The Feed People Project

Welcome back. With the economy the way it has been I’ve been very distracted by the thing that pays my own bills - capturing client feedback and helping people understand it for Charles Schwab. Not a lot of time to write about the problem of hunger in America. I assure you, however, that the Soup Lady Project has not skipped a beat - delivering 4.5 gallons of soup to the homeless shelter at 150 Otis St. - every Wed without fail for almost a year now.

I’m here today to write about a new project which I’m terribly excited about - the Green Space Soup Kitchen project!

The GSSK project has one goal in mind - to create a space which is run by homeless people and geared towards helping homeless people get back on their feet. It incorporates a few basic ideas - things that just make sense - into a framework for food assistance, vocational training and self sustainance which fits into the model society which we need to build if we are going to build a more ethical and compassionate economy here at home.

Before I discuss the specifics of the GSSK, I want to briefly discuss the problem of homelessness. I don’t think that the problem of homelessness is really about where a person lives at all - it’s about disenfranchisement. People who don’t feel a part of this great American society simply give up. They stop caring and they let their lives fall into ruin. Once there, the only reasonable route back to self sufficiency (and self-respect) is via social services - which can often be as cold and impersonal as the streets they sleep on every night. The result is a community of people who are only tangentially connected to the things that support them - the food they eat and the shelters that they live in. There is no sense of success or satisfaction to help these folks take pride in their lives. This is a dead end cycle.

The GSSK consists of two main facilities:

#1) A network of Green Spaces - There is a movement right now to reclaim abandoned lots (brown spaces) and through the hard work of volunteers turn them into community gardens (green spaces). Our project will coordinate disenfranchised people and have them work to take ownership of the community gardens they convert. These gardens will then provide the healthy, fresh food that the Soup Kitchen will use as ingredients.

#2) A Soup Kitchen - We all know what a soup kitchen is. The GSSK kitchen will be run by disenfranchised folks and will provide sustainance to other disenfranchised folks. It will be open as early and as late as the law will allow. It will be a beacon of community activity for people who want to collaborate in order to lift themselves out of a difficult place.

The beauty of this project is in its simplicity. Participants in the GSSK will have an opportunity to gain vocational skills at both the community gardens and soup kitchen. We will manage a network of volunteer gardeners, farmers and chefs to lead our efforts - at least until graduates of the GSSK can gain the skills to take over that leadership themselves. While people are working to provide food for their peers, they will also be gaining skills and exposure to new ways of life which can help them escape whatever self-destructive cycle they might be stuck in.

Sure, this project is not as easy to implement as the Soup Lady Project. That’s why we’re looking to incorporate as a non-profit and to set up a group of caring, resourceful people who can afford to focus on this one. If any of you have interest in the project in general or in how you can participate, please let me know.

Ok. Gotta get back to work. Thanks again for reading and here’s to a more functional future for our society!

- S

We’ve written on these pages before about the shortcomings of America’s Food Stamp program - highlighting a Harvard School of Public Health study that estimates the cost burden of not fully underwriting food assistance at $90B. According to their analysis, the Food Stamp program was good for 3 out of 4 weeks of food assistance for most people. They proposed the simple tradeoff of funding the program with another $10B/year in order to avoid those ill effects of not doing so.

President Obama signed the economic bailout recovery package (or whatever you want to call it) the other day and by doing so increased Food Stamp program funding by 13%. That is a pretty hefty increase, but by my calculations it falls short of what would have made ultimate sense - ensuring that every American citizen has adequate opportunity to a healthy diet. If we take the premise that the program was 75% effective, then we would have needed a 33% increase in benefits to bring things to a steady state. Why do we continue to compromise ourselves out of the most fundamental of necessities when we know that this results in an overall detriment to society as a whole?

If the government will continue to overlook such obvious opportunities to enfranchise millions of Americans - much less set straight a dysfunction that acts as a burden on the backs of our collective success - then it’s our responsibility to do so.

Food banks are one answer, but that system is already in place and straining to survive against a lack of funding, donations and public criticism (most usually tied to issues about executive salary, beaurocracy, etc). Our existing system of food banks can only go so far when it comes to picking up the slack.

Social group managed food assistance is another solution… and we’re looking to pioneer the use of them via the Soup Lady project, which you can read about all over this website. If we all pitch in and get together in social groups, we can redirect our energy towards providing food assistance to anyone who needs it.

This is a continued call to action for anyone who wants to hear it. Millions of people in your own country are starving every day. You can help prevent this horrible condition which, in the eyes of a future historian, should seem unthinkable in a compassionate society with more than enough means to provide basic rights.

Step up. Make a friend who needs food. Feed them. It feels good… and every little action helps.

The economic crisis we are currently on the front-end of threatens to leave a large percentage of Americans unemployed for an indefinite period of time. At the very least, hundreds of thousands of otherwise gainfully employed people are going to have at least a few months of time to kill as their prospects for interviews remain slim and they collect various forms of benefits. These people might feel lonely and afraid of their futures, but they don’t have to live that way.

Here’s an idea which would allow unemployed people can participate in endeavors that fill their time, bring them closer to their community and help ease the problem of food insecurity here at home:

Throw a Soup Lady Cooking Party!

The idea is simple. Organize a bunch of your unemployed friends to get together in the middle of the day for a party. One person - the “head chef”- gives instructions on what to bring, pot luck style. For example, one person is responsible for bringing 3 cups of chopped celery and a whole chicken. Then you all combine the ingredients into a big pot and drink cheap wine while it cooks. When it’s done you can all enjoy a meal, take some home and then leave a bucket for a Soup Lady organizer like myself to pick up for a homeless shelter or some other place with hungry people.

This stuff isn’t rocket science. All it takes is a little iniative and a willingness to do something a little differently.

If you are unemployed - or know someone who is - and would like to consider throwing a Soup Lady Cooking Party, we have resources that can help.

• Download the PDF “Soup Lady Start-Up Kit” from the left hand side of this page. This kit contains ideas for recipes that can make soup for lots of people at a time.
• Contact me about donating food. I would be happy to help pair you up with a distribution point (homeless shelter or other) and even pick-up/deliver the soup on schedule.
• Write to me about your experiences and/or post a comment to this article. Perhaps there are other people reading this who might want to be part of a cooking party?!

Who knows? Maybe you’ll have so much fun that you’ll keep having charitable cooking parties even after you all get jobs?!

After all, the Soup Lady Project has proven that the best path to sustainable food assistance is through social networks… and that all it takes is a few hours of your time a week to provide enough food for 1 person to eat 3 meals a day. You heard that right - check out the last post about this idea to see how the #s play out.

Until next time…

- S

I just got done delivering our Wednesday soup to the shelter at 150 Otis St… and it afforded me an opportunity to think about this great milestone of providing 1,000 servings of tasty nutritious homemade soup to people who are hungry. I’d like to share a few of these thoughts.

The first Soup Lady delivery - to the same shelter - was on June 16th, 2008. In the time since we’ve missed 2 weeks and one of those was because of Christmas. Because of the project’s consistency, we can safely say that in one year we will have delivered approximately 2,000 servings. This is just from the one-day-a-week cooking effort provided by Shelley Johnson and a few hours of organization and delivery time a week for myself. I could add up the hours, but that’s not the point. In fact, the point is really that we both had the time available and we’re using it to make soup instead of personal leisure activities.

If every person was responsible for feeding 1,000 servings of food to someone else, what would that mean?

If you take the number of meals an average healthy person eats (let’s say 3 a day) and multiply it by the number of days in a year (365) you get 1,095. That’s tantalizingly close to the 1,000 meal impact that just a few hours a week can have. This means that, conceptually at least, you can adjust those numbers to actual and have the basis for a socially driven food assistance program… for everyone!

Think about that. If we all just agreed to set aside a few hours a week to focus on making and sharing food, we could make a healthy diet a basic human right. We could build a platform which would not only give people the freedom to pursue happiness but the support necessary to actually achieve it.

So I’m happy today because I think we’ve got a good proof of concept here. We’ve been doing this without much trouble for half a year now. It’s become a part of our lifestyles as much as waking up and taking a shower is… or taking out the trash once a week. Now we need to find a way to convince everyone else that it’s something worth doing!

Thanks again for reading. As always your thoughts are appreciated.

- S

I’m lazy. I’ll admit it.

Sometimes I just want to lay there like a potato so bad that I won’t even get up to go bake myself a potato. It’s at times like these when I do my best to spin my slackerness into something positive.

I go hungry.

Before I get into the experience, I have to dig into the reasons why I think I’m so close to the idea of hunger. First, there’s my mom. She was born in a Poland ghetto and lived in a displaced persons camp until she came over at age 6. Growing up I always heard her stories about how she lived on mostly sausage and cheese… when they could get it. Back in Europe when it was someone’s birthday it was truly a celebration - because it was the only time you got to have anything sweet… and it wasn’t cake.

The other reason I feel pretty close to hunger most likely has something to do with my Jewish heritage. I’m not a terribly religious man, but I did grow up observing the cultural practices of Judaism, especially with regard to holidays. That meant fasting once a year on Yom Kippur, and for some reason I came to enjoy it… so much that a college roommate and I went a period of time fasting once a month as a cleansing thing. It was actually pretty good.

So that takes me to last night. After a long hard day at work I came home and was sucked into a music project. I worked straight from about 4pm until 10pm before realizing how hungry I was. At that point, though, exhaustion had set in. I made the conscious decision to forgo the search for food a few minutes later. I laid back to relax and listen to the music I made. I started to get sleepy.

Then the hunger set in.

Hunger is difficult. It causes your stomach to tighten up and sometimes you feel like you might puke. Even if you are dead tired, it’s a true challenge to fall asleep on an empty stomach. Last night I managed to crash out fairly easily, but this morning I woke up before the sunrise and spent hours tossing and turning. If I didn’t have a day of activities planned I would just go out and get food… but I needed to sleep!

You get the point… and it’s not that hunger isn’t so bad - i.e. “see, Stefan likes it!” No… the point is that it’s not so bad that you can’t try it sometimes in order to gain a better understanding of what peoples’ suffering is like. As part of the path towards easing that suffering, this is an enjoyable thing.

So try it some time. If you aren’t close to the idea of hunger then you can’t reasonably expect yourself to know how devastating it can be. Without this understanding, the prospect of building food assistance into your lifestyle probably seems more like a neat idea than a social and personal imperative.

Things change. Life gets complicated. While I tend to avoid writing about myself on this site I have to say that I have been lacking a certain amount of follow-through when it comes to keeping this project moving. This is partly due to emotional drama of the highest order going on during the holidays. Without going into details, my world view was turned upside down and I sort of had to reorient myself.

Despite this, however, we are still delivering soup. Last Wednesday we brought another 4.5 gallon bucket to the homeless shelter at 150 Otis St. I’m finding that regardless of how far off center I am in my life, this simple practice of food assistance as part of my lifestyle has hardly missed a beat. I’m thinking that some of the reason for this is because my commitment is small and social. It’s small in that it requires relatively little effort - simply funding and delivering soup once a week for a couple of hours. It’s social because it involves partnership and coordination which would result in letting people close to me down were I not to follow through. These two things make my involvement in the Soup Lady project a veritable certainty regardless of my situation.

A good friend of mine told me about her resolution to become better with follow-through and it inspired me, so here I am folks - making a commitment to pick up the writing part of this project again. As I did last year, I intend to keep close track of the problem of hunger and write about it as often as makes sense. I’d like this blog to be a place where people can go to read interesting things about hunger and contribute to discussions on the subject. While the Soup Lady Project is the most developed part of this thing here, I’d like to pick the torch back up on the overall Feed People Project and shine light on a problem that so many people are blissfully unaware of.

So we’re back. To those of you who subscribe, please keep on coming back and contribute if you can! I had to set comment moderation on due to a ton of spam I was getting (I’m talking about hundreds of spam comments a day)… but I’ll approve anything you all write as soon as I see it.

Oh, and before I go… a reminder. The problem of hunger, or food insecurity, at home is very real. It’s also something that we all have the power to learn about and alleviate in our lives. Our mission here is simple - to help people learn about how their neighbors are hungry and then to find creative solutions which make food available for them to eat. It’s as simple as that.

One idea I’d love some feedback/thought around - the “Who Needs Food” search engine. If you’ve ever tried to get food to people who need it, you’ll quickly find that you are routed to a few places that are all affiliated with the local food bank network. Not to knock what these guys are doing, but it can’t be the only way to help feed people. The problem is that it’s hard to identify those neighbors of ours who need food. If we knew, for example, that the nice old lady who lives upstairs was struggling to eat every day, we might be inclined to walk some of our home-made leftovers up, wouldn’t we? So the idea is to find a way to anonymously (because people tend to not like to advertise their struggles) match up food providers with those in need. If we can do this, I think that one-to-one social support will be more likely to happen… which seems like a good thing to me!

Thanks for reading folks. Here’s to our working towards some extroardinary things in 2009!

- S

It’s been a while since I wrote about our Soup Lady Project or even hunger in America for that matter, but I am here to assure you that both topics - for better and worse - are still going strong.

The Soup Lady Project is something that has become a simple part of my life - and that was really the point. The idea was to try and build a practice that supports food assistance in my own community into my lifestyle and I’m proud to say that the experiment has been a success! Every Wednedsay now I leave work a bit early and I head over to pick up the 4.5 gallons of soup that my mom - the original Soup Lady - spends the day making. Driving it to the shelter takes about an hour altogether and is a far better use of my time than 9/10ths of the other things I do every day.

What should probably be the real burden on my lifestyle is the $120/month or so that I spend funding these Wednesday soup meals… but to be honest I hardly notice the difference. Perhaps that says something about my budgeting skills, but I like to think it speaks more to my priorities. What $120 meant to me before this project was about 12 drinks - spread over a month that works out to about 3 drinks a week. When you think about it that way and realize that it really is a trade off between 3 alcoholic drinks a week and feeding upwards of 40 people a week, it just makes sense.

When it comes to charity, I am finding that consistency is king. This is why part of our “small win” philosophy involves making an emotional connection to what you are participating in. We don’t frown on large one-time donations, but they aren’t nearly as good as small ongoing sponsorships. While it might seem like $60 in January is the same as $5/month throughout an entire year, the fact is that the latter approach makes you far more likely to care about where your money is going. The latter approach is far more likely to be sustainable and, therefore, it’s more likely to lead to successful solutions for society’s problems.

There is a lot going on right now. The economy is terrible and people are losing jobs. I’m personally at the busiest time for my own job at a time when 7-8% of my company’s workforce is being laid off. Announcements are coming out every day and it’s really hard to keep from seeing ourselves as victims or potential victims. This is not a time when people tend to divert their resources to charitable endeavors. Donations are down across the board. This is what happens when people use the outstretched palm-up hand instead of the ongoing emotional connection to get people involved in charity. The philosophy of building small wins into your lifestyle is not as succeptiple to these ups and down which are a simple inevitability.

That’s all I have to say for today. I need to update the Soup Lady Tally because frankly it’s been a few weeks since I’ve done it and it’s severely understating our impact. Also, I want to give a thank you shout to all of the Soup Lady Sponsors who have continued to keep $5/month food assistance funding as part of their lifestyles - even throughout what is looking to be a difficult time for everyone. It’s a commitment to caring that most people only know through an empty envelope in the mail or a Donate Now button on a website. You guys are dropping $5 from your budget each month to make sure that 7 people get a warm meal on a cold day. This is how people who have should treat those who have not.

Until next time…

- Stefan

Hi everyone. It’s been an interesting busy couple of weeks since I last wrote and I’ve been feeling neglectful of this site… so I’m fitting an update and quick commentary on Thanksgiving in between the cracks, with a promise to write more after this holiday break.

A few items on the agenda for today, in no particular order:

First, I want to announce that the Soup Lady Project has reached a milestone! We have created our first complete funding network for one of the Wednesday meals we serve each week to the homeless shelter at 150 Otis St. Since the goal of this project has evolved to be a model of sustainable social network managed food assistance, this is a huge step for us. It means we’re more than 1/4 on the way towards supporting a whole month of Wednesday soups. Once we reach that goal, we’ll be able to start thinking about expanding out past Wednesdays. This is truly a landmark event, so thank you to all of the Sponsors who have signed up for the recurring $5/month payment. Your contribution is a meaningful part of the funding network which feeds healthy nutritious food to 40 people each month.

Next, I wanted to quickly touch on the event at Rye last Monday, Nov 17th. The event was a huge success and thank you all for coming out to show your support! Thanks to the lovely ladies of Mrs. Robinson we raised $200 and brought 5 new Soup Lady Sponsors on board. This is how things get started - with motivated people who believe in the message spreading it to other cool people who care.

Finally, I want to make note that on Thanksgiving - a holiday about food - there is most likely going to be plenty of food assistance to go around. So on this day as we’re all gathering together to share our food let’s ask ourselves why every day can’t be like Thanksgiving? Why can’t we fill our hearts with love and share the joy of cooking on the other “normal” days? We can… and we should.

On Thanksgiving this year, please take a minute to consider what food means to you and the people around you. Consider how you might be able to participate in a meaningful solution to the problem of hunger here at home. Any thoughts? Ideas?

Thanks for reading and enjoy your turkey day!!

Things are picking up here at the Feed People Project as we’ve regained a focus on our Soup Lady Project in particular. Thanks to the involvement of the Mrs. Robinson ladies, we are moving full steam ahead with our plans to produce a Soup Lady Start-Up Kit - an online printable information kit which will provide recipes, instructions, FAQ’s and everything else you need to start making homemade food for people who can’t feed themselves. To highlight the kit we’ve booked the awesome venue Rye for a November 17th celebration of food, community and the Soup Lady concept. It’s going to be a blast so look for more information to come soon. (If you’d like to be notified of the event details please contact me here via a posted reply or email me!)

I also had the pleasure today of stumbling upon a very thoughtfully written blog post about feeding homemade food to people who are hungry. It was notable to me because it hit on concepts that are very core to Soup Lady philosophy. Check out this little passage:

As we all know food taste’s the best when…

1) The food is served with love…It could be your life partner…your mom. or any favorite people in your life…

2) You are really hungry…and I mean dead hungry….

We all put lot of devotion to prepare food for the people who fall in the first category…We prepare the spice mix days in advance if you are planning a special dinner or if you are calling friends over home…and there is so much passion involved in creating that perfect carte for our loved ones…We do all this because we genuinely like the people for whom we are serving the food?

Most of us haven’t had to experience [the] feeling [of true hunger] in our lives…Most of us as adults could always afford to buy food whenever we needed…and splurge too…But unfortunately there are millions who cant…. I am requesting for a small help….Just take time out in a weekend…Instead of cooking for our friends or guests…Think about cooking for someone else if you are willing to..

Amen to that! This is exactly what the Soup Lady Project is trying to do - pair up people who love to cook with people who need to be cooked for. It’s that simple! The economics of soup are such that we can easily provide nutritious and nourishment to the 30-something million American households that suffer from food insecurity each year. When you realize that you can feed 40-50 people for about $30 (while we each spend a good $6-$10 a day on lunch in downtown SF) it sort of makes you wonder why we are letting so many people go hungry!

At the end of the day there are unhappy people on both sides of the aisle. The people who love to cook aren’t all cooking as much as they’d love and the people who need food are being left hungry. With a little organization and motivation we can put these groups together and provide a better world for everyone.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post today. In the next few weeks I’ll be developing the Start-Up Kit and posting more information on the November 17th event. If you want to be more in tune with the Soup Lady Project you can also go on to Facebook and find our group under the same name. That is a great way to keep up with what is going on.

Until then… enjoy your opportunities to bring smiles, health and happiness to the community around you. It not only feels good but it gives you a sense of personal satisfaction that you can take with you no matter what the circumstances are.

- S

We live in a time when people are starving among us. That is a fact of reality that we need to deal with - but for some reason we don’t.

I’m going to say this once and I’m going to say it again at the end - There are over 35 million families in this country that cannot put food on their table every night. This is called food insecurity and it’s an atrocity for this condition to be so prevalent in American society.

During this presidential election with all its punditry and pageantry it’s easy to become distracted from what really matters to us - the health and well being of ourselves, our familes and our communities. While all our eyes are glued to the debates tomorrow night the same people who have been struggling even to put food on their family’s tables will keep doing the same thing they’ve been doing for a long time - just barely surviving.

The one thing that we can’t afford to politicize in this country is our peoples’ right to accessible nutritious food. A nutritious diet is a cornerstone of a productive healthy life. This great American experiment of ours was intended to be “by the people and for the people”. When people can’t even eat - much less try to lift themselves up out of poverty - we are leading this experiment down the path to failure.

More than ever it is important that we come together in tangible communities to do what we know is right. We can work to establish these efficient systems of self preservation by leveraging technology (Facebook, for example) and friendship to establish lasting forms of self government. This can be our reality but we need to step up and start to make change.

Here’s where I would normally toss out the Soup Lady pitch and ask for a $5/month sponsorship that equates to feeding 7 people one meal a month… but it really doesn’t matter how you do it. Frankly, the point is that we stop relying on what is a failing system of social services and build something ourselves from the grassroots up. It’s time for us to meaningfully recondition ourselves to care enough and to reconsider our lifestyles.

I don’t think any of us want to feel responsible for allowing millions of our own citizens to go hungry. In fact, if you were to consider what a future observer might think of the citizens who would let such conditions continue, much less flourish, it sort of puts things in perspective. Think about how we perceive the atrocities of Nazi Germany and how we wonder why more people did not step up or speak out.

We need to face our problems and talk about them for what they are - atrocities. Upwards of 35 million American families struggle to feed their families. We can feed them. Regardless of all the distractions… this fact is indelibly true.