meals

4Apr

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IN OTHER NEWS

How Free School Meals For All Children Can Improve Kids’ Health

Matthew J. Landry, Stanford University Recognizing that millions of U.S. children are at risk of hunger, Maine and California have approved funding to offer free school meals to all students within their state. Meanwhile, a bill proposed in Congress aims to make free school meals a permanent fixture in all states. The Universal School Meals Program Act would provide free healthy meals and snacks to all children in public and nonprofit private schools regardless of income. Currently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allowed school districts to provide meals free of charge to families during the pandemic. Previously set to expire in September, the policy has been extended through the 2021-2022 school year. This marks the first time in the 75-year history of the National School Lunch...

2.4 Million US Seniors Get Enough To Eat While Meals On Wheels Volunteers Help Staving Off Loneliness

More than 2.4 million older adults are supported each year by Meals on Wheels, a program through which seniors and people with disabilities receive healthy and tasty meals for free from a network of volunteers. These efforts are usually organized through local senior centers and other community organizations across the U.S. that encourage the people who receive meals to make voluntary donations to cover at least part of the cost if that’s within their means. CC BY-NC-ND Services like this nonprofit meal delivery program, for which eligibility begins at age 60, are becoming more important than ever before. About 5.3 million people 60 and up, 7.3% of all Americans in that age group, experienced food insecurity in 2018 – meaning that their households couldn’t acquire adequate food bec...

America’s poorest children won’t get nutritious meals with school cafeterias closed due to the coronavirus

Schools aren’t only places where kids learn. They are also places where kids eat. Thanks to the National School Lunch Program, 30 million U.S. children – some 60% of all school-aged kids – regularly eat some combination of breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks at school. Federal subsidies ensure that school meals are affordable for all children to stave off hunger and malnutrition. But what is happening to meals provided by the nation’s largest child nutrition program as public schools shut their doors to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic? Based on my research on how schools provide meals for poor children, I worry that these closures might leave some of the nation’s poorest children without access to nutritious meals. School meals address hunger Despite persistent concer...