Last week, an uproar ensued when dozens of children at an elementary school in Utah had their lunch trays snatched away from them because their accounts were not paid up. The untouched lunches were thrown in the trash as food safety regulations prevented staff from passing them on to anyone else and the children were given a piece of fruit and some milk in their place. The apparent cruelty, not to mention futility, of this exercise was met with outrage among the general public and pundits alike, and the school district subsequently issued an apology and announced that the cafeteria worker involved and her supervisor have been put on paid leave pending further investigation. There's really not much else to say about the whole debacle other than that it's comforting to know that most Americans apparently do not find the idea of depriving hungry children of food acceptable. If only the same sympathy were extended to their parents, however, such situations might never arise.

The big news this week is that the Farm Bill has finally passed after nearly four years of tense negotiations. Much of the delay has been attributed to the inability of lawmakers to reach agreement over how much (more) to cut from the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP.

A version of the bill proposed by GOP house leaders last July would have cut $40bn from SNAP. In the final version, those proposed cuts were whittled down to just over $8bn over the next decade. Although this is being hailed as a grand compromise, it still means that 1.7 million struggling Americans in 15 states will see their benefits cut by up to $90 per month in addition to absorbing an $11bn cut to the program last November. As the majority of SNAP benefits go to households with children, Congress and the White House are guilty of the same act for which the staff in the Utah cafeteria were vilified – taking food from the mouths of babes. Yet hardly anyone is calling for heads to roll.

The strange thing is that even as Congress and the White House are busy cutting off benefits to grown-ups that would help prevent their children (as well as the parents) from going hungry, there is a growing recognition both on the ground and at the government level that the crisis of child hunger in the US has reached unsustainable levels. According to census and government data from 2012, 22% of American children live in poverty and 16 million live in households that are food insecure (pdf), meaning one in five children do not have regular access to enough food. These abstract numbers are an all too real problem across the nation's public schools where teachers and principals are having daily interaction with hungry students.

In 2012, the No Kid Hungry Campaign surveyed more than 1000 K-8 public school teachers across the country with sobering results (pdf). Three out of five teachers reported regularly seeing children in their classrooms who come to school hungry because they are not getting enough to eat at home. 56% of teachers said that "a lot" or "most" of their students rely on school meals as their primary source of nutrition and more than half of the teachers surveyed said they frequently purchase food out of their own money for hungry kids, spending on average $26 a month.

It's no surprise then that when faced with the reality of hungry children on a daily basis the vast majority of public schools across the country (approximately 95%) voluntarily participate in the school lunch program and many school districts are starting to offer breakfast as well. In 2013, around 30.6m lunches and 13.15 million breakfasts were served to kids on a daily basis. Although the meals are heavily subsidized, with some kids qualifying for free meals and a smaller proportion for reduced price meals (40 cents for lunch (pdf) and 30 cents for breakfast), parents are still struggling to pay and defaults are on the rise.

A February 2012 survey carried out by the School Nutrition Association (SNA) found that among their members 53% of school districts (pdf) were experiencing an increase in unpaid meals. According to Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokesperson for the SNA, "it seems to be a lot of the families that are hovering around the threshold of poverty (that is families not poor enough to qualify for free meals but still too poor to pay the reduced rate) are the ones who can't pay." Prescriptions for how to deal with parents' inability to pay for the meals differ greatly, however, and the school in Utah is not the only one to tackle the problem with an absence of grace.

In September of last year, NPR's Marketplace program reported a shocking story about a six-year-old girl who was denied lunch at a school in East Orange, New Jersey because her account was thought to be in arrears. When the child's parents showed up at the school a little later, they learned that their daughter had been sent to a special room to wait out the lunch hour while her classmates finished eating.

The parents, who it turned out had paid their bill, were shocked to find that the room was full of kids who had not been fed even though many of them qualified for the reduced rate of 40 cents per meal. They said the school principal told them that she had spoken to parents on the first day of school and made clear that it was their responsibility to make sure their children were fed. This is all very well and it's understandable that school districts, many of which are facing mounting debt, would be upset about unpaid meal charges. But what is the point of ordering parents to pay up (and making their children suffer if they don't), when the reality is that many American parents have simply run out of money.

Can anyone really be surprised that this is the case? We all know that there are still not enough jobs to go around and that many of the jobs that do exist do not pay a living wage. Yet despite these realities, struggling American families are being dealt blow after blow. In December, 1.3 million Americans lost their unemployment benefits. Now, thanks to the Farm Bill and the cuts to SNAP in November, millions more Americans will have to absorb a steep reduction in their food stamp allowance. So while it's all very well to be outraged at the behavior of cafeteria staff in a Utah school who denied children food on one day, they are just bit players in a much larger farce. If we really can't stomach the idea of children going to school hungry in what is still one of the wealthiest countries in the world, then we need to spare a thought for their parents. Chances are that they are going hungry too.