I recently came across a New York Times video in which William Nuemann discusses the difference between food labels and the way people actually eat. As the leading organization working to fight food poverty in New York City, the Food Bank works hard to create a healthy New York — and understanding food labels is very important part of building a healthy diet for yourself and your family.
If you are trying to lose weight or fight high blood pressure — and if, like most New Yorkers, you have very little time to put toward building the perfect, balanced menu every night — you are probably going to glance at that label for the amount of fat or sodium contained. Then what happens?
The Food Bank’s Community Nutritionist, Christina Riley, offers regular workshops to help our food assistance network answer that exact question. Each lesson starts by asking participants to note how many servings are in a can of food, then determine how that effects the nutrition facts on that label. At a glance, the label on a can of green beans appears to say that the beans provide 15 percent of your daily value of sodium. However, a can of beans has 3.5 servings — and if you eat the whole can, you need to multiply the sodium by 3.5. This means that the can actually contains 52.5 percent of your daily value of salt. And that leaves precious little room for salt in the rest of your meals or snacks that day if you are going to stay in a healthy range. Just thinking about trying that has my blood pressure rising.
If you don’t read carefully and do a little math, you can easily be misled — but I won’t go on about that, since William Nuemann says it so well:
Food Bank For New York City continually works to raise awareness and support for hunger relief through media outreach and information sharing. Here are highlights of the recent stories that have featured the Food Bank:
NY1, “Food Bank Offers Free Tax Help As Uncle Sam Offers Sizable Tax Credit”
With tax season officially in full swing, the Food Bank For New York City, elected official and government agencies join forces to make sure New Yorkers get back every penny they deserve…read more[Includes VIDEO]
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “Free Tax Site Helps Brooklynites File for EITC Credits”
The Food Bank partners with the Brooklyn Community Foundation and Capital One Bank to provide tax assistance for the working poor in northern Brooklyn as part of our Tax Assistance Program...read more
The Huffington Post, “My 2010 Wish List for NYC”
Gordon Campbell, President and CEO of United Way NYC, brings in the New Year with a loud cheer and his recommendations of achievable goals for 2010 that will help low-income New Yorkers…read more
The Economist, Letter to the Editor
Food Bank For New York City President and CEO Lucy Cabrera responds to “The Big Apple Is Hungry,” published in January 2010 by The Economist…read more
The Packer, “Produce Industry Contributes Heavily to Feeding New York’s Hungry” The Packer — the leading source of news for the fresh fruit and vegetable industry — explores the Food Bank’s food distribution efforts, which provided more than 13 million pounds of fresh produce for New Yorkers in need in fiscal year 2009…read more
Former President Bill Clinton speaking at the Food Bank's 2009 Can-Do Awards Dinner; photo by Tran Dinh
Here at the Food Bank, we work to improve child nutrition because we know kids’ food choices can have lifelong health effects. Last week, at a press conference in Harlem, former President Bill Clinton said he learned that lesson the hard way.
We’re working to meet similar goals through programs like CookShop, which encourages the development of healthy diets among New York City students and their families, as well as community outreach and advocacy on issues like universal school meals.
With work like ours — and similar efforts from a dynamic duo like the former president and the current first lady — maybe we can protect more children from the outcomes of poor nutrition.
This January and February, the Food Bank held volunteer trainings for CookShop, our series of nutrition and health education programs for adults as well as elementary and high school students. We were able to successfully train more than 200 volunteers in three trainings – and that’s almost four times the number of volunteers we had last year!
After being trained, these volunteers will be placed in one of two programs, CookShop Classroom or CookShop For Adults.
Some of the things the volunteers learned in the training were proper knife skills, how to engage 5-7 year olds in nutrition education, how certain plants grow, how to purchase nutritious food on a sustainable income and even a surprisingly delicious recipe involving celery, carrots, orange juice and mustard!
By mid-February, our new CookShop volunteers will be helping teach low-income adults and children about nutrition and healthy living across all five boroughs.
By doing so, these volunteers are helping the Food Bank achieve a key element of ending food poverty – increasing the health of our city. New York City's low-income neighborhoods suffer from a high incidence of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension – and CookShop is on the frontline of the Food Bank’s efforts to change this reality.
Every year, the Food Bank For New York City convenes our Annual Agency Conference — the largest gathering of our city’s hunger relief community — for workshops, a panel discussion, keynote speeches and more to strengthen our city’s response to hunger.
While we face drastic cuts to emergency food proposed by New York City and State, the appearance of four of our city’s most prominent leaders at the Food Bank’s conference shows that there is strong awareness and support of the needs of low-income New Yorkers in city government.
Their words give us hope for the future of our city – please take a moment to hear them for yourself:
NYC COUNCIL SPEAKER CHRISTINE QUINN
“I can’t actually imagine how difficult and challenging your job is every day, to see people in so much need…And we all pledge to do everything we can, as soon as we can, to put you all out of business.”
PUBLIC ADVOCATE BILL DE BLASIO
“[T]here are very few things that the government does that are more fundamental than making sure the people of this city are fed. So let’s stop having emergency food be a political football and actually move forward and make sure that the city is providing sufficient funding.”
COMPTROLLER JOHN LIU
“The fact of the matter is, in New York City, we still have too many people hungry, or not getting enough nutrition or just not being able to live a healthy life – and in this day and age that’s totally unacceptable.”
MANHATTAN BOROUGH PRESIDENT SCOTT STRINGER
“We have got to begin to bring a bold food policy agenda that links food production in this city with concrete jobs.”
Our advocacy page contains up-to-date information on ways members of the public can help protect this vital program, including contact information for key elected officials and talking points people can use to help convince them that cutting funding for emergency food is the wrong way to plug the city’s budget gap.
For example, EFAP represents just 0.017 percent of the city budget — a tiny amount that supports hundreds of local food pantries and soup kitchens.
And even with EFAP funding, almost half the city's soup kitchens and food pantries had to turn hungry people away last year. With local unemployment now over 10 percent, the number of people needing help is expected to grow.
What are your reasons for protecting EFAP? Share your thoughts and help spread the word!
Part of the Food Bank’s suite of nutrition and health education programs, CookShop for Adults now aims to serve parents and guardians of the children who participate in CookShop Classroom. The new-and-improved course helps prepare adults with the information and resources they need to take the lessons their children learn at school and continue them right at their own kitchen tables.
The program works like this: participants meet for in-school workshops that complement the kids’ lessons on nutrition, food production and cooking. During the workshops, the adults learn healthy recipes, as well as nutrition-related topics including portion control, added sugars, food storage, reading food labels and making food substitutions.
In this way, we train participants to become nutrition educators for their loved ones, and provide them with the information and materials they need to conduct in-home workshops for their families.
When adults and kids are both excited about nutritious food and its benefits, the whole family will make a stronger commitment to healthy choices.
The Food Bank plans to feature CookShop for Adults participants here on Bank on It to give you a first-hand take of the effect of our new model…so stay tuned!
As I mentioned in my last letter here (A Year in Recession, Jan 15), 2009 was a hard year for the Food Bank For New York City and the New Yorkers we serve. While we anticipate that economic hardship will continue in 2010, as we look back at this past fall and early winter — our busiest time of year — all of us at the Food Bank are deeply inspired by how our supporters came together in these difficult times.
Our inspiration comes from the outpouring of support for the Food Bank’s 2009 NYC Goes Orange campaign, with more than 300 partners raising food, funds and public awareness for New Yorkers who struggle to get by. The season also saw the launch of the Adopt a Food Program initiative — a partnership between the Food Bank and Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Service that will dramatically increase volunteer support across our food assistance network.
Also, we launched the 2009–2010 CookShop school year. These unique Food Bank programs bring nutrition education to elementary and high school students as well as adults, inspiring enthusiasm for healthy, affordable foods. [PLUS: Witness our health and nutrition education efforts first-hand in our CookShop video.] And the Food Bank’s 18th Annual Agency Conference brought together hundreds from the hunger relief community, along with elected officials to strategize and build strength for the coming year.
With 3.3 million New Yorkers currently experiencing difficulty affording the food they need, it is essential that we continue this momentum together. President Barack Obama has set a goal to end childhood hunger in America by 2015. We’re now five years from that target, and I invite you to invest in our future by helping us end food poverty.
The New York Budget pas de deux is in full swing — and both Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor David Paterson are dangerously close to trampling on New York City’s most vulnerable.
The governor’s proposal also called for a $1.3 billion drop in overall state funding for New York City. In response, last week Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a preliminary budget that outlined steps the city could take if the governor’s plan succeeds — a list that includes eliminating New York’s Emergency Food Assistance Program (EFAP), which provides millions of dollars in funding to about 500 local soup kitchens and food pantries each year.
“[It’s] just a possibility, but in the aggregate it has to be something like this,” the mayor said.
President Obama seems to recognize the need to provide for America’s most vulnerable. Despite his call to cap federal discretionary funding, the budget released by the president this week calls for an investment in Child Nutrition programs, and preserves funding for emergency food assistance.
Even with this federal aid, significant cuts to food assistance at the state and local level would be devastating to those who depend on these funds to eat.
“You have my commitment that we won’t let the quality of life decline now,” Mayor Bloomberg said in his budget address, calling on New York to “do more with less.”
But those who turn to soup kitchens and food pantries are already struggling to do more with less. They are falling behind on rent. They aren’t filling needed prescriptions. The food pantry and soup kitchen are often their last resort.
It’s bad enough that families are sacrificing basic needs to balance their budgets. New York City and State should not follow them down that desperate, dangerous road.
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama’s call to freeze federal discretionary spending raised alarms about the future of discretionary nutrition assistance programs, including certain components of The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). But the budget he released on Monday demonstrates his administration’s commitment to keeping food on the tables of America’s most vulnerable.
White House Photo, Pete Souza, 1/27/10
According to an analysis by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), the president’s budget would preserve $246.5 million for commodity purchases under TEFAP, as well as another $50 million for transportation and distribution costs.
The president has said he wants to end child hunger by 2015. The expansions he has proposed, particularly for child nutrition, are a promising step — especially in a budget that includes cuts — but achieving this goal will require far more.
Food Bank For New York City applauds President Obama for protecting these vital programs during a national fiscal crisis. It’s a good starting point for a strong Child Nutrition Reauthorization that includes Universal School Meals. And it sends the clear message that feeding people in need is especially important during hard times – a message we hope state and city leaders also hear and take to heart.
Kate Hindin, This Is Your Life
Kate Hindin said: Thank you Daniel for this wonderful homage! I will always cherish my time at the Food Bank. I got to...
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A Taste of Tennis
San Antonio Tennis Lessons said: Wow great food and a a great sport, what more could you ask for?
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The Food Bank’s Community Nutritionist, Christina Riley, offers regular workshops to help our food assistance network answer that exact question. Each lesson starts by asking participants to note how many servings are in a can of food, then determine how that effects the nutrition facts on that label. At a glance, the label on a can of green beans appears to say that the beans provide 15 percent of your daily value of sodium. However, a can of beans has 3.5 servings — and if you eat the whole can, you need to multiply the sodium by 3.5. This means that the can actually contains 52.5 percent of your daily value of salt. And that leaves precious little room for salt in the rest of your meals or snacks that day if you are going to stay in a healthy range. Just thinking about trying that has my blood pressure rising.
As we 
Part of the Food Bank’s suite of 
