Food and Faith

Over the past several decades a seismic shift has occurred in our food system in this country and around the globe.  As a result, a huge distance has been created between us and our food…

• Most of what we eat comes from the supermarket…we can access fresh fruits and veggies year round, picked green, gassed to promote ripening, transported thousands of miles to our doorstep
• Corporate control of food puts the production and packaging of our food into the hands of a few companies.  These same companies own the patents on the seeds (Monsanto) and control the genetic modification of the foods we eat.
• Government Farm policy, really food policy, has insured that the prices for staple crops like corn remain below the price to produce them.  As a result, corn has become a part of nearly every food item we consume…which is why junk food is cheaper than fresh produce in the market,  why the production of meat is cheap enough to allow for dining on the value menu at McDonald’s to become more economical than dining at home, and why school food service can feed our children highly processed foods at lunch for $2.68 per meal reimbursement.

The impact of this distance between us and our food is vast, including:

• The rise in obesity and diabetes to epidemic levels
• The growth in hunger and food insecurity has revealed the disparities in who has ready access to good, nutritious food and those who don’t.  The words food desert and food swamp have come to define those communities, primarily urban and rural low income areas, that lack access to grocery stores and markets, and those that are “swamped” with fast food and junk food. 
• For those who are hungry, in addition to lack of access to good food, the emergency food system safety net, which includes food banks, food panties and soup kitchens, is flooded with junk food and food that doesn’t sell.  Companies get tax write offs and the poor get the “leftovers”.

In many world religious traditions and spiritual practices, we are called to partake of something called a fast.  The fast is a process of getting some distance from food to draw us closer to God, to cleanse us of the toxins we consume.  This practice of sacrifice, and purification, and the resulting hunger remind us of our reliance on God and one another.

In this context of a broken food system, I suggest we that we take up a new fast, a fast for change.  Instead of “giving up” and distancing ourselves from food, we should work to draw closer to our food and the source of our food in order to strengthen our knowledge and resolve to build a strong, healthy, just food system for all.  Some things we might do on our fast include:

• Buy your food locally, from local farmers and farm markets.  Get to know the people who grow food in your area.
• Grow your own food in your yard, your windowsill, or a community garden.
• Preserve your own food…can, freeze and dehydrate.
• Promote better food in our schools by supporting farm to cafeteria programs, school gardens and the like.
• Learn about and support fair trade practices.
• Learn about your food’s source and how the workers, animals and food are treated en route from farm to table.
• Advocate for policy changes that promote access to good food for those who are food insecure.

This change in diet, requires a change in lifestyle.  It requires our time, energy, attention and yes, even sacrifice.  The result is we draw closer to the source of our food, all living things and one another.  Learning about food, food sytems and how to engage in more just and sustainable practices will contribute to building healthier, more food secure and sustainable communities.

A terrific new resource has been produced by GreenFaith and the John’s Hopkins Center for a Livable Future to help faith communities on this fast for change…the Good Food Toolkit.

The Good Food Toolkit provides:

• A “food audit” that will enable your faith community to complete your food “scorecard”, assessing the food work you’ve done to date and the best areas for improvement.

• Planning tools to help you put healthy, sustainable food practices in place.

• Teaching tools and success stories to empower your faith community for sustainable food leadership.

To download a copy of the toolkit and get started on your fast for change, visit:  http://greenfaith.org/success-stories/just-released-food-audit

Charity and Justice – Honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

One summer, a few years ago, I was standing in the dining room at Elijah’s Promise right before we opened to serve lunch.  There was a group of teens gathered by the serving counter readying for the doors to open.  Two were Mormon missionaries, two Muslim youth from the Central Jersey Islamic Society, two Jewish teens serving with the Mitzvah Corps and a couple of kids from a Presbyterian church doing time to fulfill a confirmation requirement.  The youth were deep in conversation about their respective religious traditions.  They were asking questions of one another, sharing perspectives…it was a lively discussion and occasionally heated.  But when the doors opened and the patrons filed in for lunch, the discussion shifted to the focus of their day…making sure the hungry were fed.  It was for me then and remains for me still, an important image. People, from diverse backgrounds, united in purpose and joined together in service.   

Today, across our country, people are gathering, many to volunteer their time in community service, in honor of the life and memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Right now, people are painting walls, serving meals and reading to kids.  They are planting gardens and building homes for homeless families.  They are collecting clothes and cans, and books and furniture to distribute to people who are less fortunate.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a message delivered atEbenezerBaptistChurchinAtlantaon Feb. 4, 1968 said “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”

Service is indeed a great thing.  Service and the people who commit to helping others are the life blood of organizations like Elijah’s Promise and a potent force in many communities across this country.  I’m not sure exactly how the Martin Luther King holiday came to be a sort of national day of service.  And frankly, I can’t help to think that Dr. King himself might be disappointed.  For service, while admirable, is only one step in the movement of pervasive social, political and economic change that marked the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King advocated for civil rights, for diversity, and for an end to discrimination. At the time of his death, his focus was not just on race; he was speaking in support of labor unions and their right to strike and organize for better working conditions and benefits; he was marching and advocating for policies that would eradicate poverty…he was working to turn the traditional social and economic order on its head…his vision, his actions, his message was one that confronted the dominant power structure…he wouldn’t just occupy Wall Street, he’d march and sit and boycott Wall St., and Pennsylvania Ave. and Main Sts. Across this country.  In short, King was about change, transformation…he was about more than service, he was about solutions. He was about more than the charitable acts of collecting cans, and serving meals and painting the walls of shelters…he was about justice…ending hunger, ending homelessness, ending poverty.

A few years ago, the Home News and Tribune ran a story on children living in poverty.  They focused their piece on the plight of a local family who frequented the soup kitchen.  The mother and her five children were living in a sub-standard two bedroom apartment in town with no furniture.  She was on and off of welfare and in and out of work because of the chronic health problems of one of her children and a husband with a substance abuse problem who didn’t maintain child support payments.  She never finished HS, and her skills and experience were limited to warehouse work, UPS and the like.  Her story is the story of many across this country who live in poverty.

After the story ran, we were flooded with calls at the kitchen…over 100 calls came in the next two days from people who wanted to help the family.  From clothing and food donations, to furniture, the outpouring of charity was overwhelming.

While I was struck by the generosity and outpouring of assistance by so many good people, I was also struck by what was not offered…not one call came in that offered a job or training to help her acquire a skill.  Not one call came in offering childcare assistance so that she would have back up when her children were sick, so she wouldn’t have to miss work.  The charity was plentiful, but none of the help contributed to long term support and change for this family.

Malcolm Gladwell, in a New Yorker magazine article a few years ago writes about a homeless man fromRenonamedMurray. Murraywas an ex-marine who had lived on the streets ofRenofor ten years.  He was an alcoholic. InReno, a homeless guy could walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of liquor left at the gaming tables.  AndMurraydid just that.  As a result, he was in and out of jail, in and out of the hospital, in and out of treatment and in and out of shelters. 

In 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative designed to limit panhandling downtown.  They came under harsh criticism by the newspapers, radio and news media.  The public outcry was to leave the homeless alone.  They weren’t bothering anybody after-all.  Two local police officers, Steve Johns and Patrick O’Bryan, found themselves in a quandary. In downtownReno, food for the homeless was plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even the local McDonald’s fed the hungry. And yet, the officers spent at least half their time dealing with people likeMurray; they were as much caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren’t the only ones involved. When someone passed out on the street, there was a “One down” call to the paramedics. There were four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the hospital for days, because living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a reliable way of getting sick. None of that, surely, could be cheap.

O’Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and then contacted the local hospitals. “We came up with three names that were some of our chronic inebriates in the downtown area, that got arrested the most often,” O’Bryan said. “We tracked those three individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had been in jail previously, so he’d only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he had accumulated a bill of a hundred thousand dollars—Another individual came fromPortlandand had been inRenofor three months. In those three months, he had accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third individual actually had some periods of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand.”

The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O’Bryan realized that if you totaled up all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the streets—as well as substance-abuse-treatment costs, doctors’ fees, and other expenses—Murray Barr probably ran up a medical bill as large as anyone in the state of Nevada.

“It cost us one million dollars not to do something aboutMurray,” O’Bryan said.

At a time when hunger and homelessness are higher than they’ve been in decades; when the number of people living in poverty or perilously close to the poverty line stands at 1 in 6 Americans; as employment creation continues to lag and our leaders are calling for more and more budget cuts, and the gap between rich and poor is higher than ever…we cannot afford to spend millions of dollars to not do something about the very real problems that face people across our country.  The old ways of doing business are just not working. 

Soup kitchens and shelters started as emergency responses to terrible problems—to help ensure that people do not go hungry or die on the streets.  No one, certainly their founders, ever considered these services as appropriate, permanent solutions to the problems.  But soup kitchens and food pantries are now our standard response to hunger; cities see shelters as affordable housing for the homeless.  When we see a story in the paper about a destitute woman and her children, we respond generously with food and clothes.  When we see a guy panhandling on the street we flip him a buck.  In her book Sweet Charity, sociologist Janet Poppendieck writes that charity acts as “a sort of moral safety valve; it reduces the discomfort evoked by visible destitution in our midst by creating the illusion of effective action and offering us myriad ways of participating in it.  It creates a culture of charity that normalizes destitution and legitimates personal generosity as a response to injustice”.

We must shift our thinking and actions from a response of charity and service to one of justice.  We need to reframe the old ways of doing the business of charity so that it is as they say, not just a hand out, but a hand up… We can do service, but we must also work for solutions.

•  We can do canned food drives…but NJ ranks among the 10 worst states in government nutrition program participation.  This means millions of dollars of federal funds are left inWashingtonbecause people eligible for things like food stamps and school breakfast program are not participating.  We can do something about this by working with our local school boards and county boards of social services to enroll people in these vital safety net programs.
• We not only need to shelter, but to build and secure more affordable permanent housing; It can cost us anywhere from $10-30K per person each year to keep the homeless in shelters and hotels, or between $5-10K to put them into their own place. This requires that communities in NJ accept their fair share of affordable housing.   
• While we care for the poor, we must also devote the time and energy to advocate for policies that will lift people out of poverty, we need to not only vote at the polls, but with our wallets by where we shop and where we invest our resources…we need to fight for the things that will lift people out of poverty, like higher minimum wage, EITC, affordable health care, affordable quality education.  It troubles me when I see more people show up to fight charter schools in suburban NJ than show up inTrentonto support anti-poverty efforts.

This day has come to be synonymous with service.  But it can also be a day of national action.  A time for us to not only serve, but solve; a time to confront the social and economic forces that have institutionalized racism, poverty and other inequities in this country. Within a society, where the rich get richer and the poor and middle class are increasingly left behind, where people of color are disproportionately affected by poverty and other social ills, we need to join together in the struggle for a just and equitable society, where all have access to affordable health care, decent housing, a living wage and educational opportunities. It’s to this cause that Dr. Martin Luther King dedicated his life and work.  For this he died.  We honor him by remembering and carrying on his legacy, not only one day each year, but everyday.  While this is a day about Dr. King, it is also a day about us.  How will we live our lives, and how will we further the cause of justice for all?

These remarks were presented at the Martin Luther King Day event at the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital on January 16, 2012 by Lisanne Finston           

 

Homeless Memorial Day

This Wednesday, December 21st is Winter Solstice.  It’s the first day of Winter and the longest night of the year.  It’s also a national Homeless Memorial Day.  A time to remember that many have lost their lives at the hands of the harsh weather, and the terrible reality of homelessness.  

A couple of years ago, a homeless man froze to death in New Brunswick on a cold January night.  Folks who were homeless diners at the soup kitchen expressed their concern and fear in the aftermath of the death.  Our local homeless providers, in partnership with the City of New Brunswick, Middlesex County and other partners launched Code Blue in New Brunswick.  When the weather dips below 20 degrees or snows 6 inches or more, we keep the soup kitchen open overnight as a warming center for the homeless.

The men staying across the street at the Ozanam Men’s Inn, the shelter for homeless men run by Catholic Charities staff the overnights at the soup kitchen.  They are grateful for a roof over their heads and a warm place to stay and want to ensure that others be safe as well.  Last year there were nights when 30 individuals came in to stay warm.

It’s not really an ideal response.  Ample affordable housing and housing programs that meet the needs of the homeless and poor are more in order.  We can do better than Code Blue, but as we work to create those opportunities, it’s a good thing to have a Code Blue.

Winter is upon us and there are still a lot of people living on the streets in our communities across Middlesex County.  This Homeless Memorial Day, let us not only remember, but commit ourselves to doing something about it.

Join us at the Homeless Memorial Day gathering in Middlesex County from 5-7pm on 12/21 at the Edison Municipal Complex.

Ending Hunger one step at a time…

One week til the Turkey Trot on November 6th.  If you haven’t signed up, or haven’t thought that far ahead yet…there’s still time to set aside an hour next Sunday afternoon to come over to Buccleuch Park in New Brunswick to join with hundreds of folks to walk around the park.  It’s not a long walk.  It only takes a little time.  At face value, it doesn’t seem like a little walk around the park and a little knosh along the way does much to further the work of ending hunger…but, it can. 

I read a story in the newspaper today about a 60 year old woman and a 35 year old man.  They first met 25 years ago on a street corner in Manhattan.  She was a successful business executive, he was 10 and living in a “welfare” hotel.  She was walking to work, he was standing on the corner panhandling because he was hungry.  At first, she passed him on the corner, but then she stopped and doubled back.  She took him to a restaurant on the block for lunch.  That one meal together led to weekly meals and a lifelong friendship.  He’s now a successful business owner, husband and father.  We never know when someone, or something will touch us, move us and spark us to action. 

Margaret Mead once said  “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world.  In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”   When people come together around a cause, it creates awareness, energy, ideas, and relationships.  From these simple moments, these small steps…movements are made.

Trot with us next week, and join with us in the movement to end hunger.  Every step really does make a difference!  You can sign up here…or just make a donation…either way, Thanks for trotting!

http://elijahspromise.donorpages.com/TurkeyTrot2011/

Re-imagining the Work of Ending Hunger (Part 2)

Everyday, across the state of New Jersey, people are forced to make difficult choices, such as: “Should I pay my rent and my utility bills, or buy food for my family?” and “Should I pay for my medication or buy food?” “Should I eat from the McDonald’s dollar menu one more time this week, visit the neighborhood pantry for some canned goods or just not eat at all to make it until the next check?” One of the most disturbing and extraordinary aspects of life in this very wealthy state is the persistence of hunger.

For those of us working on the front lines in the anti-hunger field, we have long been witness to the harsh realities and frankly alarming choices that people who are food insecure are faced with daily.

Just before the Recession hit, the numbers of people lining up for meals at Elijah’s Promise soup kitchen skyrocketed, as did the lines at emergency food centers across the state. The rate of food insecurity (that is the number of people who regularly skip meals, cut back on the quality and quantity of what they eat or rely on emergency food sources) mushroomed from around 8% to 15% in three years. A crisis and shock wave ran through the emergency food system in the state: more people than ever before needing help, and not enough food on the shelves to meet the swelling ranks of the hungry. Most remarkable was the reality that hunger had crept up to the traditional “middle class,” people who worked, owned homes, even volunteered and donated to their local emergency food center, now turned to us for help.

Long ago, we ceased being an emergency system and became a supplemental food system. Many of our patrons rely on food pantries and soup kitchens to fill the gap everyday, every week or every month. So when an economic or other crisis hits, we do not have the capacity to respond because we are already running at full tilt.

And, if you stop and look at all the good that we are doing, you will see that it’s not all good. Every food pantry and soup kitchen has different criteria for eligibility, different schedules and little accountability in insuring consistent service delivery. Most of our organizations have a one size fits all approach: you get what you are given, and there is no choice in the selections of canned goods in the bag, or food on the plate. Much of the food donated to our food banks and local organizations is either food that didn’t sell, food that is outdated, food that is damaged, and often it’s junk food like soda, candy and chips. Corporations get tax write offs to donate this food so people won’t go hungry. In addition, they save on garbage disposal fees, because much of this is, frankly, garbage and has no place in an anti-hunger system.

In the midst of this recession and expanded numbers of people facing food hardship, it became very clear that the way we are doing this work is just plain not working! There has to be a better way—a way to insure people have access to good food, in a way that is dignified, and in a way that is sustainable over the long term, so that we don’t find ourselves faced with such a crisis again.

So some folks from Elijah’s Promise teamed up with some folks from another local community based organization called Who Is My Neighbor, Inc. to imagine what this new way of approaching the work of ending hunger in our community might look like. Someone pointed us to an organization in Salt Lake City called One World Everybody Eats, a local community café. The café was founded by Denise Cerreta. Denise’s operation was unique: no menu, no prices, just good, fresh, organic food, available to all regardless of means. A few other spots had taken notice and also sprouted up. Could it be possible to create a truly community dining spot where all could eat good food, regardless of means, side by side, in a way that was self supporting and not reliant on grants and government support? We reached out to Denise to learn more.

The result of this re-imagining is a social enterprise partnership called A Better World Café, which opened in October of 2009, and was the fifth community café in the country. (the number is growing as others join in this movement, including Panera’s and Jon Bon Jovi).

A Better World Café is located in the Reformed Church of Highland Park, next to the Highland Park Farmer’s Market, and is open Monday through Friday from 11am to 3pm, with new Friday dinner hours until 9pm. The café’s purpose is to help make a sustainable world where all may eat. The food is sourced locally, flexible portioning and compostable take-out containers reduce waste, coffee and tea is fairly traded, jobs were created for graduates of our culinary school, students in the culinary school help prepare food and gain skills, diners pay what they can and if they can pay more, they help subsidize those who can’t afford as much, people volunteer in exchange for a meal, others just pitch in to create sustainable eating for all.

I have to say, the food is wonderful, the feeling of community in the café embodies the meaning of hospitality, and this little enterprise is close to a break even bottom line. I really think that this is the step beyond the soup kitchen, and with some more dreaming, planning, collaborating and enterprising I think we can build a more sustainable, more dignified, more just and long term solution to hunger in our community. The way we’ve been doing it just doesn’t work.

learn more about A Better World Cafe: www.betterworldcafe.org

 

Re-imagining the Work of Ending Hunger, Part One

There’s a lot of talk these days about “sustainability.” In the midst of this Great Recession (and from where I stand, it isn’t over yet!), we are all looking for ways to live more simply, support our local economy, reduce our “footprint”, care for those who are struggling to make ends meet, and ensure that we really do make things better in our community for the next generation.

At Elijah’s Promise, we have been talking about “sustainability” for many years. Our approach has been to work on developing more sources of locally grown food through purchasing directly from area farmers and expanding donations through groups like Farmers Against Hunger and Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Middlesex. Staff, volunteers and culinary students work hard to grow food, process this healthy food into delicious meals and freeze and store it for use year round. Imagine ratatouille made from Jersey Fresh tomatoes, squash and eggplant warming the palates and lifting the spirits of the homeless.

Harvesting kale and greens from the “Garden for the Hungry” quarter acre plot at the Cooperative Extension of the Middlesex County EARTH Center

Ratatouille prepared with locally grown ingredients

We are integrating this farm to table system into the soup kitchen, into culinary training, and catered meals for area schools and meals on wheels, and of course the sustainable fare at A Better World Café, all of which add up to over 200,000 meals of fresh healthy food into our local food system this year. Through this farm to table approach, we are combating the long-term and very expensive diseases of diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity; and ensuring that our neighbors have good food to eat.

Each year we train over 70 people in culinary arts and place them in jobs throughout central New Jersey. These graduates, all formerly unemployed, are now working, paying taxes, paying rent, buying food, clothing and other goods for themselves and their families. Instead of taking money out of the “system,” these graduates are now putting significant resources back into our community, making it far more sustainable.

Catering Staff at Elijah’s Promise

We have developed a catering business and a café to create employment opportunities for the very people we feed and train, and at the same time, they generate revenue to support our programs. That’s “sustainable.”

This cycle of social good, which harnesses the power of food to feed people and fuel a stronger, healthier, more “sustainable” community, is taking root all over the nation. It’s about ending hunger, providing access to good food, promoting health, fostering a healthier environment, strengthening our agricultural base, and making thoughtful economic development decisions.

During this recession, as we witnessed the highest levels of food insecurity in decades and the growing recognition that obesity and diabetes are public health issues that are directly connected to diet and food access, there is more attention and greater opportunity to not only ensure people have enough to eat, but that they have access to healthy, good food and the tools to feed themselves.

This “food revolution” as it is referred to, is more than just a call to “eat local,” or “buy organic.” It is a real grassroots movement to re-tool a broken food system that has rewarded the values of fast, cheap and efficient at the expense of nutritious, sustainable and equitable food. From the McDonald’s dollar menu to the local soup kitchen and emergency food pantry, highly-processed food (laden with sodium, high fructose corn syrup and other realities of this broken food system), have forced those who struggle at the bottom of our economic ladder not only to confront the inequities of health, employment, education, and housing (to name a few), but also must hunger for good food—a basic need and a basic right.

If we are to really engage in the work of ending hunger in our communities, then we must do more than collect cans for our local emergency food center. We must work to re-tool the food system from the field to the fork. Join us and many others across the state and nation in this exciting work as we join together to build a healthy, just, sustainable food system, so all may eat, and all may eat well!

This blog was posted in July 2011 on the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Blog.  Our gratitude for their funding and support! For more on their important work, visit them at www.grdodge.org.

Eat Local, End Hunger (part 2)

Volunteers and Staff have been busy processing fresh, locally sourced foods for the past month.  Hundreds of pounds have been frozen to date and are in frozen storage for use later in the Fall and Winter.  As we face looming cuts to our most important supply of food, the government commodity TEFAP program…this supply of healthy, fresh food will ensure that there is enough food to feed our patrons.  Thanks to Ariel Fremed, a Rutgers intern, who helped lead processing efforts this summer.  Her blog follows:

Jersey Fresh!

“This week, I concluded my summer internship with Elijah’s Promise. I was placed at Elijah’s through Rutgers University’s Community Leadership, Action and Service Project (CLASP). CLASP is a service-learning internship program that exposes college students like me to social justice issues in New Brunswick, like poverty and food insecurity, and provides the opportunity to join locally based organizations in working for social change. My big summer project was that of processing. Fresh fruit and vegetables were delivered in larger quantities than were manageable for immediate use, and the volunteers and I worked hard to process it to be stored for the winter. We roasted peppers, shucked corn, breaded and baked eggplant and zucchini, cooked tomatoes, and blanched peaches to be frozen for later use. Together, we processed hundreds of pounds of food that will be used when fresh produce becomes scarce in the winter.  The food we processed this summer will become a key element in sustaining the healthy food initiative taken by the soup kitchen, and will allow for the use of fewer unhealthy canned vegetables. I feel very proud of the work that the volunteers and I accomplished this summer. It is an unbelievable feeling knowing that the hard work of few will benefit hundreds.”

Ariel Fremed