• Erika Davis, former Pursue temp and the blogger behind Black Gay and Jewish, published a piece on the Sisterhood blog this week about getting the Jewish community to deal honestly with internal racism. Recounting many experiences in which she has been perceived as an outsider in Jewish settings, Davis calls on the community to have this admittedly difficult conversation in order to make these experiences a thing of the past.
   
• On Monday, clergy and people of faith across the country will begin a 23 Hour Fast to End 23 Hour Solitary. Organized by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the fast coincides with the first-ever Congressional hearing on the practice of solitary confinement in prisons. To participate in this and other Torture Awareness Month activities from a Jewish lens, visit the resource page compiled by Rabbis for Human Rights-North America.
   
• AJWS’s recent Where Do You Give? National Design Competition, aimed at reframing the concept of tzedakah in the 21st century, recently named Chicagoan Doug Burnett as the competition’s grand prize winner. In articles for the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Jewish News, Burnett, who is Mormon, explained how entering the competition has taught him about Judaism and his own role in making change: “I hope in some very small way, my talent can help other people, make some small change in the world and encourage other people to do things through advertising and design.” To attend the kick-off event for the competition’s mobile tour this coming Wednesday, June 20 in New York City, click here.
   
• While the Senate is deliberating on the 2012 Farm Bill this week, the Jewish community continues to amplify its voice in favor of food justice-friendly components in the bill. The Jewish Platform for a Just Farm Bill is now signed by 20 organizations, and the Jewish Petition for a Just Farm Bill–with approximately 18,000 signatures–was delivered yesterday to members of Congress. In addition, AJWS President Ruth Messinger had her letter to the editor of the New York Times about international food aid published this week.

Movie nights on the farm are back for a second season. This summer Pursue is teaming up again with Urban Adamah to present screenings of outstanding documentaries on environmental and agricultural subjects close to our hearts. Film showings are followed by short discussions which include an examination of relevant Jewish ethics.

Join us under the big tent for the screening, enjoy wood-fired pizza from Urban Adamah’s own cob-oven, popcorn, and drinks, and meet your neighbors! Tickets are $10 in advance, $12 at the door. 

The Greenhorns
Tuesday, August 7th at 6:30

An uplifting testament to the perseverance and pluckiness of the small but growing army of young farmers committed to growing food in sustainable, sensible ways. Come see the film that serves as a grassroots rallying cry to encourage and recruit beginning farmers across the country. Click here to watch the trailer.

• In Jewish music news, Orthodox hip hop artist Y-Love (and Inside the Activists’ Studio performer) publicly came out this week in conjunction with the release of his new music video, “Focus on the Flair,” during parts of which he dresses in drag. Y-Love, who still observes mitzvot but expressed trouble with Orthodox Jews who have a “homophobic social agenda,” wants his new public identity to promote change in the Jewish community, stating in another article: “I hope to be able to stand against this and to influence a new age of new halachic rulings, which allow gay people to have fulfilling lives.”
   
• This week, Rabbi Noah Farkas (an AJWS alum) launched a new series on The Jew and the Carrot blog, Turning the Tables, about the New Jewish Food Movement. In his inaugural column, he explains that Jews’ approach to food should be about much more than taste—it’s about cultivating a “prophetic table,” bringing spirituality and ethics into our relationship with food. The kitchen table, he explains, is often the center of our lives, where news is shared, occasions celebrated, plans made—and justice should be present there too: “When we sit at our tables, we must account for those whose tables are empty, or worse — those who have no table at all.”
   
• In other food justice news, last week several change-makers from the Pursue and AJWS Global Circle communities had the unique opportunity to meet with Camille Chalmers, founder of AJWS grantee Haitian Platform for an Alternative Development (PAPDA). In a recap by Global Circle member and self-proclaimed “foodie” Marissa Miley Friedman, she recounts how Chalmers described the devastating impacts of U.S. food aid policy on Haiti’s ability to feed itself—and how this forever changed her understanding of food and the Farm Bill’s significance beyond our own consumption and production habits in the U.S.
   
• Lag B’Omer has come and gone, but there are still some milestones during the remainder of the Omer counting season. Jewcology has compiled a webpage of resources about this Shabbat’s count, the 42nd day of the Omer, also known as “Rainbow Day,” when God made a covenant with Noah to never destroy the earth by flood again. The site urges people to celebrate by using the day as a “chance to commit ourselves to the rainbow covenant, to turn from actions that destroy the earth, to turn our lives away from unraveling earth’s climate and the web of life, from diminishing earth’s abundance.”

“Yoel thinks we’re crazy!” says Leora Mallach, founder of Ganei Beantown and organizer of the first Boston Jewish Food Conference. We are on a phone call trying to plot out dinner and we’re hitting a few snags along the way. Feeding 200 people is a task in and of itself; feeding 200 people on a budget, in a less-than-ideal kitchen, and accounting for an all-vegetarian meal and additional dietary needs furthers the challenges. We were attempting to do this within the constraints of using a Kosher caterer, while sourcing as many local and sustainable ingredients as possible… in April, in New England.

To say that we had our work cut out for us is an understatement. The seed for the Boston Jewish Food Conference was first planted in the spring of 2011 when Leora Mallach, Becca Weaver and Hannah Levine, inspired by the 2010 Hazon East Coast Food Conference, sat down over leftover Tova’s vegan spicy chocolate cake to consider a local gathering. As planning moved along, it became clear that our meal and all of our snacks needed to be certified Kosher in order to be inclusive of the wide range of beliefs and practices in our Jewish community. Because the conference focused on ethics in our food choices (our tagline for the conference is “Sowing the Seeds of Sustainability”) we also knew that we needed to role model this in the meal that we served. While Boston boasts multiple Kosher caterers and several caterers that focus on using locally-sourced and sustainable ingredients, there is no one that does both.

Armed with this knowledge, initial planning team members sought out a Kosher caterer who would be willing to work with us on planning this experimental meal of our dreams. Enter Yoel Konstantine, owner of Dushez Catering. Like most seasoned food professionals, Yoel has his preferred sources for ordering food, his time-tested menus, and a general sense of what everything will cost. Our event turned all of this on its head. “Yoel says that these eggs cost three times what he normally pays!” says Leora as we try to decide if makes sense to serve a quiche. In fact, quiche is not a typical dinner entrée option listed on the Dushez website, but our desire to keep things meatless meant thinking out of the box. With that philosophy in mind, we also requested a gluten-free quinoa salad adorned with only locally-available (i.e. no mealy off-season tomatoes!) produce.

In addition to the no-tomatoes verdict, we wanted all of our food, or as much as humanly possible, to be made or grown here in New England. For many of us, this was a pointed lesson in what food is truly available here and when. It turns out that, despite excitement over the burgeoning signs of spring, April is a particularly challenging time to eat locally in this area. It is simultaneously too early for our gorgeous spring and summer crops to bloom and too late to rely on the cold storage root vegetables that get us through out frigid winters. Conversations with farmers further explained our predicament: we were told that local apples are scarce and mealy-textured, lettuce was possible but not a definite, and even cold-storage carrots are hard to come by. Damage and flooding from Hurricane Irene in August 2011 also damaged the potential root crops for that winter that might have been available to us in other years.

This begs the question, “What do New Englanders eat in these in-between months?” Dairy and eggs are available all year-round, as is ethically raised meat. However, meat was not an option for this meal, and certified Kosher cheese from humanely raised cows is not prolific, but we were able to use eggs from locally and humanely-raised chickens for the finally-agreed-upon quiche. Though higher in cost than conventional eggs, and providing sticker shock to the food professionals who are unused to purchasing them, these eggs were still a cost-effective and tasty way to feed 200 people. The eggs, which were sourced via Mobile Market from Baffoni’s Poultry Farm in Johnston, RI highlights one of the most challenging issues in food justice conversations: sustainability versus cost. The idea of food access in regards to income was discussed in one of the conference workshops, “Food Access in Greater Boston.”

When discussing food access, people often bring up the fact that fresh produce is harder to come by in poorer urban areas and areas known as food deserts. We were able to have fresh produce incorporated into the conference meal and wanted to be selective about where it came from; our radishes, salad lettuce, dark greens, herbs, and potatoes were intentionally sourced from Market Mobile Farm-to-Biz Delivery in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Sometimes, our decisions meant choosing a second or third option when our best-case scenario was not available. For example, we were able to serve bread from the Kosher Kupel’s Bakery in Brookline, MA, but most of their flour is sourced from the Midwest. For dessert, we chose to serve an ice cream bar from J.P. Licks, a locally owned and Kosher business, and topped the ice cream with locally-grown cranberries, Marshmallow Fluff (locally produced and Kosher but not a natural food), and mass-produced, artificially colored sprinkles, which seemed a staple for any ice-cream sundae bar. Our original dessert aspiration of homemade beet brownies, though enticing, was more work than our team had capacity for. (We have high hopes to serve them at the 2013 conference!)

Compromises notwithstanding, we managed to serve an enjoyable and delicious meal that embodied the values of the conference while reflecting the questions that we had been asking all day in our workshops. Why is it so impossible for some people to have access to fresh produce? How do we eat locally and in-season in the New England climate? What compromises are we willing to make when it comes to our food choices? When I first saw the dishes that Yoel and his team at Dushez prepared to our exact specification laid out on cloth-covered tables at Hebrew College, I literally skipped and hopped with excitement. The food was beautiful, delicious, and best of all, it shifted a paradigm: it was possible to have Kosher, locally sourced, vegetarian food, in New England, in April.

As the questions and discussions and lessons of the day morphed into the sound of stomachs burbling with hunger, attendees lined up put to their values where their mouths were and eat the fruits of these important conversations.

Jessica Green is a life-long food lover, food writer, former restaurant owner, and activist. She is a proud member of the 2012 Boston Jewish Food Conference planning team and can be found at www.fedbyjess.com and on Twitter by the same name.

• Over 200 Jewish change-makers gathered in New York last weekend through JOIN for Justice to participate in the “first Jewish community organizing summit.” The conference gave participants the opportunity to develop hard skills to advance their organizing within congregations or social justice efforts. Representatives from Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox movements attended as well as contingents from Jewish social justice organizations like AJWS, AVODAH, and Bend the Arc. The summit is expected to become an annual event to emphasize the role of organizing in contemporary Jewish life.
   
• May Day 2012 attracted Jewish change-makers to march with the masses on Tuesday, as this video of the day’s events taken by members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice attests. Brush up on your history of May Day, Jewish activist movements, and related social justice milestones with these recent articles:
  • In a post for RepairLabs, Charles Lenchner traces the role of Jews in labor and social justice movements over the past century leading up to Tuesday’s May Day events.
  • Jewish Women’s Archive chronicles the development of May Day observance from its origins as a pagan festival for celebrating spring.
  • Tablet Magazine offers a podcast on “A Brief History of Anarchy,” highlighting Jewish involvement in American radical movements since the anarchist marches of 1914.

What did you do to mark this momentous day? 

• AJWS group leader Shana Starobin was profiled in the latest edition of Dukenvironment Magazine for her PhD work studying eco-labels and what they really mean. Starobin is using her extensive research on kosher certification to understand how product labels can build trust and credibility that their items meet certain standards. Yet the system of checks and balances available for verifying kashrut may be prohibitive to small producers making ecologically sustainable products around the globe—so Starobin hopes, through her research, to help build up the legitimacy of certification for these products.

• Happy Earth Day, Pursuers! Some good news was announced in the Jewish social justice world this week, recognizing that the Jewish environmental movement is committed to the Earth all year long (and beyond), not just this Sunday. A coalition called the Green Hevra, comprised of 15 Jewish environmental organizations, will receive significant funding from the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Morningstar Foundation to begin to collaborate more intentionally and strategically toward making a deeper impact on green issues.
• This week, Jewish food justice activists are gearing up for the first-ever Boston Jewish Food Conference. Conference organizer Leora Mallach explored on Jewschool the momentum of the Jewish food movement and how it can help increase justice and sustainability in local Jewish communities. In addition, JTA this week profiled the “organic” rise of the Jewish food movement in Boulder, Colorado, highlighting the upcoming Rocky Mountain Food Summit taking place next weekend.
• On Monday, a group of Freedom Walkers completed their 150-mile journey on foot to Albany, the seat of New York State’s government, from New York City to ask Governor Cuomo to pass the New York DREAM Act. The Act would enable undocumented students who meet in-state tuition requirements to access state financial aid for their higher education expenses. Pursuer Steven Deheeger was among the walkers and co-authored this post on descolonizARTE about their motivation for walking and their determination to achieve the goal of getting the Act passed.
• The Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Israel, affiliated with the Masorti/Conservative Movement, announced this week that it would ordain openly gay and lesbian students for the first time in its history. Rabbi Jason Miller posted about the significance of this policy change taking place on Yom HaShoah, as homosexuals were targets of Nazi persecution in addition to Jews. Currently, the Seminario in Argentina, the Conservative center for rabbinical ordination in South America, is now the only institution in the Movement that has not yet changed its policy on this issue.

A week before Passover started, I had the opportunity to join Pursue’s Food Justice Seder. I was asked to speak about liberation and food justice in the context of the work I do at West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH), which is one of New York City’s largest food pantries. We are set up and run like a supermarket co-op, so customers can pick out the foods that are right for their families, and they volunteer to keep the pantry running smoothly.

Luckily for me, I speak to groups about WSCAH’s work frequently, but never before in a specifically Jewish context. My Jewish life and my work life are generally separate, but with reflection it became clear how related the two really are. In what other room full of people drinking wine and eating delicious (and ethical!) food can I skip the “why-is-it-important-to-help-the-oppressed-in-our-world” part of my spiel? Feeding the hungry–and much more importantly, helping the hungry advocate for themselves–is a quintessentially Jewish activity. We must speak and act as if we have been in bondage ourselves, implies the Hagaddah’s answer to the wicked child. “I do this because of what God did for me when I came out of Egypt.”

What may be even more Jewish than feeding the hungry is telling the story of hunger, and that is precisely what we did at the Food Justice Seder. My story went a little like this: 

Patricia is a middle-aged, Caucasian woman with a high school degree and some college education. She had worked her entire adult life until she was laid off in 2010. She arrived at WSCAH dejected, scared, and ashamed to be asking for help. At WSCAH she received food monthly and met with a social worker, who referred her for additional job training. Patricia began volunteering in the pantry to keep herself busy while looking for work. After three months of volunteering she found a good job as an office manager in a practice at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital. She still comes to volunteer at WSCAH on her days off so that she can give back to the community that supported her in a time of great need.

In retelling Patricia’s story we heard the story of liberation. 

Luckily for everyone present, we didn’t stop at just one person’s story. Lisa Levy from the Nassau Suffolk Law Services Committee shared the struggles her clients face in receiving Food Stamps. Rachel Kahn-Troster of Rabbis for Human Rights shared the struggles of modern-day slavery that tomato pickers in Florida face. When WSCAH received a delivery of donated Florida tomatoes the next day, I said a prayer that they came to us justly. 

After testimony on the struggles and successes of food justice today, our Seder turned to the Talmud. How did the rabbis of yore see food insecurity and food justice? At my table we had a spirited conversation about the oft-quoted phrase, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” And with a delicious Tav HaYosher meal in our stomachs we ended the Seder with a thank you to all the people involved in its creation: the delivery man, the walnut farmer, the knife and fork factory worker, the janitor at Congregation Beth Elohim, and on and on.

Hannah Lupien is the Food Policy Strategist for the West Side Campaign Against Hunger. She handles their advocacy and nutrition education programs, and oversees pantry operations, including food procurement. Before joining WSCAH she taught nutrition education in New York City farmer’s markets with the Department of Health. She has an academic background in Food History and is an avid home cook.

Last week, I joined other AJWS food justice advocates at Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s district office in Manhattan, where we discussed reforms to the Farm Bill, which is set for reauthorization this year. Senator Gillibrand currently serves on the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. At the meeting, we spoke with Senator Gillibrand’s Senior Advisor Patti Lubin about the bill’s impact on the hungry throughout the world and how we must do better. We were thrilled to get to speak with Senator Gillibrand’s staff, through whom she has the potential to influence others and introduce early amendments to this bill.

Since our meeting coincided with Passover, I couldn’t help but try to understand this issue in a Jewish context. How might Jewish teaching inform international food aid policy? Exploring the lessons of Passover, I tried to think of how my freedom and duty of responsibility are joined together. As many of us contemplate the history of our own slavery, I can’t help but feel free because I do not have to worry about hunger in my own life. Acknowledging my own sense of freedom, I am reminded of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “No one is free until everyone is free.” As a Jew, I have a responsibility to speak out and influence others to fight against injustice, wherever it exists. As the Passover Haggadah says, “This is the bread of affliction our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat; let all who are in need come share our Passover.”

During the meeting we discussed the current shipping and purchasing requirements that delay critical food aid—aid that can mean the difference between life and death. According to AJWS and Oxfam’s latest report, if we amended the Farm Bill by ending food aid monetization and removing U.S. shipping and purchasing requirements, we could provide aid to 17.1 million more hungry people at no additional cost to taxpayers. In the halls of Congress, legislators are debating the bill and need to understand why ending food monetization and purchasing food locally will save lives. Our voice is needed in these next few months to ensure that legislators grasp what’s at stake in this bill.

The above reforms to the Farm Bill can go a long way to creating self-sufficiency, which is needed for individuals and communities that are in need of aid. An example of our current approach to food aid can be seen most recently in Haiti, where the U.S. donated rice following the 2010 earthquake. This coincided with Haiti’s rice growing season, and the influx of cheap U.S. rice devastated the incomes of local farmers. This approach often doesn’t address the larger goal of self-sufficiency—where aid can build a community up. We learn in Judaism that the highest level of tzedakah, translated as justice, is to enable the receiver to be self-sufficient. The Farm Bill must move toward enabling individuals and communities to become self-sufficient and truly free. 

Overall, our meeting at Senator Gillibrand’s office was a success. Patti Lubin was very receptive to our points and signaled that the Senator may support these issues. Our next step is to work with her staff to confirm this support and encourage Senator Gillibrand to be an advocate on this issue. We also need to keep the momentum going and discuss the importance of the Farm Bill with more senators and U.S. House members. 

This is where you can really get involved and help. All elected officials track letters of support on legislative matters. In fact, Senator Gillibrand’s staff was thrilled to receive a stack of postcards supporting a Just Farm Bill. In a few seconds, you can simply click on this link and let your representatives know that this issue has support and action is needed. The more support elected officials know is out there, the more likely these needed changes will become a reality.

Elizabeth Buck is a Master’s Candidate at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at NYU. She previously managed former Congressman Sestak’s campaign office in Ardmore, PA during his United States Senate campaign.

• A seder at the White House? Not only that, but a focus on food justice: 50 representatives of the Jewish community from across the country participated in a seder last week with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the White House. The celebration included a tomato on the seder plate to recognize migrant farm workers who are often unable to provide food for their own families. Participants read from a haggadah focused on hunger and poverty prepared by Bend the Arc, speaking to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack’s staggering figure that 17 million U.S. households are food insecure.
   
• Missed out on enjoying a seder at the White House? Not to worry: President Obama’s Passover message is available for viewing on YouTube. For a glimpse into the Obamas’ own seder, held last Thursday night and using the notorious Maxwell House Haggadah, click here. The Chicago Sun-Times’ post provides a listing of “who’s who” from the Jewish community attending the seder and the history of the Obamas’ seder tradition.
   
• In further Passover justice inspiration, Freelancers Union founder (and Meet the Change speaker) Sara Horowitz wrote a piece in the Atlantic describing the Exodus from Egypt as “the first great moment in labor history.” Describing Moses as “history’s first union representative,” she lists a new set of the Four Questions that brings the lessons from winning the Israelites’ freedom from slavery to struggles for labor rights today.
   
• This Passover, as we think about passing over the heritage of the Jewish people to the next generation, the future of Jewish philanthropy is also about to change hands from one generation to the next. The Jewish Chronicle describes the tension that this transfer might create between Jewish foundations giving to Jewish causes and non-Jewish, often justice-oriented, causes. AJWS’s Aaron Dorfman thinks this tension should not be alarming: “We should be doing both [kinds of giving], and more of it.”

What does food justice look like in a food bank, anyway? 

Food justice is a two-sided term. On the one hand, burgeoning consumer demands for fair, local, and organic food, coupled with increasing attention on the 2012 Farm Bill and a trend of young people pursuing farming, represent the Zeitgeist of old food traditions stamped on a fresh-faced movement. College students organize campus food cooperatives, families crowd week-end farmers markets in search of happy organic produce, and certain resourceful individuals plant vegetables on rooftops, medians, and parking lots. On the flip side, on the slow road to food reform, emergency meal programs try to keep up with our economic hangover, as more people turn to under-resourced food programs to ease joblessness and benefit cuts. 

One might presuppose that the former examples have little or no ripple effects in a place like a food bank, where “feeding people” is paramount. But to say that one reality has little to do with the other is to reduce the people turning to food assistance to mouths to feed, and ignores the deeply rooted social implications of our broken food system. As more and more of the privileged join the ranks of slow food and organic culture, low-income families (disproportionately people of color), become the unlucky benefactors of the food industry’s waste stream. For these families, who cannot simply “opt out” of the conventional food system that is making them sick, food justice looks more like economic and social justice.

Currently, I work in a food bank that does its best to offer a quality bag of nutritious food to clients, of which about 40% is produce. We even offer gourmet coffee (which in Seattle, no one should go without). Given that, when facing tough times, a little dignity and health can go go a long way, this is an achievement. Still, it is inevitable that sodium-packed cans of soup, bags of candy, and the ubiquitous “Cup Noodle” will find their way through our doors and we won’t throw them away, for people are hungry. Is just feeding someone justice enough? Or does it mean feeding them healthy, nutritious food? Is it envisioning a situation where one doesn’t need a food bank in the first place? 

I say, aim high and then work backwards. 

At Urban Adamah, a community-minded Jewish farming fellowship in the income-disparate East Bay, I and 11 others struggled with these competing visions of what it means to be just with food. We explored our own relationship to food and agriculture both as Jews and as able-bodied citizens in an unequal society. Both realities implored us to dig deeper into the injustice of our food system, and question where we might best act as allies. Weekly, we harvested and delivered a truckload of our organic veggies to a health clinic, church meal program, and food pantry, in addition to operating a free farm stand open to anyone in the community. 

One evening at dinner over a lively debate, one fellow posed the question: why didn’t we sell our organic produce to those who would happily pay a premium for their hyper-local goods, and then offer money to organizations fighting hunger in their own way, rather than our harvest? Were we under the spell of the sustainable food movement, simply imposing our cultural food values onto communities with bigger fish to fry? It was a fair question, pointing at the tensions at the very heart of the food movement. We certainly weren’t solving the blanket issue of hunger by delivering our weekly harvest. 

One thing we were doing was envisioning and creating an alternative to the alternative food system—one that is fair, organic, and local but also accessible, both in price and proximity. To exist on a large scale, however, this relies on the willingness of policymakers and community leaders to address wider issues of income disparity and food and agriculture policy in America. In the meantime, communities are coming up with their own innovative solutions, even in food banks. Sliding scale markets and farmstands like Urban Adamah’s have sprouted up, along with programs like FoodShare’s Good Food Box in Toronto, which uses bulk buying, shared space, and volunteer packers to subsidize the cost of CSA boxes delivered to convenient neighborhood drop-off sites in low-income areas. 

Though the food movement has seen many successes, if it is not connected to greater issues of poverty, race, and class, it runs the risk of remaining a dinner party for the elite. At a class at UC Berkeley this past fall open to the public, entitled “Edible Education: The Rise of the New Food Movement,” epicures like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan took the podium alongside activists like Nikki Henderson, executive director of the People’s Grocery in West Oakland, which addresses food insecurity in that community. We ought to see more genuine collaboration like this between the different faces of the food movement, with the same shared goal, justice, justice, shall you pursue –Deuteronomy 16:20.

Looking to help a food bank? Canned items, high in sodium and sugar, are ever-present in food banks and especially harmful to those facing chronic illness, many of whom use the emergency food system. Try to donate dried beans, grains, or fruit canned in juice. Cooking supplies like oil, flour, and baking soda give people more flexibility to cook at home. And if you really want to get creative, helping to organize a gleaning drive from various gardens, urban farms, or farmers markets is a great way to increase access to produce, often the most cost-prohibitive foods for both families and food banks to access.

Anna Goren is currently serving as the Emergency Services Specialist with Jewish Family Services in Seattle, WA, where she coordinates a food bank gleaning project alongside cooking and nutrition classes. She is a member of an MLK VISTA cohort through Solid Ground, a learning community committed to exploring anti-poverty work and undoing oppression. She served as an Urban Adamah fellow in the fall of 2011 in Berkeley, CA, and eats and cooks well under stress.