"It's very helpful," Noble said. Then, sounding bewildered, she added in a low tone, "Things are just totally different for me."
Recession and unemployment have been radically changing lives throughout Philadelphia and its suburbs, pushing more residents toward hunger. Yet, said Bill Clark, executive director of Philabundance, people still have a hard time believing that suburbanites suffer from hunger much as inner-city residents do.
"There are degrees of severity of hunger, much like degrees of severity of heart disease. In the suburbs, we see a lot of 'angina' and 'extreme high blood pressure,' if not 'cardiac arrest,' " Clark said, extending the metaphor. "We're not seeing people starving in the suburbs. But it's a slow drain on the health of the community."
Some suburbanites also are facing an increasing psychological burden, "an anger that it's not fair they should face hunger," Clark added. "Many did what society says to do - get educated, get trained, buy a house - and they don't know why they're in this situation. But they are."
To more accurately assess hunger in the suburbs as well as the cities, Feeding America, the nation's largest hunger-relief charity, recently released a first-of-its-kind estimate of food insecurity catalogued by U.S. counties.
A person who is food-insecure lacks access to enough food for a healthy life. Philabundance belongs to Feeding America's network of 200 antihunger agencies.
Delaware County, where Noble lives, has an estimated food insecurity rate of 12.5 percent of the population, meaning that 69,260 people there are food-insecure.
Philadelphia's rate is 20.4 percent, while Camden County's is 14.7 percent.
