Monte Belmonte — the radio host of WRSI The River — walked for two days, over three counties and 43 miles to raise enough money so that the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts could serve a million meals to his hungry neighbors. This was the 10th Monte’s March, which begins in Springfield and ends in Greenfield.
A week after the march, I met Monte to talk about how he got interested in hunger, a social condition that should be anachronistic. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that the world has almost a trillion hungry people, most of whom cannot anticipate their next meal.
There is nothing more horrible than hunger. Money is so easily raised to prevent banks from liquidation; but when it comes to hunger, homelessness and illiteracy, governments beholden to the rich throw up their hands and say that there is no money. It is left to people like Monte to motivate the rest of us to raise the funds to do the work that tax dollars should do.
When Monte was in seventh grade, his teacher told him that overpopulation was the cause of poverty and hunger. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” which made this influential — and false — argument.
Humans produce sufficient amounts of food for our numbers. People are hungry not because there are too many of us, but because hundreds of millions of people do not have enough money to buy food. In addition, one third of all food produced is either lost during processing and transport or wasted. Inequality, not overpopulation, is the cause of hunger.
Monte’s teacher asked the class to imagine Kolkata in far-off India; the people in that city are hungry, he said, because there are too many of them. Ehrlich had also made a connection to India. His book opens in Delhi, with Ehrlich writing of the presence of people everywhere — people visiting, arguing and screaming, wrote Ehrlich. People, people, people.
If you know Monte, then you know that he loves people. He’d like to be among those people: visiting, arguing and screaming. It is hard to walk with Monte anywhere along the Pioneer Valley and not have someone greet him. Even if people don’t listen to The River, they know Monte. And they like him. And he likes people, and he likes to see things for himself.
That seventh grade teacher’s statements stayed with Monte as he went to college, where he learned — in his first year — of a program to go to Kolkata. He jumped at the chance, going for a month in the winter of 1996-97, and then for four months in the summer of 1998.
In Kolkata, Monte worked with the Missionaries of Charity, who — founded by Mother Teresa — work among the destitute and the dying. His experiences are vivid: to feel the breath of a human being as you give them emergency respiration and then listen to them slowly die; to bathe a man with such terrible sores that you can only carry him to his bath by his elbows.
“Humility teaches you a lot about yourself,” Monte told me recently.
Ten years ago, the Food Bank approached Monte to help them raise money. Monte agreed and went from shop to shop in Northampton with a cart, trying to raise money. This was insufficient.
The point was not to raise money alone, but to engage the community in an exercise around its values. To passively drop money into a bucket is not the way to build a community; to get people to join in an effort to eradicate something as outrageous as hunger was always the goal.
Monte began with a march from Northampton to Greenfield, but when he heard of the “food deserts” in Springfield, he lengthened the march southward. Congressman James McGovern joined, but so did schoolchildren and teachers, nurses and the rest of us (including the head brewer from Northampton Brewery, who now does his parallel Donald’s Dash).
One in nine children in Massachusetts do not know where their next meal will come from — that is why children, teachers and school nurses are so seized of this issue.
Each year, state Rep. Aaron Vega, D-Holyoke, meets Monte’s March in Holyoke. Vega has consistently pushed for legislation in Boston on issues of food insecurity. This year, thanks to Vega and others in the House and Senate, the Massachusetts government passed a bill to provide “Breakfast After the Bell” for all public K-12 schools that have 60% or more students eligible for reduced-price or free meals.
There is more to be done, but this is a good start. A truly civilized society would provide free meals in school for all its young students so that no one goes hungry and no one feels stigmatized when their tray comes into the classroom.
“I had to see this with my own eyes,” Monte told me about his first trip to India. He wanted to go to the city of my birth and see what it meant to be poor. But poverty lingers in places you do not expect, places such as Massachusetts. He went halfway around the world to understand suffering, and now finds it right in front of his own eyes.
Vijay Prashad, who lives in Northampton, was born and raised in Kolkata (India). He is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.