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. 

The meeting was held in a wood-paneled eighth floor conference room with a large table that stood out like a butte in the middle of the room.  Once everyone had gathered, Supervisor Yaroslavsky leaned forward in his chair like Larry King does when he gets serious about an interview.  He thanked everyone for attending and, without much further ado, set us to task.

Food stamp enrollment was the soup d’jour.  Our “Blueprint to End Hunger” makes it clear that food assistance programs like food stamps are some of the most powerful tools we have to address food insecurity.  As it stands, Los Angeles County’s food stamp program is severely underutilized, resulting in a loss of nearly $1 billion dollars of emergency food aid. 

One of the primary reasons for the low enrollment in food stamps is the requirement for applicants to have an in-person interview.  While this may seem minor, for those who are elderly, disabled, lack transportation or who can’t take off during work hours, traveling to the county office and waiting in long lines for a meeting can be logistically impossible.   Many other counties across the nation have addressed this problem by waiving the in-person interview.  In most cases, an in-person interview is actually superfluous: eligibility can be determined electronically by checking whether an applicant is already enrolled in a governement assistance program.

I’m happy to report that our meeting with the County was ultimately productive- the Department of Social Services committed to fully implementing the face-to-face waiver by June.  While it is true that in government deadlines are not hard-and-fast, we are excited that the county is moving towards making food stamps more accessible to the hungry in our community.

I left the meeting with a little skip in my step that I couldn’t help.  It was wonderful to see how the seeds of change planted by the  ”Blueprint to End Hunger in Los Angeles” have taken root.  In the coming months, I’ll be excited to watch them grow!

Thank you County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky for making hunger a priority and helping us to strengthen food security in Los Angeles!

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.

I’m happy to report that people gave generously.  Shoppers dropped off a continual stream of full paper bags and, at the end of the day, the vendors let us have their still good, but unsellable fruits and vegetables.  Ultimately, we raised over 1500 pounds of produce!!!  Our gargantuan haul was divied up between JFS-SOVA, the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition and Food Finders.  This week, hundreds of hungry people will eat healthful, nutritious meals because of our Big Sunday volunteers’ incredible efforts! 

We were very excited to have Repair the World come out and videotape the goings on as part of their documentary on all the inspiring service projects that Jewish organizations are doing all across the country.  We had to be on our best,
most enthused behavior.    Sometime soon you’ll be able to see us traipsing around the Hollywood Farmers Market and spieling about hunger and food insecurity in live action.

 There’s no two ways about- we had a blast out there.  You can’t help but have a good time when you get to watch a male volunteer in an extra small woman’s Big Sunday shirt waving around a sign in the middle of a crowd or receiving a generous donation from Mr. Billy Zane himself.  I can’t wait to do this again next year!

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.We were lucky to have Jeanne Smith, Chaplain and Director of UCLA’s Wesley Foundation and Rabbi Noah Farkas from Valley Beth Shalom to help bring the big ideas and abstract numbers of food insecurity down to earth by relating first hand experiences they’ve had of people suffering from hunger.  Rabbi Farkas spoke of a little, starving girl he met while building a school in Ghana.  Jeanne told the story of her humanitarian mission to Haiti, obviously still haunted by the failed state’s desperate, teeming masses.  These were  ”light bulb”  moments that motivated them to make social action and justice central themes of their lives.

As I said before, the banquet was a lot like a Seder- we were all extremely hungry by the time we had finished the scripted portion of the night!  Little did the participants know, however, that they would not all enjoy a satiating meal.  Those lucky enough to number among the rich were served heaping piles of spiced lentils, curried tuna fish and spinach salad.  Those who were among the American food insecure had barely palatable dollar store donuts and soda.  The last and most food insecure group ate only rice and drank water from tiny dixie cups.

As I looked around, I noticed an uneasiness had entered the room.  Those who had been served the wholesome meal ate sheepishly, obviously embarrassed that they were only the ones enjoying a full meal.  The others joked about staging an insurrection and taking some of the better food for themselves.

After people had had their fill, I closed the banquet with a question: “What did you learn tonight?”  I didn’t need the students to respond to know the answer: I  had seen it in their faces as they ate.  Hunger and food insecurity had gone from being remote concepts to something present in their minds, in their hearts, and as a taste that had still not left their tongues.

I can only hope that, for some of them, it was a light bulb moment.

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!

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. I earnestly began the long overdue clearing of my besmirched conscience by participating in the tradition of Matanot L’Evyonim (gifts to the poor) this Purim.  I knew I would have to do some serious gift giving if to propitiate the ghostly fish that haunt my Erev Purim dreams, so I put on my Fed Up With Hunger hat and got to work.

In conjunction with Shtibl Minyan, B’nai-David Judea, the Jewish Federation’s Young Leadership Division, Temple Israel of Hollywood and IKAR, I helped Fed Up With Hunger mount a Los Angeles wide Matanot L’Evyonim campaign for the city’s homeless.  Between the lot of us, we made hundreds of bagged lunches and toiletry kits.  Volunteers then fanned out across the Westside, Hollywood and Downtown to deliver the care packages directly to homeless people.

Hand delivering the meals was a very important part of our Matanot L’Evyonim project.  The homeless are in need of more than good, healthful food- they also are all too often bereft of social companionship, living alone and ignored on busy streets.  As we passed out the bags, we made sure to smile, say hello and make conversation.  Even these little gestures, while perhaps inconsequential to most of us, are rare and precious gems for the homeless.

I personally went with IKAR to the Ocean Park Community Center, a homeless shelter and rehabilitation program in Santa Monica.  It was a beautiful, crisp Sunday morning, it was Purim, and there I was, helping make the world a better place rather than contributing to the deaths of innocent goldfish.  Here’s to you, my fishy friends!

We would like to make this Matanot L’Evyonim project an annual Purim event.  If you or your congregation wants to join us next year, please e-mail me at ebraun@jewishla.org.

Aaren Alpert is Fed Up With Hunger’s in-house youth outreach pro .  When Aaren heard that the United Synagogue Youth, or USY, needed social action programming for their Valley Beth Shalom weekend teen retreat, she got to work.  Let me tell you something about Aaren– she’s serious when it comes to youth programming.  Not only is she armed with years of personal and professional experience, but her mother is the legendary Merrill Alpert, youth programming maven of Far West United Synagogue Youth.  In other words, this sort of stuff is literally in her blood.  Teaming up with VBS’ Rabbi Noah Farkas and youth directors Alison Bluestein and Tiffany Kosloy, Aaren put her know how to good use and set up a whole Fed Up With Hunger themed weekend!

On Saturday morning, the USY Fed Up With Hunger extravaganza kicked off with over 100 USY’ers crowded into the Valley Beth Shalom youth lounge for a Fed Up With Hunger Banquet.  The Fed Up With Hunger Banquet is a scripted meal conducted a lot like a Passover Seder, but, instead of telling the story of the Israelites flight from Egypt, the banquet explores the character of food insecurity in the world at large and our own communities.   The USY’ers were challenged as the more economically fortunate to realize how difficult it is for needy individuals and families to afford fresh, healthful food.  We were really impressed with the lively extended conversation the banquet provoked, especially considering the banquet was holding up their lunch!

After taking a break on Saturday for Shabbat and the obligatory DJ’ed dance, the USY’ers got back to it on Sunday morning with a workshop which had them budget for a week’s worth of groceries on a food insecure household’s income.  Even with food stamps, soup kitchens and food pantries to rely on, the USY’ers realized that eating healthfully on a strapped food budget is nearly impossible.  The numbers are demoralizing: the price differential between a nutritionally poor and healthful diet amounts to several hundred dollars per week for a family of four.  The workshop is frustrating by design, as the point is to demonstrate how the food insecure eat poorly as a matter of necessity.

Once the USY’ers were sufficiently fed up with hunger (we can’t resist that pun around here), they rolled up their sleeves and got hands on with their Tikkun Olam.  They split up into groups and worked on a bevy of different projects: potato boxes planters for VBS’ community garden were built, lasagnas were made for a local homeless shelter, food was sorted for the VBS food pantry and nearly one hundred pounds of food donations were collected from Ralph’s.  Some of the more theatrically inclined USY’ers put together video PSA’s about hunger to post on their Facebook pages and other social media.  All in all, were completely impressed by the enthusiastic response we got.  The USY’ers learned about hunger, they took action against hunger and they made the fight to end hunger their own.

After the program was over, we asked Adam Braun, one of the USY teen leaders responsible for running the kinnus, how the weekend impacted him.  He said that “For me, it was an experience to be treasured and it has inspired me to take future action because I know that, even though I may just be one adolescent teenager, I can make a difference.”  That’s right Adam- you can!  And together, we can do so much more.  Thank you USY for taking a stand against hunger in Los Angeles!

Students at UCLA Hillel are rolling up their sleeves and joining the fight against hunger in Los Angeles. Hillel is a student organization whose mission is to enrich the lives of Jewish undergraduate and graduate students so that they may give back to the Jewish people and the world.  One way Hillel students give back is though tzedek, which is Hebrew for “social justice.“ Every Hillel chapter has a tzedek chair who organizes service events, helping to teach students that an important part of being a community is to take care of the less fortunate.

In honor of Thanksgiving, UCLA Hillel’s hunger-project-in-charge Desiree Soleymani organized a PB&J Challenge Night.  Fifteen students came together to make as many as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as they could for the hungry in our community.  In their tzedek inspired zeal, they made over 200 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Hillel donated the sandwiches to the food recovery organization Angel Harvest, which distributed them to homeless people living in the West Hollywood area.

During the event, the students watched videos from the Fed Up with Hunger website and discussed future events for the upcoming year. UCLA Hillel will hold additional Fed Up With Hunger themed events in the coming year, including more PB&J Challenge Nights and a volunteer day at a soup kitchen.  They also plan to launch an initiative to get UCLA to donate surplus food from campus dining facilities to food aid providers.

Fed Up With Hunger applauds UCLA Hillel’s efforts to fight food insecurity in Los Angeles!  We here at Fed Up With Hunger are forming a broad coalition of student groups working against hunger.  If you’re a student activist from any campus organization, whether faith or cause based,  and you want to get involved with Fed Up With Hunger, e-mail me at ebraun@jewishla.org.  I’ll be happy to help your group find it’s place in the Fed Up With Hunger campaign!

“When you reap the harvest of your college campus, do not reap to the very edges of your dining hall…” – Studenticus 19:9

Dorm food is not just for students anymore.  The Occidental College chapter of Circle K, a national collegiate community service organization, has partnered with Occidental’s campus dining facilities to deliver quality, un-served food to Midnight Mission, a major provider of emergency food to the needy living on Skid Row.  Adriana Fukuzato, president of the Circle K chapter, says that, “Circle K is dedicated to service and that means being leaders in the community. This is not only a service to Occidental but to Midnight Mission as well…. we are more than happy to donate the food as well as our time to such a wonderful organization.”

Circle K’s efforts are vital at a time when the ranks of the hungry and food insecure are burgeoning.  The additional need is straining emergency food providers like Midnight Mission.  The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, the biggest player in Los Angeles’ charitable food distribution network, recently reported that demand at the food pantries they serve has increased by 34% since 2008.  More than ever, we need to make efficient use of our food to feed the hungry in our community.

Tragically, Americans waste a tremendous amount of food. According to a recent USDA study[1], about 1400 calories of food is wasted per person per day, amounting to over 150 trillion calories per year!

This figure takes into account food waste that occurs at every level, from the edible but blemished fruit and vegetables farmers can’t sell to the unsold baked goods your local coffee shops throws away every day.  If we were able to glean this food waste, there would be 3000 calories of food available to feed each of the 49.1 million food insecure Americans- 1000 calories more than their suggested caloric intake.  Of course, not all of this food waste is realistically recoverable, but these figures do suggest that gleaning presents a real opportunity to feed the hungry and improve food security.

Food waste is not just a humanitarian issue – it’s also an environmental catastrophe.  It takes one quarter of our total freshwater consumption and more than 300 million barrels of oil per year to produce the food we waste.  Furthermore, 98% of the food ends up in landfills and decomposes into methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that has 25 times the impact on atmospheric temperatures when compared to a similar amount of carbon dioxide.

I believe that an effective food recovery program would have a huge positive impact on our community, and so do the students I’ve been working with at UCLA, USC, and the Claremont Colleges.  They hope to follow Occidental Circle K’s lead and convince their campus dining facilities to donate their un-served food to food aid providers.  It’s important for our civic institutions, like our city’s prestigious universities, to set an example for the rest of the community.

Los Angeles- our students are ready to be the Boaz to our city’s Ruths.  Dorm food is every bit as gleanable as a field of grain, and just as important to feeding the hungry in our city.

We’re beset by fast food, plagued by food deserts, and our waistlines are growing nearly as fast as the Federal debt- but don’t despair, folks!  We can fix these problems with a little ingenuity and a lot of communal elbow grease.  In fact, one exciting solution is already sweeping the nation: urban farming. 

Urban farms offer a number of benefits.  They provide a ready supply of fresh fruits and vegetables to inner city communities which all too often have a dearth of nutritious, healthful food.  This locally grown produce is more earth friendly than typical supermarket fare, which must be shipped from distant rural areas.  Urban farms also help to make a community out of otherwise anonymous inner city neighborhoods.  If you’ve ever lived in a big city (like Los Angeles), you’ve had the experience of your neighbors being strangers.  You pass by people on the street and you rarely say hello.  There’s really nothing like a good democratic effort to make a community out of anonymity.

No where in the United States has capitalized on the potential of urban farms like Detroit.  Economic devastation has yielded the city a unique opportunity: there are currently 40 square miles of vacant lots in metro Detroit.  The city has begun turning the vacant lots into community and family gardens- over 80 acres have already been planted.   There may not be a single supermarket in downtown Detroit, but there are now farmers markets supplied by these gardens which provide critically needed fruits and vegetables.

Here in Los Angeles, communities underserved by supermarkets and other fresh produce vendors have also turned to urban farming.  It’s been a struggle, however.  The South Central Farmers, for example, used to run the biggest urban farm in the country on the corner of East 41^st and Alameda. 

About 350 families living in the South Central area worked together on the 13 acre farm to grow a veritable cornucopia of crops: avocadoes, beans, yerba mate, walnuts, guava, cilantro, chayote, beans, beans… and that’s just to name a few!

Unfortunately, there’s always trouble in paradise.  The South Central Farmers did not have full control over their land.  The lot was originally seized from the Alameda-Barbara Investment Company by the City of Los Angeles for a waste-to-energy incinerator.  When community opposition defeated the proposal to build the incinerator, the city decided to give the LA Regional Food Bank a revocable permit to plant a community garden on the lot.  The community garden eventually became what we now know as the South Central Farmers.  The former owners of the lot, however, sued for the right to repurchase the land and, after years of legal wrangling, the South Central Farmers ultimately had to give up their farm. The whole saga was captured in the Academy nominated documentary “The Garden: Eviction from Eden.”  

While due process was served, it still is an unfortunate setback for urban farming in Los Angeles.  There’s no reason, however, that we can’t bring urban farming on the same or even a greater scale to Los Angeles- we’ll just need your help.  Yup, I’m talking to you, the forward thinking individual who’s taken time out of their day to read a blog about hunger.  For example, the South Central Farmers now run an 80 acre farm cooperative in Bakersfield.  On weekends, the South Central Farmers shuttle out to Bakersfield to pack produce boxes to sell at Los Angeles area farmers markets.  Support their effort to reestablish themselves back in Los Angeles by buying a box of delicious fruits and vegetables.  The boxes can conveniently be ordered online and picked up at a location near you.  You’ll get a week’s worth of tasty meals and a bucket of good karma to boot!

Hey, you could even plant your own food garden.  Check out UrbanFoodGarden.org for everything you need to know about growing your own fruits and vegetables.  Be an example to the community.  Invite people over and feed them a delicious home grown meal.  Make them jealous. 

Really, that’s what Fed Up With Hunger is all about- motivating people to make a difference.  Angelenos, let’s get out there and sow some crops!  As Rabbi Hillel was wont to say,” If not now, when”.

MATCH invited some of us on the Fed Up With Hunger team to  talk with teens about the issue and help guide their giving.  We wanted to do more than just talk, so we devised a hands-on, interactive workshop called “Who’s Hungry in LA?”  The workshop confronts participants with six different situations in which an individual or family cannot afford their weekly groceries.  The challenge is to figure out how to leverage a limited income and available support services  to get enough to eat. 

The workshop showed the teens how difficult it to secure a week’s worth of food on a shoestring budget.   I knew we had hit home when several of them stuck around after the workshop to find out about how they could become personally involved with Fed Up With Hunger.   Perhaps they were “fed up” themselves after seeing how maddeningly difficult it can be just to get enough nutritious food for a week.  As Sartre was wont to say, “Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”  Good thing is, hunger is just the sort of existential plight that we can do something about.

If you’re interested in using our “Who’s Hungry in LA?” workshop materials for a class, event, or meeting, please contact us at FedUpWithHunger@JewishLA.org.