Hungry for Answers

Headnote

Jewish organizations respond to the reality of food insecurity in the Delaware Valley.

Gabina Dopiro hunches over the touch-screen monitor outside her office at the Raymond & Miriam Klein Jewish Community Center in the Northeast, fingers dandng across the keyboard as she scrolls through her options.

Fruit? Start with applesauce, apples, blueberries, canned mandarins, fresh oranges. Protein? Frozen chicken, sardines,beans, tuna and more.

Dopiro is showing off the ambitious undertaking that Mitzvah Food Project officials consider their crown jewel: the Choice Food Program, which allows recipients to select from a broad array of items - including fresh fruits and vegetables - thatwill help ensure they won't go to bed with empty bellies.

Later on this crisp fall day, dozens of clients will take their turns at the computer station where Dopiro is now sitting, and at three others arranged around the converted racquetball court in the sprawling JCC complex on Jamison Avenue.

Once they place their "orders," an army of workers will scurry to load brown bags frill of canned goods, produce, meat and dairy products for the clients to take home.

If s all about options, nutrition and dignity, says Dopiro, Klein site manager for the Mitzvah Food Project, one ofa vast mosaic of Jewish resources in the city and suburbs that are supported by organizations like the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia as they respond to the needs of a hungry population.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as "limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways," In blunter tenus, it means not knowing - or being sure - where your next meal is coming from

Nationwide, the USDA reported that 6.8 million U.S. households freed what officials termed "very low food security," meaning normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted, and food intake was sometimes reduced, because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.

Closer to home, the figures tell an equally grim story.

Some one million people in the Delaware Valley face hunger every day, according to Philabundance, the region's largest hunger-relief organization. Many of those people are Jews.

They fit no statistical profile. They are...