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 green chile 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 for WalMart, 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 be frightening.
(Cross-posted from Women On)

Amazing Grace, Generosity in Hard Times

Last Saturday was the fall Postal Carriers' Food Drive here in Albuquerque, and maybe all over the country. You know, it's that day that you clean out your cupboards and pantry and put all the canned/packaged/dry foods that you know you'll never eat into a grocery bag and leave it out by the mailbox for your postal carrier to pick up. Or at least that's kind of how I've always looked at it. I look at it quite differently now, after the experience Gail and I had late Saturday afternoon. As we are donors to Roadrunner Foodbank, our local supplier of food to those in need, we receive their newsletter. The most recent letter had a request for volunteers to help out at all our postal stations unloading the trucks as carriers came in from their mornings and afternoons of loading them full of bags of food.
So, we volunteered. The substation to which we were assigned is out behind the airport, in an area we are completely unfamiliar with. But after Saturday, I feel like I know at least some of the people who live in that area. I must add the caveat that this is far from being a wealthy residential area, quite the opposite in fact. We suited up for the cold weather, climbed up on the loading dock, and started unloading bins containing the bags of food. Then we sorted them into three categories and tossed them into huge cardboard bins: cans, glass jars, and dry packages or boxes. There were some subsets, like bags of chips, and loaves of bread, that had their own boxes on the sides so they wouldn't get crushed by heavier boxes or bags of stuff.

The big surprise to us was both the quality and the quantity of food in those bags coming off the postal trucks. These people hadn't just cleaned out their cupboards and gotten rid of the old boring stuff that had been there for a year: they had gone to the regular chain groceries for sure, but they had also gone to CostCo and Whole Foods, Sunflower Market and Keller's, places where they purchased organic peanut butter and pasta sauce, cartons of vegetable juice, Amy's soups, giant bags of organic pastas. There were bags of organic lentils and other legumes, boxes or organic cereals hot and cold, baby food of all kinds.

In short, the world has changed a lot more than I had any idea. More places are carrying organic foods of all sorts, and more people are buying them when they shop. The truly astounding thing is that they are buying them, not just for themselves, but for unknown strangers who can't afford to feed their families organic pasta with organic tomato sauce or make their kids organic peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches. And that this is happening in a time of economic harship unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. I've worried that my bags with cans of organic navy beans, pumpkin, lentil soup and so forth would be simply ignored or cast aside by putative recipients. How wrong I have been. We were so cheered up by the people we were working with, lots of whom brought their young adolescent kids, people of all ethnicities and ages, and by the amount of food we all unpacked and sorted - I've looked at the entire city differently for the past week.