It Will Start and End With Food.

It all started, and ended, with food.

In 2014, I was awarded my first Golden Pen and later “Letter of the Year” by The Journal Gazette. The subject of the winning piece? Free school lunch.

I had been a social worker — daily assisting children in poverty — and was appalled at those who saw feeding children as an “entitlement problem.”

Our family, at the lower end of the middle class, never qualified for assistance or reductions but definitely had our share of financial struggles. The idea that our family would cruise through life on the laziness the free lunch program would give us was laughable; it was simply a break, a breath during a stifling era of our lives.

Hearing that school lunches would no longer be a burden for our family brought me to tears, not only in gratitude of the tiniest wiggle room (which we clung to) but also for the knowledge that people of great importance had made my family and thousands of others a priority.

I never forgot that kindness from you, my community, who loved my family so well. I realize to some it was a small gesture and incredibly basic (most states had done the research and had been moved to provide this investment). However logical, it still had an incredible impact on my life.

I became the executive director of Blessings in a Backpack out of gratitude and determination that every child deserves the basic human dignity of food. My life has been devoted to a cause that you had mercifully bestowed upon my own.

Alas, history so often repeats itself. Once again, our children have become fodder in partisan games. It’s incredible how so much time has lapsed, yet we continue to fall into the same mistakes that break our humanity.

The effects of unfed children in our community are devastating; there is no study (I don’t care what altered, far-leaning website you conjure) that will report anything but disastrous effects when the basic human needs of children are abandoned.

Mental health issues, developmental delays, poor test scores, behavioral issues, chronic illnesses — the list goes on and on of how these negative and lasting effects greatly increase when a child is denied nutrition.

But that, in my opinion, is simply the tip of a greater and more damning iceberg.

What message do we send our children, who witness the nation of greatest abundance, wasting food and resources in measurements of tonnage, when we are not only unwilling but downright gleeful at the prospect of starving them?

What havoc do we wreak, oh mighty gladiators wielding your political swords as you cry out “protect the children!” while loudly proclaiming that lazy elementary schoolchildren should go get jobs if they want to be fed?

Who jovially cheers the plight of poor, under-waged parents who work multiple jobs but are still unable to provide with that hateful shrug of “not my job to feed your kids”? Or those who build their thrones on the moral high ground of insisting that all lives deserve to be birthed, while simultaneously shouting the cruel, “you shouldn’t have kids if you can’t afford to feed ’em!” when it comes to life-sustaining services for those already living.

I have seen firsthand what happens, my friends. And the cost is higher than we have in any treasury.

Years ago, three sweet boys came through our youth center. Sweet kids who helped me bake brownies for a charity bake sale. They had never seen the inside of an egg; one explained that his family didn’t own a stove. Another professed that breakfast was always boxed.

It gave me great insight into their lives, ones that I knew were constantly lacking in the minimal necessities.

Years later, as I was driving home from vacation with my family, I received a notice from the local news. Those three boys found in an abandoned home — a drug deal gone wrong, they speculated. All three shot in the head in a cold execution that snuffed out their young lives.

The comments section was incredibly harsh; people called them gangbangers, said they played stupid games and got stupid prizes. And maybe they were, maybe they did.

But before that, they were children who were hungry. What option do children have when they’re thrown into a world where even the crumbs are swiped from their plates? Why are we shocked when they venture down a dark road that invites danger but also provides a chance for survival?

They were just trying to eat.

Hunger is not a problem. It is an obscenity. Anne Frank said this in her diary (now an often-banned book).

And here we are again. For those who insist that pain is the way to encourage parents to provide for impoverished children, let me clue you in: Children deprived of shoes have no bootstraps to pull themselves up by.

Food, nutrition, the simple act of feeding a child, is the necessary foundation of our society. I think of how we are at well over 70% food insecure in our school system, and what detriment awaits us should we fail to prioritize this necessity.

To quote Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” (another frequently banned book): “Until you do right by me, everything you even think about gonna fail.” It’s a reflection of self-worth, of justice, of the importance of respect and dignity.

Of how if we deny the least of these, we are building our houses on sand, readying the crumbling of our society.

Food is not “federal waste.” The feeding of children is not partisan, for children are not and should never be considered “disposable.” This is our future, our foundation. They’re ours, all of ours, to care for and protect the way we proclaim we want to.

And it will all start, or end, with food.