Food and Faith
About this blog
Food and Faith is a blog of the Presbyterian Hunger Program.
Recent posts
- Food Fighter Feature: Cutting Costs and Building People
- What's on the Table: Growing and Cooking in Louisville
- Food Fighter Feature: Goodness Grows
- Greetings from a VISTA!
- Flow, the Eternal You, and the neighborhood creek:
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Food Fighter Feature: Cutting Costs and Building People
Woodford County Detention Center takes to the fields to grow a little bit of justice.
When it comes to food and fairness, few populations are more consistently disregarded than our nation's incarcerated individuals. Sentenced to time away from friends and families, and kept indoors with little access to fresh air and community engagement can leave inmates even more broken and disjointed from society than ever before.
The cost of detention does not present itself solely through spiritual degradation for inmates; it also presents a very real financial cost to American taxpayers at roughly $129/day (estimate based on 2009 California State Prisons cost analysis). This money goes to inmate healthcare, security, feeding, administration and rehabilitation. One jailer in Woodford County Kentucky decided as part of his term to cut some of those costs and engage inmates in taking ownership for their food and their well-being.
This week’s Food Fighter, Jailer Johnny Jones at the Woodford County Detention Center, comes from four generations of farmers who farmed land for a living in Midway, Kentucky. Mr. Jones, before his election in 2010, worked at the Falling Springs Recreation Center, maintaining the county’s sports fields and satellite parks. During this time he worked alongside with inmates from the Woodford County Detention Center and was inspired to run for jailer with his love for agriculture and a certain inmate empowerment gardening project in mind.
With the economy presenting a challenge for nearly every publicly-funded program in the country, Mr. Jones knew he had to find a way to engage inmates to help lower costs for the county, but he also wanted to share his love of agriculture and cultivated it in some of the folks at the jail. He connected the Versailles Farm Service Agency and the Woodford County Detention Center and set out to turn 5 acres of unused land into a place where inmates could grow their own food, support local Senior Centers and bring a little justice to the prison food system.
The project, now in its 2nd year, is already wildly successful. Mr. Jones describes the garden:
“We have about 1 ½ acres of corn, 1 ½ acres of green beans, 1300 tomato plants, 300 pepper plants, 500 onions as well as a patch of watermelon and another for pumpkins.”
Last year, crews of inmates volunteered to work together to plant, weed and harvest this land all season long, netting more than 8,000 lbs. of food in the 2011 growing season. The majority of the food was sold directly back to CBM, the jail’s food service contractor, saving the county approximately $10,000.
With the donation of 9 deep freezers, the project stretched its limbs even further. After harvesting, inmates gained additional skills in working together to preserve some of the harvest for the winter. They used the jail kitchen to blanch, freeze and can hundreds of pounds of corn, beans, tomatoes, and peppers to enjoy all winter long, further cutting food costs. This was in addition to their normal participation in the prepping of the harvest for daily meals.
What was left over couldn’t possibly go to waste. By the end of last years growing season more than 700 lbs. of food found its way to the Lexington Rescue Mission, Woodford County Senior Citizen Center and Versailles Baptist Church Veggie Ministry mission, all entities working to help hungry and underserved citizens in Kentucky. The project was recently adopted by the USDA's "People's Garden" initative bringing even more resources and expertise just in time for their second growing season.
“It’s a win-win-win!” Mr. Jones reflects.
Inmates involved in the project are noticeably healthier and happier, the county is saving money, and hungry people are being provided with fresh local food to eat. The garden gives all individuals involved the opportunity to grow and eat fresh local food while developing skills that can be usedto help find work in the future. This project is an inspiring example of what happens when we work together to bring some food justice to our own backyards.
For more information about the Woodford County Detention Center garden or how to get your own Food Justice project off the ground please email or call our National Food Security Coordinator: arianna.king@pcusa.org or (502) 569-5818. Happy Growing!
May 10, 2012
What's on the Table: Growing and Cooking in Louisville
The radish is an easily recognizable and common garden crop. It is a member of the brassica family, which includes other veggies like turnips, cauliflower, mustard and kale. I like to think of radishes as cabbage’s crunchier cousin or broccoli’s baby brother.
May 3, 2012
Food Fighter Feature: Goodness Grows
The Heritage Presbyterian Church in Acworth, Georgia proudly boasts the motto that: “Love Grows Here”. Well, love isn’t the only thing growing at Heritage Presbyterian. Community is creeping up the trellises and leaders both young and old are being born everyday. I spoke with one such leader; Katie Loud, a young woman who decided to try her hand at growing food and ended up with in a garden of goodness.
After the untimely passing of a young man in the congregation, members of the Heritage Presbyterian Church began planning for what was soon to become the food ministry’s ...
May 1, 2012
Greetings from a VISTA!
Since I took an interest in the Food Justice movement, I’ve worked hard to start and contribute to conversations unveiling the downsides of industrialized food systems and the importance of taking an active role in the fight to reclaim and re-localize the control we have over the food we eat. So often, these conversations unearth the problem that people feel helpless, as though any action is interminably ineffectual. While the true nature of our existing food system does indeed lack transparency, there are many things that we can all do to engage our communities and ourselves in the fight ...
April 11, 2012
Flow, the Eternal You, and the neighborhood creek:
Deffenbaugh writes, “Buber recognizes in a very practical way that our experience of nature is often unexceptional and routine. How quickly we take for granted the enchanting beauty of the mountains or the rolling streams we see everyday. How easily they become objects in our world. But there are moments, Buber suggests, when a person can hear in crisp tones the enigmatic language of the fields, can for a brief time - often just an instant - delve beneath the It-world and come face to face with the Eternal You.
April 4, 2012
VISTAs Help Bring Justice to the Food System
Laura Stricklen Jonathan Krigger
Rachel Brunner Arianna King
National Anti-Hunger and Empowerment
Corps Year Two Takes Off
AmeriCorps VISTA Team to Work in around the U.S. including Louisville
Four full-time national service participants, Arianna King, Jonathan Krigger, Laura Stricklen, and Rachel Brunner started work this week for the Presbyterian Hunger Program (PCUSA) as part of a nationwide program to fight hunger, the National Anti-Hunger and Empowerment Corps.
Their service began on February 13 after top federal and local officials joined with nonprofit groups in Boston to swear-in the 31 members of the new national team, an AmeriCorps VISTA project which will help nonprofit organizations in 18 states, at nearly 30 sites, fight hunger, increase the amount of healthy, locally-grown food, and help to empower more low-income individuals and families to achieve long-term financial security.
For the next eleven months, Brunner, King, Krigger and Stricklen will assist congregations and organizations in Louisville and around the country more effectively connect low-income individuals and communities to government nutrition programs, such as SNAP and WIC, and to healthy, locally sourced foods.
The program is being led by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH) and is funded by the USDA and the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) with additional support from non-governmental sources. This unique public-private partnership is aimed at reducing the hunger and food insecurity faced by 50 million Americans.
“In this nation of plenty, it is unacceptable that millions of children still go to bed not knowing if there will be food for their next meal,” said Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), Chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds AmeriCorps and a senior member of the subcommittee that funds the USDA. “The Anti-Hunger and Opportunity Corps is a win-win - it will play an important role in the fight against hunger, while helping young people build leadership skills and pay off school debt.”
“Increasing access to nutrition assistance for our most vulnerable populations is a top priority of the Obama Administration,” said USDA Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Concannon. “We are committed to working with our partners at the federal, state and local level, as together we help millions of families in need.”
“For more than 46 years, VISTA has been in communities working to improve the lives of millions of the most vulnerable Americans,” said Paul Davis, Acting Director of AmeriCorps VISTA. “This cross-agency collaboration with USDA will prove instrumental in helping individuals and families get on the path to economic stability and build stronger communities.”
“We are excited to host Arianna, Jonathan, Laura and Rachel, who will be working with congregations and communities to strengthen their witness of Christ in the world,” says Presbyterian Hunger Program staffer, Andrew Kang Bartlett. “Over decades, the Presbyterian Church USA has carried out ministries of compassion, helping to alleviate hunger, as well as ministries of justice to help Presbyterians understand and address the root causes of hunger. The VISTA workers extend the work of the Presbyterian Hunger Program to help build the capacity of local churches and groups to create healthy, just food systems in the U.S.”
“The AmeriCorps VISTA program is a perfect tool to fight hunger and improve nutrition,” said NYCCAH’s Joel Berg. “We are grateful that this new public-private partnership will cost-effectively aid the ability of grassroots nonprofit groups in 18 states to increase their capacity to enable eligible families to access the federal nutrition assistance benefits that they need to avoid hunger and improve their diets. We are extraordinarily grateful to the Obama Administration and to local officials around the country for this tremendous federal and local support.”
The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that engages more than five million Americans in service through its Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America programs, and leads President Obama's national call to service initiative, United We Serve. For more information, visit NationalService.gov. AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) taps the skills, talents, and passion of more than 7,000 Americans annually to support community efforts to overcome poverty. AmeriCorps VISTA members are assigned full-time for one year at nonprofit community organizations with the goal of building the organizational, administrative, and financial capacity of programs that provide low-income Americans with the skills and resources needed to break the cycle of poverty.
April 2, 2012
Food Justice Fellows ~ Deadline Extended for new Class: APRIL 15
New and Final Deadline for Food Justice Fellows is the 15th of April
February 27, 2012
Nathan aka 'Man in Overalls' featured in new interfaith documentary
Take a look at this clip featuring PHP's Food Justice Fellow, Nathan Ballentine (aka Man in Overalls), and his efforts to help folks grow food throughout Tallahassee.
February 8, 2012
Taking the Time to Make Food Sacred
TRY this: place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love — let’s say it’s that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.Now comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.
So begins an article called "Mindful Eating as Food for Thought," which challenges us to not eat like the Cookie Monster.
And in case you haven't yet done the Just Eating? curriculum, one of the sessions is all about food as a sacred gift from God. You can download it for free here. Look for Unit 1 on Food Sharing as Sacramental...
And if you've never tried a food meditation, here are the simple instructions for a Raisin Meditation!
February 1, 2012
Announcing New Hunger Bible Study from PHP!
The Presbyterian Hunger Program is pleased to announce the publication of a new PHP Bible Study. Written and compiled by PHP Staff, with contributions from PHP Partners, RELUFA (Cameroon) and MPP (Haiti), this is a one session study reflecting on the biblical call to work as partners with people who have been made poor in order to address hunger and its causes. Early feedback from participants reflect favorably on the approach of this study. One user commented that they felt “the scripture choices will be good ones for helping to interpret this message. You take familiar scriptures and tie them with new questions.” This study focuses specifically on the examples of two stories that come from PHP’s Joining Hands ministry, Haiti and Cameroon.
The accompanying Bible Study website has information for delving even deeper into some of the central themes. The study is available from PDS (#25432-11304) or by visiting www.pcusa.org/hunger/biblestudy to download the electronic version and see the accompanying materials. Our prayer is that by using this study our reflections and action contribute to God’s glorious vision for how we treat one another in a world that grows enough food for all of God’s children.