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ON FOOD: Feeding off of one another: Industry helps hungry kids through Share our Strength

(Dec. 22, 2008) One of every two children in Washington, D.C., is hungry, said Claudia Morris, director of the Capital Area Foodbank there. Nationwide, one in every six kids is “at risk of hunger,” said Bill Shore, founder of Share Our Strength, at the fundraising organization’s annual conference in Washington.

“At risk of hunger,” means those young people may not know where their next meal is coming from. Within the last few years SOS has narrowed its mission from working to end general hunger in the United States to concentrating on eradicating childhood hungry, partly because it’s a more attainable goal.

But even that relatively easier mission of feeding 12 million hungry kids is monumental. The cause greatly benefits from the restaurant industry’s support of a variety of programs.

Share Our Strength’s Great American Dine Out, during which participating restaurants donated a portion of sales to fight childhood hunger, now includes more than 4,000 restaurants.

Additionally, the fifth season of SOS’s Tasteful Pursuit fundraising dinners begins in January at the Lever House restaurant in Manhattan, under the direction of chef Bradford Thompson, who is the organization’s national spokesperson this year. The lineup of celebrity chefs who also are planning to hold Tasteful Pursuit dinners include Daniel Boulud, Charlie Palmer, Michael Symon and Michel Richard.

Most notably, for more than 20 years thousands of restaurants donated delicious dishes to SOS’s 46 Taste of the Nation events around the country. Taste of the Nation has raised more than $70 million since its inception.

As an organizer of a local Taste of the Nation for the last decade, I would have given up years ago if I hadn’t felt the encouragement of local and national leaders—mostly restaurant industry people. The mission is overwhelming and getting more daunting as the economy tanks and number of hungry people rises.

It is hard to continue drumming up interest in the hidden-hunger problem. How many people see bony children with bloated empty stomachs in the U.S.? Also, few of us know anyone who’s hungry.

I was hungry. Or so I was told. For the first six months of my life, I was unable to digest any kind of baby formula. My parents tried everything, but nothing agreed with me until a banana mixture did the trick after a half a year of tummy turmoil.

When I told a friend about this, he said, “That traumatic ordeal explains your love of and work with food.” He had learned during an Eastern spiritual journey that some people believe a person’s life is predetermined by what occurs just after birth.

Anything’s possible, even though the theory sounds far-fetched. We don’t know what we don’t know. Perhaps a period of hunger that I don’t remember motivates me on a subconscious level. But the most motivation I know is working side by side with others for the same cause.

During SOS’s conference speaker Michael Landgarten, who owns Bob’s Clam Hut and Robert’s Lobster Grill in Kittery, Maine, said he facilitates open discussions about what “maintains” people’s interest with his fellow members of the Taste of the Nation team that organizes the event in Portsmouth, N.H.

“I admit it, I wanted to eat for free,” said Faith Bahadurian, a former Taste chair and current food writer and restaurant reviewer for the Princeton Packet paper based in Princeton, N.J., as she candidly described her original motivation for joining SOS.

“It’s good to help make a better world, but it is also important to make a better world for ourselves,” she said. “When you volunteer in your community you meet a nice class of people and it can help you personally with development, professional visibility and credibility.”

While she led public relations for the N.J. Taste event she also was the main contact person for local media.

“So they knew me professionally,” she said. “They knew I could make a deadline and put a sentence together.” Soon she was hired at the paper as a freelance restaurant reviewer.

“Collaborating with colleagues in the hospitality industry and other industries to feed every kid in our country also feeds an emotional need: Feeding people feels good,” said Jenny Z. Dirksen, director of community investment for New York City’s Union Square Hospitality Group, who volunteers for SOS. “Working with and meeting so many incredible individuals, who volunteer their precious hours to get that work done, feels great. I feel blessed to be part of an industry that recognizes we really are all in this together.”