New campaign takes aim at hunger

Hunger in Los Angeles County is visible to anyone who chooses to look closely.

For Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, that fact hit home again last week as he made one of his frequent drives past the SOVA food pantry near his house. “I’ve never seen a line there that long,” he said.

For Los Angeles Unified School District board member Steve Zimmer, it came last year in the actions of a boy he was tutoring in an after-school program in Northeast Los Angeles. Rather than devour an ice cream cup he’d earned as a prize, the youngster tucked it in his backpack to save for breakfast the next morning. “When you see that simple act of a six year old, it kind of hits you in the gut,” Zimmer said.

Stories and statistics of the rising tide of hunger in Los Angeles flowed Monday morning at a conference to launch Fed Up With Hunger, a major initiative to combat widespread hunger and malnutrition in L.A. The project of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles aims to combine government, private and corporate efforts to understand and combat a pervasive hunger that leaves more than one in eight L.A. area residents hungry every day. To expand awareness, the campaign produced a report entitled, “Hungry No More: A Blueprint to End Hunger in Los Angeles.”

The goal is ambitious—“not just to address hunger in Los Angeles but to actually solve it,” said Fed Up With Hunger Chairman Ron Galperin. In a video shot for the campaign, actress Debra Messing noted that hunger is so pervasive that “with one million people in our city hungry every day, it not them, it’s us.”

The project has three major aims:

• To declare Los Angeles a “Hunger-Free Zone.”
• To improve food assistance programs.
• To increase access to nutritious quality food.

The effort also encourages local officials to beef up existing hunger-fighting organizations and bring innovative approaches to the battle.

This week, Supervisor Yaroslavsky will introduce a motion directing county departments to “expand the reach of existing anti-hunger programs” and to “explore future goals and benchmarks” using the “Blueprint” report as a starting point. “We will use all of our resources and know-how” to attack hunger, Yaroslavsky said.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz pledged to help “bring visibility to an otherwise invisible issue” by introducing legislation to push city departments—from Parks and Recreation to the LAPD—to ways to identify and serve hungry populations.

One target of opportunity: signing up thousands of Los Angeles families who qualify for federal food assistance but haven’t signed up. Food stamps, for instance, can add $100 a month in groceries to a family’s kitchen. Zimmer, the school board member, suggested that neighborhood schools, which already sign up children for federal breakfast and lunch programs, could become focal points for signing up entire families.

Data shows that the need for these kinds of services is greater than it has been for decades. Food banks have reported a heavy demand as unemployment in Los Angeles has hit 12.7 percent and homes continue to fall into foreclosure. Since 2007, demand has spiked 85 percent at Jewish Family Service’s three SOVA food pantries, said Paul Castro, executive director of JFS.

Hunger issues are complex. Some aspects are easy to understand, such as families who simply can’t afford to feed their children and seniors who must choose between food, medication and rent. More difficult issues include how to end the problem of “food deserts,” poorer communities where high-quality food is scarce. Many communities have an overabundance of high-calorie junk food outlets but lack grocery stores that sell fresh fruits and vegetables. Obesity due to over consumption of nutrient-poor foods can also hit those who are going hungry, leading to diabetes.

One key partner in Fed Up With Hunger is MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, a national anti-hunger group (Mazon means ‘food’ in Hebrew) based in West Los Angeles. At Monday’s event, MAZON Vice President Leslie Friedman announced the awarding of 10 “micro grants” to local hunger-fighting organizations. Among the recipients: the Valley Interfaith Council, Food Forward, Temple Emanuel and Jewish Family Service.