"We are all really what we eat," Gallagher said at the first hunger symposium organized by Philabundance, the region's largest hunger-relief agency.
Gallagher praised Philabundance's efforts to build an "oasis" in one of this area's largest food deserts - Chester City, which has been without a full-service food market for 10 years.
Philabundance is creating a nonprofit supermarket that will offer free items, like a food pantry, along with low-priced staples.
It should be open within a year, said Bill Clark, executive director of Philabundance, who is putting funding together for the project.
Clark was among those addressing an audience that included antihunger advocates and executives whose companies donate food and money to agencies like Philabundance.
He invoked the latest bad news about the poor, provided by the U.S. Census Bureau this month: In 2010, 15.1 percent of Americans lived in poverty, which represents 2.6 million more people than in 2009. That's a number "greater than the populations of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore combined," Clark said.
Others speakers included Lyn Kugel, a senior director of PathwaysPA, a social service agency in Holmes, Delaware County.
Citing the high costs of housing, food, and child care in the area, Kugel said a single parent with one school-age child and one preschool child would need to make $54,705 annually to live without using public assistance.
"That's startling," Kugel said, saying few single parents in the area make that much money.
Praising the resourcefulness of poor women who learn to shop, deal with public-assistance bureaucracy, and work when they can, Mariana Chilton of Drexel University's School of Public Health said she had seen the "fragility and grace" of mothers suffering from hunger.
