The city’s food bank has created a program that will try to help alleviate hunger by bringing healthy habits back to the classroom and hopefully, back home with students as well. NY1’s Roger Clark filed the following report.
It’s a twist on the Food Bank for New York’s BackPack Program, which provides kids at this after school program with fresh produce and healthy foods for the weekend and holidays, when reduced price school lunches and breakfasts are not available. Here the children get to pick their own groceries, learning how to shop for food that’s good for them.
“Provide children with choices, and do it in a way that’s constructive, in a way that also emphasizes nutrition education, fitness, and ties it all together as part of what we need to really combat childhood hunger,” says Carlos Rodriguez of Food Bank for NYC.
Which remains a big problem in the five boroughs. The Food Bank says almost one third of the children in the city live below the federal poverty level – about one in five rely on emergency food programs.
The above story makes me very happy. I like the way they mix nutrition education with food assistance at the schools.
The poverty trap creates a devastating cycle in which children born into poverty never receive the necessities to develop into self-sufficient adults, leaving them destined for a life of poverty. The following statistic demonstrates it: 50% of United States children born into poverty remain in poverty for their entire lives.
On the upside, programs and initiatives such as the one mentioned in the story above help break the poverty cycle. I hope to see many more of them.