Two recent KNOW Hunger Nutrition Fairs conducted in Vicksburg and Jackson drew 40 local organizations and more than 800 participants. The events, part of the Urban League-Tyson Foods Hunger Project Mississippi, provided free food and health screenings, nutritious cooking and exercise demonstrations plus access to programs for the underserved.  A donation of 34,000 pounds of food kicked off the fairs. [...]

Tyson Foods, Inc. has completed a 10-city string of food donations, marking the end of a campaign in which the company donated 193,000 total pounds of protein to food banks across the southeast. As part of its 2012 “Show Us Your Nugget Face” promotion (www.ShowUsYourNuggetFace.com), where the public voted on their favorite children pictured with Tyson Chicken Nuggets, Tyson Foods [...]

Share Our Strength will debut a new curriculum for its Coins for Kids program in March that may “make change” in the way students learn about money. Aleta Greer, an elementary school teacher with the Alpine (Calif.) School District near San Diego, created the program last winter. The idea was to mesh identifying coins with the community service requirement of [...]

$500K Grant Will Provide Meals to Children in Need Thursday the corporate campus at Tyson Foods celebrated being named McDonald’s USA’s 2010 Supplier of the Year. But there’s something even more important to cheer about. The honor was primarily earned by the enhanced cost savings, increased sustainable supply and food safety standards that our food service group is delivering. As a McDonald’s [...]

We’re in the process of doing some research about attitudes and perceptions of hunger.  More details to come, but it’s a bit of follow-up on some of the informal research we did last summer with participants of RAGBRAI.    Last week we watched four different focus groups in two distinctly different parts of the U.S. come together to share their perceptions. [...]

  Arkansas—our home state—ranks  11th in the U.S. among states for total agricultural production.  Lots of food produced here.    Yet according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, it ranks #1—worst—among states with the highest percentage of children at risk of hunger.   Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe thinks it’s time something is done to erase that paradox.   That’s why he was [...]

We’re trying to help The Food Bank for Monterey County (California) get some new friends. Facebook friends, that is. For every new “like” they get on their Facebook page for the next week, we’ll give them 100 pounds of food–up to a 30,000 pound truckload.

Gayle Keck from the San Francisco Food Bank discusses the face of hunger in her community. Tyson will donate 100 lbs. of food to the SF Food Bank for every comment to this post (up to a 30K lbs. truckload)

By Ed Nicholson We recently spent a week traveling through Iowa with the rolling circus that is RAGBRAI  (I still have lots left to talk about there; more later).   The bicycle ride features 15,000 registered riders and thousands more who come along for the ride. Practically every state in the union is represented. One of the things we did as [...]

Check out our video from the first three days at RAGBRAI 20101

  The Food Research and Action Center  (FRAC) has a very informative piece of research in Food Hardship: A Closer Look at Hunger–Data for the Nation, States, 100 MSAs, and Every Congressional District. Here in order are the metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) with the highest rates of food hardship in 2008-2009 1. Memphis; Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas 2. Bakersfield, California 3. Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, Ohio-Pennsylvania [...]

    Participants in the WeCanEndThis Cause Lab By Ed Nicholson On Monday, I had the privilege of sitting in on the first WeCanEndThis Cause Lab, a day-long think tank at the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, focused on arriving at new solutions to the problem of hunger in the U.S.   Big vision guy, Scott Henderson conceived [...]

    By Andrea Sherwood Does food insecurity impact peace and war or the choices children face? Share your thoughts. Let’s have a discussion as uncomfortable as it will be as we sip on our coffee, tea, soda or beverage of choice while we blog and “engage” from a distance. After reading, Ishmael Beah’s, A Long Way: Gone Memoirs of a [...]

by Ed Nicholson A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned AgChat, the excellent Twitter discussion about food production  that occurs every Tuesday evening from 8-10 Eastern.  Once a month, the group uses the hashtag #foodchat to broaden the discussion beyond agriculture.  This week’s #Foodchat topic will be Food Insecurity.  If you’re involved in hunger relief, your perspective is critical to this [...]

    By Ed Nicholson A lot of people know the statistics about hunger.  They sincerely believe something should be done. They know it in their heads. A lot of people know enough to talk about it.  But they’re not doing anything about it. They just need to know it from the neck down  to really be motivated to do [...]