School Lunch Emergency

By Dan Rattiner

04/01/09

The slowdown in the economy here on the East End has hit the poor particularly hard. One of the most shocking stories is about children and school lunches. In schools where lunches are not served in a cafeteria and parents are supposed to have the kids bring to school their lunches, children are more and more frequently now coming to school without bagged lunches from home and are more and more frequently relying on others at school to help them deal with hunger.

In the Springs School, for example, the number of children coming to school without lunches has doubled in recent months. Since in the moment this is considered an urgent situation, since hunger is hunger, calls are then made to local food pantries and food is brought over by car.

And now food pantries are suffering. It was reported last week that the food pantry in East Hampton might have to close entirely next week if it cannot raise more funds or get more canned or packaged food. An appeal has been made to the general public. If you can help, call 631-329-3993.

It is a profound thing when parents know they have to make lunches for their children, but find they simply do not have the money to buy the means to do so.

The safety net for all this, of course, is food stamps, easily obtained, but there are those that do not know this and there are those who, because of their immigration status, are unable to take advantage of this.

Along those lines, there seems to be increasing evidence that Hispanic immigrants, both legal and illegal, are receiving money from south of the border rather than sending money south of the border to help their families and friends, which was the original reason they came here, to find jobs and to send money home.

There is also increasing evidence that illegal immigrants, no longer able to find work here, are in increasing numbers returning to their home countries.

None of this, of course, matters to the children who get to lunchtime and have no lunch. This is a problem that has to be attended to.

In spite of the downturn, this part of the world continues to be a place of tremendous financial wealth. This situation does not have to happen. A farmer I know who lived through the Depression - at a time when the Hamptons were primarily farming and fishing country - told me that at that time, many in the area blessed with an abundance of food, and the farmers surely were that, would pack up food in trucks and take it around to others in the community who were in need. His wife, he said, did that every Thursday.

This is not a time to find blame or point fingers or say these people (like our parents and grandparents) should never have come here and should go back to where they came from. This is not about whether the poor are taking advantage of the food pantries because they know they are there and so use their limited funds for other things rather than lunches for their children. This is about hungry children.

Find out how you can help, and do so.