The Affero Blog

Summer Hunger

By Steven McLaughlin in Articles,News

18Jun, 2010

I’m writing this as the temperature is getting well into the lower 80’s and droves of people are filing through our town with their towels and coolers on their way to the beach. The ice cream truck has become more of a mobile hangout than occasional treat in recent months. The smell of burgers and dogs cooking on the grill intertwines with the odors of sunscreen and sweat as they waft in through our rarely cracked windows. All of this can mean only one thing; summer is close at hand.

For some, summer is more about tradition and ritual than it is an actual calendar event, I know for myself it is. The cookouts, the fireworks, the small town festivals celebrating some random claim to fame (The town next to mine growing up had an Onion Festival every year, many of us still have yet to figure out what the correlation between the onion and that town ever was.)

As I’m winding down my first year teaching I have numerous friends asking me what I’m planning on doing with my time off over the summer. My response is usually an icy glare that is cold enough to commit to not needing the A/C for the next several days. This is due to the fact that my school is year round, and while we do get several vacations throughout the year, for the most part we teach through the summer.

While I am envious of my friends that get a couple months off in a row for summer vacation, there is a student population that I find myself not envying throughout the summer. I recently came upon this article which explains in depth the food shortage that a group of students in America face throughout the summer. To briefly summarize the article, it basically points out that throughout the school year; many families in lower income neighborhoods come to depend on federally subsidized lunches that the children get at school to give their children a substantial meal.

In 2010 alone 20.5 million students depended on these lunches throughout the day, up from 19.4 million in 2009. Estimates suggest that over the summer months when school is out, around 16 million of these kids aren’t going to be able to receive lunches. Reasons for this seem to extend beyond my comprehension; everything from shortages at food pantries throughout the country due to the sour economy to bureaucratic red tape mandating when and where food can be given to children seems to be mucking up kids chances at a decent meal.

I don’t think I have ever in my life thought about school lunches being a significant source of nutrition. From all the time I have spent working in, volunteering at or attending public schools, all I have ever heard is how awful the food is. How messed up is it that I’ve spent years only hearing about how terrible food is, and there are kids that have stomachs that are aching for this food?

I heard a friend teach one time on how hunger is not an issue that stems from a downturned economy, but that stems from people not willing to reach out and help their neighbors in need.

I hope that this summer we can figure out how to feed more students than ever before, whether it’s donating food to a local pantry or finding out what it takes to volunteer at a lunch program in a nearby city, I know that I don’t want this to just be another few warm months that I drift through carefree and unaware of my hungry neighbors’ struggles.

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