Loretta Schwartz-Nobel

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Loretta Schwartz-Nobel is an American journalist and writer currently living in Pennsylvania. She is known primarily for her advocacy of the disadvantaged families of America.

Schwartz-Nobel achieved national acclaim for her article in the Christmas 1974 issue of Philadelphia magazine, in which she brought attention to the hardships of the poor and destitute living in the otherwise typical American city of Philadelphia. The article proved worthy of the 1975 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award "for outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged."

For the next seven years, Schwartz-Nobel traveled the nation, doing similar research in several other cities, including Boston, Washington, and Chicago, and writing articles for local newspapers and magazines in each city. In 1981, she combined her experiences to form her first novel Starving in the Shadow of Plenty in which she outlined the alarmingly destitute living conditions of America's poor families, focusing especially on the difficulty of obtaining food and the ineffectuality of government welfare programs. Her book, as well as a number of economic factors, contributed to a distinct period of awareness of domestic poverty in the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, concluded that "Hunger is increasing at a frenetic pace and the emergency of food available for distribution is quickly depleted."

After at least fifteen federal agencies acknowledged the existence of a domestic hunger epidemic, Schwartz-Nobel considered her duties as a journalist accomplished. She resigned herself to other subjects, publishing four nonfiction books on unrelated topics. The surge in public awareness of the early 1980's never directly caused any significant political action to alleviate hunger or poverty in the United States. In fact, as early as 1985, the Department of Agriculture insisted that domestic hunger was no longer a problem and that the United States government was already more successful at preventing malnutrition and poverty than any other administration in history. Instead of trying to relieve the problem, Congress reduced funding for nutrition programs by $12 billion. The White House also denied the existence of a problem. President Ronald Reagan himself insited that there was plenty of food available to the poor and that "the hungry are too ignorant to know where to get it." Reagan's words caused a public outcry, to which he responded by admitting his mistake and personally participating in Hands Across America. Shortly thereafter, Congress responded to hunger concerns for the first time since Starving in the Shadow of Plenty by increasing funding for nutrition programs by $5 billion.

In 1996, though, the passage of Contract with America and Welfare to Work laws threatened the availability of funds for America's hungry families once again. Schwartz-Nobel responded by reviving her crusade to put an end to hunger in America. In 2002, her efforts culminated in Growing Up Empty, another muckraking novel sharply critical of federal government welfare policies. Some especially shocking and controversial elements of the book include her criticism of poverty among families in the U.S. military and the federal government's ironic preoccupation with solving hunger epidemics in other nations rather than focusing on similar problems inside its own borders. Schwartz-Nobel has not recently commented on her satisfaction with the effects of the novel, but there have been no significant straightforward increases in welfare spending in the United States since the book's publication.