Karen Heller: Expert: Hunger has more to do with opportunity than with food

In the richest country in the world, in the fertile agricultural state of Pennsylvania, people go hungry.

In Philadelphia, where 5,000 rowhouse-size parcels at 1,200 locations have been made verdant by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, some neighborhoods resemble green acres.

Gardens of produce thrive in Kensington and West Philadelphia. Urban farmers, almost all women, harvest crops while teaching teenagers the value of dirty hands and fresh nutrition. There appears to be enough arable land to feed the city.

"It's very hard for us to wrap our brains around this problem," says the Food Trust's Yael Lehmann, one of many inspiring Philadelphians grappling with the issues related to hunger. "We live in a country where there's a lot of food, so how can this be happening?"

I thought Mariana Chilton, the Drexel public health professor and a national authority on poverty, might champion a campaign for a more agrarian Philadelphia as a solution to hunger while potentially providing jobs.

"Eliminating hunger has nothing to do with food," she tells me. "If you really want to treat hunger, you have to make sure that every poor child has the same opportunity as every other child."

By the time people need the food pantry or soup kitchen, the system has failed.

The ravages of poverty begin early. The Inquirer's Josh Goldstein reported Monday an astonishing discovery: In 2008 in Philadelphia and surrounding counties, there were more infant deaths than homicides.

And there were far too many homicides.

Those 410 preventable deaths during a child's first year were due to a fury of societal ills - inadequate diet, health care, safety, and education, all enveloped by crushing poverty.

It's unforgivable, a statistic more common in the developing world than a region blessed with great hospitals.

We're coming to the close of a punishing political campaign season. Many candidates and their supporters have unleashed their wrath at the government spending our money when voters have less.

And in hard times, the poor make convenient targets. They're easy to blame. Almost three of four Americans, according to a Pew Research Center study, believe "poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs."

But poverty, as I've noted before, is the problem we all own. We end up paying for poverty through increased demands on health care, education, and public safety. You can't wish the issue away.