We're pleased to see that our recent seven-part editorial series, "For I was hungry," has led to a modest increase in donations to some central Maine food pantries. Those operations can use all the help they can get.

We're also pleased that the series has led to more awareness and discussion about the critical and growing problem of hunger among our neighbors -- Maine's children, elderly, veterans, disabled and working poor. From college classrooms to church basements, people are talking about this issue. It has emerged from the shadows.

But talk and even a few more donations will not right what's fundamentally wrong here in Maine: We don't have enough high-paying jobs, or the people trained to fill them, to put food on every Maine table and in every child's lunchbox. Nor do we have a public-assistance system that provides for all of those who can't make, or don't have, enough money to feed themselves and their families.

Fixing Maine's economy, educating Maine's workers and generating relatively high-paying jobs that pay an adequate wage is the real answer to what's wrong -- but that solution will take a long time. And right now, many Mainers are going hungry.

That's why we have proposed a modest set of changes that could help feed Maine's hungry, sooner rather than later. We have suggested several simple and achievable goals:

n The state should mandate that schools make free or reduced price breakfast available to all eligible children;

n The federal government should restore food stamp benefits lost in the 1996 welfare reforms, a move that would grant an extra $24 a month in food stamps to a family of three;

n The federal government should raise the cutoff level for food stamp eligibility so that those working their way out of poverty don't get denied food stamps.

Each of these proposals, if enacted, would put more food in the stomachs of Maine's hungry. They will play out in two arenas: one federal, one state.

On the federal level, Congress is now debating changes to the Farm Bill, which encompasses the food stamp program.

U.S. Reps. Mike Michaud and Tom Allen, both Democrats, have supported new rules that would increase food stamp benefits as well as the pool of those eligible for them. Our two Republican senators have yet to weigh in on those changes, other than to have their staff reiterate, in general terms, the senators' long-standing support for the food stamp program. As we wrote in a recent editorial, we hope both senators will clarify their positions and fight for increases in food stamp benefits and eligibility; there is much in their respective records on social programs that gives us hope they will do so.

On the state level, lawmakers now need to move from general statements about fighting hunger to specific action to feed the state's schoolchildren.

Sen. Margaret (Peggy) Rotundo provides an example for others: Last session, the Lewiston Democrat fought hard to increase the number of breakfasts served to Maine schoolchildren. Her strong advocacy resulted in $60,000 being appropriated by the state for financial incentives to schools to expand free and reduced-price breakfast programs, which currently serve fewer than half the children eligible for those meals.

School administrators are, understandably, preoccupied these days with school consolidation. But the truth is that increasing the number of Maine children who get school breakfast will cost the state's schools virtually nothing in dollars because the school breakfast program, like the lunch program, is federally-funded. Giving more children breakfast, though, will take time, effort and organizational wizardry for some schools, already overburdened with the task of doing more with less. Yet the concrete returns are great: Students who behave better and learn more because their stomachs are full. The moral returns are even greater: Justice for our state's hungry children, who have done nothing to deserve their misfortune.

That's where leadership comes in. Rotundo's example needs to be joined. The governor can take the initiative on this issue and make feeding all Maine's hungry schoolchildren a priority just as high as the other issues he's championed. Maine's lawmakers can likewise make a bipartisan commitment to support a major expansion of our state's school breakfast program -- supported by the state's many advocates for children, the poor and the hungry.

Talk is good. Awareness is important. Charity is a meaningful thing. But action is the true test of our commitment to helping the hungry. Maine's leaders have the tools to help feed our hungry schoolchildren -- will they exercise leadership now and do it? Will Maine's citizens demand it?