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I have a good friend who works in a “food desert,” which is a community that lacks access to healthy food.  She interns at a mental health clinic in Boyle Heights.  At lunchtime, she faces a deluge of fast food options: Burger King, Little Caesar’s, Subway, Popeye’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Drug dealers and gang members loiter outside the only market in the area.  Given that her lunch break doesn’t afford her enough time to commute for lunch, she’s forced to choose from this surfeit of unhealthy food.  Fortunately for her, it’s only a lunchtime dilemma.  The residents of Boyle Heights are not so lucky.

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My work at the Jewish Federation has made me privy to a secret: millions of people in Greater Los Angeles (and thousands of Jews) can’t make ends meet; they can’t put food on the table.  So when we started talking about a plan to end hunger I thought to myself, this is great, but can we really make a dent?  Not just in the Jewish community, but in the community at large?  And how are we going to tackle an issue this big, this amorphous?

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