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 »