In the quick and easy way to make a difference department, this Saturday is the National Association of Letter Carrier's annual food drive. If your post office is participating, you can leave bags of non-perishable food by your mailbox and the letter carriers will take it away and deliver it to local food pantries. Last year, they delivered 700,000 pounds of food to food banks and by extension to hungry people in our communities.
Food banks and food drives won't stamp out hunger. Hunger is a systemic problem and can't be fixed by those of us with food doing feel-good service projects once a year. But that doesn't make these projects unimportant. We can, in fact, provide food to hungry people, so that -on a particular day, for a particular meal- they don't have to be hungry. We can confront the excess that lives in our cupboards and do something to change it. (I have SIX unopened jars of peanut butter. Clearly no one eats this around here, but I keep buying it. What's that about?) We can involve children in service, so that it becomes a seamless and unremarkable part of their lives. And most importantly, perhaps, we can acknowledge that for no good reason, there are hungry people in this country and in this world and we can do our little part to say, "No more, not today!"
Go pack your bag!
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