This is the story of one of four buses that makes its way through the back roads to delivery lunch to kids who just don't have enough to eat. This is a very well reported and well written story -- Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow rode the bus, and then hung out with a family along the route. He provides a lot of context about these kids' lives. It's heartbreaking, and you have to wonder about why anyone would vote against food stamp subsidies. From the story,
She always worried about the basics of caring for her family — “Home. Job. Food. I never hit that jackpot all at once,” she said — but only in summer did their situation become so dire that she regularly asked her children to rate their hunger on a scale of 1 to 10. When her kids were in school, they ate a total of 40 free meals and 20 snacks there each week — more than 25,000 government-sponsored calories that cost her nothing. Her $593 in monthly food stamps usually lasted the entire month. They ate chicken casserole and ground beef for dinner. But now, with school out, she was down to $73 in food stamps with 17 days left in the month. “Thank God for the bus,” she said, but even that solved their problems for only one meal a day.
Desperation had become their permanent state, defining each of their lives in different ways. For Courtney, it meant she had stayed rail thin, with hand-me-down jeans that fell low on her hips. For Taylor, 14, it meant stockpiling calories whenever food was available, ingesting enough processed sugar and salt to bring on a doctor’s lecture about obesity and early-onset diabetes, the most common risks of a food-stamp diet. For Anthony, 9, it meant moving out of the trailer and usually living at his grandparents’ farm. For Hannah, 7, it meant her report card had been sent home with a handwritten note of the teacher’s concerns, one of which read: “Easily distracted by other people eating.” For Sarah, the 9-month-old baby, it meant sometimes being fed Mountain Dew out of the can after she finished her formula, a dose of caffeine that kept her up at night.
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