Robert Egger at Rooting DC 2010 from Barrett Jones on Vimeo.

By Robert Thomason

With the blizzard snow beginning to melt outside, Robert Egger leaned against a stage before a full house-audience and popped off statistics and benchmarks about food security in America like the curator of a museum on food and hunger.

The cost of a new quality kitchen is $300 per square foot, a big stretch for many local communities who need sizable spaces, said Egger, president of the D.C. Central Kitchen. The Federal government spends $16 million promoting its healthy Food Pyramid concept compared to the hundreds of millions spent on commercial advertising for all types of food. And despite persistent hunger in some sectors, about 25 percent of the food purchased in America winds up being discarded.  

But the numbers that have affected this city over the last few weeks were ones of his own making. Egger told the Rooting DC conference that during the blizzard, which shut down most of the city, DC Central Kitchen not only maintained its daily offerings of 4,000 meals, but added an extra 2,300 daily meals to address the additional needs of the emergency. In all, 45,000 plates were put before the needy during the worst snowstorm D.C. has seen in over 100 years.

The specific effort during the blizzard week were effective, but Egger said that as a whole food security and anti-hunger efforts are facing issues that could challenge their sustainability. For instance, culinary and hospitality schools are training their graduates in sophisticated inventory control systems. This means kitchens have smaller food surpluses at the end of the day and, thus, less to contribute to food pantries or kitchens for the needy.

Forty million Americans run out of food at least once a month, said Egger. Much of the reasons stem from “dumb” practices that extend from the way that nutritional value is often ignored to the fact that food that is not cosmetically or picture perfect (a bent carrot for instance) is generally rejected. “I love my work but hate my business,” he told the audience.

But then he started working the numbers again to suggest a solution. Each day 12,000 Americans turn 60 and Meals on Wheels, an elderly food program, has large waiting lists as a result. Most college students have spent about a year in public service before they started their freshman year. And there are 60,000 school cafeterias in the country that shut down
around 1 p.m. each school day and stay dormant until the next morning.

To Egger, these factoids blend together well and form the recipe for a program that would help the elderly. Why not, he suggested to the audience, form after-school cooking clubs in which students, who are already at school, help prepare meals for the elderly. The older students could drive the meals to seniors or, better yet to Egger’s mind, the seniors could come to the school cafeteria and break bread with the teen-age students in an inter-generational meal.

The elders in America have the deepest well of life experience in history, he said, and simultaneously the youth are becoming accustomed to community service. Egger submitted that these two phenomena create a perfect storm. “This is a once in a millennium opportunity,” he said.

Thomason publishes GlobalResourcesNews.com, a site on ecology and economics.

Photo credit and lots of gratitude go to Beverlie Lord of Satsun Photography for the images above.