Last week I volunteered at Second
Harvest Heartland, a food bank which serves 59 counties in Minnesota and
western Wisconsin. September is National
Hunger Action Month, and all throughout Bremer Bank is matching every
volunteer hour at Second Harvest with a $5 donation. Having spent my last two
years thinking about and seeing hunger and poverty in Malawi, I thought it was
a good opportunity to explore the same issues closer to home. Plus, they made
it super
easy to do.
Second Harvest (@2Harvest) is part
of Feeding
America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks that helps feed
people across the country. According to their website 1 in 7 Americans
struggles with food insecurity. One in seven!
I’ve learned a lot about “food
insecurity” in developing countries, but it never really occurred to me that
the same terminology would be applicable so close to home. From what I remember in my grad school days, food
insecurity revolves around three things: access, availability and uptake. That
is: is there food nearby? Is it affordable? Is your body getting what it needs?
In Malawi, our program explored
this through periodic surveys covering the three aspects. How far do you need
to walk to find food? What could you afford? Were there enough calories
available? The local staple was nsima and relish with every meal, so we also asked if they were getting enough dietary
diversity (a fancy way of saying “balanced diet”).
In the United States, the three
aspects still hold. Getting enough calories is less of an issue, but given the
overabundance of cheap, sugar-filled calories, finding a healthy and nutritional
balance remains a struggle. According to the latest 2014
Food Hunger Survey, 81% of clients in the Second Harvest service area
choose inexpensive, unhealthy food.
Hunger is at once an uncomplicated
and complicated issue. It’s relatively
easy to improve access and availability – that’s what food banks like Second Harvest
try to do. It’s harder to teach about what
to eat. Adding to that, it also impacts so many other things: if you are food
insecure, how do you have enough energy to learn? To work? To borrow a
development phrase, this is called poverty ratcheting. Not having one puts you
at risk for the other, which knocks you down another step, and then another,
etc.
I enjoyed my afternoon re-packaging
excess tortillas and sorting through boxes of semi-expired goods from local
grocery stores (it is seriously fascinating to see what things get donated. Easter
Eggs! Gluten free matzo balls!). It also helped that I randomly ran into my
friend Curt, who was also there to volunteer. It felt good to spend time
thinking of others, learning something new and putting myself to service.
It’s sexy to think about helping
others in far off places. It’s easy to think about a poor hungry Ethiopian child
with flies about her nose, but that is not necessarily the reality. It has been
somewhat difficult during my return to reconcile the image of this land of
abundance with one that perhaps has more in common with Malawi than it would
like to admit. Returning home, I feel
more strongly than ever that “making a difference” isn’t something that is done
to Another in a Far Off Place, but to each other, as we live our lives, every
single day.
