Feeding the Hungry: The Micro Level

The darker the shading the deeper the poverty.

I’ve just posted some numbers of hunger in America on LaMarotte. For a bit, in the next month or so, we’ll hear a great deal on this subject because a documentary, with Jeff Bridges in the lead, titled A Place at the Table, will make the subject current. Then in will fade again. This is a dreary subject, and having come to the end of my post, the only answer I could think of, in the context of “what do we do about this,” was that we should give more to our charities. Brigitte had already produced a list a couple of days ago.

The numbers at the macro level have a dismal sort of feel. Here I thought I’d point to how things work at the macro level. One of our old, old friends is the Christian Appalachian Project (CAP). It serves the central area of the Appalachian Region where poverty is quite astonishingly high (see map, courtesy of the Appalachian Regional Commission). CAP operates the Grateful Bread Food Pantry, located in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky, Rockcastle County. Just in the first half of 2012, the pantry served, on average, 2,057 residents of the county, equal to 51.6 percent of those living there in poverty. CAP reported, in October of 2012, receiving a $15,000 donation from The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels toward the purchase of a new 8x10-foot walk in freezer, purchased with that money—and additional donations of $5,660 from people who support CAP, like Brigitte and me. That’s how feeding the hungry works at the micro level. Here is hope that A Place at the Table will inspire many, many to become habituated to donating more; that seems to be the only way; the collective is failing us.

This also permits me, parenthetically, to record here that I am an official Kentucky Admiral. Never mind how that came about. Long story. The certificate is there, somewhere, if someone wishes to challenge me. Meanwhile, instead of belatedly buying myself an admiral’s cap, I’ll send its price to…CAP.