Growing up in West Virginia, Jennifer Garner remembers the moment she began to notice the divide: some classmates stayed behind in elementary school while she moved on to the next grade.

“I was raised in a middle-class family surrounded by generational rural poverty,” the actor, 53, tells TODAY.com.

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It wasn’t until later that she made the connection. Children whose parents were professionals seemed set on one track, while kids from the “hollers,” isolated communities in the state’s mountain valleys, were on another.

Unknown to Garner at the time, some of her peers were going to bed hungry, but she didn’t realize it because their bellies appeared full. It was the result of low-quality, processed foods they were e

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