Congress is currently contemplating a $54 billion request to support our airlines. I respectfully request that at least a similar amount be dedicated to America Eats Now, so that our restaurants and delivery partners can feed our elderly citizens and deliver meals to their doorsteps.

That measure of spending could sustain our elderly citizens in daily meals, freshly prepared, through the peak of this crisis. It would also sustain our farm workers, food suppliers and delivery agents, who in turn would spend the cash sustaining their own families. There are many hundreds of thousands of food jobs that depend on our restaurants.

America’s technological innovators, such as Uber and GrubHub, can rapidly adapt a home delivery service for our neighbors who are too fearful to buy their own food. This country’s world-class entrepreneurs can solve these challenges creatively and economically.

The second group that needs our urgent support are families on the brink of economic disaster. Governors and mayors across the country have rightly grappled with the competing needs to close down schools to limit the spread of the virus, while maintaining the school meal services that keep our kids healthy.

We need to go several steps further, however. The children who rely on free school meals live in families who are struggling financially at the best of times. Now is the time to extend the school meal program to their families: to turn our school kitchens into community kitchens. For those in suburban and rural areas, we should use the school bus network to deliver food packages along the routes where they normally pick up and drop off students.

Sadly, school kitchens may not be enough.

As the crisis worsens, we need to maintain the capacity to support our medical heroes, first responders, senior centers and the homeless, with safe havens of food preparation and distribution.

Hospital kitchens and senior centers will lose staff to sickness. An army marches on its stomach: Our police and National Guard can no longer rely on their favorite neighborhood food stands and delis.