Eating Animals

On Sunday, I was privileged to be part to a panel presentation at the Clarkson University Convocation.

All incoming freshmen at Clarkson has red the book, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer.
The book makes a strong case for a vegan lifestyle, although I did not feel it was too "preachy" on the subject.  It did provide examples of both animal farmers and slaughter operations that maintain high standards of animal husbandry and humane treatment and encouraged those of us who will eat meat to consider those options.

The panel responding to the book did not, interestingly enough, include any vegetarians or vegans.  We were all omnivores, a couple of whom might describe ourselves as "selective omnivores."

Fair warning if you do intend to read the book, the descriptions of conditions at many large factory farms and slaughterhouses are quite graphic and stomach-turning.  And, I am sure that the things described really do happen at large factory farms and large slaughter houses.  Which is why I count myself among those selective omnivores who wants to know where her meat is coming from.

Although I was not raised in any of these traditions, I feel a deep connection to the Jewish, Muslim, and Native American traditions as it relates to animals and meat.  I believe that when we do take an animals life for food, we need to treat it with reverence and as the gift that it is.  Offering a prayer of thanks to the spirit of the animal that is providing food for us has always seemed appropriate, indeed important, to me.

Sadly, our modern food system does not allow for that for most of us.

Which is just one of the reasons I want to see a vibrant, sustainable, local food system here in the North Country.

Gloria

New book: Big Hunger

To most Americans, the food bank is revered on both the political left and right for its steady work helping to feed the roughly 40 million people who wonder where their next meal will come from. But longtime anti-hunger activist Andy Fisher tells a different story in his new book Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups. Fisher writes that food banks and other anti-hunger organizations (as well as federal programs) are far too cozy with big corporations. He suggests that USDA, anti-hunger organizations, and the food industry comprise an “anti-hunger industrial complex” in which anti-hunger groups lobby for federal nutrition aid that USDA distributes so recipients can buy products the food industry sells  (one-sixth of Kraft’s sales are SNAP-related). Fisher also criticizes food banks for their failure to address the root causes of hunger and to perpetuate the problem through just treating its symptoms.

Source: Citylab, 6/13/17, Inescapable Hunger Cycle

Economic inequality as a cause of hunger

Chronic hunger persists across the U.S. The number of food insecure Americans has risen—from 10% in 2002 to 13%.  While anti-hunger leaders have been effective at maintaining funding for SNAP and increasing the number of food banks, and federal food programs have remained intact while other anti-poverty programs have been eliminated or slashed, Andy Fisher argues that anti-hunger advocates are missing an essential point: That hunger is not an isolated problem, but the product of much larger economic inequality driven by low wages. Fisher is the author of a new book,  Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups, which contends that because anti-hunger organizations are heavily reliant on corporate donations of food and money, they have often failed to hold businesses accountable for offshoring jobs, cutting benefits, exploiting workers and rural communities, and resisting wage increases.

Source: Civil Eats, 4/20/17, Solve Poverty

How the good food movement can solve the problem of hunger

When community worker Nick Saul became the executive director of The Stop in 1998, he found a cramped and under-funded food pantry.  Through his vision and leadership, The Stop was transformed into a thriving, internationally respected Community Food Centre. The Stop has flourished with gardens, kitchens, a greenhouse, farmers markets and a mission to revolutionize our food system. In an easy to read, down to earth way, he tells us what The Stop could mean for the future of food.  His passionate argument that everyone deserves a dignified, healthy place at the table is hard to disagree with.

The Stop, a Community Food Centre, introduces us to a whole new way to combat hunger and poverty.  In a way that few have accomplished, The Stop brings the anti-hunger and good food movements together.  It's worth the read for anyone working to fight hunger or on the good food movement. 

Closing the Food Gap

Having worked in Hartford for many years, I occasionally get asked if I know Mark Winne.  Mark is the former long-time executive director of the Hartford Food System,the founding chair of the board of directors at Foodshare, and the author of "Closing the Food Gap."  Mark was also the board chair who hired me to be the director at Foodshare in August of 1984.  He probably never thought that we would both still be working on food and hunger issues in 2016!

Mark's book is about the "food gap," the gap between how the well-to-do / well-educated eat and the way the lower income people in this country end up eating.  I tend to characterize this gap by saying "the rich get locally-grown, organic, and the poor get the dollar menu at the corner fast food place."  (Now, I know that's a generalization and not always true, but it's more true than untrue - that's the nature of generalizations!)

Although the book was published in 2008, sadly, not much is different today.  We are still struggling to close the food gap, change the system, and ensure that everyone has good food to eat.  The book is still worth a read!

Part of what drew me to GardenShare is the way we are working to ensure that everyone, no matter their income or circumstances in life, has access to good food.

Gloria

New book "A Square Meal"

Like us today, during the Great Depression our grandparents grappled with a barrage of advice from nutritionists on the best foods to eat. A new book, “A Square Meal” by Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe is an absorbing account of how the Depression changed American eating habits. The Depression gave reformers the opportunity not simply to try to avert hunger, Ziegelman and Coe write, but to change the way America eats. These reformers believed that modern scientific research on nutrition offered the key to improving a misguided and wasteful American diet. First, Wilbur Atwater at Wesleyan University established baseline calorie needs and measured the caloric value of common foods.; then Elmer McCollum and others figured out which vitamins and trace elements were important. They argued that milk was the most perfect food. Armed with this information, nutritionists, home economists, and government officials convinced food companies to fortify their foods and advised homemakers on the best diets for their families. In the process, regional home cooking drowned in a sea of creamed casseroles and milky chowders, the authors assert.

Source: Wall Street Journal, 8/17/16, Depression Dining

Building community at the food pantry

As a Christian, I highly recommend "Take This Bread" by Sara Miles for those working on food ministry projects.  The author was raised an atheist and experienced a conversion when she walked into an Episcopal Church one day.  At the church, she founded a food pantry, housed right in the sanctuary around the altar, and practiced the "client choice" model.

One of the things she writes about is the community that was created around their food pantry, as most of the volunteers ended up being clients of the pantry.  She saw this ragtag group formed into a community around the need for food, but more important, around the need for human connection.

She expresses it so much better than I, but I came away more convinced than ever that the only way we will solve the problem of hunger is by building community, bringing together those who need help and those who can help in meaningful relationships.

Food for the body can draw people into a food pantry or soup kitchen, but the food for the soul created by being part of something larger than themselves is what keeps them, and in some cases, changes them for the better.  In the North Country, our free will dinners do this well - they don't call themselves soup kitchens and they welcome all to be part of the community.

I highly recommend this book to any Christians struggling with what the call to "feed my sheep" really means.

Gloria

"Volun-tourism" - is it a good thing?

Over the weekend, the Today Show has a segment on "volun-tourism," people using their vacations to do volunteer work.

It sounds great, doesn't it?  Visit some new and interesting place and do some good while you're there.  And I've done it myself, if you count church mission trips to Appalachia and Maine.

But seeing it brought me back to Robert Ludlum's book, Toxic Charity, which I reviewed last month.

Rev. Ludlum spends a lot of time in his book on church mission trips and why they often serve the needs of the people on the mission trip more than the needs of the people at the trip's location.  Too often these kinds of activities have middle class Americans swooping in and trying to fix a problem for people they have defined as poor or in need.  In doing so, they can sometimes infantilize the people the people they are serving and take away their right to self-determination.  One example he gave was of a mission group that built a well for a village in  another country, so they would not have to walk miles carrying their water.  Fast forward a year and the villagers were again carrying water for miles.  Why?  The outsiders built a well, but they did not engage the local people in the project, teach them how it works, or what might go wrong and how to repair it if it broke.

The mission trips I went on were powerful experiences for me.  But when I reflect on it, I'm not 100% sure that they were as important or powerful for the people we were seeking to help.  And it should be about the people in need and the local community, not about those of us from the outside, shouldn't it?

Gloria

Can emergency food programs end hunger?

Although it was written in 1998, Janet Poppendieck's book, "Sweet Charity?  Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement," has much to say to us today.

The book describes food charities (food banks, food pantries, community kitchens) functioning as a moral safety valve which have allowed us as a society to accept the erosion of government's role in fighting poverty and hunger.

My favorite part of the book continues to be the chapter on "The Seven Deadly In's of Emergency Food."  The following are among the reasons that private, charitable, emergency food programs like food banks cannot solve the hunger problem:  

• Insufficiency (there's not enough food), 
• Inappropriateness (it's not the right food); 
• nutritional Inadequacy (it's not healthy food), 
• Instability (programs are hand-to-mouth relying on volunteers and uncertain funding streams),
• Inaccessability (people in need can't get to the charities), 
• Inefficiency (the can of food ends up costing several times its real cost from the time someone purchases it and donates it to a food drive until it gets to the person in need), and 
• Indignity (bread lines in America today!).

Almost twenty years later and all of these things are still true.  And yet, we still have politicians calling for massive cuts in federal food programs "because the private charities can take care of it."  The private charities weren't meeting the need in 1998 when Ms. Poppendieck wrote her book and we have fallen further behind every year since.  

We can only solve the problem of hunger with bigger picture, systems change thinking.  That's what we are trying to do at GardenShare and what our slogan, "Healthy Food.  Healthy Farms.  Everybody Eats." speaks to.

Toxic Charity - how our efforts to help may actually hinder...

Have you read the book, "Toxic Charity" by Robert Lupton? 

This is a book primarily about churches and the charity projects they undertake, but it has lessons for all of us working to build a better world.

Two themes that really resonated with me (and I'm sure there may be more in the future):

Volunteer projects - When a group or even an individual wants to volunteer, it's important to establish motives.  Is it more important that the volunteer activity meet the needs of the volunteers or the needs of the community / the organization you are volunteering with?

This may seem easy to answer, but I can't tell you how many times people have called me with ideas for things they want to do that don't really meet the needs or mission of GardenShare.  They often have a hard time accepting "no" for an answer, even though I think that I am, for the most part, pretty diplomatic in providing that answer!  

Then there are the volunteer groups who expect nonprofits to spend our limited resources to feed the volunteers lunch or provide t-shirts or other things.  We've already spent a lot of resources in staff time setting up and organizing the project, so don't be surprised if we say no to those requests, also!

Ending hunger or poverty -  The book has lots of examples of programs that have not succeeded in ending the social ill they set out to fight.  And a little guidance about how to do better.  Lupton says the key is in relationships.

"To effectively impact a life, a relationship must be built, trust forged, accountability established.  And this does not happen in long, impersonal lines of strangers.  A name and a story have to be attached to each indivdual face.  Highly personal life struggles must be explored and with each person a unique action plan created.  A bed for the night...where to get a job...treatment for addiction...escape from an abusive husband...childcare for homeless children...a wheelchair for an amputee."

This is the same conclusion that I have come to in my 30+ years of work in the anti-hunger field.  We won't end hunger by building bigger food banks and distributing more and more food.  We will end hunger one family at a time, because each family's needs will be different.  And we can only do this by mobilizing an army of volunteers who will work one-on-one with people in need and build these kinds of relationships.

At GardenShare, we have two primary ways of building community - the CSA's and the Farmers Markets.  Can you help us think about other ways we can build community and engage people in need with people who can help?