"School's Out for Summer" by Anna Quindlen

When the Ad Council convened focus groups not long ago to help prepare a series of public-service announcements on child hunger, there was a fairly unanimous response from the participants about the subject.

Is it any wonder that the slogan the advertising people came up with was "The sooner you believe it, the sooner we can end it"?

For many adults who are really closet kids, this means that their blood hums with a hint of freedom, the old beloved promise of long, aimless days of dirt and sweat and sunshine, T shirts stained with Kool-Aid and flip-flops gray with street grit or backyard dust.

With so many households in which both parents are working, summer is often a scramble of scheduling: day camps, school programs, the Y, the community center.

And hunger in the United States, particularly since the institution of so-called welfare reform, is epidemic.

The Agriculture Department estimated in 1999 that 12 million children were hungry or at risk of going hungry.

But while the Christmas holidays make for heart-rending copy, summer is really ground zero in the battle to keep kids fed.

The school-lunch program, begun in the 1970s as a result of bipartisan federal legislation, has been by most measures an enormous success.

For lots of poor families it's become a way to count on getting at least one decent meal into their children, and when it disappears it's catastrophic.

Those who work at America's Second Harvest, the biggest nonprofit supply source for food banks, talk of parents who go hungry themselves so their kids can eat, who put off paying utility and phone bills, who insist their children attend remedial summer-school programs simply so they can get a meal.

The parents themselves are loath to talk: of all the humiliations attached to being poor in a prosperous nation, not being able to feed your kids is at the top of the list.

The people who run food banks report that most of their clients are minimum-wage workers who can't afford enough to eat on their salaries.

Some don't want or seek government help because of the perceived stigma.

Some are denied food stamps because of new welfare policies; others don't know they're eligible, and none could be blamed if they despaired of the exercise.

The average length of a food-stamp application is 12 often impenetrable pages; a permit to sell weapons is just two.

I stopped believing in that when I found myself in a bodega with a distraught woman after New York City had declared a snow day

I stopped believing in that when I found myself in a bodega with a distraught woman after New York City had declared a snow day; she had three kids who ate breakfast and lunch at school, her food stamps had been held up because of some bureaucratic snafu and she was considering whether to pilfer food from the senior center where she worked as an aide.

Surely there should be ways for a civilized society to see that that does not happen, from a simpler application for food stamps to a decent minimum wage.

Find a food bank and then go grocery shopping by proxy.

Somewhere nearby there is a mother who covets a couple of boxes of spaghetti, and you could make her dream come true.