Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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 Visionaries Promote Alternatives to Foods Banks

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/1353
Hungry for Change, Visionaries Promote Alternatives to Foods Banks
by Kari Lydersen

While the mainstream turns its yearly eye to the plight of hungry 
people, Kari Lydersen takes a deeper look at the corporate-perpetuated 
food bank model through the eyes of critics seeking unconventional 
solutions.


Chicago, Dec 24, 2004 - During the holidays you see lots of bins for 
food bank donations; you see lots of news stories about people eating 
their holiday meals at soup kitchens. In the richest country in the 
world, hunger is still obviously an ever-present and growing problem. 
But some community organizers are taking imaginative approaches to 
solving what otherwise appears to be a unending problem by empowering 
the hungry to take an active part in providing for their own needs.

This year millions of people visited food banks or soup kitchens to 
avoid going hungry, many of them children and senior citizens. Though 
it is difficult to know how many people experience food insecurity each 
year, the US Department of Agriculture reported in 2003, the last year 
for which census numbers were available, that 12.6 million households 
did not have enough money for sufficient food. Of those, 3.9 million 
households experienced hunger during the year, while the rest had their 
needs met by government or community programs.

There is ample reason to believe that hunger in the United States was 
on the rise this year. The US Conference of Mayors' recently released 
annual report on homelessness and hunger found that requests for food 
assistance were up in 96 percent of cities surveyed, and requests 
increased an average of 14 percent in each city. The report, which is 
based on surveys of state agencies and service providers, has found an 
increase in hunger every year since the mid-1980s.

"Our agencies have been telling us that in the last year they've seen 
an 11 percent increase in need," said Donna Larkin, communications 
director for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, which supplies food 
to about 600 food banks and soup kitchens in the metropolitan area. 
"They're seeing a lot more working poor families, husbands and wives 
who are both employed but just don't earn enough or people who were 
laid off a few years ago who got jobs again but don't make as much as 
they used to. When your income is strapped, food is one of the first 
things to go."

Suzan Bateson, executive director of the Alameda County Community Food 
Bank in the Bay Area, California said they have seen requests for 
emergency assistance increase by 50 percent from last year to this 
year.

And many people are increasingly relying on what were intended to be 
emergency food aid programs on a permanent basis. Those in need of food 
aid include not only the unemployed and homeless but significant 
numbers of working people who cannot afford to pay for housing, medical 
care, utilities and other necessities out of their paycheck.

"Some months I cut it very tight with everything I need to do for my 
kids, and there isn't money left over for enough food," said Elizabeth 
Porter, 26, who works several jobs as a medical assistant, waitress, 
janitor and nutritional consultant to support her four kids in Oakland. 
"A lot of times it's a choice between paying the gas and electric or 
buying food, and those are both really important things."

Food is often the first thing families skimp on when they are having 
trouble paying the bills, since failing to pay rent or utilities has 
longer range consequences like evictions or shut-offs.

Given the urgent and growing need, support for food banks and soup 
kitchens is critical. But those with a more progressive outlook note 
that a shortage of food has never been the problem, either on a 
national or global level. Rather distribution of and access to 
nutritious, healthy food and people's ability to control their own 
nutrition is the real issue.

They point out that the definition of hunger overlooks the huge number 
of Americans who eat a diet of fast food and heavily refined snacks 
lacking in nutrients, since that is usually cheapest and easiest to 
access in poor neighborhoods where corner stores have largely replaced 
groceries. The common perspective on hunger also overlooks the larger 
issue of people's disenfranchisement from food production and lack of 
control over their own food supply and health.

With these factors in mind, a recent report from the group Food First, 
called "Beyond the Food Bank," criticizes problems in the traditional 
food distribution model and calls instead for support of alternative, 
empowering food production projects like community gardens and urban 
household gardens, buying collectives and cooperative organic farms.

"We need to revisit what kind of society we want to have," said 
Christine Ahn, one of the study's authors and a staffer at the Women of 
Color Resource Center in Oakland. "We need to look at why these social 
programs [like food banks] were put in place in the first place, and 
how can we fund more alternative projects. We need to look at things 
like the Farm Bill and reallocate some of those resources to community 
projects."

"Beyond the Food Bank" argues that food banks are something of a 
band-aid solution rather than a holistic approach to ending hunger and 
that corporations take advantage of them as tax breaks and public 
relations vehicles. "Apart from providing food for millions, food banks 
also provide a tax shelter for corporations and agribusiness," reads 
the report, "corporations can deduct up to twice the cost of production 
for their donated products, encouraging these companies to send damaged 
goods or test products that would otherwise get thrown out. Not all of 
the donations are nutritious, and some aren't even edible."

At least some food banks take exception to Food First's assertions. 
Bateson said the Alameda County Community Food Bank offers a diversity 
of high quality food, including lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, and 
she thinks examples like those given in the report are relatively rare.

"Our food bank has the goal that 75 percent of the food needs to be 
nutritious, and we're very mindful of balancing donations with 
purchased items to round out the stock," she said. "The majority of the 
food we distribute is nutrient heavy, like beans, rice, peanut butter, 
canned tuna, dried milk."

Few would dispute that food banks and soup kitchens play a crucial role 
in meeting people's nutritional and economic needs. Nor do many suggest 
that fighting hunger should be an either-or approach. Along with 
strengthening a social safety net that includes food banks and soup 
kitchens, a plethora of alternative agriculture and food-related 
projects around the country provide low-income people a degree of 
control over their own food supply and also offer a connection to the 
land, a sense of community and job skills.

"Poverty and hunger do not necessarily correlate when a poor person has 
the ability to produce food," reads the Food First report. "A 
contemporary example of this historical truth is Cuba, where people are 
poor but have significant access to food through localized production, 
with easy access to seeds, fruit trees and technical assistance."

Examples of empowering alternative food projects in the US include the 
Milwaukee-based group Growing Power, which runs a large organic farm 
and supports community gardens on vacant lots in Milwaukee and Chicago. 
Along with farming and gardening, Growing Power participants can learn 
how to assess brown fields (land contaminated from past use) and learn 
organic techniques to restore them and make them safe for farming.

Growing Power derives funds from Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) 
shares. In a CSA program, subscribers -- sometimes known as 
shareholders -- pay a set amount in order to receive regular food 
baskets of current produce. Often CSAs, which exist all over the 
country, include more affluent members who help subsidize lower-income 
members.

Likewise, an urban ecology and farming project called EcoVIDA, located 
in Chicago's mostly Latino Pilsen neighborhood, helps immigrant youth 
grow organic gardens, raise tilapia fish and compost with worms, 
providing them a source of food to consume and sell as well as a 
connection to the earth that is often lacking in city life. EcoVIDA 
founder Neris Gonzalez, an ecologist who fled repression in El 
Salvador, preaches a holistic way of looking at food, life and the 
earth, with the health of the environment and human bodies inextricably 
linked through the food we eat.

Another organization, Victory Gardens, based in urban New Jersey and 
Athens, Maine takes the concept to a wholly different level, not only 
introducing organic farming to low-income city dwellers but also using 
the operation as a vehicle for political awareness and activism. The 
project was founded by incarcerated Afrikan Liberation activist Herman 
Bell and environmentalists Carol Dove and Michael Vernon, based on the 
Black Panther Party's survival programs and Malcolm X's belief that all 
revolutionary struggles are centered around land.

Victory Gardens boasts that it produces about 12,000 pounds of produce 
on a two-acre farm in Maine every summer and distributes it in bags 
decorated with pleas for social justice and freedom for political 
prisoners. Inner city New Jersey residents and others who visit the 
farm not only learn about organic farming but also about specific 
prisoners' struggles and ways to support them.

In Camden, New Jersey, activists established a soup kitchen called 
Leavenhouse in 1981, when food stamps were cut and unemployment rose. 
The project later became a cooperative, operated by the people it 
served. In exchange for a few hours of work in the kitchen or a $5 
donation, members receive monthly meal tickets good for all of 
Leavanhouse's meals, served six days a week. Leavanworth has expanded 
to include cooperative housing and engages in numerous activist 
projects.

On the opposite coast, the Garden-Raised Bounty (GruB) project in 
Olympia, Washington also empowers and supports community on a number of 
levels. The group constructs raised bed gardens for low-income 
families, enabling the growth of fruit, grains and vegetables for their 
own consumption. Since 1993 they have built over 1,300 gardens for 
local families. Supporters purchase beds or shares of beds to be 
donated to low-income families, and in the summer the project employs 
15 low-income high school students in farming and building the beds. 
About half the food produced on the farm goes to local food banks and 
half is distributed through CSAs.

"It helps young people be aware they can grow their own food, which is 
a powerful statement," said Jackson Sillars, youth employment 
coordinator for GruB. "It definitely changes their perspective on food, 
in terms of being part of the process of growing food from planting the 
seeds to taking care of the garden to the harvest. You can see the 
cycle and feel connected to food, to see that it doesn't just come from 
grocery stores."
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