Food Insecure Americans

You could put a Trader Joe's or Walmart on every corner, and food insecurity could still not afford to eat or to buy what they should be eating. Why? Because America's food system is designed from the farm bill on up to make calories cheap and nutrition expensive. That's why the face of hunger in America today is an obese person. Food insecure Americans are forced to fill up on food that's loaded with sugar, fat, sodium, little nutrition. Hence the answer isn't a full stomach, it's a healthy meal. So my next learning was about money. Nonprofits tend to spend 75 percent of management's time in fund raising. They do great work. It's the air they breathe. But... funder fatigue sets in, funding dries up. So I wondered instead of seeking donors to continually fund our mission. Year after year, would it be possible to have a mission that could fund itself? Well, we did something interesting, we actually went into a food insecure neighbourhood, and ask the people what they wanted. And they said, we don't want handouts, we want to buy tasty nutritious food we can afford. We're not looking for charity, we're buying food now, we want to keep buying food. Don't make your store needs-based, everybody should be able to shop there. We don't want to feel stigmatised by shopping in a store that's just for poor people. Another light bulb, turns out people are even hungrier to keep their dignity than for nutrition, which means we can use the dignity problem to help solve the funding problem.