Feeding America is working hard to ensure that Congress passes the Child Nutrition Bill during the Lame Duck session. To garner public support for the passage of the bill, we are featuring a series of guest posts from our governement relations team throughout the week. This post is by Michelle Berger, Child Hunger Programs Coordinator at Feeding America.
While the health care debate is not the topic at hand, for me, the fight for CNR has triggered similar emotions to those elicited during the debate for health care reform. Perhaps it’s because my husband is a soon to be physician, and myself a dietitian, so the issues of medicine and nutrition tend to monopolize our dinner conversations (exciting right?). Or maybe it’s because I truly believe that, like providing medication and health care to people who are sick, ensuring that all people, especially our children, can access the nourishment they need to achieve a healthy, productive life is simply a basic human right–Not one only reserved for children whose families make more than 250K per year or live in the “right” neighborhood.
Federal nutrition programs are built on this premise. That no one should be hungry in America, and that children and low-income people, like all Americans, should have access to food, a healthful diet and nutrition education.
Today’s fight to expand access and improve the nutritional quality of Federal nutrition programs is not an either/or scenario. We need both and, more importantly, our children need both. The CNR bill we need to push through Congress in the next few weeks is far from perfect, but it contains several critical improvements to child nutrition programs that are essential in progressing efforts to fight hunger and safeguard the health of our children.
I’ve had the privilege of working in Sacramento as a dietitian in the WIC program, and know first-hand the immediate and long-lasting impact that WIC foods educational resources have on the lives of young children and their families. Not only does this CNR bill make possible the expansion and improvement of the WIC program, but it also aims to improve the quality of school meals, expand the supper, breakfast and farm-to school programs, not to mention support research and test innovative strategies for ending child hunger.
Like health care reform, the improvements to child nutrition programs won’t happen overnight. The evolution is slow, and as today’s situation proves, often full of trade-offs and compromises. But we don’t have the luxury of waiting for the perfect bill, program or time—we must pass CNR as it stands today; a critical piece of the solution in our commitment to ending child hunger and ensuring nutrition equity.
“We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.”
–Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance
