2019 Summer Meals Program

                                                      2019 Summer Meals Program

By Albert B. Kelly

I should start by saying I’m grateful for the USDA’s summer meals program which exists to provide food for low-income children in urban and rural areas during the summer months when schools are not in session especially since the reality is that many children rely on their schools from September through June for nutritious meals, sometimes two a day.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Far too many to explore in detail here, but some primary reasons include shrinking job markets, the fact that the “new normal” in hiring for all but the lowest skilled jobs requires a college degree, an inadequate minimum wage, and the fact that the working poor often spend between 30% and 50% of their pretax earnings on rent. Far from a complete list, these constitute some systemic causes that make something like the summer meals program an absolute necessity.

Yet in the midst of poverty we’re also a wealthy and wasteful society, evidenced by the fact that we routinely waste between 30-40 percent of our food supply according to the USDA, with 31% of this loss coming at the retail and consumer level. In 2010, this reality translated into a 133 billion pounds of wasted food with a value of $161 billion, most of which ended up in landfills.

With numbers that large across a country this big, these problems can seem far away, but they’re not. Locally in Bridgeton, between 2011 and 2015 nearly 2,200 renting households were cost-burdened spending 30% or more of their gross income on rent with 52% of these earning less than $20k per year. This partly accounts for the poverty rate for children under eighteen coming in at roughly 42%.

My point is that there are larger forces beyond our control that go into making the summer meals program a necessary thing as opposed to the mindset that suggests that the program should be on the chopping block in favor of corporate tax cuts. I don’t accept that, especially when it involves children in a society that wastes 100 billion pounds of food annually. While we can’t solve that problem here, we will feed some hungry kids at several sites throughout Bridgeton this summer.

The Marino Center, located at 11 Washington Street will begin the program on July 8th and end August 19^th with a schedule that includes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday with breakfast at 9:00am and lunch at 12 noon. Nearby, Gateway’s facilities at 110 Cohansey Street has a start date of July 1^st, with an ending date of August 2^nd and will operate Monday through Friday serving breakfast only at 8:30am.

As for our schools, the following will have their meals program July 8^th until August 2^nd operating Monday through Friday with breakfast at 8:30a and lunch at 12noon: Cherry Street School, Indian Avenue School, and Buckshutem School. West Avenue School and Quarter Mile Lane School will start breakfast at 8:00a and lunch at 11:30a. Bridgeton High School started their meals program on June 24^th and will end it on August 30^th. Running Monday through Friday, breakfast starts at 8:45a with lunch at 12 noon.

As for other neighborhood locations, the Johnson Reeves Playground at 115 East Avenue will host a summer meals program beginning on July 8^th and running until August 2^nd. This program will operate Monday through Friday serving lunch only at 2:30pm.

The summer meals program in the Southeast Gateway neighborhood will be held at the Greater Family Success Center located at 155 Spruce Street beginning July 8^th and ending August 16^th with operations Monday through Friday. Lunch only will be served beginning at 12 noon. 

PALs Soccer Team will provide summer meals at the Alms Center, 1 Martin Luther King Jr. Way,
July 8^th to August 19^th serving lunch at 11:00am and lunch at 1:00pm Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

The program for Midget Football will run from July 29^th to August 30^th, Monday through Friday, with meals at 7:45am only, located on Scholastic Drive.

The Summer Theater Camp at 1 Martin Luther King, Jr., Way will operate from July 29^th to August 16^th, Monday through Friday, with breakfast at 9:00am and lunch at 12 noon.

There is no cost or enrollment required and the program is open to children 18 or under. I’ve highlighted only some Bridgeton locations but there may be more local sites, as well as sites in
Millville, Vineland, Salem, Gloucester and throughout South Jersey. To learn more, visit https://www.fns.usda.gov/summerfoodrocks .