There's not enough food in Imani Sullivan's life.
At home, Sullivan, 31, often doesn't set a fork for herself at the table so that her sons, ages 3 and 10, can eat.
Naturally diminutive, Sullivan looks frail these days. She has dropped 15 pounds since losing her part-time janitor job during the summer.
Each family meal feels like an obligation she cannot meet, a daily burden multiplied by three.
"It makes me feel like less of a mom not to have food," she says in her mother's North Philadelphia apartment, suddenly overcome by the hardship. Tears form in her eyes. "Every day, I walk into a brick wall. No bricks fall - there's no dust, no crumbling. Just the wall. It never moves."
The hunger in Sullivan's house is distressingly commonplace throughout the area of Philadelphia where she lives: Pennsylvania's First Congressional District.
At a time when more people in America are suffering from hunger, the First Congressional District is one of the hungriest, second only to the Bronx, N.Y., according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, an ongoing national poll done in conjunction with the Food Research and Action Center in Washington.
Meanwhile, U.S. Census data released in late September show that the district, with a poverty rate of nearly 29 percent in 2009, is among the 10 poorest in the United States, and poorer than any other district in Pennsylvania.
The district is a bizarrely drawn, serpentine coil along the Delaware River that includes parts of North, West, and South Philadelphia, as well as Chester. Represented by Democrat Bob Brady since 1998, it encompasses the urban opulence of Society Hill and the ground-down, teeming precincts of Kensington. There's also West Oak Lane, Frankford, Fishtown, Northern Liberties, Queen Village, and Overbrook, among others.
Its population is about 650,000, like most House districts. But this one has more troubles than most, helping to make Philadelphia the poorest of America's 10 biggest cities.
The consequences of having such a poor and hungry place in its midst can be catastrophic for a city, whose young people risk being developmentally compromised by a dearth of nutritious food in their first years.
"Too many families here must choose between rent and food," said Renee Turchi, a pediatrician at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in the First District. "Lack of food hurts brain development in young children. Without enough food for our kids, we are fostering a cycle of failure for the entire city."
