Main Street

Food Stamps and Free Lunches

Something to think about:

Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

The estimate comes from an analysis of 30 years of national data, and it bolsters other recent evidence on the pervasiveness of youngsters at economic risk. It suggests that almost everyone knows a family who has received food stamps, or will in the future, said lead author Mark Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

People in this country are generally agreed (not entirely, but mostly) that it’s a bad thing for kids to live in poverty or go hungry, so this study should give at least a few people some pause.

I had a moment a couple years ago that was something like being hit over the head—I read something about free and reduced-price school lunches, which was not a topic I’d given much thought to in recent years. I don’t remember what I read, but this is the basic information that stunned me:

Today, the United States Department of Agriculture spends $8.3 billion a year to provide free and reduced-priced lunches for 30.6 million children whose families are at or below 130 percent of the national poverty level, about $26,845 for a family of four. The program also provides reduced-priced meals for students who are between 130 percent and 185 percent of the poverty level, or $38,203 for a family of four.

Because I knew quite a few kids in grade school who received free or reduced-price meals, even though I spent kindergarten through third grade in a neighborhood school that drew from a small area of mostly one- or two-family homes…a “good neighborhood,” you know? More to the point from how I saw things as a kid—because it’s not like I thought “oh, I live in a good neighborhood”—I largely missed the class distinctions between families. Everyone felt pretty much the same to me. In fifth and sixth grade, when we were transferred to a larger school, I could have pointed out the poor kids. But it turns out that even in my little neighborhood school, I had classmates whose families were seriously struggling. And in my childhood obliviousness I really gave no thought to what it meant that they paid less than the 90 cents or so that was full price at the time.

Since the free lunch article I excerpt from above is about high school students not taking their free lunches because of the stigma attached, I guess my obliviousness was a good thing at the time. But it goes to show that when we think about poverty and hunger and how the economy is organized to address those things, we have to shake off our obliviousness to realize that these things are more widespread than perhaps we realize.

Tags: food stamps, poverty, school lunch