“A Place at the Table”: Film on Hunger in the U.S. - Nov. 2

Please join us for a Showing of the Movie

“A Place at the Table”

Starring Jeff Bridges!

50 Million Americans—1 in 4 children—don’t know where their next meal is coming from. A Place at the Table tells the powerful stories of three such Americans, who maintain their dignity even as they struggle just to eat. In a riveting journey that will change forever how you think about the hungry, A Place at the Table shows how the issue could be solved forever, once the American public decides—as they have in the past—that ending hunger is in the best interests of us all.

Sponsored by Monmouth Center for World Religions and Ethical Thought

and

The Social Action Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation

When: 7:00 PM on Sunday, November 2, 2014

Where: Community Room

The Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse

1475 West Front Street, Lincroft, NJ

Admission: Free

Following the movie there will be a Panel Discussion and Q&A featuring:

Barbara Scholz, Advocacy and Programs Director of the

FoodBank of Monmouth and Ocean Counties

Debbie Keszler, Director of the Food Pantry of the

Lutheran Church of the Reformation, W. Long Branch

Gayle Topper, Chair of the Social Action Committee of

Temple Beth Miriam.

Moderator: ClaraGee Stamaty Ziment

In lieu of Refreshments, please bring a personal care item or nonperishable food item for distribution to those in need.

For more info, call Dan Ciaglia 732-284-6312

Pallone, Booker Team Up With EPA, BJ’s Wholesale Club to Tackle Environmental, Economic Impacts of Food Waste

For Immediate release:
9/22/14

EDISON, NJ – Today, Congressman Frank Pallone (NJ-06) and U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) joined U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Regional Administrator Judith A. Enck to highlight Hunger Action month. They visited a BJ’s Wholesale Club in Edison, New Jersey to announce the store’s participation in the EPA Food Recovery Challenge Program that reduces food waste and hunger while also protecting the environment. They were also joined by BJ’s Wholesale Club’s Doug Schiefelbein, Community Food Bank of New Jersey’s (CFBNJ) Tristan Wallack, and Edison Mayor Thomas Lankey.

 (Cory Booker, Frank Pallone, Judith Enck, Tristan Wallack. Credit:EPA)

“Thirty-one percent of food that is available at supermarkets, restaurants, and in households goes uneaten and ends up in a landfill,” said Congressman Pallone. “Meanwhile, millions of Americans struggle every day to put food on the table and feed their families. The Food Recovery Challenge tackles both of these critical issues by reducing the amount of food that goes unsold and recovering more wholesome unsold food to donate to people who really need it. I commend EPA for organizing this campaign to reduce food waste and BJ’s for participating.”

Participants in EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge reduce, donate, and compost as much of their excess food as possible, which saves money, feeds hungry people and helps protect the environment. As part of this new agreement, BJ’s plans to develop new benchmarks to measure progress from its food donation program BJ’s Feeding Communities as well as utilize EPA’s tools to enhance its environmental programs and minimize its environmental footprint.

“A staggering amount of nutritious and edible food is wasted every day, winding up in landfills where it produces methane gas,” said Judith A. Enck, EPA Regional Administrator. “EPA commends BJ’s Wholesale Club for being part of the commitment to feed people and not landfills.”

Fourteen percent of New Jerseyans live in a state of food insecurity, and 50 million Americans live in households that struggle against hunger. Food accounts for the greatest percentage – more than 20 percent - of waste going to landfills in the United States. One way to reduce that volume of waste is by donating edible food that would otherwise be thrown away.

“Hunger is persistent problem in New Jersey and across the nation,” said Senator Booker. “Yet each year Americans waste more than 36 million tons of food - 96 percent of which is thrown into landfills and incinerators. I commend the EPA, BJ’s and all the other participants in the Food Recovery Challenge because the only way we truly tackle complex problems is through public/private partnership. Committing to this challenge isn’t just good for society - it’s good for the bottom line.”

In addition to being the first wholesale club to join the Food Recovery Challenge, BJ’s also recently awarded a grant of $21,000 to the Community Food Bank of New Jersey in honor of the company’s 30th anniversary and Hunger Action Month in September. The grant will help the Community Food Bank of New Jersey build capacity through the purchase of additional refrigerators, thermal blankets and other equipment for their partner organizations such as local soup kitchens and food pantries. The new equipment will help their anti-hunger partners store a larger amount of perishable items and distribute more nutritious options to local families struggling with food insecurity in New Jersey.

“At BJ’s Wholesale Club, what is not sold, is shared; we have a vested interest in addressing and helping to solve the very real problems of hunger prevention in our local communities,” said Doug Schiefelbein, general manager of the BJ’s Wholesale Club in Edison, New Jersey. “BJ’s Wholesale Club is proud to join the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Food Recovery Challenge. We look forward to working together with the EPA to help keep food out of landfills and minimize greenhouse gas emissions to better the neighborhoods we serve.”

EPA’s Food Recovery Challenge is based on the fact that wasted food has economic, environmental, and social impacts. Much of this waste is not waste at all, but actually safe, wholesome food that could potentially feed millions of Americans. Excess food, leftovers and scraps that are not fit for consumption and donation can be composted into a nutrient-rich soil supplement. There is also a tremendous waste of energy and natural resources that goes to the growth, processing, transporting and marketing of food, all of which goes to waste when food is thrown away. A full list of the 600 participants can be found at Food Recovery Challenge.

It Is More a Matter of Will

The following is from Congressman Rush Holt's newsletter:

Half a century ago, 26 percent of Americans endured, in the words of President Johnson, the “squalor and misery” of poverty. Many politicians claimed at the time that their misery was natural, even inevitable – that any economy will have winners and losers, and that government can do nothing to address that fact.

But President Johnson knew better. And so 50 years ago this week, he launched the “War on Poverty,” kick-starting programs as varied as Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start and others.

And what has been the effect? As a recent Columbia University study revealed, today’s poverty rate – when properly measured, taking into account the effects of government efforts – is about 16 percent, down by 40 percent since the War on Poverty began.

This success can be traced to the programs created or improved by President Johnson. Without Medicare and Social Security, for instance, half of seniors would live in poverty today and would lack any type of health insurance. Food Stamps now keep four million people out of poverty.

Although President Johnson’s coinage may have been a misuse of the word “war” (a misuse repeated in many other government efforts to confront challenges, problems, or threats – cancer, drugs, or terrorism), he intended the effort to be massive. In fact, beyond Medicaid, the programs amounted to only 1.5 or 2 percent of GDP – a large sum to be sure, but not as huge as implied by the critics of these programs. In the wealthiest country in the world, with one of the largest GDPs per person, and with tens of millions of people looking for a way out of poverty, we could do more.

Yet today many in Congress are instead embracing the old and disproven claim that government is helpless in the face of poverty. These skeptics, mostly Republican, have already cut Food Stamps by $5 billion – and they’re trying to cut it by another $40 billion. About 57,000 students have been kicked out of Head Start, and only about one in ten children eligible for Head Start is now enrolled in the program.

Eliminate poverty? Maybe, maybe not, but it is more a matter of will than of our ability to devise programs to confront the problem. Can we muster the compassion to say, "We will not accept this in the United States!"?

Share This Newsletter

I hope you find this weekly newsletter, the eGenda, to be engaging and informative. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you regularly about my votes, my services, and the issues that affect Central New Jersey – as well as to share important information during emergencies like Hurricane Sandy.

If you find the eGenda helpful, may I ask for your help in sharing it? Please forward this message to your friends and family in Central New Jersey, or ask them to sign up by visiting holt.house.gov/egenda. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Rush Holt
Member of Congress

Pallone to Call for Boost in Support of Hunger and Nutrition Programs in Federal Budget at Elijah’s Promise Soup Kitchen, New Brunswick

Congressman, Advocates and Local Elected Officials to Decry Crippling Cuts to Critical Food Assistance Program

New Brunswick, NJ – On Monday, December 2nd, 2013 at 10:30 a.m., Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr. (NJ-06) will visit Elijah’s Promise in New Brunswick, New Jersey, decrying cuts to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) on the heels of House Republicans’ latest effort to disable the program. In September, Republican leadership in the House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill to cut roughly $39 billion from the SNAP program over the next decade.

Pallone will be joined by New Brunswick Mayor Jim Cahill, Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula, Lisanne Finston, Executive Director, Elijah’s Promise and Adele LaTourette, Director, New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition.

According to the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition, 394,240 children in New Jersey were living in food insecure households in 2011. More than 15% of Americans, including 22% of all American children, live in poverty. SNAP provides a basic nutrition benefit to many low-income Americans, including senior citizens and children, and has largely eliminated severe hunger and malnutrition in the United States. The Republican effort to further cut SNAP would mean more Americans, including children, will go hungry and malnourished, and an influx of pressure would be put on our community soup kitchens. The $39 billion in SNAP cuts would come on top of $5 billion in across-the-board SNAP benefit cuts that already went into effect on November 1st due to an expiring provision included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that provided a modest boost in SNAP benefits.

Elijah’s Promise is a community soup kitchen, culinary arts school, catering business, and pay-as-you-can café that connects low-income individuals and families with social and health services. Elijah’s Promise serves 100,000 meals per year and trains previously unskilled workers for careers in the food service industry.

The Shutdown in New Jersey

The following is from Congressman Rush Holt's newsletter:

About 31,000 New Jerseyans work for the federal government. Many of these public servants have been furloughed; the remainder are continuing to perform their duties but will not be paid until Congress funds the government. As a result, Moody’s Analytics estimates that a three-to-four week shutdown would cut economic growth nationwide by more than half in the fourth quarter.

Due to the shutdown, the Children’s Home Society – which administers the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program in Mercer County – could not write any food or milk vouchers last week, impacting several thousand women and their families. The state of New Jersey has since stepped forward to support WIC temporarily, but if the shutdown continues, more children could lose access to basic nutrition.


At Rutgers Cooperative Extension, 60 staff members are about to be laid off due to funding shortfalls related to the shutdown. New small business loans, including those for New Jersey’s nearly 200,000 small businesses, are being halted. New student loans for New Jersey’s 440,000 college students are not being disbursed. New applications for Social Security, veterans’ benefits, visas, and passports are not being processed.

These problems will only grow worse if this shutdown is allowed to continue. And if the debt ceiling crisis is not resolved, the increased cost to the government could easily be in the tens of billions of dollars each year.

For Generations

Today Republicans in the House are stalling and filling time while they find the courage to admit they have made a big mistake, substantively and politically, in shutting the federal government and to bring to the floor a resolution to resume funding. So, they are using time to bring up a version of the farm bill that would leave more Americans hungry by reducing SNAP benefits (previously known as food stamps).

According to the Lancet Medical Journal published this past week, “SNAP is in jeopardy, which means American children’s health is in jeopardy.” More than 70 percent of SNAP benefits go to households with children. The program, dating from the 1960s, has been shown to have less waste, fraud, and erroneous awards than other government programs.

The Lancet article continues, “Many studies have shown positive associations between receipt of SNAP and... a lower risk of anemia, obesity, poor health, hospital admission for failure to thrive, and reports of child abuse and neglect. Children aged 5 - 9 years of SNAP-participating families had better academic outcomes and less obesity than had children of non-participating families... Between 1961 and 1975, the programme was implemented county by county, thus, allowing for comparison across counties that differed only by SNAP availability. In SNAP-available counties there was… a significant increase... in mean birthweight [an important measure associated with infant health] for both black and white Americans compared with those counties where SNAP was not available. Children of low-income women in SNAP-available counties were less likely to have metabolic syndrome [ill health such as diabetes] in adulthood, and women who had received food stamps during early childhood were more likely to be economically self-sufficient.”

This seems to me to be a very important point: the societal benefits of food stamps extend far beyond the temporary reduction of hunger pangs, and the benefits last for years, even into the next generation.

Sincerely,

Rush Holt

NJPP Monday Minute 11/22/10: Giving Thanks

This week, most of us will enjoy a fabulous Thanksgiving feast. Our holiday will be marked by an abundance of family and football and food, all in joyous testament to the good fortune we enjoy. Our tables will be set so full that by Sunday surely there may be recriminations over the monotony -- if not the extravagance -- of all the leftovers from a 26-pound turkey with all the trimmings.

We must indeed find time this week to give thanks for our good fortune. We must be mindful of the shared spirit of that first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Plantation, nearly 400 years ago, when the Pilgrims celebrated the harvest in community with the Wampanoag people.

And we must also recognize that these times are not plentiful for every one of us.

In fact, 24.1 million Americans are living in poverty, more than at any time in our nation's history, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The economic recession has kept unemployment over 9.5 percent for more than a year. Home foreclosures are at record levels. Homelessness is on the rise. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service reported that 50 million Americans, including 17 million children, do not have consistent access to a nutritious, well-balanced diet.

This lack of plenty is evident at food pantries across New Jersey, which are seeing a 30 percent increase in demand over last year, according to Anthony Guido of the Community FoodBank of New Jersey. That's all the more remarkable considering that the Community FoodBank assisted 1,600 agencies in distributing 35 million pounds of food to 830,000 people last year, a 45 percent increase from 2005.

"Times are tough all around," Guido told WBGO radio. "Our agencies will give out the food as soon as we can get it to them. That means as soon as we collect it and bring it into the food bank, it goes right back out to the charities in need."

The need could have been much greater.

Amid all the budget trauma in New Jersey, the Christie administration and the Legislature protected state funding for a vital initiative in the Department of Agriculture called the State Food Purchase Program (SFPP). The SFPP is a supplement to the federal Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which last year supplied about 12 million pounds of food to nearly 400,000 households in New Jersey.

Begun in FY2007 with a budget of $3.9 million, the SFPP provides state tax dollars to the Community FoodBank in order to buy food in bulk quantities to be distributed at local food pantries. In January, as he was leaving office, former Governor Corzine added $3 million more to the fund for FY2010. Governor Christie shaved off a token $100,000 from that total in his first budget, but continued the program at the more substantial level of $6.8 million for FY2011. The SFPP allows for the purchase of 9.7million pounds of food for distribution at local pantries.

Thirty-eight states invest in emergency food and nutrition programs. A study by the California Association of Food Banks earlier this year showed New Jersey was fourth among states in its funding of emergency food programs, with an annual expenditure of $22 per household. Massachusetts was first at $62, followed by New York at $36 and Pennsylvania at $32 per household.

Even so, New Jersey could improve. In 2007, only 59 percent of New Jerseyans eligible for food stamps received them, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and there are 324,000 New Jersey households that are "food insecure," meaning that all household members do not have access to enough food for an active, healthy life at all times.

That first Thanksgiving in the autumn of 1621 was a three day harvest festival, not unlike others in ancient times or other cultures. We should all keep foremost in our minds that the gathering of Pilgrims and Native Americans offered a chance for the entire community to join in the feasting and partake of the bounty that the harvest offered.

NJPP Monday Minute: 11/23/09 Thanks and Giving

New Jersey is one of the richest states in the nation and certain counties are among the richest places in the world to live; and yet about 10 percent of households in this state face hunger. We want to believe that hunger only affects people in developing countries or in poor southern states. But two percent more households in New Jersey were hungry in 2007 than were hungry in the preceding 4 years. This is an alarming trend.

The holiday season is associated with family gatherings and big meals where people eat more than they should then sleep in front of the TV only to start eating again when they awaken. For many New Jersey families hardest hit by the poor economy this won't reflect their holidays.

A new report released by the United States Department of Agriculture found that the percentage of American families who don't have enough to eat is at its highest level since the agency began food surveys in 1995.

Food banks throughout the state have been struggling to meet a higher demand as the poor economy triggers greater unemployment and/or reduced work hours. One food pantry in particular, the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton, is serving 40 percent more households at its Trenton location than a year ago and 50 percent more in Princeton. The median monthly income of families who seek food assistance at the Crisis Ministry is $980 per month--clearly not enough to make ends meet in New Jersey.

Donations and aid to food banks are down--perhaps because the bad economy has reduced everyone's ability to give. Last winter the Legislature and Governor Corzine sent $3 million in emergency funding to the state's food banks. This year the state will have to do something again to help. In a country and a state with such wealth we cannot allow people to wonder when and where their next meal will arrive.

The state must continue to provide support for those who need it most. But in this Thanksgiving season, all of us should give thanks for what we have and give whatever we can to those who need it most.

Click >>> Here for a list of food pantries in New Jersey.

Click >>> Here for an additional link to Feeding America

Join Forces With The Kellogg Company to confront Hunger in the U.S.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich., June 21, 2009 – Kellogg Company (NYSE: K) today announced a transformational partnership with Katalyst, a studio for social media co-founded by Ashton Kutcher (www.twitter.com/aplusk) and Jason Goldberg. The partnership will raise awareness of the growing hunger epidemic in the United States and encourage consumers to donate to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger relief organization, at the KelloggCares Facebook® Page at www.facebook.com/kelloggcares. Recent reports show that one in eight Americans is struggling with hunger, and food banks across the country are challenged to keep up with rising demand.

As part of its ongoing commitment to fight hunger, Kellogg teamed up with Katalyst to spotlight the issue through a new online video, directed by Demi Moore (www.twitter.com/mrskutcher). The video can be found on the KelloggCares Facebook Page at www.facebook.com/kelloggcares. It features user-generated content submitted by consumers moved to end hunger following requests that @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) and @mrskutcher (Demi Moore) posted on their respective Twitter feeds and Facebook Pages.

“We are grateful to be working with Kellogg on such a meaningful project and excited to be creating people-powered content for social media networks as a powerful tool for change,” said Kutcher, co-founder of Katalyst. “Innovative partnerships like this one demonstrate the good that companies can do when resources are pooled. The Katalyst team has been inspired by the thousands of voices that have emerged on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms dedicated to ending hunger in America.”

The goal of the video is to reach Americans through social media channels and encourage them to work together to help replenish food banks and feed the hungry by making donations to Feeding America. On the KelloggCares Facebook Page, consumers can become a fan, make a monetary donation to Feeding America and find out about other ways they can help fight hunger in their local communities.

“Hunger is an issue that often gets overlooked, especially here in the United States. Having food readily available is something that we too easily can take for granted. And yet we know, especially in these times, that many people in the United States go to bed hungry. That’s why it’s critical that we come together to shed light on the issue,” said Moore. “The collective spirit of the American people can do extraordinary things. It is our hope that this video and partnership with Kellogg Company will draw attention to this important issue and help make a difference for the 36 million Americans struggling with hunger.”

Kellogg hopes that by reaching consumers where they get much of their information – via the social web – it will engage even more people in the fight against hunger.

Governor Corzine discusses his economic stimulus package and the greater economy

Governor Corzine discusses his economic stimulus package and the greater economy.

You find more information about my Economic Assistance and Recovery Plan, including how to get assistance for your family at http://nj.gov/governor/home/plan.html