I recently found out that the Minneapolis School District serves federally-funded free lunches to all children ages 1 through 18 all summer long at many sites around the city: local community centers and parks, among other places. Our local YMCA is one such site. Today I happened to be out with my kids and heading home at lunchtime, so I stopped by the Y to check it out. "Where are we going?" asked Oscar, but I wouldn't tell him, just in case they were out or something. No sense setting anyone up for a disappointment.
The staff at the Y knows us by sight. I walked in and said to the woman working the counter, "Hey, we wanted to check out the lunch program -- where do we go?" She directed me downstairs. Down we went, following the sound of children's voices. We found a door with a piece of paper taped to it, on which had been written -- by a teenage girl wielding a whole box of markers, I guessed -- "LUNCH ROOM." We peeked in carefully -- I knew that there is also a sort of summer-camp program going on. Several dozen kids at tables, and a handful of teenagers with matching tee shirts.
"Is this the summer program or the lunch program?" I asked a tee-shirted teenage boy, whom I would describe as "clean-cut" except that he was graced with a huge halo of frizzy brown hair.
"It's both," he said, "how many lunches do you need?" I decided that MJ and Milo could share and asked for two. He retrieved two plastic-wrapped cardboard baskets from a pallet and cheerfully handed one to Oscar and one to Milo. "All the kids here are for the summer program, so you can go upstairs and sit at the picnic tables by the pool."
Upstairs we opened up the packages and examined them. The children were impressed. Each had a half-cup of apple juice, a half-pint of two-percent chocolate milk, a banana, and a sandwich of turkey ham and American cheese on what appeared to be a soft whole-wheat bun. Plus a packet of mayonnaise and a napkin and a straw. Oscar was very pleased and ate up his whole lunch. Milo ate the bun and the cheese and the juice and the milk and half his banana. Mary Jane ate Milo's turkey ham and the other half of the banana and a couple of pieces that I tore off of Milo's bun when he wasn't looking.
Except that I hardly ever serve juice, it's not unlike the sort of lunch I normally feed the kids in the summer, and they were very pleased. We homeschoolers might as well get some of those tax dollars back, eh? (If the food doesn't get eaten, it just gets thrown away.) Here's some more information about the USDA Summer Food Service Program. Maybe one is available in your city.
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