New York City Is Starving Half a Million Children, Mamdani Claims

Campaign offers no backup for echo of Soviet propaganda

“Hunger and poverty - are the companions of capitalism. 34.4 million Americans live below the official poverty line,” says this Soviet propaganda poster from 1985.

The far-left has gotten so much mileage out of bashing Israel with the “starving Gazans” myth that it’s now moving on to try the same libel against an American target.

The Israel-hating socialist who is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, made the accusation today on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show,” in response to a question about education policy. “No matter what we do in the classroom, if we don’t reckon with the fact that 500,000 children are going to sleep hungry every night, then we will continue to see these kinds of struggles,” Mamdani said. “And that’s endemic of a city where one in four New Yorkers are in poverty.”

The Editors emailed the Mamadani campaign seeking a source for the half-million starving children claim. The campaign has not yet replied with a response.

The data that are publicly available about New York City suggest that the half-million-hungry-children every night claim is a stretch.

The New York Times reported in June 2024 that New York City’s entire population aged 0 to 19 is 1.8 million. So a half million hungry children every night would mean that 27.7 percent of the children in New York are hungry every night.

The state comptroller reports that one anti-hunger program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, spent about $405.8 million on food in fiscal 2024 statewide. Roughly half went to the 233,703 participants in New York City. In January 2025, New York City benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be called food stamps, were another $423.9 million, for 1.8 million beneficiaries in the city. Annualize that one month times twelve and it’s $5.087 billion.

The mayor’s management report says it served 230,887 school breakfasts daily and 557,596 school lunches daily in fiscal 2024. It also offers after-school snacks. Those meals are free to all students, and they are also available over the summer, seven days a week. As the website puts it, “you don't need to sign up, show any papers, or have an ID to get these meals.” There are even 27 Halal locations for free-meal recipients who follow the dietary laws of Islam.

In addition to the government programs there are many private-sector food pantries, food banks, and soup kitchens working to combat hunger. Where there are gaps, they manifest frequently not as children going hungry “every night,” but at the end of a payroll or end of a benefits-payment cycle before a benefits card is automatically reloaded. City Harvest, one of those private-sector organizations, says 1 in 4 New York City children “does not always know where their next meal will come from.” But “not always know” is not at all the same as “hungry every night.”

A May 2024 article by researchers from Duke, NYU, and New York City’s Office of School Health found that in the 2019-2020 school year, 23.5 percent of the poor-neighborhood students in New York City schools were obese and 24.9 percent of the very-poor neighborhood students were obese. The same study found that 7.4 percent of the poor-neighborhood students were “very obese” and 8.4 percent of the very-poor-neighborhood students were “very obese.” The kids from poor or very poor neighborhoods were more likely than the kids from wealthy or very wealthy neighborhoods to be obese or very obese.

Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health reports, “New York City has particularly suffered from this epidemic of childhood obesity. Recent studies of NYC children show that 15-19.4% of children are overweight and an additional 22-27% of children are obese. We see similar trends in our cohort study: 21% of 5 year olds were obese, as were 25% of those followed to age 7.”

I’m not saying there are no poor hungry children in New York. It should be a public-policy and charitable priority to make sure they are fed. But it’s a huge leap from that to Mamdani’s preposterous assertion about “the fact that 500,000 children are going to sleep hungry every night” in New York City.

Where might Mamdani have gotten such an idea in his head?

“One in Every 7 Is Starving in U. S. Under Capitalism, Pravda Asserts,” was a headline from the New York Times in 1949.

Ebay has for sale a Soviet propaganda poster from 1984 with the slogan, “In the capitalist world, more than 500 million children live in poverty.”

A 1985 Soviet propaganda poster sold at auction last year in London was described by the auction house as “Original vintage Soviet anti American propaganda poster - It’s hard to live a full life on an empty stomach - featuring an illustration of a crying child, the caption below reads in Russian - Hunger and poverty - are the companions of capitalism. 34.4 million Americans live below the official poverty line.”

I’ve been describing Mamdani as a socialist while President Trump has been calling him a communist. I generally try to avoid the name-calling. It’s certainly possible to be concerned about, and to work against poverty, and child poverty, without being a communist. But now Mamdani is going around calling for a rent freeze, taxing the rich more, demonizing Israel, setting up government-run grocery stores and building more government-owned housing, and he’s also echoing the Soviet propaganda line about starving American children.

The national platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, which Mamdani is part of, says, “We call for the nationalization of businesses like railroads, utilities, and critical manufacturing and technology companies, alongside regulation of corporate, communications, data, and financial sectors. We seek to ensure social and worker control over these businesses….we fight for the abolition of capitalism….” You don’t have to be Donald Trump to be concerned about what is going on here, you just have to be someone conversant in Soviet history or old enough to remember the Cold War.

Anyway, New York City is the media capital. If there were really half a million starving children you’d think the New York Times would find them and put those pictures on the front page instead of relying on the propaganda photos from Gaza featuring people suffering from other pre-existing medical conditions for which they are being evacuated elsewhere.

One paper that has been doing intriguing work on the New York state hunger beat is the Wall Street Journal, but you have to read pretty deep into a glum front-page article to get the news.

The Journal reported, “Felica Allen, a 39-year-old nursing assistant and single mom, works the graveyard shift in the emergency room at UHS Wilson Medical Center near Binghamton before returning home each morning to care for her four children, ages 3, 12, 14 and 17. A fifth, 22, moved out in September. Allen’s $20 an hour salary rose last year to $22.90, which amounted in 2024 to about $39,000 for the hours she worked, including bonuses and overtime. That’s more money than she’s ever made and not far above the federal government’s supplemental poverty threshold for her family size.”

The Journal dispatch continued, “Before Christmas, a letter from the county social services department arrived, saying her monthly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, the official name of the federal food assistance program, were being slashed from nearly $1,000 to $564 because she’s now making more in wages. Federal food aid is calculated through a formula that considers income and family size….In March, she decided to reduce her official weekly work hours from 32 to 26 so she could get back $220 in food benefits.”

Real problems in poverty policy are means-tested benefit phaseouts that function as marginal tax rates of 95 percent or higher. A politician serious about the issue might try working on that, rather than destroying his own credibility by exaggerating the hunger problem in New York City.

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