As we were growing up, parents would frequently shame children who did not clean their plates by telling them of children starving in China. At the time, we could not grasp a clear relationship between the two; we had friends who were digging a hole in their backyard sandbox to try to get to China.

We’ve grown up and can see the need to prevent mass starvation anywhere in the world. But now we can also see a direct link between New Yorkers who are starving and a way that wasted food can directly help them.

We’ve written for several years now about the increasing “food insecurity” in our midst and can see it on our pages as local food banks report their growing need. People above the federally-set poverty line can be food insecure — not having regular access to nutritious meals. Sometimes, a seemingly comfortable suburban family, for example, can be overextended when a job is lost or an accident happens.

While strides have been made nationwide since the Great Recession in combatting food insecurity, the numbers remain stagnant in New York.

In 2015, over 42 million Americans lived in food-insecure households — that’s 13 percent of households —  according to Feeding America, the country’s largest hunger-relief organization. Of those, 5 percent, or 6.3 million households experienced very low food security.

A report put out by the United States Department of Agriculture, “Household Food Security in the United States in 2015,” shows that the food-insecurity rate in New York State dropped just a fraction of a percent from 2014 to 2015, going from 14.4 percent to 14.1 percent while other states with large populations, like Florida, California, and Texas, made much better progress.

Nationwide, the report says, the food insecurity rate between 2014 and 2015 dropped 1.3 percentage points and 2.2 points from the peak of the recession in 2011. Federal government programs often don’t fill the need. Nationwide, just 59 percent of food-insecure people reported getting help from federal nutrition assistance programs.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal offers a solution. About 40 percent of all food produced in our country gets thrown away. In New York State, millions of pounds go to landfills where the food decomposes, releasing methane — a gas that furthers the greenhouse effect, hastening climate change. A large portion of that thrown-away food is edible.

The governor’s Food Recovery Act would require hospitals, supermarkets, universities, restaurants, and other facilities that waste large amounts of food to donate the unused but edible food, and to send remaining waste to a plant that would recycle it, compost it, or use it to produce energy.

This would help the one in seven New Yorkers who are hungry and would also help the environment. Our landfills are filling at a rapid rate — just look at the mountain of waste rising from Rapp Road — so it is essential to recycle what we can. However, the Food Recovery Act was not included in the State Senate’s one-house budget.

We are writing this as the legislature continues, past the April 1 deadline for the state budget, to hammer out compromises in the midst of stress from proposed federal cutbacks. On Monday, both houses agreed with the governor to extend the current state budget until May 31 to keep New York’s government fully functional until a new budget is adopted.

A proposal has been made to include the act by linking it to the Farm to Foodbank Tax Credit, which, for the past two years, has passed in both the State Assembly and the State Senate. This bill, which is a  good one, would let farmers claim tax credits for food donations made to a food bank for a quarter of the farmer’s qualified donations.

We know local farmers are already doing this — we’ve covered Indian Ladder Farms in New Scotland, for example, donating huge bins of apples that may not be perfect enough to sell retail but are plenty nutritious. This act would help keep struggling farms in business while at the same time it would get produce that otherwise might be discarded to people who need it.

Even if the linked measures don’t make it through the current budget process, we urge that they be considered again next year. A survey released on Tuesday from the Siena College Research Institute showed that, in the past year, one out of every eight New Yorkers has gotten food from a local pantry or meals program, with half of them doing so somewhat or very often. At the same time, the survey showed that 96 percent of New Yorkers agree “most strongly” that no one in the state should go hungry.

So, clearly, the need is there as is the public will to solve the problem, with nearly half of New Yorkers donating food, the survey found.

It is simply not acceptable to be simultaneously wasting so much food, and hurting our environment in the process, when one in seven New Yorkers isn’t assured of a nutritious meal. Even a child — and thousands of them are hungry in our midst — could grasp the rightness of this proposal. There is no need to dig deep to understand it. People are hungry. At the same time, food is going to waste. A good government links the two.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer