Click Here: With the match, $1 will provide 18 meals.
When I was asked to do a blog post for a Feeding America Blogathon a few years ago, I set my Googles to the task: first, to find out what Feeding America was, and second, to find out a little bit more about food security in America and the food stamp program, SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program).
Feeding America has some pretty simple origins:
In the late 1960s, John van Hengel, a retired businessman in Phoenix, Arizona began volunteering at a local soup kitchen, and began soliciting food donations for the kitchen. He ended up with far more food than the kitchen could use in its operations. Around this time, he spoke with one of the clients, who told him that she regularly fed her family with discarded items from the grocery store’s garbage bins. She told him that the food quality was fine, but that there should be a place where unwanted food could be stored and later accessed by people who needed it, similar to how banks store money.
Van Hengel began to actively solicit this unwanted food from grocery stores, local gardens, and nearby produce farms. His effort led to the creation of St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix, the nation’s first food bank.
(I want to pause here for a minute to think about a time when a food kitchen had too much food).