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• About Changing the Face of Hunger
• Q & A with Ambassador Hall
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Tavis: Tony Hall was a 12-term Congressman from Ohio, and the former chair of the House Select Committee on Hunger. And more recently, he served as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies for food and agriculture. His new book is called 'Changing the Face of Hunger, One Man's Story of How Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, and People of Faith are Joining Forces to Help the Hungry, The Poor, and the Oppressed.' Congressman Hall, nice to have you on the program.

Tony P. Hall: Good to be on your program, thank you.

Tavis: Delighted to see you. This subtitle pretty much says it all with regard to what you're trying to get across. 'One Man's Story Of How Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, And People Of Faith Are Joining Forces To Help The Hungry, The Poor, The Oppressed.' Is all that happening?

Hall: It happened with me, and what the story is is about some of the people that have worked with me over the past 25 years. For example, I'm a Democrat. My best friend in the Congress was a Republican by the name of Congressman Frank Wolf. And we met together weekly in a prayer group, just him and I.

We'd pray, and we'd read a little scripture, and we'd talk about our family. We also traveled together. Our wives knew each other; we'd been to Romania together, Sudan, Ethiopia. And it's about some of the things that we did together.

Because obviously, he's a Republican, a conservative, I'm a Democrat. Oftentimes in the, in the Congress, we would vote against one another. But we had decided a long time ago that it would be better if we would not try to get together on what separates us, but what brings us together. So some of the things that brought us together were human rights, hunger, poverty, development assistance. So we decided to concentrate on those things, and work together.

Tavis: What attracted you - I'm always fascinated by people's personal stories, particularly where they're doing righteous work like working on issues of hunger and poverty. What in your background, what about your service attracted you to this particular issue of hunger? Not a sexy topic, to say the least.

Hall: Well, I was in the Peace Corps many years ago. I think that probably helped. But the thing that really got my attention is I went to Ethiopia in 1984, and that's when they were having the great famine, and where 7,000 people were dying every day. And in those days, in the Congress, I was chairman of the subcommittee on international hunger.

And so I decided to go see it for myself. I was the first person from the United States to go. And I was just absolutely stunned. One day, I was about two hours by plane up country from Addis, and I went into Mother Theresa's compound, Sisters of Charity. And as soon as I got in there, the doctor said, come with me, we're going outside.

There are 3,000 people there, they're hungry, they're starving, and we can only handle about five or six children, because they've all brought their children. And I want you to see this. So I went out among the 3,000. They thought I was a doctor. And everybody was holding their child up to me. Please take my child, take my child.

And we could only take six kids that day. All the rest died. And for the next two or three days, I continued to see those kinds of situations in different parts of the country. I never got over that. And coming home on the plane, I just thought to myself, we do a lot of things in life that really don't amount to much.

We do a lot of things in Congress that are sometimes very, very meaningless. And I was gonna concentrate on poverty and hunger in my own country and overseas. And that's what I've been doing the past 25 years.

Tavis: I wanna talk about poverty overseas and in our country. Before I do that and move on, there's a powerful piece of advice that Mother Theresa gave to you that once I read, it absolutely resonated with me. Share it with you.

Hall: Well, she gave me a lot of advice. I was with her once in Calcutta, and we were walking down the street. And Calcutta in those days was just packed full of people. It still is. And it was so amazing being with her, but at the same time, there's so much poverty just right there. And I said, "How can we possibly make a dent?"

Look at this. Look at the poverty here, look at the people, how they live. And to make the point to me, she went to this person who was in the street, and he was kind of lying there, and he was sick, and she got some help, took him home, cleaned him up and loved him, and served him and all kinds of things. Her point was to me, you do the thing that's in front of you.

She said, 'We can't all go to Calcutta. But if we do the thing that's in front of us in Dayton, Ohio, or Los Angeles, or Boise, Idaho, if each one of us did that, we could take care of so many problems in this world.'

Tavis: That's a powerful piece of advice. Do the thing that's in front of you. I think all of us are conflicted and confused, oftentimes, about what to do next, and how to do the thing that's in front of you.

Hall: It's right here. And walk out of this studio here, and find something probably across the street.

Tavis: Yeah. Speaking of doing the thing that is in front of you, when we talk about, to the extent that we do talk about hunger, we tend to focus on hunger outside of our borders. How many of us, how many times a day, a weekend, do we flip the channels and see the stories of 'Feed The Children' and all these other programs that are taking place around the world, where individuals like yourself are doing their part to try to feed hungry children. Why is it that that story, for us, is an international story and not a domestic story? And is that the whole story?

Hall: It's not the whole story. We've got hunger in our own backyard here. We've got it in America. We've probably got 22, 23 million people that go to bed two or three days out of every month without food. These are senior citizens that live on Social Security. But because of medical problems and stuff, they run out of money.

And so they find themselves going to food banks at the end of the month. Same way with women and children. The lady works hard, she probably makes a wage a little bit over minimum wage, but by the time she pays her rent and she pays her utilities and maybe some childcare, she's out of money. And we have 22 to 23 million of these that, that go to bed two or three days out of every month.

We don't see these people. These aren't people that you see driving downtown. These aren't people that are begging. These aren't people that are asking for a handout. These are people that feel bad that they're in that kind of a situation. And there's 22, 23 million of them. The first thing we ought to be able to do in our own country is take care of our own problem. There shouldn't be anybody, ever, go to bed in this country hungry.

Tavis: Let me cut in right there, Congressman, 'cause I'm curious to that point, why it is, then, when we do talk about hunger, when we do see it, to your point, we don't see it. So when we do see it, we see, as I mentioned earlier, these pictures of persons around the globe who are hungry. Children around the globe who are hungry.

Who is behind those choices, those decisions, to show us those pictures? And I'm not arguing that those pictures ought not to be shown. But why, who makes the choice to constantly show me the pictures of hunger around the globe, but I don't see the pictures of Americans who are hungry? Is that a conscious decision? Is it marketing, or what is that?

Hall: I don't know what it is. It has a lot to do with media; it has a lot to do with probably the nonprofit organizations that wanna show something. Hungry people in America are different than hungry people, let's say, in Ethiopia or Sudan. They're different. In Ethiopia and Sudan, they're dying. And they don't have water, they don't have food. I've been to North Korea six times. And they eat weeds. Here in America...

Tavis: Weeds like mulch?

Hall: Like mulch, it's what we call substitute food. And they put it together with weeds and bark and sticks, and they make noodles. And you'll see all these people in North Korea going to hospitals holding their stomach, and you're thinking, well. And it's because you can't digest this substitute food. They do it to fill themselves up, because there's no food in the country.

So, you see those kinds of stories, they're more graphic. We understand those. The lady with the two children who is the working poor who is working in a part of society, but she goes to, at the end of the month, she has no money. So she goes to the food banks. You don't see her. And she doesn't complain. And a lot of news people think those are kind of boring stories. I don't think they are boring stories. I think they're important to tell.

Tavis: So how do we get traction on an issue like this?

Hall: We need a lot more political will, and we need a lot more spiritual will. We need both. And we need education of Americans. I think a lot of Americans really don't believe that we have the kind of hunger that we do in our own country. We have it in almost every city; we have it in a lot of our rural areas. And we have it overseas. We waste 110 million tons of food in this country every year.

Tavis: How much?

Hall: A hundred and ten million tons.

Tavis: We waste.

Hall: We waste it. It doesn't get eaten, it gets thrown out in the grocery store or before it gets to the grocery store it rots, or it's never picked in the field. And that's why we do gleaning projects, where we ask the farmers, could we go in and clean up? Can we take what you don't pick? And I started a program like that in Dayton, Ohio, my hometown, and it lasted for many, many years.

There's a lot of gleaning projects all over the country. And we need a lot more of these kinds of projects. The thing is, all of this hunger is right in front of us. It's what Mother Theresa says, do the thing that's in front of you. Look around. Open your eyes. You'll see it.

Tavis: Let me offer this as an extra question, back to something you said a moment ago. You said we needed more political will, we need more spiritual will. I don't mean to be naïve in asking this question. I think I know what you meant, but I wanna hear it, as I'm sure our listeners do, our viewers do. The political will, the need for more political will, I think I get. We all get pretty easy, we understand that. What did you mean by needing a greater spiritual will?

Hall: I think the faith-based organizations in this country need to do a better job to reach out to the poor. I think that, and I'm a man of faith. I think if you got a church on every corner, why do you need four maybe different food banks? Why don't you just have one? And if the gospel says, and it does, over 2,000 times, it talks about the poor; it talks about the sick; it talks about orphans and widows, the people in prison.

It talks about the elderly; it talks about the alien. And God is very clear about this. He says, 'I want you involved.' All the faiths say that. And a lot of this responsibility really belongs to us, people of faith. And it belongs to individuals; it belongs to churches, synagogues, all faiths. And we need more spiritual will.

Tavis: I guess the moral of the story, or of this book is, as we've discussed here, to do the thing that is in front of you. Do the thing that's in front of you, whatever that might be. The new book by Congressman Tony Hall, 12-term Congressman from Ohio, 'Changing the Face of Hunger.' 'Changing the Face of Hunger.' Congressman, an honor to have you on.

Hall: Thanks, Tavis.

Tavis: And thanks for your work.

Hall: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Up next on this program, Emmy-winning actress Jean Smart. Stay with us.