Mississippi State University’s Committee of 19 is collaborating with the Society of St. Andrew to end local hunger. Students will bag gleaned potatoes for distribution at the Palmeiro Center Nov. 7. Approximately 200 students are needed for the Friday potato drop-off.
Despite the fact MSU’s committee is only a year old, it has met with considerable success in the past. In 2007, the group coordinated a potato drop that netted 20,000 pounds of potatoes.
Chiquita Briley, MSU associate professor of food science, nutrition and health promotion, said although curing immediate hunger is viable and righteous, she wants to extend MSU’s efforts to focus on a long-term approach.
“As time goes on, we can hopefully have researchers look at the issue of poverty,” she said. “By doing these projects on campus we’ll get people to start thinking about new ideas and different research projects that they may want to get into, and we can stretch beyond [fulfilling] immediate needs and get students involved in [long-term solutions].”
Briley said she believes hunger issues can be solved within the current generation’s lifetime.
Walker Satterwhite, executive director of the Mississippi Food Network, said he believes hunger could be solved within the current generation’s lifetime.
“The partnership of the private sector and federal programs is finally starting to make a difference,” he said. “There are too many generous Americans that have committed to ending hunger for this not to have a good chance of happening.”
The SoSA was created in 1979 and has currently evolved into a successful non-profit charity determined to feed the poor. Utilizing SoSA’s Gleaning Network, the organization collected almost 10 million pounds of produce in 2006, which was given to 1,906 distribution agencies.
Briley said the network chose its namesake from the Biblical reference of gleaning.
“Once farmers have taken their crops for sale, they have crops left [in the fields]. [SoSA] have volunteers that glean those fields – go out there and pick the crops – and distribute them to food pantries,” Briley said.
According to a recent report from Feeding America, a nationwide group backed by the government, individual and industrial organizations, 35.5 million people in America lived in food insecure households in 2006.
Satterwhite said hunger in the U.S. correlates with poverty and is largely overlooked. He said the perception of starvation at a local level is also sometimes inaccurate.
“In many cases, hunger is seen as a result of laziness,” Satterwhite said. “In our work, we see the majority of people we serve have been affected either by their lack of resources to obtain a good paying job, slow economic growth in their rural communities and rising costs.”
Hunger is beginning to affect more people, he said.
“There is a new category of people we are starting to see, the hard working middle class family that is finding because of the rising costs and the weakening economy, they are struggling to make ends meet,” he said.
Marilyn Blackledge, director of development at Mississippi Food Network, said the current sluggish economy is also affecting hunger and starvation levels.
“Unfortunately, with the recent turn in the economy, we are seeing more clients using the service of our member agencies rather than less,” she said.
Satterwhite said he believes the key to ending hunger is in education.
“[People] must be offered quality education, have access to quality health care and have the means to purchase nutritional food,” he said. “If this generation can be assured this will be supplied, the next generation will be better equipped to prosper.”
To volunteer and for more information, contact Chiquita Briley at 325-8728 or [email protected].