Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America, by Loretta Schwartz-Nobel. HarperCollins. 272 pages. $24.95.

Twenty years ago, a young journalist named Loretta Schwartz-Nobel found what the older and more experienced among her craft had failed to illustrate -- that millions of Americans were going hungry in the richest nation in the world. The result of her work, a groundbreaking book called Starving in the Shadow of Plenty, won awards and calls to action, promises that things would change.

And then Schwartz-Nobel did what many of us do every day: She turned to other stories, other subjects that would more readily pay a writer's bills. By the time she turned back several years ago, what she discovered shocked even her savvy conscience. Despite the nation's unprecedented prosperity in the last two decades, hunger among its citizens had only gotten worse.

Schwartz-Nobel's latest work, Growing Up Empty, may be even more important than her first. For it tells us not just what we find when we care to look, but also what happens when we look away.

There have been other reports on the soaring numbers of hungry Americans in the last decade, to be sure. But the larger the figures get -- more than 36 million, according to Schwartz-Nobel, a third of them children -- the more remote they can seem to those of us whose pantries are well-stocked. We can't understand why many of these people now are working people, whose wages simply aren't enough for both shelter and food.

So Schwartz-Nobel takes us in close, to meet the once well-to-do wife who steals from her synagogue after her philandering husband, a physician, leaves her penniless; the soldier whose pay can't support his family and whose demanding schedule in the field won't allow a second job. We see working families in Annapolis lining up for food because the housing prices are beyond their means, and get to know the Philadelphia woman dependent on a pantry because her husband broke her back.

We learn that Schwartz-Nobel has her own story of struggling to keep food on the table after her first husband left her without support, a narrative she weaves throughout her interviews. While it's clear that she was never as desperate as her subjects, her story underscores the message: Food insecurity can happen to anyone under the right set of circumstances.

As a work of journalism, Growing Up Empty has its weaknesses. The author does not give the full names of her subjects, a decision she says she made in the interest of protecting people who, in some cases, admitted crimes like stealing to feed their families. While that point is well-taken, hiding the identities of the hungry adds to their invisibility, and will make it easier for some to believe they don't exist.

The stories also are a bit one-sided. While the doctor's wife tells a compelling tale, for example, there's no evidence that Schwartz-Nobel ever confronted her husband -- who is painted as a pure villain -- for his version, or forced him to explain why he would let his wife and children starve.

These shortcomings, though, are paltry when compared with the power of the picture that Schwartz-Nobel has presented here. Anyone will be able to read this book and receive its message, and everyone should.

Kate Shatzkin is a Sun reporter who has covered the working of nonprofit institutions. In her 12 years as a journalist, she has also written about courts, crime and social issues.