Every year at about this time, a feature of the season appears that is as reliable as tinny recordings of tired old carols at the mall: a surge in efforts to collect donations for food pantries and soup kitchens.

I don't want to demean the selflessness of those who organize or contribute to holiday food drives, but there's a level at which they simply don't make sense. It's not that such donations aren't needed, since demand for them is now high, and it would be foolish not to take advantage of the generosity the holidays bring out in all of us.

The problem is that the same needs are there all year long, and we as a society don't do much about them after the rosy glow of the holidays has faded.

Say we as a nation were serious about addressing hunger. Should we launch massive job training programs? After all, as the old saying goes, "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

The problem with job training, however, is that a large percentage (more than half, in some places) of those who regularly need help putting food on the table are already working one or more jobs. Unlike the mentally ill, chronically unemployed, or homeless who might come to mind when you think of food drives, the "working poor" earn at least some money. But they are failing to make ends meet.

Experts I've spoken with disagree about how best to help the working poor, but they do return again and again to three related possibilities: a living wage, affordable health care, and affordable child care.

If this sounds like a recipe for socialism -- a claim leveled at Obama during the run-up to the recent election -- then consider the federal minimum wage, now a measly $6.55 an hour. If you and a spouse worked 52 weeks a year, 40 hours a week at that wage, your pre-tax income would be $27,248.

Take rent, utilities, car expenses, food, clothing, and other bare essentials out of that, and it's like cutting up a grape with a meat cleaver. Child care? College tuition? Medications? As Donnie Brasco said, "Fuggedaboutit."

Do the working poor deserve what they get (or don't get) for lacking the skills needed to land higher-paying jobs?

Well, we seem to want someone, and someone who's not in the country illegally, to flip our burgers, empty our trash cans, and change the diapers of our senile parents.

I'm not suggesting that everyone on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder get a 401k, but we could pay them enough to live on without needing handouts.

We could also give away or at least subsidize the health care and child care they need to get to work. The experience of countries like Finland suggests that we could offer all of these protections to our poorest citizens without bankrupting ourselves as a nation.

Ultimately, until we choose to take more dramatic steps than food drives, our efforts to eliminate hunger won't add up to more than a can of beans.

Mittenthal is pursuing a doctorate in entomology at UW-Madison.