USDA Puts Hunger on Vacation This Summer

The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service is helping to put hunger on vacation this summer with their Summer Meal Site Finder, a Web and mobile tool that will provide the location of summer meal sites to ensure low-income children continue to receive nutritious meals while school is out. Having this information in a mobile format is key considering that lower income families are more likely to be mobile only.

Available in both English and Spanish, typing your address, city or zip code into the mobile tool will return a list of the 10 closest locations and information on when they serve meals to children through age 18. For those who are uncomfortable navigating the mobile tool, phone numbers are provided in both English and Spanish for the National Hunger Hotline.

The Summer Meal Site Finder is powered by the Summer Meal Site Finder API, one of USDA’s many publicly available APIs. According to USDA’s blog, the response to this tool has been phenomenal and 50% of the traffic is coming from mobile devices.

You can download this and other government apps through the USA.gov Federal Mobile Apps Directory. Do you have a federal app that is not listed on the Directory? Take part in the Great Federal Mobile Product Hunt.