It's easy to forget while indulging in a hearty turkey dinner with loved ones you are truly thankful for, but in our land of plenty, hunger continues to be problem. Even in Oakland County.

One in four Michigan children lives in poverty, and that puts them at risk of not getting enough food. Nearly half the people Gleaners Community Food Bank helps—at least 40 percent— are children younger than 18. Sadly, that need is far from being filled.

Gleaners actively works to eradicate hunger, targeting a five-county area— Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland and Wayne—in southeast Michigan. It provides 45 million pounds of food each year to Michigan’s hungry via its 600 partner food pantries, schools, soup kitchens, shelters and nonprofits.

“Last year more than 317,000 children in southeast Michigan qualified for free or reduced fee lunches -- about 3,000 more than the year before,” says Natalie Fotias, marketing manager for Gleaners. She shares Kids Count in Michigan data, where from 2006 to 2009 the number of students who qualified for reduced-cost school lunches jumped 26 percent, and 45.8 percent of Michigan students qualified.

In the Bloomfield Hills Schools, students saw a 20-cent increase in overall lunches and a 5-cent hike in milk prices districtwide last year after two years of stable pricing. Statistics on how many students used government subsidies for school lunches were not available.

The district was not alone in implementing the price increase as a provision of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, signed by President Barack Obama last year, required a rate increase for some. The law mandates that every district adjust its meal prices to ensure the overall rate is comparable with federal reimbursement rates.

The USDA reimburses districts $2.72 per meal for each lunch served to students who are eligible for free meals. But many districts, federal officials found, charged less for meals and less than the cost of making them. The act requires schools to charge closer to an average of $2.46 per meal.

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Each of the five counties Gleaners serves saw double-digit spikes over those three years—Livingston, 55 percent, to more than 5,500 students; Macomb, 59 percent, to more than 54,000; Monroe, 47 percent, to more than 8,800; Oakland, 45 percent, to more than 61,000; and Wayne, a 14 percent rise, to more than 186,000.

Hunger isn’t just a gnawing pain in a child’s belly. “(It) has a big impact on a child,” Fotias says. “Kids that are hungry can’t focus in the classroom, (and) studies show they lag behind their peers and typically aren’t able to make that gap up later in life.”

She shares some scary statistics:

"Insufficient nutrition puts children at risk for illness and weakens their immune systems, (making them) 90 percent more likely to be in fair or poor health," according to John T. Cook, Ph.D., associate professor at Pediatrics of Boston and primary author of “Child Food Insecurity: The Economic Impact on our Nation” (2009). That includes higher rates of hospitalization, and adding to the hidden costs of hunger.

Hunger can be harmful to a growing mind, too. In “The Effects of Poverty on Children,” by Jeanne Brookes-Gunn and Greg J. Duncan, the authors state “Even short spells of malnutrition can have detrimental, long-term effects on the cognitive development of children during the critical early childhood years.”

The aftershocks of hunger don't simply fade away. It can hurt them later in life, too. A child not getting enough to eat can fall behind in their studies, according to Harry J. Holzer’s “The Economic Costs of Poverty in the U.S.," putting them at a distinct disadvantage from their properly fed peers.

Simply put, a healthy, balanced and nutritionally complete diet does a body, a brain, and the whole society good.

How can you help? Join Patch in our virtual food drive, which runs through Nov. 24. Click here to help! Then share this with your friends and family.