WBEZ | hunger

Global Activism: Pan African Rural Health and Social Services aids Africans in dire need

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:27:00 -0500

Pan African Rural Health and Social Services (PRHeSS) aids rural Africans in: maintaining clean drinking water; sanitary living conditions; poverty alleviation and opportunity through education. The group was founded by Chicago area physician Sam Kormoi and his wife, Mary. Dr. Kormoi pays close attention to his native Sierra Leone, a country devastated and traumatized by years of civil war. Dr. Kormoi, along with PRHeSS Board Director, Lesta Woods, will share stories about the people and communities they're helping to transform.

This Saturday May 4th, 2013, PRHeSS will sponsor a Walk-a-Thon of doctors and nurses for food, clothing, medical and school supplies for rural Africans.

Global Activism: Bright Hope International gives aid and comfort to the extreme poor

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:05:00 -0500

Join Worldview on Saturday, 4/6/13 for WBEZ's 6th Annual Global Activism Expo, hosted by the UIC Social Justice Initiative.

Bright Hope International helps faith communities provide aid and assistance to the extreme poor in some of the world’s most devastated countries. The group aligns many of its programs with the UN Millennium Development Goals. Some of Bright Hope's primary goals are in: extreme poverty and hunger eradication; universal primary education; combating infectious disease and promoting environmental sustainability - all this with a focus on gender equality, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health. Bright Hope recently started a program to rescue girls from the sex trade in northern India.

We’ll talk with Bright Hope's CEO and president, C.H. Dyer about the group's work. Dyer has encountered a number of memorable people in his travels:

Justine Nkandu is a single mother of six from the rural area of Samfya, Zambia. She is thriving after being given the opportunity of a microloan through Bright Hope in 2009. From three years on the program, Justine increased production of beans by 300%. Last year, she harvested 84 gallons of peanuts and used the profits from her farming business to build a house and iron sheets for her roof. “My vision is to save money for my children’s education before they reach high school, and to maintain food security for my family,” she said.

Justine now feels that she has made enough capital to stand on her own and has requested that the leadership from her church allow her to step aside from the microloan program so that others may benefit. “My family no longer worries about where our next meal will come from. We are not poor anymore. Now we can bless others. I thank the Lord for giving me knowledge and wisdom to make me reach this far in sustaining my livelihood and my family,” she said. Justine is expecting to double her harvest of peanuts, cassava, and maize this year.

Cook County food pantries report record need

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 11:05:00 -0600

Chicago’s food pantries see the city’s growing hunger problem up close.

“You see people lining up before the sun rises even on these coldest days of the year, and waiting, you know, in some cases two, three, four hours,” said Bob Dolgan of the Greater Chicago Food Depository, Cook County’s largest food bank.

He said in October 2012, their food pantries had more than 550,000 visits - a record number (they don’t have numbers yet for more recent months). Over five years, the organization has seen an 84 percent increase in monthly visits to its 650 food pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters.

That’s probably because the number of people in poverty in the area is on the rise. A recent report by the Heartland Alliance found one in three people in Illinois live in or near poverty, and many of those work full-time. A lasting decline in mid-wage jobs that have been replaced by low-wage jobs since the 2009 recession is likely a factor.

“Soup kitchens are volunteer-run organizations,” Dolgan said. “They’re doing everything they can to support their communities, but when there are just more and more people at their doors, either they have to pack smaller bags or they have to look at the number of hours they’re able to operate.”

Below: A report from a food pantry line in Rogers Park

To make matters worse, the depository has been receiving less food donations. A combination of drought and lingering recession means corporations, wholesalers and distributors are giving less. Drought devastated crops across the Midwest this year, and a major produce source here ended up with far less surplus through the summer.

Most of the depository’s food supply comes from donations – and luckily, said Dolgan, individual giving has not taken the dive that corporate giving has. Still, the depository has received 3 million pounds less donated food over the last six months than the same period a year ago, a decrease of about 9 percent.

They’re making up the difference by purchasing food directly, but it’s hardly a sustainable plan. The organization’s depends on that cash to keep its basic operations afloat.

“We have a lot of trucks we need to fuel, we have thirty-nine vehicles that need to be ready and leave this facility each day,” said Dolgan. “So it’s a challenge.”

And the bottom line remains: smaller bags of food mean emptier stomachs. Reports by the Food Depository and Feeding America estimate one in six people in Cook County don’t know where their next meal will come from.

What happens if they don’t start seeing either more food, or less hungry people?

“We all have a knot in our stomach about that,” Dolgan said.

Artist Steve McQueen transforms the Art Institute of Chicago

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:08:00 -0500

Mere steps inside the Steve McQueen exhibition you'll realize this is a completely different sort of show for the Art Institute of Chicago.

For one, the exhibition space is mainly dark - and vast. The first work is Static, McQueen's 2009 film which consists of a swirling shot of the Statute of Liberty. You can imitate the circling movements of the film by moving around the large two-sided rectangular screen.

Further in you'll pass a close-up of an eye bathed in red light, called Charlotte, after the British actress Charlotte Rampling. In another room three of McQueen's better known installations come together in a wide triangular structure: Bear (1993), Five Easy Pieces (1995) and Just Above My Head (1996).

In fact the entire space has been sculpted to present McQueen's work, including the construction of a series of small dark screening rooms that are accessed long passages with padded walls. At times it feels a little like traveling through one of those cinematic spaceships, only instead of the usual blindingly white interior, all the lights have been turned out.

McQueen isn't well-known in the United States, at least not outside art circles. Mention his name and most people will think you're talking about the late star of films like Bullit or The Great Escape.

Adding to the confusion, McQueen is probably best known here for directing some recent feature films, including Hunger and Shame.

This review, covering 20 years of his work, will introduce the artist to a wider circle of fans. But even those familiar with McQueen's work will have the opportunity to encounter new work. His 2003 installation Queen and Country is being shown in the U.S. for the very first time.

You'll find it in a small, well-lit room near the back of the exhibition. McQueen worked with photos of British soldiers who died in Iraq. He printed them up as large sheets of postage stamps. They're framed in glass and hung in a large wooden cabinet.

He made it in 2003, as the British Imperial Museum's Official War Artist to Iraq, and aimed for a different view of the war.

McQueen says his ambition was "to look at this conflict outside of newspapers, outside of television or whatever we get information from as far as how we get our information on conflicts."

The Steve McQueen retrospective is at the Art Institute through next January.

Food pantries can't meet demand

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:43:00 -0600

As holiday menus are being planned, local food banks are scrambling to feed everyone in need this coming year. Area soup kitchens and food pantries are seeing record numbers of people through their doors.

Kate Maehr heads the Greater Chicago Food Depository. She said food pantries are seeing much more of a new demographic - people who have jobs.

"But when they get to the end of the month and they've paid all their bills, they don't have enough money to buy food at a grocery store. Increasingly - that's the story of hunger in America," Maehr said.

The food banks like the one Maehr runs aren't able to supply as much food to pantries as they used to. This year the Greater Chicago Food Fepository is 7.3 million pounds short the amount of food they gave away by this time last year.

That's because of the rising cost of food. Maehr said area pantries and kitchens are having to close or scale back their services because they can't meet demand.

The Food Depository estimates 1 in 5 Cook County residents are food insecure - meaning they don't know where they'll find their next meal.

Maehr urged Chicagoans to contribute canned food to collection areas around town.

Rich dog, poor dog: Foreclosures fill animal shelters while high-end pet products take off

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:50:00 -0500

When people lose their jobs—and their homes—things like food and vet care for their animals start to look less like priorities.

At the Animal Welfare League in suburban Chicago Ridge, behind doors plastered with posters asking for donations of dog food, are hundreds of panicked, barking dogs. Communications director Terry Sparks says the number of animals they’re dealing with has doubled since February—and it’s clear to her that a lot of them are victims of the ongoing foreclosure crisis.

“We find a lot of real estate agents finding abandoned animals in houses,” says Sparks. “They’ll go to show a house that’s been foreclosed and they’ll find a poor starved dog in there.”

Linda Estrada, the League’s Executive director, was present when a vacant house turned out to have not just one starved animal—but two. “There was one dead dog and one live dog, and he was bones covered with skin,” says Estrada. “He was a skeleton. We pulled him through, but he couldn’t even walk.”

And while those stories are tragic, it’s no picnic when people bring in their own pets to shelters. Cook County Animal Control’s Donna Alexander has seen older people—and their aging pets—especially hard hit.

“The bills keep on getting higher and higher and higher, and they can’t afford to keep [the pets],” she says. “So we get a lot of elderly cats coming into the system, and a lot of elderly dogs and a lot of very tearful owners that reluctantly have to give them up.

And those elderly dogs, they don’t get adopted so fast. “If you see a fifteen year-old dog with arthritis in a cage, you’re going to be a bit reluctant to try and adopt it,” says Alexander. “Because you want the dog to live more than a year if you’re going to put your trust in this dog and you know the dog’s only got about a few more months.”

An un-adoptable dog. That’s pretty grim. And although official numbers are hard to come by, it’s clear that the recession has produced hordes of abandoned and relinquished pets.

(Meanwhile, there’s this weird data point from the city of Chicago that we should explain: The number of animals coming into Chicago’s animal-control system has actually gone down in recent years. But all of that reduction is in stray animals—which have been dropping sharply in number for years because of an aggressive spay-and-neuter program. But the number of pets who have been handed over to shelters by their owners has gone up in the city as well.)

Rich Dog
Even with more pets becoming homeless because of the recession, the pet products industry has continued to grow, increasing its business through every year of the recession. This year, The American Pet Products Association says the industry will bring in nearly 51 billion dollars. That’s five percent more than in 2010. The Association’s president, Bob Vetere, says much of the growth is in high-end food and convenience products.

“People who aren’t feeling the pinch at all--or feeling it much less, they’re migrating to even higher end types of foods and types of products,” Vetere says.

He means products like the High-Tech Pet Company’s electronic Pet-Activated Door. A story about this product from HGTV ends with “The door will set you back three hundred dollars,” an HGTV announcer says in one clip, “but that might be a small price to pay for your dog-duty emancipation.”

Emancipation? We thought letting the dog out was the easy part.

And then there’s the food, from companies like the Canadian firm Orijen, which touts its “Regional Red” kibble as “setting an entirely new standard for dry dog foods…[replicating] the same diverse balance of fresh meats, fruits, vegetables and grasses that dogs would encounter in their natural environment.”

Regional Red also costs about five times as much as Kibbles’n’Bits.

Vetere says the high-tech products tend to be purchased by baby boomers and young professionals, people who want to be able to keep up their lifestyles while making sure their pets at home are taken care of.

So some dogs—maybe they’re the canine One-Percenters—are doing just fine in the past few years. But as with people, it has not been a good time for most dogs to get old, sick, or poor.

* * *

For this week’s Windy Indicator, we cut over to the Glenwood Sunday Market in Rogers Park, where, alongside the organic farmers and the artisan ice cream vendors, David Nels has set up shop on a Sunday morning, sharpening knives. Customers drop them off, and Nels puts them on his slow-turning whetstone while the owners go pick up their organic greens and grass-fed beef.

He says the bad economy has been good for his business. “We’ve started to become less of a wasteful society,” says Nels. “We’ve actually gone from, ‘We’re gonna rely just on restaurants and take-out,’ to ‘We’re watching more cooking channels now, we’re becoming a little more daring.’”

Which means: Cooking more at home.

Which means: Wanting a sharper knife.

So: Knowing that money can be scarce, Nels has the following advice for anyone considering buying an expensive carbon-steel knife from Germany or Japan: Check out a thrift shop or a garage sale first.

“Sometimes people will discard something just because it’s dull,” he says. “You know what? Only a few dollars to get it sharpened and you might find yourself a little treasure. I’ve had people come back with big smiles on their faces, they’ve found two- three-hundred dollar knives at a Goodwill store, and they paid two or three dollars for them.”

He also says: Don’t be so quick to get rid of a knife that’s not the latest and greatest.

“People will sell what their parents gave them or handed down to them as a wedding gift, and not realize the quality of the knives,” Nels says. “And a lot of the knives made 20 years ago are really good quality metal.

“A lot of the knives made today are made with surgical steel: Very good knives--they’re a little bit lighter—but they don’t hold the edge as well as some of the older models. You’ll find yourself sharpening a lot more with some of the newer models versus some of the older ones that have heavier, harder steel.”

If he’s giving customers advice that means they’re going to come and see him less often, then it sounds like David Nels is not kidding around about having plenty of business.

New study says 1 in 5 Chicagoans are 'food insecure'

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:20:00 -0500

A new study by the Greater Chicago Food Depository says one in five Chicagoans are “food insecure.”

The agency looked at data from 77 city neighborhoods and 119 Cook County suburbs over the past decade. It says that 20.6 percent of Chicagoans and 15.4 percent of Cook County residents report a decrease in quality or quantity in their diet.

“Hunger [in the past] has been defined by did you go to sleep wishing you had something else to eat or not having enough food,” says Mari Gallagher, principal of Mari Gallagher Research and author of “Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Chicago.”

She said she does not find the statistics surprising.

“Hunger today also has a lot to do with people running down to the fast food place and, for a couple of dollars, filling up on a lot of empty calories," Gallagher says.

The Depository survey found the most insecure communities were concentrated on the Southwest and West sides of the city. In Chicago proper, Riverdale (40.8 percent), Washington Park (34.0 percent), Englewood and North Lawndale (both 31.2 percent) had the highest rates of food insecurity, while Ford Heights (55.5 percent), Robbins (45.0 percent) and Dixmoor (38.7 percent) had the highest rates in the suburbs.

For comparison, the national and state rate for food insecurity last year was a little more than 14.5 percent, according to a 2010 survey by the USDA.

State officials promote Asian carp as a solution for hungry families

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:05:00 -0500

Illinois officials hope they can make progress on two different problems by feeding Asian carp to hungry families.

The invasive species of fish has been added to the state's "Target Hunger Now!" program, which encourages hunters and fishermen to donate food to the needy. The state plans to promote Asian carp as a tasty food later this month with a cooking demonstration in Chicago.

The carp have been spreading across Illinois rivers and streams, killing off native species. Officials want to create demand so that commercial fishing will reduce the carp's numbers.

In March of 2010 the Chicago Reader provided several well-regarded chefs with Asian carp and asked them to try and prepare the fish. The results were mixed; Lockwood’s Phillip Foss described the carp as “about as good of a freshwater fish as I've found, period,” whereas Paul Kahan and team were “creeped out” after a few attempts at butchering and aborted their attempt. Most noted the difficulty of obtaining meat from the fish given its unusual bone structure.

The state Department of Natural Resources says Target Hunger Now! could process up to 40,000 pounds of fish a day.

Food bank shortages lead to innovation

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 06:21:00 -0500

Food banks around the country are trying to keep their shelves stocked as more people in the U.S. struggle to get enough to eat. Increasingly, that means finding new ways to salvage food that would otherwise go to waste.

One innovation is being tested at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee. In a back room at the food bank's warehouse in Gray, Tenn., dented and crushed cans containing everything from green beans to beets are piled high on a counter.

In the past, these cans all would have been thrown out, because no one knew whether bacteria had slipped through a crack, spoiling the contents.

But Scott Kinney, who's in charge of finding food supplies for the food bank, says that might be about to change.

He puts several damaged cans into a box-shaped machine with a clear lid. It's a vacuum packaging machine — the kind usually used to seal food in plastic.

"Right now it's setting up the vacuum," he says, as the machine motor starts to hum. "You can watch; the cans will move a little bit as the vacuum gets to its highest pressure point."

The cans vibrate, then puff up like little balloons as the machine sucks out all the air in the chamber. They return to normal when the machine stops.

Kinney takes out one of the cans, running his hand along the outside. It's dry, which is a good sign. He says if there had been a hole, the vacuum would have sucked out some of the food.

Kinney says this system is still part of a pilot program, but at this food bank alone, it could mean tons of additional food for needy people. Out of 300 cans run through the machine the day before, only one had to be thrown away because it showed signs of a leak.

"The good news is, it was cat food," Kinney says.

Rhonda Chafin, the food bank's executive director, says Second Harvest of Northeast Tennessee distributes about 8 million pounds of food a year, but it needs more because demand continues to grow.

She already gets lots of donations from local supermarkets and retailers, but she has her eyes on other potential donors.

"We still have hospitals, hotels, caterers, restaurants that could give prepared food that has not been utilized, that's still in the kitchen, that was left over," Chafin says.

The challenge is convincing potential donors that it's a good thing to do, and then finding a way to store and transport the food safely.

Jonathan Bloom, author of a book called American Wasteland, says Americans squander about 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. — or 150 billion pounds a year. He says that's far more than what's needed to feed the hungry.

"All throughout the food chain, there's a winnowing process, where anything that doesn't look quite right or isn't the right size gets cast aside," Bloom says. "And this squandering of perfectly edible food is happening from farm to fork. The main culprit here is wanting our food to look perfect."

He says lots of retailers prefer to throw damaged or bruised food away, rather than donating it, for fear of being sued if something goes wrong — even though there are laws protecting donors against such suits.

Farms are another promising source of more food donations, says Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks.

"We know that today, there is 6 billion pounds of produce that is grown, but never distributed," she says. Much of it is plowed under when market demand falls short. Now, Feeding America is talking with farm groups about how to get a billion pounds of that food a year to the poor.

"The good news is it's healthy food, which clients need," Escarra says. "The challenging thing is a billion pounds is a lot of food and it is highly perishable."

So, along with buying machines to check out damaged cans, food banks are likely to be in the market soon for more refrigerated trucks and mobile pantries, so they can get all this produce quickly and safely to those who need it.

The skinny on smoking: Why nicotine curbs appetite

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:52:00 -0500

Scientists say they have finally figured out how smoking helps people keep off extra pounds.

It turns out that nicotine activates a pathway in the brain that suppresses appetite, according to a study in the journal Science. This discovery should lead to better diet drugs, the researchers say.

The finding comes after decades of research showing that smokers tend to be a bit thinner than nonsmokers, and that smokers who quit tend to put on weight.

Researchers made the discovery after stumbling onto a major clue recently, says Marina Picciotto, a professor of psychiatry at Yale and one of the study's authors.

The clue turned up during experiments looking for chemicals to treat depression, Picciotto says. A scientist at Yale named Yann Mineur was giving mice a chemical that's a lot like nicotine, she says.

"He was watching these mice and he said, 'You know what, they don't eat as much as the mice that didn't get this medication,' " she says. "And so he decided to follow that up. It was a window into how nicotine might be decreasing appetite."

The scientists knew that nicotine must be triggering a response in certain brain cells. So they started looking at cells in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain known to regulate appetite. And they focused on a type of nerve cell, called POMC cells, known to be involved in eating behavior.

Sure enough, nicotine made these POMC cells more active. But the researchers still needed to figure out how nicotine was communicating with these cells.

To find out, the team took a closer look at the different types of receptors on the surface of the cells, Picciotto says.

"And we actually thought that maybe the same nicotine receptors that make you want to smoke, that make you rewarded when you smoke, would be the ones that also control appetite," she says. "But we were wrong."

So the team looked at another type of receptor. These receptors don't make you feel good — they're involved in the so-called fight-or-flight response that occurs when animals or people encounter a threat.

It turned out these fight-or-flight receptors responded to nicotine in a way that reduced hunger. That would make sense from an evolutionary perspective, Picciotto says.

"The fight-or-flight response is one where you actually want to preserve your energy to do something very important," she says. "So maybe you don't want to be out there eating while you're supposed to be running away from a tiger."

The nicotine research does not mean people should take up smoking to lose weight, Picciotto says. But for people who already smoke and want to quit, but don't want to put on weight, she says, nicotine gum or a patch might help.

Still, Picciotto says, any form of nicotine has a downside, and scientists who study weight loss agree.

If people used, say, a nicotine patch, "you might find that patients do lose weight but then become dependent on a patch all the time," says Michael Cowley, who directs the Obesity and Diabetes Institute at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Fortunately, Cowley says, Picciotto's new research hints at a much better solution: drugs that suppress appetite without triggering the brain circuits involved in addiction.

"What this shows is that there's a whole new class of drugs that can potentially be used as weight-loss agents," Cowley says.

Picciotto's lab has already shown that a nicotine-like chemical called cytisine causes mice to eat less.

Cytisine comes from a natural source: the laburnum plant, a flowering shrub found in Eastern Europe, Picciotto says. She says it's sold there as an herbal smoking cessation product.