School is almost out for summer, and while many New York City public school students are looking forward to a carefree break, for others who rely on free school breakfasts and lunches, it may also mark the hungriest time of year.
To combat summer hunger head-on, meal kit delivery service HelloFresh partnered with No Kid Hungry, City Harvest and award-winning chef and TikTok personality Eitan Bernath to distribute more than 1,500 free HelloFresh meal boxes to families at P.S. 177 in Gravesend on June 17.
According to Feed the Children, 13 million kids in the United States experience food insecurity. In New York City, one in four children faces hunger — and the long summer break can make matters worse for many public school students.
Bernath, who serves on the City Harvest Food Council, told Brooklyn Paper the goal of the event was to provide families with “nutritious and delicious” food.
“They deserve to eat just as good food as all of us,” said Bernath, noting that New York City is one of the world capitals of gourmet dining.
“Yet, people that walk right past these restaurants every single day, all day long, don’t have access to any food,” Bernath said. “It’s so easy to take for granted that those of us who aren’t food insecure can just open the fridge, grab something to eat, go to the pantry, grab something to eat. How many New Yorkers don’t have that?”
Potential cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by nearly $300 billion would further exacerbate the food insecurity crisis and increase demand for food pantries and soup kitchens — demand that has already grown by 85% compared to 2019.
At the same time, reductions to vital federal feeding programs — including the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which allows food banks to purchase food from local farms, and the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which ships food directly to food banks and helps cover operational costs — have made it harder for organizations to meet the growing need.
Jeffrey Yorzyk, senior director of sustainability at HelloFresh North America, highlighted the company’s Hunger Heroes campaign, a partnership with No Kid Hungry aimed at raising awareness about childhood hunger, especially during the summer, when school meal programs are unavailable to students in need.
“Nine out of 10 teachers are worried about the food their students are going to get during the summertime, and up to 85% of them believe that families really should have assistance around food insecurity during the summer as well,” Yorzyk explained. “So with SNAP programs at risk right now and so many things, we really wanted to try and bring visibility to that for the community.”
In addition to the Hunger Heroes campaign, HelloFresh also runs Meals With Meaning, a weekly food distribution effort launched in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign distributes about 36,000 meal kits weekly across Brooklyn and several other U.S. cities — and is on track to hit the 10 million mark since its inception.
HelloFresh has also partnered with the New York City Department of Veterans’ Services (DVS) to provide meal kits to veterans and their families through Meals with Meaning.
“[DVS] is really making sure that military veterans and their families are getting food because there’s actually such a disproportionate amount of food insecurity with military families and the Veterans especially,” Yorzyk said.
City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, runs the Produce Pals program at P.S. 177. Pedro Urbaez, associate director of direct and community distribution at City Harvest, said he appreciated HelloFresh’s support.
“One in four children in New York City [don’t have] enough access to food,” Urbaez said. “For us to have someone like HelloFresh be able to donate these meals, especially now, right before the school year ends — and summer meals are not something that everybody will be able to access — this is very important to us.”
Urbaez told Brooklyn Paper that 50% of working-age New Yorkers are struggling to make ends meet due to high inflation and the rising cost of living.
“[For City Harvest] it is very important to continue to have things like [the meal box distribution] and be able to give people access to food and be able to give them at least some sort of break, financially, so they can go ahead and take care of other things that they might have to take care of [like] rent and bills,” Urbaez said.
