Pandemic-era federal waivers that expanded children’s access to food through year-round, free school lunches are set to expire this month, after Congress failed to extend the waivers past their June 30 deadline.

A cumulative 4.3 billion meals were distributed through the program over the last two summers.

“Now parents have to go back to filling in humiliating applications saying, ‘Here's what money we make and why we need help from the school lunch,’” Kummer told Boston Public Radio on Friday. “What parent has time to do that, let alone wants the stigma of their kid asking for this kind of assistance?”

Kummer is executive director of the Food and Society policy program at the Aspen Institute, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.