Jun 11, 2015 2 min read

Despite the United States’ material abundance, there remains another America, to roughly paraphrase the title of Michael Harrington’s pathbreaking 1962 book on American poverty. As of 2013, 49 million Americans lived in households that were deemed “food insecure,” a bit of jargon that basically means people within those households were not always sure when and where their next meals would come from. To put 49 million people into perspective, that’s just about the combined populations of California and Ohio.

Almost 16 million of those people are children, and some of them live within Washington and Greene counties. It’s sobering to realize, within the Washington School District, a full 79 percent of students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch.

Fortunately, the LeMoyne Multicultural Community Center in Washington, along with several churches in the area, recognize the need these childen have and are offering free, healthy lunches through Aug. 21, when students are out of school and cannot rely on the lunches they get at school.

In 2014, more than 200 children received free meals through the program, called Camp Challenge. This summer, organizers are hoping to almost triple that number by reaching 550 children. The program also teaches children about food preparation, gardening and nutrition.

“It almost seems a shame that kids, for whatever reason, are forced to depend on school lunches,” Tom Aloia, the missions chairman of Washington’s First United Methodist Church, told the Observer-Reporter. “Just because school is out, all of a sudden eating is out, too. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

And what makes the least sense of all is that so many millions of children and their parents are left in a state of uncertainty about food in a country as rich as ours.