Please find us at http://www.vermontfoodbankblog.com/
The Vermont Foodbank is the largest hunger-relief charity in Vermont and for the last 23 years has been serving food insecure Vermonters through a network of food shelves, meal sites, shelters, senior centers and after-school programs. These are our experiences.
Friday, April 13, 2012
Friday, September 2, 2011
Irene Flood Relief
You can keep up on the latest Vermont flood recovery information on www.facebook.com/vermontfoodbank and on www.twitter.com/vermontfoodbank . Also, to help sustain the Vermont Foodbank's response, you can text FOODNOW to 52000 for a $10 donation to the Vermont Foodbank. We can turn that $10 into $60 of food at retail cost! You can donate at our website www.vtfoodbank.org.
Over 200 roads and bridges compeletly washed away. Whole towns isolated for days with food and water being dropped in by helicopter. Hundreds of homes completely destroyed and thousands flooded. Libraries, offices and businesses out of commission for the foreseable future. Vermont this week has literally seen a disaster.
As a statewide organization with a delivery network and partners in every county, the Vermont Foodbank is part of the recovery network. We are part of the state's emergency recovery plan, and are in constant contact with Vermont Emergency Management and FEMA. During the first reponse phase, the Foodbank responds to any requests by VEM or FEMA for assistance. The recovery phase, which is beginning now, is where the Foodbank's efforts get into high gear.
The immediate response to this devastation has been overwhelming. The Foodbank has 15 additional truckloads of food and cleaning supplies ariving over the next week to meet the increased need. Donations from Hannaford, Shaw's, C&S Grocers, Sodexho, and national manufacturers will help restock food shelves in the hardest hit areas. A number of food shelves and meal sites have lost everything - their buildings, food, refrigerators and freezers. We are gearing up to replace infrastructure and keep our partners stocked as they provide comfort to their local communities.
Businesses stepping up include Seventh Generation, Merchant's Bank, Gardners Supply and the August 1st Bakery and Cafe in Burlington, which is baking 200 loaves of bread and delivering them to the Community Cupboard food shelf in Rutland. Food banks in New England are also reaching out. The Good Shepard Food Bank in Maine has sent a truck, driver and warehouse supervisor to our Brattleboro Distribution Center for a few days to assist in moving the additional food and supplies to the hardest hit areas of the state. FoodShare in Connecticut is bringing up some prepared meals to Brattleboro also.
The biggest challenge, however, is on the horizon. It is sustaining this effort past the flurry of respone, into the long recovery phase.
Food shelves in hard-hit areas that were normally open one day a week or one day a month are now open every day or several times a week. This will continue for weeks and months, long past the media's attention span. The Foodbank does not receive state or federal money to provide food and other support to food shelves and meal sites across the state. We need your support to continue the effort. Please consider a donation the your Vermont Foodbank. You can give at our website, www.vtfoodbank.org. Thank you.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Listen to what they are NOT saying.
THIS IS A GREAT EDITORIAL BY NEIL SALOWITZ OF WEST DES MOINES, A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF MAZON: A JEWISH RESPONSE TO HUNGER, A HUNGER RELIEF ORGANIZATION.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110830/OPINION01/308300065/0/CAROUSEL/?odyssey=nav%7Chead
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Policy Doesn't Create Jobs, Businesses Do
Here are some interesting ideas about creating jobs from Joe Nocera in the August 16th New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/opinion/nocera-what-is-business-waiting-for.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/opinion/nocera-what-is-business-waiting-for.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
USDA food amount below last year
This is no time for the federal government to be reducing the food available to food banks nationwide, but that is just what's happening. See the update below:
Update on Recent TEFAP Purchases
Feeding America learned last week that USDA is making $50 million available for the purchase of a variety of canned, frozen, and fresh fruits and vegetables and juices. These products will be distributed through TEFAP and will have estimated delivery dates betweek September 2011 and March 2012. Each state will be provided with their fair share of funding, and will be able to order from a menu of products which include tomato sauce, corn, carrots, green beans, peaches, pears, cranberry juice, orange juice, blueberries, potatoes, and oranges. This purchase is being made to satisfy a requirement in the 2012 Farm Bill that USDA purchase $401 million worth of "specialty crops" (i.e., fruits and vegetables) in FY2011.
. . . [M]uch more help is going to be needed to shore up supplies of TEFAP commoditeis nationwide. The inclusion of these products brings total FY11 spending on TEFAP up to $360 million. However, that still level of spending is still approximately $295 million -- or 45% -- below the FY2010 spending level.
Update on Recent TEFAP Purchases
Feeding America learned last week that USDA is making $50 million available for the purchase of a variety of canned, frozen, and fresh fruits and vegetables and juices. These products will be distributed through TEFAP and will have estimated delivery dates betweek September 2011 and March 2012. Each state will be provided with their fair share of funding, and will be able to order from a menu of products which include tomato sauce, corn, carrots, green beans, peaches, pears, cranberry juice, orange juice, blueberries, potatoes, and oranges. This purchase is being made to satisfy a requirement in the 2012 Farm Bill that USDA purchase $401 million worth of "specialty crops" (i.e., fruits and vegetables) in FY2011.
. . . [M]uch more help is going to be needed to shore up supplies of TEFAP commoditeis nationwide. The inclusion of these products brings total FY11 spending on TEFAP up to $360 million. However, that still level of spending is still approximately $295 million -- or 45% -- below the FY2010 spending level.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
A Letter to the First Lady
A letter to first lady
Michelle Obama
Written by
Melissa Pasanen, Correspondent
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20110630/NEWS02/110629043/A-letter-first-lady-Michelle-Obama-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE
8:02 AM, Jun. 30, 2011
Dear Mrs. Obama,
Last spring, I spent a couple hours at the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf observing people pick up their weekly allowance of groceries.
It was not the first time I’d been to a food shelf during a decade of writing about food and agriculture for this newspaper and other publications, but I was struck that particular visit by the number of children accompanying their parents.
There was a 4-year-old who ran over and picked up a box of corn flakes, hugging it to his chest, and a little girl with huge eyes who stayed shyly glued to her mother’s side. A tow-headed boy stood in front of the fresh fruits and vegetables. After his mom gave him the go-ahead, he carefully selected one apple and one orange and placed them in his family’s box.
In anticipation of your visit to Vermont today and your high-profile “Let’s Move” program against childhood obesity, I’ve been recalling images like these and reflecting on what I’ve seen, heard and learned in Vermont. Stories about food are rarely just about the food.
Youngsters in healthy cooking classes slice and dice with the bravado of Food Network stars but might quietly add, as one teenager said, “My mom works a lot. Now I can help her.”
A recently arrived refugee tending a community gardening plot looks at her bright-eyed toddler and says, “When my children eat the food I bring home from the garden, I feel comfortable because I farmed it and I know where it comes from.”
A dad in a homeless shelter takes a break from learning how to make a healthy Asian noodle dish and admits, “It’s hard to cook for your kids when you don’t have a home. We eat a lot of McDonald’s, Burger King and pizza.”
Probably the most important thing I’ve learned is that although they may seem like polar opposites, hunger and obesity are often evil twins, flip sides of the same problem.
“Lack of access to healthy food is a major cause of both malnutrition and obesity,” says Marissa Parisi, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, an education and advocacy organization working to end hunger and malnutrition.
Although Vermont’s largely rural landscape may appear to be a land of plenty (especially in summer and fall), it also comes with a high cost of living, sometimes overwhelming transportation challenges and limited shopping options in small or remote communities, Parisi says. Ironically, just like in the urban inner city, it is often easier and cheaper to buy a bag of chips than a bunch of fresh carrots.
On the plus side, we could probably grow enough carrots to go around. Vermont has the highest per capita number of organic farmers and food processors of any state, as well as the highest number of community-supported agriculture farms and farmers markets per capita.
But, as you know, it takes work to ensure that everyone has access to those carrots — from the senior living alone, to the mother who told me she hates asking for help but acknowledged that the food shelf is a lifeline at the end of a hard month.
Vermont also has more than the average number of dedicated, creative people working hard to make fresh, minimally processed food more accessible to everyone.
We now have a statewide gleaning program to salvage excess produce from farms and orchards, as well as other innovative partnerships such as a foodbank-owned farm and a food shelf-based food service training program in which unemployed and underemployed Vermonters learn marketable skills while also feeding the hungry.
Our pioneering farm-to-school movement has helped facilitate and support change toward healthier offerings in school cafeterias around the state. It also holds a high-profile and totally rockin’ Junior Iron Chef contest annually in which dozens of school teams compete like athletes with recipes starring local, wholesome ingredients.
Long before the White House planted a kitchen garden, Vermont boasted a thriving gardening culture, including vegetable gardens tended by grade-schoolers, by seniors (with special raised beds for easier access), by the incarcerated (who donate produce to their nearby food shelf and learn job skills), by emergency shelter residents and by a global mosaic of new Americans.
On the infrastructure side, we are nurturing a growing system of food hubs from Bellows Falls to the Northeast Kingdom, a model recognized by the USDA as the wave of the future for their role in increasing physical and organizational resources such as storage, processing and distribution services that support small farms and healthy communities.
As renowned California chef and food activist Alice Waters said during a visit a few years ago, “Why doesn’t the state of Vermont just show us the way?”
And yet, in spite of all these inspiring and successful efforts, Vermont still has hungry children and we still have an obesity problem.
Hunger Vermont reports that 1 in 5 Vermont children experiences hunger or food hardship, which puts them at greater risk for a number of health issues, including obesity.
Rachel K. Johnson, the Bickford Professor of Nutrition at the University of Vermont, shares that while “Vermont is faring somewhat better than the rest of the country, 27 percent of our children are overweight or obese according to the most recent CDC data.”
Johnson applauds you for shining a spotlight on the public health crisis of childhood obesity with an emphasis on moving more and eating more healthfully, but she also wishes that there was a little more direct recognition of some of the other issues at play.
“A colleague at Tufts recently analyzed all the factors around childhood obesity,” Johnson says. “It goes way, way, way beyond just individual choices. We live in an environment that promotes obesity,” she says, detailing super-sized portions, strategically located fast food outlets near schools and marketing to children.
“Frankly,” she says, “our kids need to eat healthier and move more, but they also need to eat less.”
Last summer, I spent time at the King Street Center in downtown Burlington where I watched teenagers cooking in an after-school program and preschoolers eating lunch family-style, politely passing platters of turkey burgers.
“We worry when children come to the center carrying junk food,” says Vicky Smith, King Street’s executive director. “We try not to be judgmental of families struggling with weight or with income to put healthy food on the table. We’re not here to be the food police. We set the tone, what happens within these four walls, and the kids can take that message back home.”
Smith, like Parisi, worries about looming budget cuts that threaten programs that help so many of the at-risk families they work with.
“If we really value the health and well-being of our kids, we’d be putting resources there rather than cutting,” Parisi says.
A few years ago, while observing a cooking class offered at the Committee on Temporary Shelter’s family shelter in Burlington, I asked some of the parents about their efforts to feed their families healthy meals.
Later, one mother pulled me aside. “I can’t give my kids much,” she said. “If they beg me for a Happy Meal, you think I’m gonna say ‘No, it’s not healthy for you.’ It’s something I can give them. It makes them happy.”
So, Mrs. Obama, as you visit Burlington today, take a look at what we’re doing in Vermont, but know that we, like the rest of the nation, have more to do. Amid our bounty of healthy, local food, many challenges remain.
Sincerely,
Melissa Pasanen
Savorvore writer
Burlington Free Press
mpasanen@aol.com
Michelle Obama
Written by
Melissa Pasanen, Correspondent
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20110630/NEWS02/110629043/A-letter-first-lady-Michelle-Obama-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE
8:02 AM, Jun. 30, 2011
Dear Mrs. Obama,
Last spring, I spent a couple hours at the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf observing people pick up their weekly allowance of groceries.
It was not the first time I’d been to a food shelf during a decade of writing about food and agriculture for this newspaper and other publications, but I was struck that particular visit by the number of children accompanying their parents.
There was a 4-year-old who ran over and picked up a box of corn flakes, hugging it to his chest, and a little girl with huge eyes who stayed shyly glued to her mother’s side. A tow-headed boy stood in front of the fresh fruits and vegetables. After his mom gave him the go-ahead, he carefully selected one apple and one orange and placed them in his family’s box.
In anticipation of your visit to Vermont today and your high-profile “Let’s Move” program against childhood obesity, I’ve been recalling images like these and reflecting on what I’ve seen, heard and learned in Vermont. Stories about food are rarely just about the food.
Youngsters in healthy cooking classes slice and dice with the bravado of Food Network stars but might quietly add, as one teenager said, “My mom works a lot. Now I can help her.”
A recently arrived refugee tending a community gardening plot looks at her bright-eyed toddler and says, “When my children eat the food I bring home from the garden, I feel comfortable because I farmed it and I know where it comes from.”
A dad in a homeless shelter takes a break from learning how to make a healthy Asian noodle dish and admits, “It’s hard to cook for your kids when you don’t have a home. We eat a lot of McDonald’s, Burger King and pizza.”
Probably the most important thing I’ve learned is that although they may seem like polar opposites, hunger and obesity are often evil twins, flip sides of the same problem.
“Lack of access to healthy food is a major cause of both malnutrition and obesity,” says Marissa Parisi, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont, an education and advocacy organization working to end hunger and malnutrition.
Although Vermont’s largely rural landscape may appear to be a land of plenty (especially in summer and fall), it also comes with a high cost of living, sometimes overwhelming transportation challenges and limited shopping options in small or remote communities, Parisi says. Ironically, just like in the urban inner city, it is often easier and cheaper to buy a bag of chips than a bunch of fresh carrots.
On the plus side, we could probably grow enough carrots to go around. Vermont has the highest per capita number of organic farmers and food processors of any state, as well as the highest number of community-supported agriculture farms and farmers markets per capita.
But, as you know, it takes work to ensure that everyone has access to those carrots — from the senior living alone, to the mother who told me she hates asking for help but acknowledged that the food shelf is a lifeline at the end of a hard month.
Vermont also has more than the average number of dedicated, creative people working hard to make fresh, minimally processed food more accessible to everyone.
We now have a statewide gleaning program to salvage excess produce from farms and orchards, as well as other innovative partnerships such as a foodbank-owned farm and a food shelf-based food service training program in which unemployed and underemployed Vermonters learn marketable skills while also feeding the hungry.
Our pioneering farm-to-school movement has helped facilitate and support change toward healthier offerings in school cafeterias around the state. It also holds a high-profile and totally rockin’ Junior Iron Chef contest annually in which dozens of school teams compete like athletes with recipes starring local, wholesome ingredients.
Long before the White House planted a kitchen garden, Vermont boasted a thriving gardening culture, including vegetable gardens tended by grade-schoolers, by seniors (with special raised beds for easier access), by the incarcerated (who donate produce to their nearby food shelf and learn job skills), by emergency shelter residents and by a global mosaic of new Americans.
On the infrastructure side, we are nurturing a growing system of food hubs from Bellows Falls to the Northeast Kingdom, a model recognized by the USDA as the wave of the future for their role in increasing physical and organizational resources such as storage, processing and distribution services that support small farms and healthy communities.
As renowned California chef and food activist Alice Waters said during a visit a few years ago, “Why doesn’t the state of Vermont just show us the way?”
And yet, in spite of all these inspiring and successful efforts, Vermont still has hungry children and we still have an obesity problem.
Hunger Vermont reports that 1 in 5 Vermont children experiences hunger or food hardship, which puts them at greater risk for a number of health issues, including obesity.
Rachel K. Johnson, the Bickford Professor of Nutrition at the University of Vermont, shares that while “Vermont is faring somewhat better than the rest of the country, 27 percent of our children are overweight or obese according to the most recent CDC data.”
Johnson applauds you for shining a spotlight on the public health crisis of childhood obesity with an emphasis on moving more and eating more healthfully, but she also wishes that there was a little more direct recognition of some of the other issues at play.
“A colleague at Tufts recently analyzed all the factors around childhood obesity,” Johnson says. “It goes way, way, way beyond just individual choices. We live in an environment that promotes obesity,” she says, detailing super-sized portions, strategically located fast food outlets near schools and marketing to children.
“Frankly,” she says, “our kids need to eat healthier and move more, but they also need to eat less.”
Last summer, I spent time at the King Street Center in downtown Burlington where I watched teenagers cooking in an after-school program and preschoolers eating lunch family-style, politely passing platters of turkey burgers.
“We worry when children come to the center carrying junk food,” says Vicky Smith, King Street’s executive director. “We try not to be judgmental of families struggling with weight or with income to put healthy food on the table. We’re not here to be the food police. We set the tone, what happens within these four walls, and the kids can take that message back home.”
Smith, like Parisi, worries about looming budget cuts that threaten programs that help so many of the at-risk families they work with.
“If we really value the health and well-being of our kids, we’d be putting resources there rather than cutting,” Parisi says.
A few years ago, while observing a cooking class offered at the Committee on Temporary Shelter’s family shelter in Burlington, I asked some of the parents about their efforts to feed their families healthy meals.
Later, one mother pulled me aside. “I can’t give my kids much,” she said. “If they beg me for a Happy Meal, you think I’m gonna say ‘No, it’s not healthy for you.’ It’s something I can give them. It makes them happy.”
So, Mrs. Obama, as you visit Burlington today, take a look at what we’re doing in Vermont, but know that we, like the rest of the nation, have more to do. Amid our bounty of healthy, local food, many challenges remain.
Sincerely,
Melissa Pasanen
Savorvore writer
Burlington Free Press
mpasanen@aol.com
Friday, May 27, 2011
Federal support for SNAP use at farmer's markets
Here is a letter from Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) supporting funds for EBT machines at farmer's markets - a VT success that needs to go national.
The Honorable Daniel K. Inouye
Chairman
Senate Committee on Appropriations
Capitol, S-128
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Herb Kohl
Chairman
Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
SD-122
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Thad Cochran
Vice Chair
Senate Committee on Appropriations
Capitol, S-128
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Roy Blunt
Ranking Member
Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
SD-122
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Chairman Inouye, Vice Chair Cochran, Chairman Kohl, and Ranking Member Blunt:
We appreciate the past support you have given to programs that bring farmers and consumers together, and urge you to increase the access of financially struggling families to healthy fresh foods by supporting the President’s request for $4million in the USDA Food and Nutrition Service budget to provide wireless point of sale Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)/Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) technology for farmers markets in Fiscal Year 2012 (FY12) Agriculture Appropriations.
Access to healthy locally grown food continues to increase for most Americans. Between 2009 and 2010 alone, the number of farmers markets in the U.S. grew by 16 percent, according to the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, to more than 6,100 – the vast majority of which are hosted by nonprofits, municipalities, or other civic organizations. Unfortunately, access to healthy local products is limited for most SNAP beneficiaries. In 2010, only 0.012% of all SNAP benefits were redeemed at the 1,611 farmers market retailers authorized to accept them.
There are nearly 200,000 brick and mortar SNAP retailers which are supplied with free government supported EBT equipment, but farmers markets generally lack access to electricity and land lines, so cannot benefit from standard EBT equipment. Instead, most farmers markets must find alternative funding to cover the wireless technology, staffing, recordkeeping, and other administrative costs associated with offering SNAP as a service to their communities. This limits the ability of farmers markets to ensure that SNAP beneficiaries have access to the healthy fresh food they provide. With the cost of wireless devices having declined dramatically, the President’s requested $4 million for the purchase of wireless EBT machines for Farmer’s Markets is timely and economically reasonable.
The Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 and corresponding SNAP regulations, have made it clear that all authorized SNAP retailers must be afforded the opportunity to participate in the EBT system at no cost. Funding the purchase of wireless EBT machines for farmers markets will ensure that the Department of Agriculture meets this requirement, and will ensure that the nation’s 43 million SNAP customers have healthy choices for their SNAP dollars.
We again urge you to include the President’s requested $4 million for wireless EBT in the FY12 Agriculture appropriations bill. This funding will provide point of sale terminals to all farmers’ markets nationally that cannot currently redeem SNAP benefits, and will help increase the redemption of SNAP benefits for healthy locally grown fruits and vegetables at farmers markets.
The Honorable Daniel K. Inouye
Chairman
Senate Committee on Appropriations
Capitol, S-128
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Herb Kohl
Chairman
Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
SD-122
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Thad Cochran
Vice Chair
Senate Committee on Appropriations
Capitol, S-128
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Honorable Roy Blunt
Ranking Member
Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies
SD-122
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Chairman Inouye, Vice Chair Cochran, Chairman Kohl, and Ranking Member Blunt:
We appreciate the past support you have given to programs that bring farmers and consumers together, and urge you to increase the access of financially struggling families to healthy fresh foods by supporting the President’s request for $4million in the USDA Food and Nutrition Service budget to provide wireless point of sale Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)/Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) technology for farmers markets in Fiscal Year 2012 (FY12) Agriculture Appropriations.
Access to healthy locally grown food continues to increase for most Americans. Between 2009 and 2010 alone, the number of farmers markets in the U.S. grew by 16 percent, according to the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, to more than 6,100 – the vast majority of which are hosted by nonprofits, municipalities, or other civic organizations. Unfortunately, access to healthy local products is limited for most SNAP beneficiaries. In 2010, only 0.012% of all SNAP benefits were redeemed at the 1,611 farmers market retailers authorized to accept them.
There are nearly 200,000 brick and mortar SNAP retailers which are supplied with free government supported EBT equipment, but farmers markets generally lack access to electricity and land lines, so cannot benefit from standard EBT equipment. Instead, most farmers markets must find alternative funding to cover the wireless technology, staffing, recordkeeping, and other administrative costs associated with offering SNAP as a service to their communities. This limits the ability of farmers markets to ensure that SNAP beneficiaries have access to the healthy fresh food they provide. With the cost of wireless devices having declined dramatically, the President’s requested $4 million for the purchase of wireless EBT machines for Farmer’s Markets is timely and economically reasonable.
The Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 and corresponding SNAP regulations, have made it clear that all authorized SNAP retailers must be afforded the opportunity to participate in the EBT system at no cost. Funding the purchase of wireless EBT machines for farmers markets will ensure that the Department of Agriculture meets this requirement, and will ensure that the nation’s 43 million SNAP customers have healthy choices for their SNAP dollars.
We again urge you to include the President’s requested $4 million for wireless EBT in the FY12 Agriculture appropriations bill. This funding will provide point of sale terminals to all farmers’ markets nationally that cannot currently redeem SNAP benefits, and will help increase the redemption of SNAP benefits for healthy locally grown fruits and vegetables at farmers markets.
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