Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of an equitable society included ending hunger as a foundational building block. In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Dr. King said:
“I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”
Certainly, all people must be free from worry about where their next meal will be coming from in order to move beyond surviving and into thriving. This weekend, millions of Americans will honor MLK’s spirit by choosing food banks and pantries among the causes they support for their day of service. We deeply appreciate that show of caring for our neighbors who are food insecure.
We also urge our friends and supporters to join us in calling for policies that address the root cause of hunger. We seek to build equity in our society by ensuring, as a non-negotiable, that every person has enough food to eat.
To that end, the Food Shuttle is lifting our voice to support full funding of federal nutrition programs, such as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is the nation’s most effective federal nutrition program. SNAP is crucial in helping people afford groceries, but participants receive only about $6 per person per day, clearly not enough to relieve food insecurity by itself. Funding levels should align with the price of groceries.
We support the Farmers Feeding America Act of 2023, which would increase U.S.-grown food resources for food banks by investing in TEFAP, The Emergency Food Assistance Program. TEFAP helps people who make too much to qualify for other benefit programs, like SNAP, but still cannot afford stubbornly high grocery prices. It’s a lifeline for rural communities, such as those in our Piedmont service area.
We also support fully funding WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. WIC provides life-sustaining health and nutrition benefits for new parents, expectant parents, and young children, and the program is facing a potential major funding shortfall that could turn 78,000 eligible North Carolinians away.
If you’d like to join us in supporting these federal nutrition programs, click here to contact your member of Congress: Contact Us | Congress.gov | Library of Congress. Urge them to strengthen federal nutrition programs in the next farm bill.
Food security for everyone is within reach if we raise our voices collectively and insist that hunger is unacceptable. Let’s do this today in the spirit of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Photo by Marion S. Trikosko, in public domain, Library of Congress.