Final Lessons from the Food Stamp Challenge

Stopped in the supermarket today to pick up something for my husband Peter who is not on the Food Stamp Challenge.  Since I still had 50 cents of my $31.50 budget to spend, I gave in and walked through the fruit aisle.  Picked up the smallest apple I could find and weighed it.  Hmmmm.  At $1.29 a pound it would have come to about 50 cents but maybe a bit over. I put it back and looked for something cheaper. Sure enough there were beautiful pears on sale at 99 cents a pound.  Chose one. Turned out it was only 39 cents at checkout. Thank you ShopRite!

And it was delicious.  Arrived home and ate every speck of it except the seeds and the stem.

This Sunday night is the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  At many synagogues, including ours, folks will take home an empty grocery bag and return it ten days later on Yom Kippur with food donations for the hungry.  A few days ago one of the teens asked me to think about how those who cannot afford to donate food must feel when they are handed that bag.  Are they ashamed that they cannot do the good deed for others that most around them seem to be able to afford? How does it feel to return the next week empty handed?  I explained that someone could just recycle the bag at home, and that people do not bring the bags back all at once so no one would notice if someone did not make a donation.  Still, it gave me pause. There is shame in not having the resources other have.

When we make the announcement at services inviting people to take a bag home, we will need to acknowledge that many among us cannot afford to participate so we need others to make an even greater effort this year if they are blessed with financial well-being. And we need to be sure our ushers ask if someone would like a bag - not assume that all will take them. 

After Yom Kippur we will also need to ask ourselves: what are we doing for the food-challenged sitting in our own pews? We Jews think of the hungry as the “other.”  We don’t imagine it in our own well-educated community. 

We are wrong. 

I don’t know the solution yet.  I do know that the greatest impact of taking the Food Stamp Challenge has not been the planning, eating or reading up on the facts about SNAP.  It has been the unplanned conversations that arise as people share their stories of volunteering and donating for the hungry, teaching their children about hunger, or quietly reveal their own situation of food scarcity.  Those stories are more real than the $31.50 worth of food I lived on for the last 7 days.

One challenge is ending, but the challenge we all face - to make sure no child or adult goes to bed hungry -  remains.

P.S. If you are in New Jersey, please consider signing up as an automatic monthly donor at the Community Food Bank of New Jersey. Just go to http://www.njfoodbank.org/how-to-help/donate-funds/community-harvesters