someone in need," Messitte said. "We have to find little ways to repair the world, because the big ways are impossible."

The political science professor encouraged students not to become discouraged, pointing them toward volunteer opportunities at a men's shelter and soup kitchen in Lexington Park close to the campus, and noting their ability to contribute money to larger organizations or to write letters to politicians.

Bouri said she erred when she organized her first hunger banquet last year by not providing ways for people to become involved. This year, she and the banquet co-chair asked a dozen campus groups to prepare displays about their efforts against world hunger and distributed copies of a flier they wrote: "10 Things You Can Do to Change the World."

"It is a hard sell, because there's no immediate visible effect," she said. "But I feel so strongly that the little things make a difference. If I get one person that actually starts thinking about this stuff and donates their loose change, it's worth it to me."