Angel de Blas, a 10-year-old entering fifth grade in the fall, said meals at home are uncertain. “Anything we can find,” he explained. Rice and beans, hot dogs wrapped in tortillas, cereal, pizza.
Angel is finishing the orange that accompanied his cheese sandwich. He is eating for free at the Rowland Heights Library, a county library a little more than 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. His brother, Juan, a 21-year-old student at California State University, Fullerton, is seated nearby at a desktop computer. Juan waves me away — he’s trying to enroll in his fall semester classes.
“It’s unpredictable,” said Angel, who sometimes gets seconds when offered by librarians Rebecca Sevilla and Tiffany Pranajasa.
Lunch at the Library, a free summer lunch program that fills in for free and reduced cost meals at school, is predictable. At least for now. For de Blas and other food insecure children, that’s the point.
In only its second year as a fully state funded program, Lunch at the Library was on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s list of programs this past May to be cut in the wake of a massive state budget shortfall. But elected officials in Sacramento agreed to fund $3 million, about half its original budget. The strains show.
Lunch at the Library is advertised on flyers and signs in and around the library. That may be effective for regular patrons, but there are still young people who might not regularly visit the library and see the advertisements, like de Blas.
Sevilla, who has worked in Los Angeles County libraries for 11 years, said the first week (beginning June 17) of Lunch at the Library at Rowland Heights was “sparse,” with about 30 meals served a day. The following week, there were 45 students and the library ran out of meals.
Nearly 3.6 million California children — more than 61% — enrolled in K-12 public schools in the 2023-2024 school year are eligible for free or reduced price meals, according to the California Department of Education. In an effort to address food insecurity, California became the first state to offer free breakfast and lunch to all public school students, starting in 2022. For children and families dependent on school for meals, winter and summer breaks pose a problem. While community centers, food banks and parks often ramp up service during breaks for school, hunger and nutritional needs remain.
Lunch at the Library began last summer as a $5.49 million program of the California State Library in partnership with the California Department of Education. Local libraries work with local governments and community agencies to bring Lunch at the Library into communities like Rowland Heights. While the program has been fully funded by the state for the past two years, similar efforts have existed since 2013, according to Kaela Villalobos, a library program consultant with the California State Library.
Lunch at the Library doesn’t just serve lunch. Last summer, in addition to providing 271,030 meals, the program distributed 125,422 free books to families, and libraries hosted 10,609 enrichment programs. Teens were provided paid jobs as well as opportunities to fulfill volunteer service hours. Youths learned about food and nutrition through field trips to educational farms, cooking demonstrations and construction of community gardens.
Food insecurity is limited or inconsistent access to healthy food, according to UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research. Food insecurity can impact a child’s physical development as well as their mental and physical health. More than 1.4 million California children were food insecure in 2022 (the latest year for which data is available), according to Map the Meal Gap, a child food insecurity report published annually by Feeding America. Food insecurity affects about double the percentage of Black and Latino families with children compared to the percentage of white families affected, according to the California Association of Food Banks.
Locally, libraries are responsible for drawing attention to the lunch program. In Los Angeles County, that means putting up flyers, banners and yard signs at the libraries themselves. Emails are sent to cardholders, and direct mail cards are sent to homes in the library’s ZIP code, explained Jessie Towers, marketing manager for the L.A. County Library system. While that approach works for library patrons and regulars, it simply doesn’t reach all hungry children who might otherwise have a meal at their school during the academic year.
When Sevilla and Pranajasa announce the end of lunch, Angel cleans up and returns to the book stacks. He’s reading about the Bermuda Triangle. Brother Juan reveals there’s no computer or internet at home. He needs the library computer to register for classes. Asked about breakfast today, Juan said Angel ate a protein bar from a gas station. There’s less food towards the end of the month.
“Sometimes we eat less,” said Juan de Blas. Sometimes Juan forgoes a meal so his younger brother can eat. Food insecurity is a problem among California State University students, like Juan, according to a report released last fall.
Though Juan took his brother Angel to Lunch at the Library last year, he forgot about the program this summer until the day before, when they stopped in. He didn’t get any flyers or emails. He didn’t see any banners. Angel got his lunch yesterday simply by chance.
California needs to do more than rely on librarians printing flyers to get food to hungry students during the summer. But California’s budget priorities when it comes to food security are unpredictable.
