MORE HUNGRY TO FEED AS ECONOMY TAKES ITS TOLL
By William Battaglia
As Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, sees it, “trying to end hunger with a few food drives is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon.”
Serving Thanksgiving dinner at the Bowery Mission. (Photo by William Battaglia)
And never has that been truer than today as the city faces an economic crisis that is only going to exacerbate the situation. Having been the executive director since June of 2001 and working eight years for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington during the Clinton administration, Berg has been trying to provide a wake up call to the country.
He understands that hunger is a pervasive problem where according to data and statistics compiled by the Coalition, it impacts 1.3 million New Yorkers every day and that in our city, one in five children live in homes without enough food.
As the economy continues to worsen, more New Yorkers have found themselves in need of emergency food. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), “over 36 million Americans are forced to skip meals and survive without adequate nutrition.”
In addition, New York State has cut funding to these programs, making it extremely difficult for these programs to succeed. Meanwhile, Berg and the Coalition have been working to lend food assistance to low-income New Yorkers and to enact innovative solutions to help them towards self-sufficiency.
“The truth is when the economy gets a cold, poor people get pneumonia,” said Berg.
“Things have been real bad this year. More people have been showing up at pantries and kitchens across the city.”
For example, the Bowery Mission served more than double the amount of Thanksgiving meals this year than they did in years past. Approximately 5,000 meals were served this Thanksgiving day, compared to 2,367 meals last year. Volunteers worked rigorously in the kitchen preparing food and lined up to bring the food to the hungry who were patiently seated in the cool confines of the church. Thanksgiving Week required 600 turkeys, 1,000 pounds of potatoes, 900 pies, 800 pounds of stuffing, and 260 gallons of gravy.
“Thanksgiving is a very special day here at the Mission and what most people fail to realize is that we do it 365 days of the year,” said James Macklin, 68, director of outreach for the mission. ““I think it has just gone exceedingly well considering the amount of food that we served. Everyone is serving with very grateful very happy hearts and I’m really pleased with how everything is going.”
VIDEO: FROM BAD TO WORSE
Since 1879, The Bowery Mission has been reaching out to New York’s hungry and homeless 365 days a year, seven days a week. They have been providing each meal, each night of shelter, each shower, each piece of clothing, and each free doctor’s appointment as an invitation to participate in their residential recovery programs, where lives are being transformed.
According to statistics from The Bowery Mission & Kids With a Promise in 2007, the mission provided homeless men and women with more than 306,000 meals, 50,000 articles of clothing, 45,000 nights of shelter, 460 professional medical care appointment and 52 eye exams.
According to more statistics compiled by the Coalition, in March and April of this year, food pantries and soup kitchens served nine percent more meals than in March and April of 2007. While food pantries and soup kitchens appear to be the short-term answer to the recession, Berg feels it is up to the government to solve this major problem.
“While hunger over the last few years has been an ever growing river, overflowing its banks, this year it’s truly a tidal wave and it’s going to get worse unless our elected officials and our corporate leaders really start to engage in an entirely different set of policies,” he said.
Berg remains optimistic as history has shown him and his fellow advocates that government can end this problem. “Government has ended major problems like cholera, yellow fever, and malaria. We used to have those major diseases and government-led efforts ended them. In the late 1970’s, government programs and higher minimum wages all but ended hunger in America. So we do have proof in American history that government can solve major problems but we as citizens have to make government do it.”
Berg truly feels that hunger and poverty really are man-made conditions for which there are man-made solutions. The New York City Coalition Against Hunger also advocates to change the government policies that create the problem and change the economic policies that foster the problem. Certainly, donations and volunteers have been helping the organization.
“The reason we have hunger, the reason we have poverty in America isn’t because that’s just the way life is; it’s because we’ve decided as a society, that’s how life is going to be for the poorest in our society,” said Berg in an office interview.
However, Berg sees hope for a workable solution to ending hunger from President-elect Obama, who has offered a plan to end all child hunger in America by 2015.
“If he pushes that as president, if Congress supports him, through a few basic steps, expanding school breakfast, making the food stamps program better serve working families, raising wages for working families, we really can end hunger, particularly child hunger in just a few years,” Berg said.
An important new initiative that the Coalition is working on with the city is to expand the number of free breakfasts offered to public school students.
“The bottom line is when you don’t provide breakfast in a classroom, most kids are going to have too much stigma to go get it,” said Berg. “The 80 percent of kids eligible for free breakfast in New York City don’t get them and that’s why we want them served in their first period home room, so every kid will get it regardless of their income. We know serving breakfast in the classroom is a very important educational tool.”
According to Berg, kids have been coming in early just for the meals. Absenteeism and visits to school nurses have dropped, and in the afternoons, kids fell asleep in the classrooms less frequently. He feels that it is good nutrition policy but also good education policy.
“The most important thing the public needs to know about hunger is that it is a solvable problem,” said Berg. “The reason we have it is not because hunger is inevitable or not because hungry people are somehow lazy or not deserving. Most of the hungry are children, senior citizens, working people, parents who just don’t earn enough to get by. The reason we have hunger is our political system’s failing and to end hunger we need to fix our political system.”
For now, the lines at soup kitchens and food pantries will get longer.