As a kid growing up, I recall the periodic food drives to which our family regularly contributed making a small difference in people’s lives.

Later, as a young man I had opportunities to travel widely throughout the Middle East, Asia, and South America where I saw first hand many desperately poor people. It was convenient for me to return from those trips concluding that some problems are just too big to be solved and grateful that I lived in country of prosperity.

I’ve always been bothered by the Matthew Gospel passage in which Jesus says “The poor you will always have with you.” I understand the comment was made by Christ admonishing his apostles that he would not be with them much longer, and not to justify poverty. Nevertheless, I have used the passage to justify my own complacency.

That’s why this week my ears perked up when I heard Anderson Cooper on 60-Minutes say he had “good news” about malnutrition.

“Every year, malnutrition kills five million children – that’s one child every six seconds. But now, the Nobel Prize winning relief group Doctors Without Borders says it has something than can save millions of these children,” said Cooper.

A cheap, ready-to-eat, vitamin-enriched peanut butter concoction called Plumpy’nut created by French scientist André Briend may be the most important advance ever to cure and prevent malnutrition, according to 60-Minutes.

“It’s a revolution in nutritional affairs,” says Dr. Milton Tectonidis, the chief nutritionist for Doctors Without Borders, comparing its impact on world health to penicillin..

“In three weeks, we can cure kids who looks like they’re half dead. We can cure them just like an antibiotic. It’s just, boom! It’s a spectacular response.”

Cooper traveled to Niger in West Africa where child malnutrition is so widespread that most mothers have watched at least one of their children die. Mothers watch their children die because they can’t produce enough milk themselves. There is no electricity to refrigerate foods. Powdered milk is useless because water is contaminated, and Plumpy’nut is saving lives.

New York Times reporter Michael Wines told a similar tale during a 2005 visit to Niger.

“Plumpy’nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands, is 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, a beige paste about as thick as mashed potatoes and stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals. But that is akin to calling a 1945 Mouton Rothschild fortified grape juice.”

“Since the packets came into the hands of relief organizations during the Darfur crisis in Sudan, they have been revolutionizing emergency care for severely malnourished children who are old enough to take solid food, by taking care out of crowded field hospitals and straight into mothers’ homes,” wrote Wines.

The United Nations reports that 150,000 children under age 5 in Niger are severely malnourished, and another 650,000 moderately malnourished – all together, about one in five, according to Wines.

The New York Times report said malnutrition is a factor in 60 percent of deaths of children younger than 5 – and in Niger, more than a quarter of all children never reach their fifth birthday.

A daily dose of Plumpy’nut costs about $1. Small factories mix it locally in Niger. This year 120,000 kids are getting Plumpy’nut, up from just 10,000 children three years ago.

Doctors Without Borders is now urging the United States and the European Union to spend part of their food aid on it so more companies will start making it and build upon the success in Niger.

“Even by taking a miniscule proportion of the global food aid budget, they will have a huge impact, huge impact!” Tectonidis told 60-Minutes.

Doctors say this cheap peanut butter paste holds out the possibility of saving untold numbers of families from unimaginable grief. It may be a simple answer to intractable famine.

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Paul Marcotte is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.