Feeding The Hungry – Part 2

Some Innovative Hunger Projects

Welcome to Part 2 of this series on feeding the hungry in your neighborhood. Before I get into the current homestead project, my family has been involved in some rather innovative hunger projects over the years in a number of places, both urban and rural, local as well as international in scope. We’ve found that while it’s nice to volunteer once or twice a year at the local soup kitchen or deliver Meals on Wheels to homebound and elderly folks in your town or city, there are things you can be doing on a constant basis that don’t require a lot of paper-pushing, government approval or desperate efforts to convince the hungry to swallow their pride.

And that last issue is one that homesteaders should understand better than most. There is a certain amount of shame attached to poverty and hunger in our society, so it’s a sure bet that formal programs are not going to reach all the people who are actually going hungry during any given week of the year. We’ve found that an individual approach, and an attitude of joyful sharing will reach more people than any amount of scary bureaucracy can. It’s just crazy how hunger programs can get so bogged down in trying to make sure nobody who might be able to afford food doesn’t ever get a bite of free food. THAT seems positively designed to thwart good efforts and leave way too many people out in the cold. Our current project manages to get around this pretty well by simply NOT means-testing anybody who comes for food. They wouldn’t be there if they didn’t need the food, so who the hell cares? But more on that in Part 3.

First, our background is that we had become involved in a grant-funded hunger project out of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1983 called “The Whole World Family Supper.” We were the promo team and designed the brochures, wrote the letters, maintained the contact lists, etc. for the project. It didn’t get that far before the grant ran out (and we moved away), but my favorite aspect was that it chose a day – Thanksgiving – and enlisted missions/NGOs in many countries and depressed areas of the US to sponsor a giant pot-luck get-together on that day, the price of admission being a dish for the meal and at least two “guests” who could not afford to feast.

When we moved from Tulsa we located in northeastern Florida. There we became fast friends with a retired Air Force officer who maintained a boatyard in Saint Augustine. He loved the family supper idea so much that he became official host for the Thanksgiving pot-luck every year, setting up sawhorse and plywood tables end-to-end the entire length of the roofed dry-dock shelter (which made the spread at least 100 feet long). He also pit-roasted three huge turkeys and two ample hams every year, which were donated from two local grocery stores and the owners of the boatyard. The crowd was always colorful and culturally diverse, the smorgasbord piled with vegan dishes, every kind of vegetable dish you can imagine, more pounds of mashed potatoes and yams than should be allowed by law, veggie and turkey gravy in two-quart pitchers (constantly refilled), rolls and homemade bread loaves by the dozen, cranberry sauce and fruit dishes by the bushel, one 4×8 tabletop completely full of piled pies of every variety, and enough tea, lemonade and fruit juice to quench an army’s thirst! Again, price of admission was at least one dish of food and at least 2 people who otherwise would not eat a feast on Thanksgiving. There were often well over a hundred people present, and the feast lasted the whole weekend (lots of campers in the yard).

Thus for us, getting good food into hungry people’s mouths is sort of a “personal mission.” This is America, there’s just no excuse for chronic hunger. Thus shortly after we moved to the mountain I was appalled to discover one day while taking the trash to the county dumpsters that in this rural area where almost everybody’s got a garden going and there are always trucks full of produce in summer in parking lots or by the side of the road, there were whole families of “Dumpster People.”

Dumpster people are very poor people (this is Appalachia, we’ve got poor people) who actually live in tents and crude box-huts in the woods near the dumpsters, and whose children can be found any time of day digging through other people’s garbage for something to eat. I was horrified, immediately took to packing a garbage bag with bread and fruit and veggies and hard boiled eggs and whatever else I could find that didn’t require cooking, and taking it with me whenever I took the trash. I’d tie the food bag with a ribbon and stash it in the shade in back of the dumpster, as the child I’d tried to simply hand it to was practically feral and quite frightened of me. But he knew what the food bag looked like and kept an eye out for my car, and always quickly retrieved the food when I left it.

Over the months I started noticing that other people had begun stashing bags of food (and often clothes and toys and blankets) in the shade behind the dumpsters too. I don’t know how exactly they’d found out about my hiding place, but they decided all on their own to help out, and the Dumpster People started eating pretty well! By the first winter one of the local churches had intervened to get the families into an actual house nearer town, and the County government moved the dumpsters into a fenced-and-barbed-wire compound with a full-time on-duty guard to make sure no Dumpster People could get in. We call it the “Inconvenient Station” to this day. That of course didn’t stop people from going hungry, it just cut off their food supply.

And that brings me up to the new project that came to me one day, when someone from the other side of the highway through town showed up at our door with a big box of groceries that had been donated to a little local grocery’s hunger project. I sure don’t know how we ended up on the list, but my grandson’s best friend worked at that grocery after school and probably added our names just because he could. That got me to thinking that this county – of just 38,000 people total, all of 738 in our little town – is just chock full of people who are as appalled by the idea that anyone should go hungry as I am. At that moment I knew I could count on as much help as anyone would ever need to launch a perpetual hunger project in these environs, and it’s still going strong to this day.

“This Is America. No One Should Go Hungry.”

Posts to This Series:

Feeding the Hungry – Part 1
Feeding the Hungry – Part 2
Feeding the Hungry – Part 3

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