As a kid, I would sometimes act up, and my punishment would
be that I couldn’t have my usual cookies and milk before bed. On those nights,
I felt distressed, because even though I’d eaten a good dinner earlier in the
evening, I would get hungry later that night, and would look forward to a
little snack before I went to sleep.
I’d lay in bed with my stomach growling. I would toss and
turn, feeling deprived. It probably would have been easy to sneak downstairs
and grab a little something, but at the time I was too young to even think of
that as an option. The fact that I had the opportunity to do so, however, says
a lot about how fortunate I was.
Some children in the Binghamton area can’t tip downstairs
and find anything to eat. They don’t go to bed hungry because they’ve
misbehaved, they go to bed hungry because they have no other choice. When they’re
supposed to be sleeping, they’re tossing and turning, and yet they’re expected
to get up and go to school the next morning, nutritionally fortified for the
day.
The recent Public Service Announcement the Half A Loaf team
created on Broome County’s Breakfast Program is one of 10 PSAs in the “Never Go
Hungry” campaign. It lets people know the resources available to address food
insecurity in our area, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed working on the
HAL project. We’ve used the resources from a Ross Foundation grant to address this
challenge in the Binghamton area.
Robert Mansell
Half A Loaf Team
