Hunger and Food
Learning from young people about hunger and finding food everywhere
Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
This newsletter explores topics like history, culture, work, urbanism, transportation, travel, agriculture, self-sufficiency, and more.
Hello Dear Readers,
First of all, a note of gratitude to you for your continued support of this little project. My writing has not been as consistent lately, but the ideas are nonetheless still swirling around in my head. It’s finding time to commit those words to the digital “page” in a timely manner that becomes a challenge.
I appreciate reading your thoughtful reflections on my writings and hearing how some of these ideas influence how you live your life and think about our place on this spinning ball of rock.
I spent a few hours earlier this week participating in the March for the Food Drive, an annual event where local radio personality Monte Belmonte pushes an empty shopping cart 43 miles from Springfield, MA to Greenfield, MA to raise awareness for hunger. This was the 16th annual event and given the recent delay in SNAP benefits, the event was very well attended and was a successful fundraiser.
The event had hoped to raise $650,000, but as of right now, has exceeded $800,000 in donations! Perhaps more importantly, it raised awareness of hunger in Western Massachusetts and spotlighted the work of the people working to combat it.
What I didn’t realize before the event was that The Food Bank is a rather large operation. Its reach covers the four counties of Western Massachusetts and it operates many of the local food pantries. Had it not been for this march, and having just moved to this area a year ago, I likely would not have known much about this organization.
Perhaps most importantly, The Food Bank isn’t just collecting canned goods or expired grocery products. They are truly trying to build a healthy local food system which is accessible to all.
In 1992, the organization purchased a 60 acre farm which produces certified organic produce for the Food Bank and for local CSA customers. In 2020, they purchased a second farm, this one 142 acres, which provides fresh produce to local schools and serves as an educational farming hub for the community.
I joined the walk in Hadley, MA on Tuesday, walking some 8 or 9 miles along with students from my kids’ school to Sunderland. By my estimation, there were maybe 200-300 people joining with us, roughly 50 or so from our school group.
I spent some time chatting with high school students, asking them why they chose to participate. Their answers were deep, thoughtful, and personal.
A few students used the phrase “food should be a human right,” and the way they were saying it I could tell it was coming from their hearts and minds rather than them just repeating something they had heard in the media or that a teacher had taught. They truly and passionately could not understand why hunger exists in our community and in our world.
Seeing the combination of hope and disillusionment in these young eyes brought to mind the words of Henry David Thoreau in Walden:
"It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilising rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new… Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.”
We like to believe that our current system of tying “work” to the ability to eat is functional, but these young people clearly see through that. They believe that everybody can and should eat. And why not?
As we did last year, my family and I have rented a house in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, just across the river from the capital city of Trenton, New Jersey. We spent yesterday cooking our Thanksgiving meal in a small, unfamiliar, and not fully appointed kitchen. After eating a hearty lunch of all of the traditional dishes, we took a walk around the neighborhood.
We are on a street of houses that I would estimate date to the 1910s and 1920s. It was probably once considered “suburban” though by all modern interpretations would be “urban” now. The lots are close together, many houses are single family but many are also multifamily. The streets are in a grid and sidewalks run on both sides of the street everywhere. A hardware store, grocery store, a library, and several restaurants are all within a few blocks walking distance, integrated into the housing, not separate from it.
As we walked, I began to observe something that I’ve written about before: there was food everywhere! I first noticed it as tufts of what looked like tall, unmowed grass in the small median between the street and the sidewalk. To confirm my suspicions, I broke off a blade and sniffed, then passed it to my son to smell. Chives.
Its location made it a bit dubious for consumption. No doubt many neighborhood dogs (my own included) had used this spot as a toilet. But as I looked around at other grassy areas, I noticed more of the same. Here were chives growing nearly everywhere, not in a manicured garden but in the liminal spaces of the urban streetscape.
A few houses down, and I noticed a familiar plant growing in a front garden bed. Kale. In this case, I believe it was cultivated and was more decorative than nourishing, but still edible none-the-less, and it was bounded on one side by the public sidewalk, on another by the front walkway, on the third side by a driveway, and in the rear by the front porch. In a space roughly three feet by six feet was a productive little garden!
Now chives and kale alone hardly make a hearty meal, but there were protein sources all around too that in modern times we would overlook. Squirrels scampering from limb to limb of trees. Ducks and geese gliding down an old industrial canal. Maybe not your taste, but food nonetheless.
My larger point here is that people once lived in places all over the world, from the deserts of North Africa to the tropics of the Caribbean to the frigid tundra of the Arctic, and somehow they were able to eat. There were no grocery stores, there was no McDonalds. There was merely symbiosis with the other life forms all around, whether plant or animal.
Our modern perception of food is that it must come processed in a box or bag. It must be purchased from a grocer with money earned from entering numbers in a spreadsheet or scanning items at a register. We’ve forgotten how to eat because we’ve forgotten how to grow. We’ve lost our connection to nature, and thus, our connection to food.
Those students are right, food should be a human right. But also, food should not require Pepsi, Nestle, Driscolls, Ahold Delhaize, or the Waltons to be accessible.
I wrote about this at length recently so no need to rehash all of that right now. I want to leave you with the invitation to look for the food all around you and to consider how we might redefine those natural sources as equally as important and accessible as that which sits on a store shelf.
One last note: today is Black Friday. I wrote last year about giving up Amazon Prime, and I want to update you that it was much easier than I expected and more than a year later, we have not looked back. Please consider supporting small, local businesses today and every day.
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Related Reading
Fix SNAP, But Also Fix Food Too
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