It was my first time at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration.  Nestled in the Civic Center downtown, it’s drab, bureaucratic aesthetic is no frills and all business.  It set the right mood, given that, today, Fed Up with Hunger was all about business.

We came to attend a meeting convened by County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to review the progress of the county’s audit of its response to food insecurity.  The audit, which was requested by the Board of County Supervisors in response to Fed Up with Hunger’s ”Blueprint to End Hunger in Los Angeles”, will help the county determine how to apply the Blueprint’s recommendations.  Over a half a dozen county department were in attendance, as well as the Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, Feeding America’s spoke person David Arquette and the California Food Policy Advocates.  Read more »

Hello folks!  This last weekend was Big Sunday and Fed Up with Hunger was out in force.  For the unaware, Big Sunday is a Los Angeles wide community service event involving hundreds of service organizations and over 50,000 volunteers.  Be proud Los Angelenos- it ranks as the largest community service event in the nation! 

Fed Up with Hunger’s Big Sunday project was a gleaning of the Hollywood, Larchmont, Brentwood and Encino Farmers Markets.  Our cheery volunteers from the Jewish Federation’s young leadership divisions and Birthright Next solicited produce donations from farmers market shoppers and vendors alike.  We mercilessly unleashed our smiles and go get ‘em enthusiasm, inspiring scores of vulnerable, charity prone people  into giving us produce. Read more »

The rich aroma of cinnamon and onions permeated the kitchen.  The Fed Up With Hunger team was cooking up a smorgasbord of food at the University Religious Conference, the umbrella group for faith-based organizations at UCLA.  We assembled quite a spread: curried tunafish salad, spiced lentils, spinach salad, long grained white rice, platters of pastries and a bevy of 2 liter bottles of soda.  Who would have thought that it was all for a hunger banquet?

It’s not as much of an oxymoron as you may think.  Our hunger banquet, an event originally pioneered by Oxfam International, brought college students together from UCLA, USC and Hebrew Union College to examine the full breadth of food security, from those who eat well to those who barely eat at all.  A lucky few did get to partake in the smorgasbord…but most were not so lucky.

The banquet program ran similarly to a Passover Seder: a lengthy scripted conversation and a meal, culminating in a moment of reflection.  The students learned that food insecurity in the developing world and here in the United States is different, but very much the same.  For you folks at home, I’ll boil it down to the elevator speech: the food insecure, both here and abroad, suffer from impaired development and chronic disease that engenders poverty and pushes a happy, healthy life further out of reach for the vulnerable people that live in our community. Read more »

The Maggid portion of the Seder tells of the Israelites’ journey from slavery to freedom.  It begins Ha Lachma Anya: let all who are hungry come and eat.  This year, don’t let these words pass by as a perfunctory beginning to the Passover story.  The rising tide of hunger in Los Angeles behooves us as a people remembering the poor bread we ate in the land of our affliction to not sit idly by while people who are hungry in our community suffer.

Please help turn yourself and your guests into educated advocates for the ending of hunger by taking a moment to read aloud the Fed Up With Hunger Maggid.  Your Seder is an opportunity to spread awareness of the hunger that exists in our community and what can be done about. 

We’ve included a ready-to-print-and-stamp advocacy letter in support of a strong reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act with our Maggid.   Join Michelle Obama and Scarlett Johansson in their campaign against child hunger and call on Representative George Miller, the Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, to make the Child Nutrition Act a fiscal priority even during this challenging time for the federal budget.  Preventing hunger-associated malnutrition is one of the most cost-effective ways we can ensure that disadvantaged children have the opportunity to grow up into healthy, productive adults. 

This Passover, bring your celebration of freedom out of the past and into the present by taking action against the modern day Mitzrayim of hunger!

On March 24th, we are partnering with MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, Progressive Jewish Alliance, Valley Beth Shalom, and Sinai Temple for the First Annual Los Angeles Hunger Seder. 

During the Passover Seder, we open the doors of our homes and invite all who are hungry to come and eat but are we really ready to feed all those hungry people?

The statistics are staggering: about 1 out of every 8 people in Los Angeles is hungry, making us the Hunger Capital of the US.  The number of people in poverty in Los Angeles County is roughly equal to the population of Philadephia, our nation’s 6th most populous city.  Around the world, over 1 billion people suffer from hunger.

Come to the first every LA Hunger Seder on March 24th at VBS at 7:o0 pm to learn about hunger in LA and worldwide and to learn how you can make a difference.  Register here.

All proceeds from the $18 ticket will be donated to The SOVA Community Food and Resource Program of Jewish Family Service. 

It will also be webcast at www.JewishJournal.com

Join us on the bus with The Progressive Jewish Alliance and the Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores for a tour of food deserts on Sunday, March 21st.  The bus will leave the Westside JCC at noon and tour the food deserts of Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights.  The program includes learning from health experts, text study, a visit to a community garden, talks with residents, and concludes with an Interfaith Observance of Passover. 

From our Blueprint to End Hunger:

…an assessment by the East L.A. Community Corporation (ELACC) identified one supermarket for almost 90,000 residents in the Boyle Heights area, or more than four times lower than average for the rest of Los Angeles County…61% of residents of California’s 46th Assembly districtm which includes much of Boyle Heights and some surrounding neighborhoods, are either obese of overweight.   

You can register here or click here for more information.

Back in the days of snails, pails and puppy dog tails, I would anxiously await for Valley Beth Shalom’s Purim Carnival for the chance to win a bag of goldfish.  Winning goldfish was no easy task—it usually required some heroic feat, like knocking down a pyramid of bottles with a mere two bean bags.  I relished those glorious years when I persevered and brought home a ziplock with shining goldfish darting back and forth.

Invariably, the goldfish would die within the week despite my best intentions, but that only put a small damper on my joy.  It was all for love of the chase rather than for any sort of deep seated interest in the goldfish themselves.  I’m going to be honest: now that I am older and more empathetic for my aquatic compatriots, I feel guilty.  I’ve left a lot of dead goldfish in my wake.  One might argue that depth of empathy for goldfish is not something one would expect a child to have, but that wouldn’t do much to convince a goldfish that I should be let off the hook.

Thankfully, this year, I had a chance to show that I’m a changed man. Read more »

On Sunday, as part The Jewish Federation’s Fed Up with Hunger Purim events, Jewish volunteers delivered food, toiletries, and other care essentials to people in need all over Los Angeles in the Purim mitzvah of matanot l’evyonim (giving gifts to the poor).

A group of volunteers from Federation’s Young Entertainment Division (some of whom helped organize the Ghostbusters JFS/SOVA benefit screening at Hollywood Forever during Sukkot) and their friends joined me to cook a meal for 60 residents of Proyecto Pastoral’s Guadalupe Homeless Project, the only men’s shelter in East Los Angeles (recipes below).

Even before the cooking started, the volunteers spent the earlier part of the afternoon buying all of the ingredients for our menu.  Sara Reich, who did the yeoman’s job of coordinating all of the volunteers and the food procurement, bought 35+ pounds of chicken.  Jeannine Hamaoui cleared out the produce departments of Vons and Albertsons to get the 30 bunches of Swiss Chard that we needed.  Rachel Fleischer brought enough chicken stock to fill a large kiddie pool. Read more »

Yesterday, the First Lady of the United States unveiled her Let’s Move initiative to combat childhood obesity, a problem that affects nearly one in three children in America.  With hunger affecting nearly one in four children in America, the link between food security and obesity is pretty clear.   

The initiative itself is impressive and far reaching, tackling childhood obesity and its causes through physical activity, quality of food, education, access, and affordability.  It’s a good first step in achieving President Obama’s goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015.  Read more »

White House chef Sam Kass shows TODAY’s Al Roker and students from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, D.C., how to prepare a quick and healthy meal in the morning.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Local nonprofit RootDownLA (one of The Jewish Federation’s micro-grantees under the Fed Up With Hunger banner) has a similar philosophy. In their words, they “get kids to get kids to eat their veggies.” RootDown works in local schools, empowering young people to make healthy eating choices and to help improve the food system. Check them out at RootDownLA.org.