A spare meal awaited some of those who attended a “banquet” that was part of the 10th annual Hunger and Homelessness Auction.

As they entered the banquet, diners were directed to meals typical of those who are “food poor,” “food insecure” or “food secure.”

Volunteers dish out a taste of hunger

At the annual auction for hunger and homelessness relief, a sampling of what it’s like to be “food-insecure.”

An invitation to a banquet usually conjures up images of heaps of sumptuous food, a decadent dessert and a cup of gourmet coffee, all proffered by a hovering staff of solicitous servers. But a jarringly different scene greeted participants at the first hunger banquet at Harkness Lounge last November.

“We’re hoping to give people a little taste of what it might feel like to not have total food security,” said Jena M. Giltnane, a second-year medical student who helped organize the event as part of the School of Medicine’s weeklong hunger awareness project. The banquet was part of the 10th annual Hunger and Homelessness Auction, which in past years has raised as much as $30,000 for local charities. The proceeds of this year’s auction will benefit New Haven Home Recovery, fish, the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, Youth Continuum and Life Haven. In addition to silent and live auctions, activities this year included a flag football game, a canned-food drive and panel discussions on health, hunger and homelessness.

The hunger banquet, modeled on a program sponsored by Oxfam International to raise awareness about global hunger, tangibly illustrates the disparities in food access that exist among New Haven residents. Approximately 60 diners drew tickets from a box and, based on the numbers on their tickets, received one of three meal assignments. The first group lined up for a typical meal served at a soup kitchen: watery barley vegetable soup and a slice of Wonder bread. The second group got the kind of meal you might have if you had to buy it at the corner convenience store: processed macaroni and cheese and a packaged brownie. The third group had three entree choices: sirloin tips, grilled tuna or a vegetarian grinder, served by waiters and waitresses.

“I think I’m going to be hungry when I finish this,” said Allison F. Carey, a first-year medical student seated at the soup kitchen table. “I couldn’t imagine doing everything I need to do tonight, if this was all I had to go on,” added Mary Beth Turell, another first-year student.

“Actually, this rivals what I lived on when I was a poor college student. It got pretty bad sometimes,” said classmate Bobby Ndu, eyeing a forkful of macaroni. “Where’s the meat, that’s what I want to know.”

Students at the three-entree table were dealing with a different kind of discomfort. “I’m feeling kind of guilty,” said second-year medical student Bart C. Kenny, glancing at all the half-eaten entrees at his table. “The conditions of the haves and the have-nots are not usually so vividly juxtaposed. We thought about donating some of our food to the other tables.”

That dawning awareness is just the kind of reaction organizers were hoping for: a heightened sensitivity to the hardships faced by area residents who struggle to get enough nutritious food for themselves and their families (called “food insecurity” by those who work to alleviate hunger). According to Giltnane, close to 80 percent of children attending New Haven public schools receive free or subsidized school lunches, and nearly 9 percent of city households are food-insecure.

Keynote speaker Nancy Carrington, executive director of the Connecticut Food Bank, told the audience that unlike global hunger, which often manifests itself in malnutrition and starvation, the problem in the United States is more hidden. Food pantries, soup kitchens and subsidized school meals have greatly reduced the threat of starvation, but food security—the economic and physical ability to get nutritious food—remains a serious problem.

“Eating should not be a privilege; it should be a right,” she said.

—Jennifer Kaylin

To the four corners of the globe, studying mosquitoes, hookworms and alcohol

On the surface, both strains of Anopheles arabiensis look the same, and inside their bodies, both types of mosquitoes have the potential to carry the malaria parasite—killer of at least one million people each year. But public health student Randolph Cheung knows that the difference between the two strains of mosquitoes is significant: one type always dies when sprayed with DDT, while the other type sometimes survives.

In July, Cheung went to South Africa to identify some of the genetic variations between the two strains of A. arabiensis. He was one of 13 Yale graduate students who did research abroad last summer with funding from a Downs International Health Student Travel Fellowship. “They have gone literally to the four corners of the world,” said Serap Aksoy, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology and public health, at a symposium in October featuring talks and posters on research by the fellows.

Cheung’s corner of the world was the insectary at the Department of Medical Entomology at the National Health Laboratory Service in Johannesburg, where he spent three months analyzing genetic differences between the two strains of malaria mosquito. Entomologists can use this genetic information to figure out which strains of mosquitoes are genetically similar to the newly resistant strain—and therefore most likely to develop resistance themselves. Once they know where those strains are located, South Africa’s public health officials can give priority to killing resistance-prone mosquitoes.

Cheung searched for genetic differences between the strains by extracting their DNA and comparing polymorphisms at eight sites on the gene. When Cheung finishes characterizing those differences for his master’s thesis, entomologists will be able to use that information to classify different types of mosquitoes. The only way to tell the difference without genetic methods, according to Cheung, is to see if two mosquitoes that mate produce healthy offspring. If not, they probably belong to different strains.

Cheung spent his hours outside the lab volunteering in the emergency department of a public hospital and enjoying the differences between South Africa and his native California. “Everything was interesting: the weather, the people, the language, the architecture, the music, the food.” He described as “surreal” the radical disconnection between the impoverished Hillbrow neighborhood where he worked and the deluxe shopping malls 15 minutes’ drive away in Santon.

Last summer’s Downs fellows came from the schools of public health, medicine and nursing and from the graduate school. Fellows included Jessica Kattan, a second-year medical student who analyzed medical records in Paraguay to research patterns of leprosy transmission to children; public health student James Moore, who surveyed teenagers in South Africa to study how drinking alcohol affects their nutrition; and Gladys Y. Ng, also at the School of Public Health, who spent the summer in a laboratory in China to find out whether mice could serve as animal models for testing potential hookworm vaccines.

The fellowship was established in 1965 and later named in honor of its founder, Wilbur G. Downs, M.D., M.P.H., who died in 1991. Downs was a specialist in tropical medicine and infectious diseases, a champion of international travel for students and a formidable fly fisherman who was a professor at the School of Public Health from 1962 to 1971.

—Cathy Shufro