Posts Categorized: Hunger

So you’ve heard about the Week of Action on Food, right? It’s October 10-17, and the Hunger Program helped put together a resource guide for congregations to use at worship, Sunday School, bible study, etc… Taking a trip to New Orleans for the Community Food Security Coalition Annual Conference would be a great way to close the week of action. The format for the conference is a little different this year. “This is not a conference to just stay in the hotel and never go outside.” That’s why they’re offering a ton of trips at the beginning of the conference to get out into New Orleans and see what there is to see in the world of food, culture and justice. Some of the more interesting looking trips include: * Food Deserts, Food Swamps & Food Access in Urban Communities * NOLA Urban Agriculture * Cooperation is the Name of the Game: the Mississippi Farmers Co-op If that’s not enticing enough, they’ve invited First Lady Michelle Obama (who’s been involved in the Let’s Move campaign to raise a healthier generation of kids) Regular registration for the conference ends October 1st. You can register for an additional fee up until October 19th. Visit www.communityfoodconference.org to learn more and register. Let us know if you’re planning on going… we’ll see you there. And check out their awesome shrimp fleur de leis. Kudos to whoever designed that!

Despite the reference to eggs, this has nothing to do with food. No eggs, but yes, hot. Some fellow human beings have achieved and measured a quark-gluon plasma at 4-trillion degrees Celsius. In case you can’t fathom that, imagine 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Protons and elections would simply melt. If that isn’t wild enough to fry your brain, what gets me is the speeds they get these gold nuclei circling around their handy Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. They collide these invisible-to-the-eye gold specks after accelerating their speed to 99.995 percent the speed of light. You can do the math, right. One lap of this underground track is 2.4 miles. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, I think. So in one second, this gold speck goes around that track 77,500 times. In ONE SECOND. If we can do stuff like that, we should be able to figure out how to end hunger. Do you think we can?

Food Stamp Usage Across the Country The number of food stamp recipients has climbed by about 10 million over the past two years, resulting in a program that now feeds 1 in 8 Americans and nearly 1 in 4 children. Slide your cursor over this interactive map to find food stamp information in your county. Hunger at Home in the U.S. How does hunger affect your community? Roll over a state to find out the state of childhood hunger, poverty and other facts.

Will the new Green Revolution be a blessing, or end in disaster for Africa? The Gates Foundation is the driving force behind AGRA – the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa – and the under-funded agricultural sector is Africa will get substantial new funds. But the dangers of pushing on Africa hybrid and genetically-modified seeds requiring irrigation and optimal conditions for high productivity may be a recipe for disaster. Dr. Johnson Nkuuye, with the UNDP and Millennium Development Goals and Village Program explains the danger of dependency on such modern farming technologies and on saviors from the outside.

I want to start this entry with the following disclaimer: I am not currently employed by any Christian-affiliated organization but I have been and hope to do so again. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to do meaningful…

We fast for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes we abstain from food for medical tests or surgery. Sometimes we fast as a way to “cleanse” or give rest to our digestive system. Sometimes we fast as a form of protest,…