One in every four children in America doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from.

It’s an issue that has often passed quietly under the radar and gets little attention on TV or in books. But a new film screened Wednesday night at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center, A Place at the Table, aims to change that by bringing the issue to the forefront of people’s minds.

They stood 21 strong, their backs to the harbor, shirts billowing in the sea breeze, cheered on by honking cars, applause and exclamations of grati

Traci Monteith is afraid of heights but she loves depths. She’s been diving in Vineyard waters for more than 10 years, but only recently has she been working toward certification as an advanced diver on the Oak Bluffs fire department dive team. On a recent Thursday evening, she wet-suited up alongside two other members of the team for their first night dive.

A caretaking crew for a private property in Aquinnah was hard at work Tuesday pruning dead branches with chainsaws. Sawdust was flying everywhere, so Alex Poole of Chilmark stepped down off the ladder to get the stuff out of his sneaker. While down there working on the sneaker, he was distracted by a flash of pink. On closer inspection, he announced: “Pink grasshopper!”

Albert Fischer, the man in charge of the crew, knew better. He’d seen katydids before, but never had they been pink.

Forty years ago Dr. Karl Skoreki trained in nephrology in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. During his time there, he noticed that many members of the same family were contracting kidney disease, a condition that was poorly understood at the time. During his career Dr. Skorecki continued to study genetic predisposition to the disease. He and other researchers have since determined that the illness, which can devolve into kidney failure, disproportionately affects African Americans, who are four to five times more likely to contract the disease and to die from its effects.

Black Americans on average die four years before White Americans, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistic released last month. “When America gets a cold, poor black folk get pneumonia,” said Dr. David Williams, professor of public health at Harvard, in a panel discussion last week.