Going to Bed Hungry

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.

During my time on the project, I’ve learned a lot about mapping, analyzing, and collecting data, particularly as it relates to food deserts and available resources to combat that issue. We’ve collected hundreds of surveys from people of many different backgrounds.  We’ve done outreach and, I hope, touched a few lives along the way. 

Robert Mansell

Half A Loaf Team