A Call For Action
Following the spread of a deadly coronavirus pathogen from its source in Wuhan, China to countries around the world, a global surge in hunger has brought the impact of food insecurity into critical focus. The first confirmed case of the virus known as COVID-19 in the United States was in January 2020. In the months since then, life as we’ve known it has been drastically altered. For an increasing number of Americans and for millions around the world, food insecurity is a daily struggle.
At home, we are reconnecting with our kitchens and eating together as a family. As David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker wrote in May 2020, “The simplicity of home cooking has a way of evoking powerful feelings and recollections. Some of us conjure images of days spent in the kitchen with our families, whereas others contemplate the improvisation of new meals or recipes from a favorite cookbook. The common thread is that certain tastes can make us feel, at least for the moment, that all is right with the world.” Food matters.
In that spirit, I joined a small group of friends last March who were concerned about the effects the pandemic would have on food insecurity at both a local and global scale. As cooks ourselves, we saw in cooking a way to raise donations from the community to help people struggling to feed their families. With the help of an MU grad student and Zoom technology, our team worked from home to create an online food blog called “The Common Ingredient” that stresses the power of food to feed the spirit.
Over the past months, recipes and comfort food stories have been submitted by local Columbians and Missourians beyond Boone County eager to contribute to the effort. To help feed those in need at this unprecedented time of food insecurity, visitors to the website are encouraged to use a recipe and make a donation to one of three local non-profits—The Food Bank for Central and Northeast Missouri, the Boys and Girls Club of Columbia, and Love, INC. Their collective family food stories are now available online here: The Common Ingredient.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the World Food Program (WFP—a United Nations agency. The award recognizes their work to combat the surge of global hunger and its devastating impact during the coronavirus pandemic. Announcing the prize in Oslo on 10/09/2020, Berit Reiss-Anderson, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, “The combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation.” The Nobel committee said that the work by the WFP to address hunger had laid the foundation for peace in nations ravaged by war.
The World Food Program was proposed by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The agency was established at the U.N. in 1961 when I was in high school. In the decades since that time, it’s been a food lifeline for people around the globe affected by humanitarian disasters. The New York Times reported (10/09/2020) “The World Food Program—the largest humanitarian organization addressing hunger and promoting food insecurity internationally—last year provided assistance to nearly 100 million people in 88 countries.”
The Nobel committee pointed out that their recognition of the herculean efforts of the World Food Program comes at a time when the current administration has pulled back U.S. support for the United Nations. And incredulously this spring, it has halted funding to the World Health Organization—a UN agency coordinating the global response to the pandemic. David Beasley, the WFP’s executive director, sees the Nobel Peace Prize as “an indictment of humanity” that anyone could want for food when there’s so much wealth in the world. It is, he believes “a call for action.”
Donations large and small, global and local, can change worlds.