Ever done the Food Stamp Challenge?  Limit your budget to $25 a week–what a single SNAP (formerly food stamps) recipient is allocated. I did it for a week in 2009, and reported on it here. I’m a cook and have time to cook. I was a professional musician early in life, and learned to live sparsely. So I had a [...]

    The Tyson Truck arrives at the food bank   By Ed Nicholson  On Monday, we announced a collaborative effort, including Tyson Foods and the Social Media Club for the San Francisco Food Bank’s Hunger Challenge, part of their Hunger Action Month activities. That support included Tyson donating 100 pounds of food to the food bank for every hunger [...]

Last year, we had the opportunity to work with the San Francisco Food Bank and a great group of  bloggers to help raise awareness for hunger in the Bay Area during Hunger Action Month. It was a successful effort in which we asked for–and received–your assistance.   More than 2100 comments were submitted to this post, resulting in five truckoads of food being [...]

Gayle Keck of the San Francisco Food Bank, and Amy Sherman, who does the Cooking With Amy blog, disucss how the Hunger Challenge was put together and executed.  Several Bay Area bloggers documented their experiences of living on $21 a week (a typical Food Stamp allotment) It’s a great example of how social media can be put to good use creating much-needed [...]

John Curry is the food resources manager for the San Francisco Food Bank.  John was instrumental in our expanding the Hunger Challenge comment for food effort to all five food banks in the Bay area. In addition to being an all-around good guy , John also helps manage a unique distribution sysem for the food bank.  John discusses the system in the video [...]

By Ed Nicholson Every time I visit a food bank, I’m impressed and inspired by people who are taking limited and continually-taxed resources and working miracles with them.  Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting the San Francisco Food Bank to donate a truckload of chicken, made as part of the Tyson commitment you the readers of this blog made [...]

By Ed Nicholson As of this morning, more than 2000 comments had been submitted in the read-and-comment-for-food effort to benefit Bay Area Food Banks, meaning all 200,000 pounds of food committed to the effort will be delivered.  In fact, some has already made its way to the food banks, and more will be delivered in coming weeks. We continue to [...]

  Hunger is a serious problem in the Bay Area… • Nearly 1.2 million people in the Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma and Santa Cruz counties) are living near the poverty line, at risk of going hungry. According to census figures, these people are making less than $26,000 for a family [...]