Students get a taste of world hunger.

Byline: MATT COOPER The Register-Guard

Mason Goche took one look at the lump of bread and dirty water in front of him and started plotting a raid on the gentry and their well-appointed dining table nearby.

The 17-year-old had a problem, though - his Third World status precluded him from any chance to filch from the upper class.

"My friend and I were thinking about it," Goche said, "but in reality it would be impossible to get to those people. We'd have to go through the middle class."

Goche - sporting a fisherman's cap - was play-acting his role as Pancho, a Filipino fisherman unable to provide for his family. The mock banquet was one of the exercises prepared for about 35 Lane County high school students Tuesday at the FOOD for Lane County office in west Eugene.

The students learned a lesson in hunger during a one-day awareness summit, "Be Involved To End Hunger" - that is, "BITE Hunger."

The summit concluded three months of planning by participating students. During a day of workshops, they studied hunger as a local and global issue, then planned presentations on their own campuses.

The mock banquet inspired an especially lively response, and not just because food was involved.

The students split into groups representing the upper, middle and lower classes, in numbers that reflect reality: 15 percent of the world's population earns $9,400 or more annually while 55 percent make $765 or less - about $2 per day.

Thus, there were only five students seated at a dining table loaded down with bagel-and-ham sandwiches, potato chips, apple juice and chocolate cake. On the floor next to them, four times as many people fought over a bowl of bread chunks, Goche among them.

"This hunger banquet is a metaphor for how food and other resources are inequitably distributed in the world," coordinator Jenna Nevills, 18, told the groups.

"The one thing we would like you to remember is this: Everyone on Earth has the same basic needs, it is only our circumstances - where we live and the culture we are born into - that differ."

To illustrate her point, students portraying characters acted out cause-and-effect scenarios: A manager of a U.S. coffee company earned a bonus for maximizing profits when the price of coffee dropped; in the same room, coffee's plummeting price cost a coffee-bean picker his job, and he shuffled from the middle class to the poor.

At the dining table, where a violinist played for the upper-class participants, Megan Hawkins sought to level the playing field, offering up bagel sandwiches to the lower classes but the offer passed without notice.

Were it not for the fact that she was seated in the same room as the underprivileged, "it's kind of, out-of-sight, out-of-mind," Hawkins admitted. "And I'm even guilty of that."

When the students were asked what should be done to correct the inequalities, one responded, "a revolution."

But Kate Sheridan, a junior at Churchill High School, had another idea: "You need to implement programs to help them become self-sufficient," she said. "You need to find ways to help them become independent."

Anna Peroutka, a 17-year-old from Marist High School who coordinated the banquet with Nevills, said at day's end that the exercise "was the best part of the day for a lot of people."

"Once a person gets a chance to experience what it's like - even in a mock situation - it brings that personal situation to their lives," she added.

"When someone sees somebody on the street, they can say, `I was in the poor group, I know what that feels like,' and they can do what is right."

CAPTION(S):

Heather Thornton (center) and Kate Sheridan (right) treat themselves to a feast, while the rest of the room makes do with meager portions of bread and water. "This hunger banquet is a metaphor for how food and other resources are inequitably distributed in the world," coordinator Jenna Nevills "This hunger banquet is a metaphor for how food and other resources are inequitably distributed in the world." JENNA NEVILLS coordinator