Starting Thursday, August 27, Huntington residents who are 60 or older can pick up a free 35 pound box of food once a month in the middle of Huntington Station. Island Harvest, the Melville based food bank, is adding a monthly mobile distribution at the Town of Huntington's Municipal Parking Lot 22, at 1057 New York Avenue, and the first one runs from 10 a.m. to noon.

The site appears on Island Harvest's own August pickup calendar, and under the agreement with the town the distribution repeats on the fourth Thursday of each month for the next year, through late August 2027. It costs the seniors nothing, and it costs the town nothing.

What the box is

The program behind this is the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, a federal USDA nutrition program that Island Harvest administers across Long Island under the plainer name Senior Food Boxes. Each qualifying senior receives one box a month, about 35 pounds, packed with shelf stable staples chosen to fill the specific nutritional gaps that show up in older adults on fixed incomes.

Island Harvest currently delivers up to 5,777 of these boxes to Long Island seniors every month, through a mix of mobile sites like this one and home deliveries. The Huntington Station lot joins a pickup map that already includes senior centers, libraries and churches from Riverhead to Valley Stream.

Who qualifies

The requirements are simple and worth reading before making the trip:

You must be 60 or older, you must live in New York State, and your gross monthly income cannot exceed $1,995 per senior. Identification is required at every location, and it is a once a month program, so a senior who has already collected a box elsewhere that month cannot pick up a second one. Distribution is first come, first served, and the schedule can shift, so the calendar at islandharvest.org is the thing to check before heading out. Sign ups run through the Senior Support page on that site, and Island Harvest answers questions at 631-873-4775.

That income line is the part worth saying out loud to a neighbor. $1,995 a month is close to what a typical Social Security check alone comes to, which means a senior living on Social Security and little else, exactly the person too proud to think of a food bank as being for them, is very likely eligible.

How it came to Huntington Station

The Huntington Town Board cleared the way on August 11, authorizing Supervisor Ed Smyth to sign a memorandum of understanding with Island Harvest. Councilwoman Theresa Mari sponsored the resolution and Smyth seconded it. The town has run mobile meal distributions for seniors before through its Department of Human Services; this arrangement hands the monthly operation to a food bank that already does it at scale, on town property, at no cost to the town budget.

Island Harvest works out of Spagnoli Road in Melville and supports a network of about 300 community partners across Nassau and Suffolk. Putting a monthly senior site directly on New York Avenue matters because Huntington Station is dense, walkable and underserved in exactly the way that makes a parking lot distribution practical: a senior without a car can actually get to Lot 22.

What it means for you

If you are 60 or older and the income line fits, the fourth Thursday of the month now comes with 35 pounds of groceries you do not have to buy. If you are not, you almost certainly know someone who is: a parent, an aunt, the neighbor who has been in her house since the sixties. Forward this to them, or better, offer them the ride on the 27th. The food is packed, the lot is reserved, and the only thing the program cannot supply is the person showing up.