Two observances are putting a spotlight on food poverty: October is Tackling Hunger Month and National School Lunch Week begins on Oct. 14.
The school meal program highlights the nutritious meals served to students every day throughout the school year, not just for lunch, but often breakfast as well. Tracking Hunger Month recognizes hunger across the country among all ages.
The National School Lunch Program was signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1946 to serve public and nonprofit private schools; it fed about 7.1 million children in its first year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was President John F. Kennedy who created National School Lunch Week to recognize a food program that now serves nearly 30 million children every school day.
Tackling Hunger Month focuses on the fact that one in six Americans – or 33 million – may not know where their meals will come from on a daily basis, according to the National Day Calendar. An estimated 86.5% of U.S. households were food secure in 2023, while 12.8% in 2022 were food insecure at least some time during the year. About 5% of households were very food insecure.
Food programs instituted in the 1970s couldn’t conquer hunger, and the idea that it wasn’t possible in a wealthy nation like the U.S. was no longer viable, according to Time magazine. The need went widely public in 1986 with the Hands Across America campaign to raise money for food programs. Eventually, Camden’s own Campbell Soup – or now Campbell’s – teamed with the organization Feeding America to found Tackling Hunger Month in 2002.
The school lunch program is now the second largest U.S. food and nutrition assistance program, with almost 60% of American children ages 5 to 18 participating in the program at least once a week. Almost half of all lunches are free or at reduced prices, and while schools are not required to offer lunch programs, 94% of them do so voluntarily.
By 2006, the program was in more than 100,000 schools, serving 28 million low-cost or free meals to children on a typical school day. Breakfast meals began in 1966; in the 2022-’23 school year, recipients numbered about 14 million, reports the Washington, D.C.-based Food Research & Action Center, an advocacy organization that focuses on poverty-related hunger.
So how can we help feed the hungry? According to the National Day Calendar, we can focus on donating foods such as canned goods, brown rice and soups to a local food bank. Monetary donations can be made to national organizations like the Hunger Project or local pantries such as the Food Bank of South Jersey.
That pantry – founded in Camden in 1985 – delivered 22 million pounds of food last year to about 170,000 people along with its partner agencies in Burlington, Camden, Gloucester and Salem counties, its website notes. To find other pantries in the area, visit foodbanksj.org.
As the singer Bono once put it, “If you want to eliminate hunger, everybody has to be involved.”
