AUGUSTA — While dietitians are observing National Nutrition Month with the slogan, “Enjoying the Taste of Eating Right,” an expert on hunger said that more than 20 million Americans are not tasting sufficient food of any kind.

Speaking at the eighth annual conference sponsored by the Maine Nutrition Council in Augusta earlier this month, Dr. Larry Brown said that hunger existed in epidemic proportions along with poverty in the United States. Brown is director of the National Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University.

Brown led a team of nationally prominent doctors that, in 1983, studied the incidence of hunger in the United States by traveling through 25 states, including Maine. The team obtained information from welfare agencies, food banks, soup kitchens and visits to almost 6,000 poverty-level homes. In many states, he said, they found wide extremes of prosperity and poverty.

Brown addressed a gathering of 225 health professionals and others involved in the delivery of nutrition and social service programs. The steering committee of the conference is planning a session in April to explore the role of health professionals and other interested citizens in rousing those who do not suffer from hunger to become as concerned as those who do.

Also at the conference, the Maine Nutrition Council presented its annual public service award to the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association.

Brown said data showed there has been a dramatic shift to lower-paying jobs with the total slippage of wages at its lowest point in the past 10 years, in spite of the slight increase in minimum wages. He said that although the government claims that 13 million new jobs were created in the 1980s, 8.2 million jobs were at wages of less than $7,000 per year.