Until recently, few people realized that an estimated ten million people in the United States are chronically hungry. This is a distressing and a disgraceful fact, and one which exposes problems of unbelievable complexity; so complex, in fact, that until 1964, there had been but minimal effort even to understand these problems, much less meet them with commitment and imagination. It has always been expedient to dismiss the poor as shiftless and irresponsible, or to incant the American shibboleth