Ayanna Pressley: “I thank Representative Omar for bringing us together this afternoon and for her steadfast leadership on the issue of…”

“I thank Representative Omar for bringing us together this afternoon and for her steadfast leadership on the issue of hunger and food insecurity, an issue that she has been leading on since she was in the Minnesota State Legislature. We are grateful for her shining a light consistently on this and the need for us to address rising hunger and its impact on communities here and around the globe. Madam Speaker, across Massachusetts' Seventh District and across the Nation, families are facing unprecedented levels of food insecurity. I am reminded of the words of Coretta Scott King, who said: ``Starving a child is violence. Neglecting schoolchildren is violence.'' We can, in fact, do something about this violence. I am picking up on the words of Congressman McGovern, a global champion in the fight against hunger and food insecurity, when he said that we should stop managing problems and solve them. This is a solvable problem. A recent survey by the Greater Boston Food Bank found that nearly 2 million adults across the Commonwealth struggled to get enough to eat last year. It was Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ people and their families with children who were most likely to struggle. No one should know hunger. No parent should know the heartache of putting their baby to sleep with an empty belly. Our communities were already in the midst of a hunger crisis, one that we knew would be exacerbated by the pandemic.…”