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Food has arrived. In particular, concern about both global and local food security, a “nice” term for hunger. With a popular cable channel featuring more than 80 programs dedicated to food and cooking; with America anxiously awaiting Gordon Ramsey’s next kitchen nightmare; it’s still just like your mother used to say when you wouldn’t eat your peas: People are starving.
The federal Department of Agriculture reports that our current economic crisis has brought hunger in the U.S. to its “highest level since the government has been keeping track.” Almost 50 million of us did not have enough to eat at some time in the last year, and this includes one in every four children.

The 2007 edition of the same report noted that some 40 percent of "food insecure" people were Latino or African-American, a reminder that hunger affects different groups more than others just as it affects some countries more than others. Globally, the UN's World Food Programme says of the one billion people who are hungry each day, 92% live in the developing world, making hunger and malnutrition the greatest risks to health globally.

Locally, Rutgers University sponsored a World Food Day Forum in October. The featured speaker was New Jersey native Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. Also speaking was Rev. Lisanne Finston, who has been addressing local hunger head-on as director of Elijah’s Promise soup kitchen and culinary school.

Winne and Finston’s goal is to marry concern and action about hunger generally to providing local, fresh, sustainably-grown food. Although this might seem a no-brainer, hunger advocacy and sustainability activism have not always traveled in the same circles.

The parallel history of the food stamp and farm subsidy programs, says Winne, have led to “an unholy alliance between anti-hunger advocates and big agriculture corporations . . . (which is) bad for health, environment and often the economic vitality of agriculture in developing nations.”

While fully funding the Women Infants and Children food grant, food stamps, and child nutrition programs is essential, Winne says, “none of these programs are doing much to lift people from poverty.… Food presents us with a paradox. People cannot be free unless they’re fed. But how can they be free if they are fed by a charity, government, or like most of us, the industrial food system?”

The same food gaps between rich and poor countries exist within our own borders. “It’s not just a problem of having enough money to buy food, but of finding places where you can buy healthy food,” says Winne. In the U.S., the poor live in food deserts, populated by convenience stores, junk food, and fast food restaurants.

Rev. Finston observed that a vision of food security must go “beyond the idea of moving cans around to end hunger.” She asked, “How do we equip people and communities with the ability to feed themselves with healthy food?” This question calls for a food system that is not only sustainable and healthy, but also fair and just.

World Hunger Year, the advocacy organization co-founded by Harry Chapin in 1975 to support grassroots efforts to end povery and hunger, and the Growing Food and Justice For All Initiative, have teamed up to study the historical roots of racial disparities in our food system so that solutions can be socially just.

The international high-IQ society Mensa, through its consulting organization Mensa Process, has also joined in the effort. During November 14-21, their IdeaAid project challenged Mensa members to work in their communities generating ideas on how to raise $1 billion for Heifer International.. Highland Park participant Josephine Giamo says of IdeaAid, “It’s in 66 countries. People all over the world are thinking about how to eradicate poverty.”

Giamo wants to implement the Heifer model locally through donations “so people in our local community could buy livestock and become self-sufficient. We’d have local farms and businesses and we wouldn’t have to ship milk and meat from other parts of the country. We wouldn’t have to have so many people unemployed because they would be starting their own businesses…It’s a scalable, sustainable model.”

Meanwhile, Highland Park schools are recruiting students, parents and teachers to help build four edible school gardens. The gardens will initially provide fresh produce for food pantry patrons. In time, the gardens may also supplement school lunches. And the students will learn valuable skills.

Mark Winne says, “There has to be something personal and individualized about our work. We need to empower people.”

“The public policy goal should be ‘everyone who wants it should have a piece of land on which they can stand. The more soil that trickles through a person’s fingers, the more we can predict that they will take care of themselves, their neighbors, and the land.”

What can you do to help? Believe 100% that the world is plummeting toward climate crisis and, therefore, a food crisis. Everything you do now is needed to teach the next generation how to survive the damage caused by environmental degradation and its associated social degradation. A quick list of local daily actions might include:

• Don’t abandon the food pantry. They’re needed and they do accept certain fresh produce (call and ask).
• Eat at A Better World Café and pay it forward
• Support Elijah’s Promise.
• Join the Edible Gardens Project.
• Compost your kitchen scraps for the school gardens.

On a little larger scale, try some of these earth-shaking actions:

• Support local farmers (try the 100-mile diet).
• Help improve child nutrition by insisting on locally-sourced food in school lunches.
• Support World Hunger Year's Hungerthon 2009..
• Check out Heifer International’s gift catalog and give a sustainable gift of food security.

And for a good guide to tying it all together, download What One Person Can Do to Support Community Food Security from the Community Food Security Coalition website, www.foodsecurity.org.

If we don't build a better world, then our children and grandchildren will be left to the wolves of the world, who have consistently proven their appetite for destruction.