Help Feed Our Kids

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Omar for continuing to be a champion on this issue, and I thank the Congresswoman for being here this evening.

As it was said before, we are the wealthiest nation on Earth. We should be able to feed every child and every person, period, point- blank. We have the resources--financial, natural, and intellectual--to help feed every child on the planet. The fact that we are choosing not to do so is a policy choice. It is not a choice based on a lack of resources.

As we focus on school lunches and children in our schools, we often talk about education. The conversation that has been happening over the last several decades is a conversation that focuses on something called the achievement gap.

We often look at the achievement gap through the lens of race. We say that Black and Latino students are outperformed by their White and Asian counterparts. What we don't often talk about is the achievement gap through the lens of economic distress and poverty.

What we know is children who suffer from poverty and live in poverty do more poorly in school than their middle-class and upper-middle-class counterparts. Poverty is obviously related to food insecurity and hunger.

Poverty and everything that comes with it is a complex trauma. Hunger is also a complex trauma. Children will not thrive in a school setting if we continue to allow them to be hungry.

This is not just about their academic performance. This is about their physical development. This is also about their social and emotional development as well. It is also about their mental health both in school and out of school.

This is not something that is only confined to what happens in our schools. We have to look at, consider, and think about what happens in their post-graduation environment. Children who are hungry and children who suffer from the complex traumas that I mentioned before will have lower or less positive health and economic outcomes over the course of their lives.

It is our duty and responsibility as the United States Government, with the power of the purse and the power of the intellectual and natural resources, to make sure we have preschool lunches in our schools and to make sure our children are fed.

I also want to mention a few other components that take place in schools that we don't often talk about as it relates to school lunches, poverty, and hunger. When we look at the school-to-prison pipeline, when we look at school suspensions, and when we look at school expulsions, when we look at these things, when we look at who is placed in special education, these are children who come from challenging circumstances rooted in poverty and also rooted in hunger and the trauma in their communities and in their homes.

Again, it is our duty and responsibility to get this done. To use language used by some of my more conservative colleagues, this is a national security issue because if we are not feeding our children, then we are not educating our children. If we are not educating our children, then we do not have a healthy society and we do not have a healthy democracy.

The well-being of our children is a pillar of our country going forward, and in order for them to receive the nourishment and education that they need, we must make sure they are fed and fed well and are not food insecure.

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