For the third year in a row, the San Francisco Food Bank has launched the Hunger Challenge, a week-long opportunity for bloggers and others to walk in the shoes of America’s hungry. The challenge: Eat for $4 per day per person, the current amount of the food stamp benefit provided to recipients.

Participants this year include veterans of the challenge and those brand new to it. In addition, California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma has joined the roster.

Hannah of Project Open Hand admitted that though the Hunger Challenge will provide a solid education in one facet of being poor in America, she’s working from a place of great advantage:

“As I walk in the shoes of a food stamp recipient, I realize that I will have a hot shower each morning, clean clothes to wear each day, a safe home to return to after a long day work, and a warm bed to sleep in at night. Thus, I will only encounter one of the many hardships endured by the poor every day. However, it is my hope that this experience will help me gain a better understanding of what I call the “food insecurity epidemic” and provide elucidation on ways people like me and you can help to alleviate this societal problem.”

Vinette Gutierrez of Hello Vinette! went slightly over budget during her shopping trip at the beginning of the challenge. “On my list of groceries, I got mostly carbohydrates and starchy items since they were the least expensive,” she said as she embarked on the week.

“I hope I’m not being overly confident and optimistic but I think I can handle this,” said Hello Cupcake. “At the very least, it’s only one week and as it stands now, I am very conscious of my food spending habits.”

Dana of The Food Stamp Diet had already run into a challenge starting on Day 1: she hadn’t gone shopping for her groceries yet, she woke up craving restaurant pancakes that wouldn’t fit in the budget for the week, and her boyfriend gave her a homemade piece of candy that, also, she could not eat while on the challenge.

“I’m not pleased. So now I guess I’m gonna go to maybe Safeway or maybe some fruterias on mission and see what I can get for cheap. I have $28 for the whole week but I’m not sure I’m going to spend it all today because I’m worried I won’t ration properly for the week and then I will run out. I am going to try to have some fruit and veggies this week even though I’m sure that will take all my money.

It’s gonna be a beans and rice kind of week I guess.”

The Day 1 challenge for Kate of Some Dreams Come True and her husband, Mark, was when her in-laws invited them over for dinner.

“One of the challenge rules is no accepting handouts – after all, you could just set up to be at another friend’s house for dinner every night.

But, it got me thinking about what would happen if we were really living on food stamps. Would that be the end of social eating? I really don’t think so. While I really wouldn’t think anything less of anyone using food stamps, I don’t think I’d be advertising it if I was. So, I did what I’d usually do – asked what I could bring.

Mark and I ended up bringing dessert. And, in the spirit of the challenge, I wanted to make something that would fit into our $8/day budget. I ended up whipping up another Strawberry Sour Cream Pie. The total cost for the pie was $5.18.”

Learn more about the program, and check out the full list of participating bloggers, at The Hunger Challenge’s site. It’s not too late to sign up and participate!

• Planning…and worrying a little…
• Bringing deprivation into stark relief
• Telling stories with the Hunger Challenge bloggers
• Hunger Challenge: Day One
• Good food/Good Food

But on the way up to my office, I ran into one of my coworkers in the elevator, bearing a bucket of fragrant sweet peas that perfumed the lobby and couldn’t help but lift spirits.

“Just like your grandmother used to grow,” she said. Apparently, they’d overrun a vegetable bed, and since she was going to pull them out anyway, she cut a swag of them to bring into the office and share with everyone here.

The flowers disappeared quickly, whisked into offices by the handful. By 11 a.m., the bucket in the kitchen was empty, and everyone’s week was just a little brighter.

• You can always grow more
• Them’s some powerful beans
• One successful delivery
• A-pee-logy required?
• Waste not, want not

They were visiting me for the first time in this new city I called home, and I wanted to show them the newly-dedicated Cathedral of Christ the Light, which I’d been attending since its dedication Mass just two months before. That celebration swept me up: the hymns, the readings, the prayers were all given in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Tagalog. People wore big Sunday hats, kente cloth, silk Ao Dais, and Oakland A’s windbreakers. We passed the peace among us, pressing white hands to brown, smiles everywhere. It made the list of the most memorable and moving Masses I’ve ever attended.

I wanted to share this amazing place with my family.

We celebrated Thanksgiving Mass, and, at the end, greeted the couple behind us, an American woman married to a Nigerian man. My Dad and the man began reminiscing about Lagos, where my family lived for two years when I was in middle school, and talking about what has changed there since then. The man invited us to travel there with them. The woman invited me to join the choir. By the time we wrapped the conversation, it had been nearly 45 minutes. We all hugged as if we were old friends.

“I want to show you guys the healing garden,” I said then. “I haven’t been able to figure out where it is.”

The garden project attracted controversy during its planning stages. It was designed by a clergy abuse survivors’ group, hand-in-hand with the Oakland Diocese. It is tucked out of the way, in a place where survivors can come and meditate, cry, heal, but where they can do so out of sight of passersby on the main plaza, and without actually entering a church.

I can only imagine how reticent an abuse survivor might be to enter a church.

We found the garden on the cathedral grounds map and rounded the corner of the building. None of us spoke. None of us could have spoken had we wanted to. I made a sort of broken sound as I read one of the two plaques that read “This healing garden, planned by survivors, is dedicated to those innocents sexually abused by members of the clergy. We remember, and we affirm: never again.”

My father raised me as a Catholic, though my mother is a staunch Protestant who would not compromise her strong and fervent beliefs to join a church with which she could not agree 100 percent. My father, too, was raised as one of six children in a devoutly Catholic family, and my father’s youngest brother is one of the most gentle, most wonderful priests I have ever met. He has chosen to serve his entire career in upstate New York, and I can only hope the small parishes where he has devoted his life have any idea how lucky they are.

Uncle Steve, you see, is one of the very best of the good guys.

He is a priest who understands how love, humility and deep and abiding faith, combined with intelligent, proper discourse, can lead to a higher understanding of the broken and human Church. His diocese has sent him in to help heal parishes during terrible situations because he is both deeply spiritual and a thoughtful attendant to his flock, but also an incredible parish administrator. Like all his siblings, he is brilliant at what he does, and passionate.

It is because of him that, after I got divorced, I pursued and got an annulment. He presided over my wedding, so I wanted to close the books properly, in the eyes of the Church, on the failed relationship.

It is very much because of him that I continued to attend Mass regularly, even after many of my friends had abandoned organized religion. In fact, for the first year I was in Oakland, I not only sang in the Cathedral, but even cantored at the Masses. I credit his influence with keeping me on my knees even as the pastor of that parish preached before the 2008 elections about how we needed to vote with our “Catholic consciences” on issues like marriage equality and abortion rights (I did vote with my Catholic conscience, which, I must say, is identical to my Genie Gratto conscience. I voted for Barack Obama.).

But for a long time, my resolve to stay in the Church has slowly crumbled as my faith has grown. Along the way, I’ve hoped for an American split from Rome, thinking that might create a more liberal Church that is more friendly to the issues I care about. But honestly, based on the news exposed over the past decade and my personal connection to those stories, I don’t think the American Church has any idea, either, how to comport itself in a good, rather than a harmful way.

Still, I’ve managed to reconcile, for years, my pro-choice beliefs, my support for marriage equality, my assertion that there is zero reason that women should not be priests, with my ability to still attend Mass and be fulfilled by its ritual power.

Even less than a month ago, when I got some news mid-day that socked me in the gut so hard I could do nothing but shake and cry at my desk, my first instinct was to leave the office and go and sit in a pew of the Cathedral, tears rolling down my cheeks as two of the musicians practiced hymns for a later Mass. I lit a candle. I sent my prayers for peace in my heart up toward the soaring, light-filled rafters. It was more sanctuary to me than anything else I could think of.

But the news out of Rome only gets worse, not better. And on Wednesday, I read a piece in The Stranger in which Paul Constant demands his own excommunication:

“I demand to be excommunicated because I do not believe women are second-class citizens. I demand to be excommunicated because your missionaries are informing impoverished citizens of third-world countries that birth control is a sin when it is in fact the single most important thing they could do to gain some small amount of control over their economic situation and health. I demand to be excommunicated because your church has become a hate group as virulent as any this world has ever seen, one that is unnaturally obsessed with the sex lives of good men and women across the planet. I demand to be excommunicated because I do not condone child rape or the concealment of child rape.”

I am not ready to make Constant’s demand. I am a woman who always harbors hope for good, for better, for change. But I noted, this year, that I didn’t bother attending services for Ash Wednesday. That I ignored Easter. That I ate meat on every Friday in Lent. I noted, this year, that I’ve stopped singing at the Cathedral, that I don’t go to Mass anymore, and that even thinking about the current Pope spikes my blood pressure. And I agree with everything Constant says: I do not want to be associated with any organization that espouses those values.

I am not a survivor of clergy abuse. But this issue has touched my family and, therefore, me. The Church is broken, and as long as its current leadership is unwilling to deal with its past and present in an unequivocal way that heals that break rather than rends it further, I must turn away. I cannot condone this. I cannot continue explaining to people how I reconcile my personal position with the fact that, by giving my time, my voice, and my money to any agent of the Church of Rome, I am supporting something so deeply and systemically flawed as to perhaps be unfixable.

I hope. I pray. I want it to be different in my uncle’s lifetime. I want a whole, not broken, sanctuary, one in which healing gardens like the one here in Oakland are unneeded.

I remember, and I affirm: Never again.

• Eat at Bill’s? Not any longer
• Repot at your own risk
• A garden poem
• The nerd approach to garden location
• Normal becomes newsworthy

At the end of the weekend, on my way home from the airport, I stopped at my local Whole Foods, a behemoth of a store in itself, and certainly a bastion of its own panoply of processed foods. Let’s not kid ourselves, right?

But I was psyched to find, there in the produce section, sandwiched (oddly) between two different kinds of radishes, a pile of bunches of beautiful baby golden beets from Happy Boy Farms, a local producer that I buy from at the farmers’ market almost every week.

Sure, it was Whole Foods. And sure, it’s California. But the fact remains that, in this country, the food producers getting the tax breaks, the government support and attention, and the most shelf space in most American grocery stores are the industrial producers, not the smaller, local guys like Happy Boy.

This week, though, you have an opportunity to help change that balance. This week, Change.org is hosting a crowd-sourcing competition called 10 Ideas for Change in America, and the top 10 ideas will be presented to relevant members of the Obama administration. Even better, Change.org will mobilize its grassroots network to support those 10 ideas.

Among those ideas? Slow Money, a radical idea to fund real, healthy food by investing in small producers and local farmers. The return on that investment—for our environment, for our health, for our food security—is certainly more than any results I’ve seen in my 401(k) lately…

The voting on the top 10 ideas runs through Friday, and I encourage you to go over and check out the options. I’d love to see Slow Money make it into the top 10, but there are other great ideas that will improve food systems, including the American Farmland Trust’s effort to save ranch and farmland across this country, and an effort to put a garden at every school.

Don’t delay. It’ll take about five minutes of your time to promote 10 ideas you think can change the world, and maybe change what’s on the shelves at your local grocery store.

• How you can help Midwestern farmers
• How to save community food programs in two easy faxes
• Menu for Hope underway today
• Act now, and pledge to end hunger
• Tomorrow, declare your Food Independence

Here is what sinks my stomach to a dark pit: I cannot help but think about the 30,000-foot view that all of us who aren’t there have. We have access to reports, and television, and photographs, and social media, and Google Earth images of before and after. We know the world has mobilized. We know help is there, and is still coming. We know what is on the way.

But I imagine what it must be like, late at night, to lie in a park next to the remaining members of my family, smelling death and hearing moans and snores and conversations around me, and not having any way to find out that the world is out here, reaching out a hand, sending what we can to help.

There are so many who have no idea when or if help is coming.

Life is a fine balance of tragedy and joy, of death and living. Though Haiti has been on the minds and hearts of all those around me, the fact remains that we all still have to go to work, and there are parties to attend, and conversations to have about non-weighty matters. Life goes on out here in the rest of the world, no matter how unfair that may be.

So I encourage you to find ways to weave that life together with support of the people who need our help so much right now. All around the Bay Area, musicians and restaurateurs have begun holding fundraiser events in support of Haiti relief. On Monday, I’ll be stopping by Papalote, which will be donating 15 percent of their proceeds from sales at both stores to Haiti relief. Eater SF is compiling a running list of other local bars and restaurants that are making similar efforts. Support a local restaurant while supporting the people of Haiti? It’s a small thing, but it’s a way I can weave this into my daily life.

To my friends back in Iowa City, I encourage you to hit Devotay on Sunday during dinner. A portion of what you spend, whether it’s on the bacon-wrapped dates or any of the other fantastic menu items, will go to the American Red Cross in support of Haiti.

And, because the enjoyment of art, too, can be in service of the greater good, I must tell you about a fundraiser project put together by Lane Hartwell and Michael Biven, a Bay Area couple I’ve gotten to know via Twitter. They have released Onè Respe: A Photographic Benefit for the Survivors of the Haiti Earthquake. Featuring the donated work of photographers including renowned photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark, it’s a beautiful tribute to this devastated country. All proceeds from sale of the issue will go to the International Red Cross.

These things are small, but they are something. Whether you take action through these channels or another way, take action. Take action for those who have no idea whether help is coming or not.

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The random number generator has spoken, and the winner is Commenter #6: Daphne of Daphne’s Dandelions! Check your email for more information, Daphne, and congratulations.

I also must encourage you to take part in Menu for Hope, which is running from now through Christmas Day. For $10, you can buy a virtual raffle ticket to win some amazing prizes, and benefit the World Food Programme at the same time. Go! Bid! And help make a difference for the hungry.

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But, really, do it for others. Each comment left will result in another five pounds of food for the Alameda County Community Food Bank, which means a more meals for more hungry people.

So get over there! Participate! You’re a guaranteed winner, whether I draw your comment number for the gift card or not.

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We’ve never really been that kind of family. Sure, there are traditional dishes that show up often, but this year, when I sent out an email asking if anyone had any required dishes to show up at Thanksgiving, I was met with a resounding silence.

But two years in a row, I’ve served the cornbread and sausage stuffing recipe that Amanda of What We’re Eating posted just in time for Thanksgiving last year, and it may become a staple of my holiday table from here on out. Studded with delicious pork garlic sausage made locally by my favorite butcher and crumbly with cornbread, it’s the perfect gravy-delivery mechanism.

Christmas is always even trickier than Thanksgiving, because while my family has a tradition of having a big Christmas dinner, the main course rotates from year to year, and the side dishes change based on who’s contributing and what everyone feels like. But it generally provides an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary, like the year that Mom rocked a crown roast of pork so delectable that I still think about it. It’s the kind of dish I could never attempt as a single girl cooking for one, so it’s all that more fun to share a dish like that with family and friends around the holiday.

What are your favorite holiday pork recipes? In the comments, share either a full recipe or just a story about how you use pork in dishes on your holiday table. I will use random.org to select a comment number—that person will win a $50 gift card, just in time for last-minute holiday shopping!

But even better, for each comment you leave, the National Pork Board will provide five pounds of pork (up to 100 pounds) to the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Even if you don’t live in my neighborhood, your comment and story can help provide food for hungry people, and that’s the best holiday gift I know.

Thanks to the National Pork Board for providing the food donations, the gift card and sponsoring this contest. Comments will be considered valid if they’re left before midnight PST on December 18. Make sure you include an email address with your comment so I can get in touch with you if you’re the winner. On the 19^th, I’ll announce the winner!

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Disclosure: The National Pork Board’s PR firm sent me a gift card for taking the time to post about and promote this campaign.

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Late last week, a food blogger friend of mine Tweeted about a Walmart press release advertising a $20 Thanksgiving dinner. According to the press release, the dinner, which was available starting on November 4, included the following list of ingredients:

• One 12-pound Grade A turkey
• Three 11 to 15.5-ounce cans Green Giant vegetables
• Two 14-ounce cans Ocean Spray cranberry sauce
• Three 6-ounce boxes of Stove Top stuffing
• One 5-pound bag of red potatoes
• One 12-count package of Sara Lee dinner rolls
• One 22-ounce pumpkin roll cake

The Tweet spawned a healthy debate in the Twittersphere, but, even though I’m usually happy to run my mouth in support of all things local, sustainable and organic, I didn’t think I could capture the nuance of my position on this in 140 characters or less.

This is a tough one. I firmly believe that Walmart’s pricing policies—the ones where they force their suppliers to lower and lower and lower their costs year after year, creating an artificial pricing structure and forcing jobs overseas to cut labor costs—are evil. Flat-out evil.

The only way that Walmart can offer such a deal—all that food for so little money—is if they’ve forced their suppliers to cut corners and offer the corporation similarly low prices, or Walmart used this as a loss leader to get people in the door of their stores. Neither of those options are particularly in the spirit of giving and thanks and being a good neighbor. They are Walmart’s brand of business. And I abhor that. I simply abhor it.

But I’m going to be straight up and honest here. It’s not like I never shop at Walmart. In fact, I bought probably 85 percent of my supplies for my trip to Burning Man at the Walmarts in Oakland and in Sparks, NV. The stuff I bought—including my ridiculous Miley Cyrus-brand pleated skirt short enough to shock even me—was cheap, and it didn’t matter if it got ruined in the dust of Black Rock City. I’ve also visited relatives in towns like Keyser, WV, where the Walmart was really the only place to shop for electronics, clothes and other consumer goods. So I can’t be one to cast stones—I don’t think it’s right that there are places in America where Walmart is your only shopping option, but I understand it’s the reality for more Americans than I’d like to count.

There’s another aspect of it, though, that checks me from fully passing judgment on Walmart. It has nothing to do with the company or the stores or the way they do business—I repeat…I abhor the way they do business—but it has to do with the families who might not be able to afford Thanksgiving this year if it weren’t for food banks, and industrial turkeys offered up for sale at Walmart.

At the end of the day, here is what I believe: I believe we have to make radical, dramatic changes to our food system. I believe no one should ever have to eat an industrial, processed, hormone- and antibiotic-laden turkey that might be cheap at the checkout counter but also will cost way more down the line in environmental and health costs. I believe industrial food has made America sick, and we’re only getting sicker. I believe the only way to turn this around is to find ways to make local, sustainably-grown, seasonal, and sometimes organic food available at better prices to people who cannot access nor afford that food right now.

But that work is going to take time. And in the meantime, while plenty of good and thoughtful people in this world are doing that work, I still want everyone in this country to be able to sit down on Thursday and celebrate Thanksgiving. As families. As friends. As neighbors. As a community. And if, to do that, they have to eat a meal that is artificially low-priced due to location or finances, so be it. I can’t, in good conscience, ask them to do anything different.

Here are some resources and ideas for making your Thanksgiving affordable and sustainable this year:

• Mir Kamin of BlogHer has some great tips for celebrating a frugal Thanksgiving.
• Hilary Meyer of the Eating Well Blog has ideas for making Thanksgiving dinner for less than $7 per person.
• Deanna Duke of Relish! asks her readers if sustainable food can be affordable.
• Alison of Discover(ing) Sustainability describes an effort to provide food baskets that contain locally grown or produced food items for the needy in her community–an effort that I applaud!

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The idea behind Drop In & Decorate is this: bake some cookies; gather a group of family, friends, neighbors, or co-workers to decorate the cookies together; and then donate the cookies to a nonprofit agency serving basic human needs in your own community. This program has already touched lives all over the United States and Canada, and before the end of this year, the ten thousandth cookie will be decorated and donated.

If you’d like to host your own Drop In & Decorate event, Pillsbury and Wilton would like to help. Pillsbury has donated 50 VIP coupons, worth $3.00 each, off any Pillsbury product—including sugar cookie mix, icing and flour—to be distributed, first come, first served, while supply lasts, to anyone who plans to host a Drop In & Decorate event (max. 5 coupons per person). And Drop In & Decorate will include a Comfort Grip cookie cutter, donated by Wilton, while their supply lasts.

Write to lydia AT ninecooks DOT com for more info on how to get your free coupons and cookie cutters. And if you need help getting started, visit the Drop In & Decorate website for a free guide with all the information you’ll need to host your party.

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