I come from a poor family. I never had brand-name shoes or video games, or even a Lisa Frank binder and stickers like my friends at school, but I always had plenty of food in the fridge at home. My family never went hungry in spite of the fact that we were raised by a single mother who made her living as a coffee shop waitress. I did not know, till I was a teenager, that my mom bought the majority of our groceries with food stamps. It never seemed odd to me that she went to the grocery store one time a month and stocked up on milk, sugar, lunchmeat, chicken legs, hamburger meat, and most importantly, coffee. We also got plenty of non-perishable food from a local food pantry. Living this way for so long has convinced me that no person has to go hungry in America, no matter how poor she is.
In the past, however, hunger was not so easily …show more content…
Feeding America.org, Our History, tells about a man named John van Hengel, a retired businessman from Arizona, who got the idea of a food bank in the late 1960s from a mother who searched through grocery store dumpsters to feed her family. She suggested the need for a bank-like system that could gather and share waste food with hungry families. Hengel ran with the idea, and at the end of one year, he and a group of volunteers had distributed 275,000 pounds of food to people in need. By 1977, food banks had cropped up in nearly 20 cities across the country. This organization evolved into what is known today as Feeding America. There are now 200 food banks associated with the Feeding America organization. This agency gathers funding and rescued food from numerous corporate and private donors and then shares the wealth with more than 46 million Americans through local food pantries, and through school and senior food
In the past, however, hunger was not so easily …show more content…
Feeding America.org, Our History, tells about a man named John van Hengel, a retired businessman from Arizona, who got the idea of a food bank in the late 1960s from a mother who searched through grocery store dumpsters to feed her family. She suggested the need for a bank-like system that could gather and share waste food with hungry families. Hengel ran with the idea, and at the end of one year, he and a group of volunteers had distributed 275,000 pounds of food to people in need. By 1977, food banks had cropped up in nearly 20 cities across the country. This organization evolved into what is known today as Feeding America. There are now 200 food banks associated with the Feeding America organization. This agency gathers funding and rescued food from numerous corporate and private donors and then shares the wealth with more than 46 million Americans through local food pantries, and through school and senior food