Hollywood Turns Out for World Hunger Cause : Celebrities: Event demonstrates inequity of food supply by having some stars eat just rice while others feast. Similar fund raisers are held in Washington and elsewhere.

The idea was to dramatize world hunger--to drive home just how inequitably food is distributed in the world--and most of the celebrities who attended the Second Annual Hollywood Hunger Banquet on Thursday wound up sitting on the floor and eating a meager portion of rice with their fingers.

“It’s really difficult to turn a blind eye to social causes,” said actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who was among the 250 celebrities who paid $150 each to attend the banquet on a sound stage at the Sony Studios in Culver City. “If people listen to people like us, we’ve done our job.”

The banquet was aimed at educating people “on the causes of hunger,” said John C. Hammock, executive director of Oxfam America, the event’s sponsor. “What we do is bring people into a room, and 60% of them sit on the floor and eat rice. Twenty-five percent sit on a bench and eat rice and beans, and 15% sit and talk and have a banquet from soup to nuts.”

Because of the unequal distribution of food, Hammock said, “60% of the people in the world today don’t have enough to eat.”

Thursday’s banquet in Culver City was expected to raise between $60,000 and $80,000. It was one of six such dinners Thursday that raised $750,000 around the country for Oxfam America, a Boston-based nonprofit agency that funds self-help development and disaster relief in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

At the Sony sound stage, celebrities drew lots to determine which meal they would eat. Actress Cybill Shepherd posed for photographers as she sat on a straw mat, eating rice with her fingers. She was sitting in an area decorated to represent living conditions in the Third World, amid an overturned trash can and milk crates.

Asked if she had fasted Thursday, Shepherd said: “I’ve never fasted in my life, but I’ve eaten little today. I think it was something to do with coming here. We need to change the world in order to survive.”

The actress said that she is active in the “pro-choice” movement, adding that “the population problem, probably more than any other factor, is involved with world hunger.”

Actors Ed Harris and Amy Madigan served rice to those eating the Third World meal, and Madigan urged those consigned to the floor mats to “come up and get your rice. Here’s dinner. No silverware.”

Actor Mike Farrell said the banquet was intended to raise consciousness. Asked which meal he would like to eat, he quipped: “I probably won’t eat. I’m the emcee.”

Members of Congress attended a similar dinner Thursday in Washington, and local business and civic leaders ate the meals in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Boston, San Francisco and New York City, Oxfam America officials said.