Have you ever missed a meal you intended to eat?  How did it make you feel?  Irritable?  Distracted?  Can you imagine if you had to skip meals on a regular basis?  I can’t.

I love food and cooking.  Several years ago I started to try to feed my family by preparing seasonal food produced locally.  I live in the Mid-Atlantic states so sometimes, like in the winter, locally and seasonally is difficult.  Sure I have access to all kinds of food items, year-round at the grocery store, but much of it is neither seasonal, nor local in January.  I soon found myself wondering what people used to do when they didn’t have access to the year-round variety of produce we do today.  My mind loves to hop from one thought to another.  That question started my mind hopping down a trail of thoughts that ended with the question what do people do when they do not have access to or can not afford nutritious food to feed themselves.  I was feeling so proud of myself and the new way I was feeding my family, but I couldn’t get that question out of my head.

 What do people do when they do not have reliable access to or can not afford nutritious food to feed themselves?  

I started reading and learned the condition described in the question above is called food insecurity.  According to a report by the USDA, 49.1 million Americans lived in food insecure households in 2013, 15.8 million of them children.  In an industrialized country, with so much wealth and producing so much of the food that feeds the world, I find those numbers embarrassing and unacceptable.  So, I have decided to focus my energy and passion on this unacceptable reality of life for too many Americans.

My mission is to work within my community to bring awareness to the existence of food insecurity and help find solutions to lessen the numbers of people experiencing it.  Along the way I will use this blog to chronicle my efforts, share information and thoughts and hopefully build a community to grow ideas and create solutions to this problem facing too many Americans.