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The Personal Impact of Rising Food CostsFor months we’ve been reading the grim news about the impact of rising food costs on people and nations around the world. Rationing and food riots in the developing world. Wrenching choices—food or medicine or gas—in the United States. We discussed the choices people are making in response to rising food prices in the U.S. with four people feeling the pinch in very different ways.
Maggie, Boston, MA “Rice is a big part of what we eat in Haiti. I used to buy my favorite rice in Boston for $10 a sack. Now, it’s up to $25, $30, or more. I had to change to a different rice—one I don’t think is as good—so I could feed my family. I have low iron in my blood so I’m supposed to eat red meat, but I can’t really afford it. We need to eat rice and vegetables, so I’ve cut back on things like herbs and spices, and desserts, like pudding. I used to buy Italian bread but I can’t afford it now so I buy the packaged store bread. Even though I live right next to a supermarket, I drive six or seven miles to another city because they have a cheap supermarket there. If I can save $.50 or $1.00 or more on some items, it’s worth it. Now with gas getting so expensive it’s hard to know where to shop. I’m eligible for Food Stamps but I don’t want to take them. If my boy is going to be important when he grows up—maybe a Senator—I don’t want him to be embarrassed that I was on Food Stamps. I do go to a food pantry every week to get tomato sauce and vegetables.” Amy Gabala, Executive Director, Manna Food Center, Rockville, MD “We are now feeding 2,300 hungry Montgomery County residents each month—a 25% increase over last year. We started noticing an upsurge in referrals in the fall, and then in December 2007 the number really took off. Montgomery County is a very expensive place to live, and many families were just getting by. The increase in the cost of gas and food has pushed them over the edge and they need help to stay afloat. Unlike many Food Banks, we are fortunate in not having to pay for any food, as we collect everything from the three dozen supermarkets we visit each day. But the increase in hungry families has indirectly affected our bottom line. Twenty-five percent more referrals coming in means our fax machine is working over time, driving up our use of toner. We have to pay for 25% more boxes to pack the food in. If the number of at-risk families continues to rise, we may have to add staff to accommodate everyone. If we can’t afford more employees we’ll be faced with a painful decision—do we serve fewer people or give each customer less food?” John, Northern Maine “I’ve always worked and made a good living. But for the last year, it’s been traumatic. With no job, a new baby, and the rising cost of gas and food, we’re in tough shape. I’ve had to swallow my pride and accept Food Stamps for the first time. We also visit the local Food Bank to stock up on staples and fresh vegetables. There’s just one supermarket in town, so they have a monopoly…their prices just keep going up and up. Even with Food Stamps we find it’s a struggle to afford quality food, especially for the baby. Travis Price, High School Senior, Colorado Springs, CO “I’ve experienced the rising cost of food both in my own daily life and in my volunteering. Personally, I’ve had to cut back on going out with friends after work; now we just stay home. I’m doing a lot less “luxury” eating, like going to Chipotle for a burrito—burritos used to be $6.40; now they’re $8.41. That $2 makes a big difference. I also volunteer with an organization that serves homeless teens. My family purchases food and cooks for 25 kids every Sunday. We love doing it and we’re certainly not going to cut back on the number of teens we serve, so we have to cut back on the quality of the food. We just can’t afford the food we used to buy for so many people.” Learn More
Midwest Food Banks Mobilize to Help Flood, Tornado VictimsWhen terrifying tornados and severe flooding rocked Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin last month, Food Banks in those states and beyond quickly stepped in to feed displaced residents. In Indiana, Gleaners Food Bank set up mobile pantries in hard-hit cities in Central and Southern Indiana. Gleaners shipped nearly 40 tons of food and supplies to Indianapolis and to four surrounding counties whose regular food provider was knocked out of operation by the flooding. In Wisconsin, the Second Harvest Food Bank of Southern Wisconsin, located in Madison, supplied food to flood victims and volunteers. Working in concert with the Red Cross and Salvation Army, the Food Bank loaded two trucks with thousands of hot meals and baked goods for delivery to the hardest-hit areas. Iowa bore the brunt of the flooding damage, with wide swaths of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City simply washed away. Food Banks throughout the state joined with colleagues dispatched from America’s Second Harvest – The Nation's Food Bank Network affiliates from Chicago and New Orleans to feed thousands of displaced Iowans. The HACAP Food Reservoir in Hiawatha, a member of America’s Second Harvest, reports shipping 120,000 pounds of food in just one week…they typically average about 100,000 pounds per month. Food Banks were not only helping victims of the floods, they were victims themselves. Due to the flooding in downtown Waterloo, the Northeast Iowa Food Bank took proactive measures and moved pantry food out of the building, resuming operations a week later. Executive Director Barb Prather noted the Food Bank was “trekking food out for three solid weeks…at a minimum, we’ve provided 100,000 pounds of food.” 1 Vicki Escarra, President and CEO of America's Second Harvest, said of the double whammy of floods and tornadoes, "Disasters put yet another strain on working families who face hunger issues every day. Thanks to the immediate efforts of our Midwest food banks, local residents will have emergency food and supplies to help make it through these difficult days." 2 Learn More
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1 Mobile Food Pantries Open Across Southern Indiana, WBIW.com, June 16, 2008 2 America’s Second Harvest Press Release Sodexo Foundation Honors Young ActivistsContinuing its commitment to the 35 million Americans who are at risk of hunger, the Sodexo Foundation honored a new generation of activists who are making a difference in the fight against hunger and its root causes. At its annual dinner in Washington, DC the Foundation awarded $3,000 scholarships to five K-college students from Nevada, California, New York, Colorado and Virginia. A matching $3,000 donation to the hunger-related organization of their choice was also part of the award. The five students were selected from among 5,300 applicants to the Sodexo Foundation's STOP Hunger Scholarship program, now in its second year. They were selected for demonstrating leadership in the fight against hunger, and for the results they achieved through a variety of programs in their local communities. The 2008 Sodexo Foundation STOP Hunger Scholarships were presented to:
Read more about the scholarship winners Sign up to be notified when the next round of STOP Hunger Scholarship applications open. Teen Homelessness Epidemic Among LGBT YouthOver the course of a year, between 2.5 and 3.5 million Americans will live either on the streets or in an emergency shelter. Almost half of them will be young people. 1 And somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of these homeless youth identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT).2 On the streets they experience the challenges facing all homeless people: crime, poverty, ill health, and hunger. In fact, homeless children go hungry twice as often as other children.3 Many LGBT youth wind up homeless after coming out to their families. Fortunately, a growing number of community centers around the country provide a safe, welcoming environment for them. At these LGBT-focused centers they may find a place to live, food to eat, and services to help them regain their lives. According to Terry Stone, Executive Director of CenterLink, a national organization that supports LGBT-focused community centers, meal programs play a critical role in many homeless teens’ survival. “Some centers provide teens with the only meal they’ll have that day. Nutritious food and snacks are hard to come by on the streets and kids rely on LGBT-focused centers to not only feed them, but accept them for who they are.” LGBT-focused community centers are funded by foundations, corporations, and individual donors, with most gifts targeting such services as healthcare and education. Stone noted that in-kind food donations or gifts targeted to nutrition programs would help extend these centers’ mission of serving an underserved population of teens. Learn More
Centers/Resources for Homeless LGBT Youth
Organizations 1 National Alliance to End Homelessness 2 Ray, N. (2006). Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth: An epidemic of homelessness. New York: National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and the National Coalition for the Homeless. 3 National Alliance to End Homelessness SAME Café in Vanguard of “Pay as You Can” MovementFrom the outside, the SAME Café in Denver looks like a typical neighborhood restaurant. A large picture window, framed by homey yellow curtains. A long counter and a scattering of tables. But come inside and you’ll know SAME Café is not the same as all the rest. In place of a cash register, there’s a donation box. The “employees” are customers. And the menus have no prices. That’s because the SAME Café (So All May Eat) is a “Pay as You Can” restaurant that lets diners eat what they like and pay what they can, no questions asked. The movement is thought to have its roots in the 2003 opening of One World Everybody Eats in Salt Lake City and has since spread to other metropolitan areas. SAME Café owners Brad and Libby Birky say their philosophy is that everyone, regardless of economic status, deserves the chance to eat healthy, organic food while being treated with dignity. After years of volunteering at food banks and shelters, the couple “wanted to create a place that would nourish the hungry without setting them apart. No assembly line service, no meals mass-produced from whatever happened to be donated that week. Just fresh, sophisticated food, made from scratch, served up in a real restaurant.”1 The lunch menu (plus dinner on Saturday) changes daily, based on what’s fresh and seasonal. Customers decide what they want to eat—and how much they want—and then pay what they can. Those with some extra change in their pockets are encouraged to pay more. Patrons who can’t pay for a meal work off the cost by washing dishes or helping in the kitchen. Business people sit side-by-side with homeless families, students, and construction crews. The Birkys say they haven’t yet been hit by the rising cost of food, since they buy local and only what they need that day. For Denver residents seeking a home-cooked lunch at prices they can still afford, the SAME Café is a decidedly different choice. Learn More
1 LA Times, May 6, 2007 Community Gardens Flourish in Holyoke’s Urban CoreThe city of Holyoke, Mass. sits in the heart of the Pioneer Valley, a rural but vibrant region of the state overflowing with top colleges like Smith, Amherst, and Mt. Holyoke. While the Valley is largely picturesque and prosperous, Holyoke has been plagued with unemployment, crime, and drug abuse. This former mill town and farming community, with a sizable Puerto Rican population, is one of the poorest in the state. But one grassroots organization has harnessed the farming skills of its Latino neighbors and the city’s still-fertile land to bring fresh, healthy, and inexpensive foods to low income residents. Nuestras Raíces promotes economic, human and community development through projects relating to food and agriculture. Founded with a single garden in 1992, Nuestras Raíces now supports eight community gardens, nurtured by an intergenerational crew of seniors who grew up in rural Puerto and young people discovering the value of tending their own gardens. On average families are producing over $1,000 dollars of organic produce per year, this in a “food desert” where affordable fresh fruits and vegetables are hard to come by. Some families sell their produce, creating additional income. Nuestras Raíces says that by gaining more control over, and knowledge of, their nutritional intake, members’ “nutritional levels have increased both within individual families and within the broader community.” This summer, in what were once abandoned urban lots filled with garbage, needles, and broken glass, green spaces filled with peppers, eggplant, plantains, and cilantro are flourishing. More than 100 families are raising their own food and strengthening their communities on small plots of land in the heart of an urban community. Learn More Articles Organizations Article ArchivesSTOP Hunger eZine Issues Vol. 3 Issue 4: STOP Hunger eZine - July 2008 |
May 2008 – Volume 3/Issue 3
In this issue: A First-Hand Account of the Foundation Awards CeremonySodexo Foundation intern Natalia Valderrama has always been interested in hunger issues but she says, “I perceived it to be on more of a global level. Never would I have ever imagined that hunger could be so close to home. The Sodexo Foundation has quickly opened my eyes to the suffering and hardships that are everywhere in the United States.” A sophomore at Washington State University, Natalia is spending her summer with the Foundation staff as part of Sodexo’s Future Leaders Internship Program. Just two weeks into her internship Natalia got a “real live perspective of the many dimensions of poverty in our country, and how much we can all do to make difference” when she attended the Annual Sodexo Foundation Dinner. She was so moved by the stories of Sodexo’s Heroes of Everyday Life and the Sodexo Foundation Scholarship winners she chronicled her experience in a blog post on Sodexo’s Careers blog. |
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Kevin Kacvinsky, a college junior who volunteers to feed the homeless and has created a nonprofit to expand the scope of his work
Erik Krasney, a high school senior who created programs for food and clothing distribution in L.A.'s Central City East's “skid row"
Cassie Muller, a high school sophomore who runs a program that provides 1,000 lunches every day during weekends and vacations
Travis Price, a recent high school graduate, whose Project TeenFeed raises money for and increases awareness about the issue of teen hunger
Hannah Yoxall, a third grader who has collected more than 1,500 pounds of food over three years for local needy families