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Faces of Hunger Film Festival in NYC

September 13, 2016 by Mary 6 Comments

Faces of Hunger logo with food background

On October 14th I’ll be heading over to NYU for the annual Faces of Hunger Film Festival. Faces of Hunger is dedicated to increasing awareness of food security issues in the United States of America and is run by Palms for Life, an NYC based non-profit that works globally with organizations on-the-ground to provide access to food, water, education, and sanitation.

Faces of Hunger grid of models

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know fighting world hunger is one of my main missions in life, and it isn’t just a problem in developing countries. Here in the USA one out of seven children live in food insecure households. And don’t even get me started on the sheer amount of food waste in our country; that was a whole post on its own already! One powerful statistic I saw on the Faces of Hunger page is that if we cut food waste by 25%, we would have enough for everyone to eat. We have to hold ourselves accountable and commit as a country to make a change!!Food Security Waste Fact

I welcome you to register here for the FREE event, I think tickets are only available for another day or so, so take advantage and join us!

They will also have an auction with various items including an annual subscription to MARY’s secret ingredients. Remember, each box supports our partnership with the global organization Feed The Children, so if you can’t join us at the event, you can still buy a box and support the cause while enjoying our curated surprises to help you make memorable meals.

 

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: Faces of Hunger, Feed the Children, fight hunger, Film Festival, Food Insecurity, food waste, Mary's Secret Ingredients, subscription box

Food Waste

September 25, 2015 by Mary 17 Comments

I have to step up on a soapbox now. Most of you know of my desire to tackle the hunger problem in the United States and the world at large. That’s one reason I started the MARY’s secret ingredients subscription box business, as we are donating 10% of our profits to Feed The Children in their work to support a wide range of services to empower communities and wipeout hunger worldwide. No one should go hungry. In the US alone, over 48 million people suffer from food scarcity and over 15 million children go to bed hungry every night. In our super rich country, this is an atrocity. On the other side of the coin, the amount of food waste is horrendous.

Take a look at this John Oliver video:

Clearly this is a distribution problem. How can we get surpluses of food to the folks who need it?

And apparently many expiration dates on food are arbitrary at best. Maybe they’re put on to increase sales earlier as no decent grocery store will sell expired products and of course, they must restock.

When we lived in Summit, NJ, I made a discovery late one night at Kings, an upscale grocery store, with headquarters in the UK. I was in the store shopping a little before their 10 pm closing time and the woman in the bakery and bread department was going around filling shopping carts with loaves of bread and other bakery items. The bread was mounded high, the carts were overflowing.

I asked her what she was going to do with that. She said she couldn’t tell me.

I said, “Aw come on, please tell me.”

She said, “No I can’t.”

I pleaded, “Pleeeaase.”

She moved closer to me, cupped her hand near her mouth and whispered, “We throw it away.”

I was speechless.

She was embarrassed.

It was perfectly good bread, just not at its very freshest peak and Kings was such a high-class store, they didn’t even want to have a day-old rack. So they just threw it away.

At that point, after numerous letters written to the store’s corporate offices to get permission, I started a pick-up program twice a week for bread and once a week for the gently bruised fruits they also threw away. So three times a week, I filled our station wagon with food and delivered it to organizations that fed the hungry. It was a tiny bit I could do then. I hope to do more with MARY’s secret ingredients.

Feed The Children photo.
Today is the last day to purchase a fall box. We still have a few left. Buy one and surprise yourself with healthy ingredients and help us in our cause to feed the hungry.

Having enough to eat should not be a privilege. It is a basic human right.

Twitter logo.

 

 

 

Also, we’re having a TWITTER PARTY today (9/25) at 1 pm EST!! You can ask me cooking questions and I’ll ask you some too. Should be loads of fun! Join us!!

Filed Under: Products for sale Tagged With: Feed the Children, food waste, John Oliver on food waste, Mary's Secret Ingredients

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