Millions Going Hungry

Because I'm an upper class American I often get expensive stuff for free. For instance, last weekend my friends Melanie and Dave took me to an NBA game. We had excellent tickets with a combined face value of several hundred dollars, but we paid nothing for them because Melanie's father's girlfriend had been given the tickets by her employer (who no doubt deducted them as a business expense).
The next night I went to a bar association event at a fancy Denver hotel, where I enjoyed a very nice free meal (steak, salmon, surprisingly well-prepared potatoes au gratin, and a somewhat-too-sweet slice of chocolate cake). Walking to my car afterward, I encountered a beggar - a woman who asked me for a dollar so she could buy a hot dog.
I thought of that woman the next day, when I read Megan McArdle's claim that while "obesity is a problem for the poor in America . . . food insufficiency is not." McArdle, who writes for The Atlantic, is against giving poor people more food stamps because "there is no evidence the poor need more food."
This is such a sublimely clueless statement that I looked up McArdle's biography on the Atlantic Web site, to try to determine if she is an actual human being, or some sort of cyberspace caricature designed to drive me insane.
Here it is: "Megan McArdle was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra dry skim milk cappuccino." (You can't make this stuff up).
McArdle, a self-described "econoblogger" with an MBA from the University of Chicago, simply doesn't believe poor people are going hungry in America today. After all, she says, look how fat the poor are! (It's true that in developed economies body mass is inversely related to socioeconomic status, but people who think this proves that "food insufficiency" isn't something the poor need worry about should have their econoblogging licenses revoked).