Saw this in the Wichita Eagle today, from Elizabeth Williamson of the Washington Post:

It's Thanksgiving, a week sine the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its annual hunger -- er, food security -- report, and it's likely that a few folks in the department are ready for a holiday break.

For the first time, the USDA's annual report on Americans' access to food omitted the word "hunger" in describing the condition of 11 million people who at times can't afford to feed themselves. These people, among a group of 35 million who had trouble keeping food on the table at least part of last year, shall heretofore, according to the government, be described as experiencing "very low food security."

This is a relatively trivial example, but reminds us that for the Bush administration, all problems are PR problems, and the only thing it ever takes to fix them is better PR.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that hunger is the right term. Everyone gets hungry, but most of us have little or no trouble finding some kind of food. What we're talking about is persistent hunger, but is the sensation there still hunger? Or is it more like malnutrition? Hunger is a message from your stomach saying fill me up. That's very straightforward, whereas malnutrition doesn't have such an unambiguous signal: your body feels weak, deprived, damaged, but it's harder to tell why or how. That's probably the real problem, but it's a more complicated one: a combination of "low food security," miseducation, possibly a shortfall of motivation, and inadequate health care. Reducing all that down to "hunger" causes a disconnect with most Americans, who are more likely to have a problem with too much food than with too little. And who, if they're at all fortunate, take the rest of the equation for granted.

On the other hand, there's no reason to doubt that the PR solution is politically motivated. That's the Bush solution to everything.