From Handouts to How-to

In this brief return to the discussion on hunger, food stamps, and food banks, I just want to link readers to a little article I read last night in Orion Magazine online: From Handouts to How To, by Kyle Boelte in Tucson AZ. He writes that at this time of economic downturn, the Tucson Community Food Bank is demonstrating how long-term thinking can solve food insecurity.

"The Food Bank believes that gardening isn’t just a pastime for the well-to-do, but that it’s an important adaptation that anyone with access to a little space, water, and sunlight can make."

This Food Bank itself has a 7000 ft. demonstration organic garden, where it grows food which it sells at its own Farmers' Market, at affordable prices, along with eggs from the chickens they keep onsite. They also hold gardening workshops for clients and send out experts to help people in the community design and develop their own gardens. I have to say that this is Lisa's "Teach a man to fish...." idea taken to a wonderful extreme.

When I lived in East Dallas, there was a stretch of Fitzhugh Ave where empty lots and marginal land had been turned into fantastic community gardens by the mostly Southeast Asian immigrant population that lived in the area. These were longterm garden projects, where the members had built sheds for storage, shade structures, installed poles and other devices for climbing crops, places that acted not just as food sources, but community sites for gathering to socialize as they worked. I just did a little Internet exploring, and discovered that these gardens are still going strong, have been for over twenty years. There is even a website for the Gardens, here. While I believe the gardens started as a spontaneous necessity for recent immigrants to have a source for the fresh greens and vegetables that are part of their traditional diet, they have now become members of the American Community Garden Association, which has numerous gardens in the North Texas area. Gardening most assuredly is not a "pastime for the rich" and I can't imagine that many people think of it that way.

Food for Thought Continued

The comments to my previous post on this thread continue to furnish new things to think about. Aine and Jackie (who even brought one of my favorite writers, Barbara Ehrenreich, into the discussion) gathered into the fold all those folks who are living in their vehicles, or in weekly room rentals in less-than-savory parts of town. These folks don't even have the equipment to make Kraft mac & cheese out of a box, unless they're using illegal hot plates or other fire hazardous pieces of cooking equipment. And there are probably more of these people than most of us realize. The book Jackie references, Nickled and Dimed; On (Not) Getting By In America, was written ten years ago, and documents the conditions at that time for the working poor. A point Ehrenreich makes is that the low-wage jobs held by the majority of the working poor are exhausting, and both physically and mentally degrading. Ten years on from Ehrenreich's investigations, the number of folks who have lost their jobs, well-paid white collar jobs as well as manual labor, their homes, and their vehicles, is bound to have grown by leaps and bounds.

Lisa has some interesting ideas about education in the use of commodity items, and Aine brings in the use of the crockpot, or slow cooker, something I was planning to introduce myself. I want to say something here about the students in my ESL class, who are all Mexican immigrants, working as service employees at the Univ. of New Mexico. They are legal immigrants, some are already citizens, some are working on the process. As presently all of them are women, food and cooking are frequent topics of our class discussions. None of them receive any government benefits, they are fiercely independent and proud of being able to hold a job in this country, no matter how menial cleaning the University Hospital clinic bathrooms, or the dorms or the classrooms may be. They have brought the cuisine of their native country with them, and cook every night for their families. Those who work the night shifts cook meals in the morning before they head to work, which they leave for husbands and kids to warm up when they get home. They use the slow cooker as one of their main cooking tools, for a staple of their diet, beans, as well as soups and stews. It is ironically interesting to me that the food movements I mentioned in my last post are mainly based on foods that were originally peasant fare, poor people's food that needed a lot of ingenuity and time in order to produce something savory and delicious. My students are cooking peasant food without belonging to any trendy "movement," simply because they don't have a lot of money and the nutrition of their families matters to them very much.

Something else Lisa brings up is a truly fascinating idea, that of a "foodmobile" modeled on the bookmobiles used by libraries to get books to rural areas and parts of town and cities without a nearby library. I have some doubts, as does she, that this could be an effective and viable government program. But what it could be, I think, is a food bank program. Getting to the physical location of the banks is bound to be difficult for many people, as they are often located in distant industrial sections of a town or city. A mobile pantry, stocked with nutricious staple items, and staffed by an educational volunteer willing to give cooking classes travelling through areas where people need the help the most, maybe biweekly - giving live demonstrations and hands-on participation in how to use the items in the van that session. I have to bring in Growers' Markets as a resource here, as in this town anyway, all of our markets accept WIC, EBT and Senior food checks (Commodity Supplemental Food Program) for fresh seasonal produce, some of it organic, some not. All of it better than what can be found in neighborhood groceries. I have suggested to our local food bank that they connect with the Growers' Market managers to get a deal going where leftover produce from the markets could be donated to Roadrunner Food Bank and distributed to their clients. At the market I usually frequent, there are often demonstration projects to show market customers how to use produce that may be new and a little scary to them. That market is located in an area close to downtown, and has customers of every class, ethnicity, walk of life. It's education for the masses.

Okay, this is way too long, and I think I have run dry. Please continue to add your thoughts, to post on this subject. We have by no means exhausted it. I, however, am a little exhausted by it for now. Thanks for all the input, what a great crew reads and writes on this blog. I am so glad to be part of the gang.

Not A Lot of Comfort or Joy for the Hungry

The "holidaze" is finally over, and though it has been wonderful for both of us to be home, enjoying time to read fat novels by the fire, go to movies, take naps, cook hearty soups and stews, breads that make the house smell like heaven; I'm just as happy to leave the forced cheer that is endemic to this time well behind us. We don't do a lot of holiday shopping, but even the most trivial grocery store errand has an enforced accompaniment of tidings of comfort and joy, or sleigh bells ringing, snowmen melting. It begins soon after Halloween, and may not have ended yet; I won't know til I have to set foot in a commercial establishment.

Yet the truth is that for many in this the richest country on the planet, this period of several winter weeks is merely an extension of the pain they endure every day of the year. With more time to browse the Internet, read up on issues, I have become ever more aware over the holidays of the constant rise in what our government, unwilling to use the word "hunger," calls "food insecurity." While I have been cooking greenchile stew, black-eyed peas, pumpkin bread, and albondigas soup, many families with small children have had only what they could glean at local foodbanks, or purchase with their food stamps.

The facts and figures on this are available to anyone who cares to find them; Feeding America, formerly America's Second Harvest, has a Hunger Factsheet that will provide a loud wakeup call to anyone who cares to read it. The New York Times has been running a series of articles on what they call The Safety Net, the most recent of which both deal with the growing dependence of many Americans on food stamps. The first, Food Stamp Use Soars, is scary enough, but the article published yesterday, Living on Nothing But Food Stamps, documenting the rise in the number of Americans who have no cash income whatsoever and are feeding themselves and their kids on their monthly food stamps alone, is way past frightening. This latter article includes interactive maps of the USA that will show you how your own state, and county, is faring on this issue. My state, New Mexico, has experienced a sharp rise in families living on food stamps, a fact that doesn't surprise me at all, as I recently learned that NM ranks third in states where children are receiving both breakfast and lunch on the school program that furnishes free meals to families in need of them.

I think this is a situation that we don't really comprehend, unless, or until, we are living in it, or in close touch with our local food banks, or choose to make the effort to find out the reality. Food banks are in desperate need of donations; all over the country they are falling short of the supplies they need to feed those who come to them for help. Feeding America has an action center, and a food bank locater, where you can get in touch with your local resources, either for help, to donate, or to volunteer. As little fondness as I have forWalMart , I have to note that they have recently donated 35 refrigerated trucks to Feeding America food banks across the country, including Roadrunner Rood Bank, my own local bank. As part of the truck donation, a full truck- load of food was also given to the food bank and included items such as applesauce, green beans, corn, oatmeal, peanut butter, jelly, macaroni and cheese, cereal and other items totaling more than 17,200 pounds food. It is estimated that the 35 trucks donated to food banks nationwide will help transport up to 52.5 million pounds of food every year.

Early this year Feeding America will release their latest report on hunger, Hunger in America 2010. It will be of great interest to see how the numbers have increased in this report since the last one done in 2006. The statistics will probably be frightening. (Cross-posted to Quid Nunc.)