Why take this challenge?

I am finally 90% well and ready to do the cooking I needed to get done before starting the challenge, which I am now planning to start Friday, hurray!

I was contacted by a reporter asking for me to answer some questions about the co-op's involvement in the SNAP Challenge today and they were such great questions (from which only a few quotes are going to be pulled as part of a larger article) that I decided I wanted to share my answers here with you as well. As always, I love dialog, please share your thoughts!

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Common Ground has been working on the issue of making healthy food available to people of all income levels since its inception in 1974 and created the Food for All program at the co-op in January of 2009. The Food for All program has five parts, and the one being most actively utilized for the Feeding Illinois challenge are our Food for All recipe cards. When the economic crisis hit just after our move to downtown Urbana in August of 2008, there were a lot of ads on the radio all of the sudden pushing fast food "value" meals that were suddenly $5 or $4 and promoting them as a real steal, a boon to families grappling with shrinking incomes. We decided to challenge ourselves to create recipes from our own experience feeding our own families that could be made with organic and local ingredients for a family of four for the cost of one of those "value" meals. The result was 15 terrific recipes for everything from wild mushroom and chard pasta to tamale pie you could make for only $1 to $2 per serving that are now available every day in our co-op. The recipes are wildly popular and we're constantly having to print more, especially since the Feeding Illinois challenge began, many people are finding them to be a great help in taking this challenge where you are trying to find nutritious meals to fit into a budget of only $4.50 or less a day.

On a more personal level, I decided to take the challenge myself because I wanted to see if it was possible to eat only organic and local food on a food stamp budget. There is this perception that organic and local food is very expensive and out of reach for many of us, but I know this is not true after years of personal experience and years of watching staff and customers of the co-op alike shop at the co-op on very little yet be able to eat almost exclusively organic and local food. What it takes is reviving the vital skills of cooking and meal planning, which I teach in my free, monthly "Healthy Eating on a Budget" class. So I wanted to take this challenge with that unique angle, as part of my continuing self-education, and as an opportunity to talk about how to eat healthfully and organically when on a tight budget.

This challenge has already been effective, I have been amazed at the number of terrific conversations it has started! I've been talking about it on my Facebook page and gotten a terrific response from Common Ground owners who read my page, many have even chosen to take the challenge after reading about it on there. Its also started great conversations within the co-op staff, honest ones about the cost of food and the need to share food skills. And, above all, its started great conversations on the community level between businesses, media, and Eastern Illinois Foodbank that are going to stir up real energy for change. I am proud to be taking part in this challenge.

Its easy for so many of us to think of hunger as something that doesn't really exist in our communities because it doesn't manifest as emaciated children begging for food in the streets, that's what we're told hunger looks like. But in the U.S., hunger often looks like an overweight child who can't focus in his or her classes because they are filled with whatever processed, sugar-laden was on sale super cheap, because that is what is super cheap. Because these are the foods that are subsidized, this is where all that subsidized corn and soy is going, into that super cheap processed food with negative nutritional value, not into fresh fruits and vegetables. These aren't foods lacking nutritional value, these are foods that actually have a negative impact on nutrition, they don't just lack vitamins and minerals, they are actually harming young bodies. Hunger these days is not emaciated children in our country, it is children with diabetes, adults in the prime of their life who already have high blood pressure and heart issues. The face is hunger in our country is malnourishment right in our midst, and we all see it every day. It is alive and well through out our county and through out our country. How do we truly begin to address that? Common Ground does it through our Food for All program, EIFB does it through great efforts like this Feeding Illinois challenge and many others. We have to start talking about the reality of what kind of food the poorest in our country are having to live on and how that can change, this challenge is a great start.

- Jacqueline