MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger

3 Ways to Fight Hunger With Your Thanksgiving Menu

Courtesy White Earth Land Recovery Project / Native Harvest (http://nativeharvest.com)

Thanksgiving is America’s most famous meal, a time to gather with friends & family to share love, reflections and delicious food. Every time you share a meal, you can make a difference. Here are three ways to fight hunger at your Thanksgiving table – without switching out the traditional menu!

• White Earth Land Recovery Project, a MAZON grantee in Minnesota, works to restore sustainable farming & green wind-power at the White Earth Reservation. Statewide, they work to prevent GMO rice crops from overtaking wild rice. Traditional land practices enable local farmers to provide for their own elderly, disabled & families. Their projects are so successful that they have surplus stock of wild rice, organic coffee, fruit jellies & other crops available for sale through the Native Harvest online catalog. Purchasing organic crops keeps the community & its traditions alive. What better way to echo that first Thanksgiving than with delicious Native-grown food? Contact Native Harvest to see if they’re still taking orders & can ship yours in time.

Courtesy MANNA (http://mannapa.org)

• Another MAZON grantee, Philadelphia-based MANNA, makes dessert even sweeter with Pie In The Sky. The yearly fundraiser provides critical support for their programs, which deliver nourishing meals to people with acute nutritional risk. One MANNA client, Jeannine, was 80 pounds when she started receiving meals, due to HIV & depression over the loss of her husband. MANNA helps her access proper nutrition, put on weight & provide for her family when she is too sick to cook herself. MANNA pies can be ordered online until Friday, November 20th, with pick-up locations all over Philadephia & New Jersey.

Courtesy Oregon Food Bank (http://oregonfoodbank.org)

• If you live outside of the Philadelphia area, there are sweets of a different sort. Naumes Fruit Gifts donates a pound of fresh fruit for every gift basket sold. Produce is always in short supply at food banks, and one of their recipients is MAZON grantee Oregon Food Bank, which distributes 34 million pounds of food a year to food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters & other nutrition programs throughout Orgeon. Give a gift & feed the needy!

Ed Yerke-Robins

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