RABBI LENNY GORDON (Congregation Mishkan Tefila): I am doing the Food Stamp Challenge, and many of my colleagues are doing it during this week before Thanksgiving. And I am sure that this will inform our teaching to our communities, our community Thanksgiving events, and our Thanksgiving meals.

Starting off my own personal Food Stamp Challenge with a day with our teenagers is actually very important for me. We’re going to do a little menu planning and shopping-trip planning before we go to sort of think about what we are going to be looking for…and then to go out there and price it and try as we’re going through, creating what essentially will be for me my week’s food supply.

Coming off the book and film “The Hunger Games,” the kids came up with this idea that the theme for the year is Hunger is No Game.

TEENS IN SUPERMARKET: $1.84; $1.50 for these. So we’re saving some money.

RABBI GORDON: The point is to always hold in mind that we’re trying to replicate an experience that is not a game. For a slice of people who have to choose between rent, medication, food, that you might sometimes have this as your total food budget.

TEENS AND SUPERVISOR IN SUPERMARKET: So we can put these on last, and then if we have enough for the extra second one, we will. OK.

RABBI GORDON: When you go to a supermarket, you can’t just buy whatever you want.

CASHIER AT CHECKOUT: $28.34 is your total.

RABBI GORDON: During the days of the Food Stamp Challenge, one of the things that–one of the repeated experiences is leaving a meal and not being sated. We’re gonna have a little meal together at the end of our day today, just so that we sit down together and say, “OK, this is what a meal might look like for a family to sit down together, and this is what they’d be eating.”

For the people doing this, it’s not a hardship, it’s not a crisis. It’s something we’re doing to deepen our understanding about America. You know, there’s a story that I was told that, you know, sort of was transformative for me about a teacher in an elementary school looking at a girl who was falling asleep in class. And he said to her, “What’s wrong? Didn’t you have breakfast this morning?” And she said, “No, it wasn’t my turn.” And it was like, yeah, you know, there are people who are making decisions with multiple kids about who can have a breakfast before they go off to school. That’s what’s at stake.

Our synagogue is involved in collecting cereals and canned soups that are given as part of a food pantry. The teens who are doing the gathering of materials now, during the days and weeks ahead this year are becoming the ones who do the deliveries.

The tradition of the prophets was a tradition that said whatever you are doing is not really working as long as there are people who are hungry, who are without clothing, who are without shelter. When we talk about food insecurity, when we talk about the fact that there are people who are not sure where there next meal comes from, that’s where our vision needs to be.

The Food Stamp Challenge will culminate for me on Shabbat. And then, as the Sabbath ends, an opportunity to say, “OK, and now I can return to the normal routines of life,” but a little transformed by understanding that there are others for whom going back to normal meals is not an option.

NAT TURNER (Our School at Blair Grocery): This garden is the result of a lot of blood, sweat and tears and hard work in a neighborhood that a bunch of folks had given up on.

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Community activist Nat Turner is surveying a site people rarely see in the battered Ninth Ward of New Orleans. His community garden provides fruits and vegetables to people hard pressed to find fresh produce in these parts.

TURNER: Anybody in the neighborhood can come by and some time this morning somebody’s going to stop by and say, “You got any okra? You got any Creole tomatoes? You got some bell peppers? You got whatever?” And some people just come by the garden and if they want to pick it themselves, they can pick it themselves.

VALENTE: New Orleans’ Ninth Ward is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls a “food desert.” Food deserts are communities with little or no access to healthy food. For the urban poor, here and elsewhere, grocery shopping is often limited to places like this: higher-priced local convenience stores that are short on fresh healthy food and long on snacks and liquor. The problem extends well beyond New Orleans. The Agriculture Department estimates that 23.5 million Americans live in food deserts, more than a quarter of them children. The reason food deserts exist comes down to simple economics: large grocery chains and high-end supermarkets say they don’t have enough of a customer base in some neighborhoods to make opening a store profitable.

KATHLEEN MERRIGAN (Deputy Secretary, USDA): There are a lot of different solutions to food deserts and one size doesn’t fit all.

VALENTE: Increasingly though churches and other faith-based organizations are stepping in to help. Nat Turner’s project is called Our School at Blair Grocery, a learning center named after a store that existed on the site before Hurricane Katrina. His garden or “urban farm,” as Turner likes to call it, is more than just a pipeline for providing fresh produce. His students learn composting, poultry husbandry, and greenhouse management, among other things.

TURNER: It’s a safe space for young people to work in and be around in a neighborhood that otherwise is kind of wild, wild West and a little bit dangerous. We have classroom time, we have outside time, we’ve got just kind of casual kicking and hanging out time.

VALENTE: The produce is free for people in the neighborhood. Through a combination of government and private funds, young people are paid to work in the gardens and also learn to cook the food they grow.

TURNER: The other challenge is people don’t really know what to do with food. You know, they’re not sure how to cook fresh vegetables. So it’s easier to buy meat and make French fries, right? And so what you end up with is kids who have full bellies, but they’re starved.

VALENTE: Food deserts contribute to high rates of diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease. The problem is particularly acute in areas where the only option for food shopping is a small neighborhood convenience store.

KEVIN BROWN (Trinity Christian Community): We really need to care about the entire person, holistically. If we’re just caring about a person’s soul, their spiritual part, then we’re not really caring about people.

VALENTE: Kevin Brown grew up in Holly Grove, another neighborhood devastated by Hurricane Katrina. His father was the pastor of a church in the neighborhood.

BROWN: In our community, there was a high incidence of heart disease, diabetes and food-related illnesses. And so we envisioned using space that had been ruined by Katrina in a new way, repurposing this old nursery to become a farm and market so that we can feed the people of the community and take care of some of those food-related illnesses.

VALENTE: Brown’s project receives funds from Trinity Christian Church and Tulane University.

BROWN: We have a discount for community residents. One of the benefits of eating locally is you don’t have to ship in it from California, so we can keep the cost down a little bit. The other thing is if somebody volunteers here—we have a lot of community volunteers—we give them the vegetables.

VALENTE: These days, small neighborhood gardens are also popping up all over the city on previously abandoned lots and even in some residents’ backyards. This past summer, 30,000 teenage volunteers—unmistakable in their in brightly colored T-shirts—arrived in New Orleans from Lutheran congregations across the country to help till and plant. Sanjay Kharod works to connect local residents with organizations and groups, like these Lutheran volunteers, that can help them grow food.

SANJAY KHAROD (New Orleans Food and Farm Network): There’s a long history of growing in the city, and what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to encourage people to do that again.

VALENTE: By and large, residents have reacted enthusiastically.

HENRY MARSHALL, JR. (Gardener): I go to the store, if I decide to buy me some strawberry, pop one of them open, taste it, and there’s no taste to it. You know, and I grew strawberries in my yard and picked that, and they’re nice and sweet.

VALENTE: Food deserts have become more numerous in New Orleans since the hurricane. According to the Congressional Hunger Center, the average grocery store here now serves 16,000 people—twice the national average. Not having a full-service grocery store ultimately costs communities millions of dollars in what’s called “grocery leakage, money that people spend outside their community for food.

DEBRA SURTAIN (Apostolic Community Garden): We built a 40-foot raised bed and in that raised bed we started growing tomatoes, basil, mint and peppers. We grew and we harvested already the collard greens and mustard greens.

VALENTE: Another trend is for churches to plant their own gardens. The Apostolic Outreach Garden is the dream come true of Debra Surtain. A trained master gardener, Surtain felt compelled to act after learning that her state ranks in the top 10 for obesity or diabetes. Now, 27 members of her church are part of its garden club.

SURTAIN: It doesn’t cost anything right now, we just ask them for a donation because of limited funds.

VALENTE: Surtain and other food activists say what they are doing can only be a start. They insist the nation needs a broader discussion about how—and what—its citizens are fed. First Lady Michelle Obama has made battling childhood obesity a personal cause and has championed teaching children how to garden.

MERRIGAN: People say to me, “How can you have obesity and hunger at the same time?” They seem like they’re problems at odds. But in fact they have the same root cause, and that’s lack of access to good healthy foods.

VALENTE: Government can advise and educate the public about healthy eating, but ultimately it can’t demand people change their eating habits or force supermarkets to locate in poorer neighborhoods.

MERRIGAN: Maybe you have to do something innovative. Maybe you actually have a mobile supermarket, grocery, that comes into a community. So on Wednesday night when the bookmobile comes and the community health facility comes on wheels, the grocery comes on wheels as well so people can get access to the food that they need.

VALENTE: Nat Turner says the national discussion about food has to move beyond “food security”—whether or not the poor have enough food to eat—to something broader.

TURNER: A more important conversation is to talk about food justice where people not only have access to it, but they can afford it, where the food is grown sustainably so it’s not full of chemicals and all that kind of stuff. That the money for the food stays in the community, and so moving, bringing it up a notch from food security is bringing it up to food justice, right?

VALENTE: Food justice, these activists say, is not merely a question of health, it is both a fundamental right and moral imperative.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Judy Valente in New Orleans.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: At eight a.m. each day, the weigh-in begins at a regional health center. Babies are weighed and the girth of their arms is also measured, a color-coded proxy for malnutrition. There’s still the odd green, or normal. Children in the yellow zone are most common. In a few weeks many more will fall, like Amina, into the red. More tests followed to assess her condition before Amina was transferred to the emergency feeding center 10 miles away. It’s near capacity, and the medical supervisor expects they’ll begin pitching expansion tents much earlier this year.

DR. HASSAN AOUADE: In May, our admissions were up more than ten percent from 2011, and that usually means our June and July will be really bad. The peak is usually in August.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ironically, the frequency, the very routineness of such crises could contain the damage in Niger this year, certainly compared to the last famine in 2010.

BISA WILLIAMS (U.S. Ambassador to Niger): This is not like the situation in 2010. I think we are better prepared, and I think it is because the government of President Issoufou really did alert the community very early. They sounded the alarm as far back as October, September of last year.

DE SAM LAZARO: Unlike earlier governments, which denied or downplayed famines, Williams says President Mahamadou Issoufou, elected to office early in 2011, has declared food security a top priority.

PRESIDENT MAHAMADOU ISSOUFOU: I remember the first big drought in 1973-74. Then again in 1984 we had another one. Since then, the time between droughts has been getting shorter, and I believe this is attributable to climate change.

DE SAM LAZARO: The president said he wants to take Niger beyond its chronic food emergencies.

PRESIDENT ISSOUFOU: That’s why we have created the 3N initiative—Nigeriens helping Nigeriens. It’s a structural response to the food crises that are consistently linked with our recurrent droughts. We are convinced that drought does not need to mean famine.

DE SAM LAZARO: A key part of the 3N program is to expand a greening initiative that began two decades ago. This former French colony is land-locked. The Sahara lies in the north, and it has steadily crept south, turning farmland—arid to begin with—into desert. International aid groups like World Vision have led the effort, sharing the president’s goal of going beyond humanitarian aid.

MICHEL DIATTA (World Vision): If you see the humanitarian response, it just come and respond to a need. But the long-term programming is something that really matters for World Vision. That is why FMNR is one of these initiatives that is mainstream in all of our programs.

DE SAM LAZARO: FMNR stands for Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration. It begins on barren patches like these, where World Vision and others have launched temporary employment projects.

ABDOULAYE SALEY: They give us food to dig these holes. We get four kilos of maize and six kilos of beans. This land is very dry, and they told us it will have trees. We can have better crops and fodder for our animals.

DE SAM LAZARO: The shallow, half-moon shaped depressions they’re digging trap rain water and tree seeds. It’s hard to imagine anything sprouting in such conditions. But in non-drought years there’s just enough rain to transform the land, and it’s already happened in a wide swath of southern Niger.

CHRIS REIJ: If you look around you, not a single tree that you see here has been planted. It’s all coming from seed stock in the soil, or coming from trees that were cut in the past, and the root system is still alive, and given chance to emerge, it will grow, or from seeds from the manure that livestock deposited here.

DE SAM LAZARO: The trees have kept desert sand storms at bay and returned land to productivity, says Chris Reij, a Dutch scientist who has worked in this region since the 1970s.

(speaking to Chris Reij): So this is a crop, it doesn’t look like much because it looks like it’s coming out of a desert.

REIJ: This is millet, which is one of the main crops here. And it has just been sown probably two weeks ago. But in three months time, it will be about one and a half to two meters high, and this whole field will be lush green.

DE SAM LAZARO: In the old days he says farmers used to clear their fields of trees or sapling. Under colonial laws, trees were state property, seen as a timber or forestry resources. Drought and rapid population growth added to the cutting, creating a virtual desert visible in this 1975 U.S. Geological Survey satellite picture.

World Vision Video: The leaves on the soil will protect the crop from drought. It will hold the moisture in the soil. Too easy!

DE SAM LAZARO: Chris Reij and a colleague, Tony Rinaudo, began championing agroforestry and a model for protecting trees on farmland that they saw practiced by a farmer in Burkina Faso, Niger’s western neighbor. Their work was picked up, among others, by World Vision, which produced this video. Farmers like Sakina Mati were employed to spread the word.

SAKINA MATI: We began using this technique in 2006, and it has worked well for us.

DE SAM LAZARO: One of the key goals was to dispel a commonly held notion that the payback is years away.

REIJ: Even in the first year you need to start pruning. The tree develops a trunk and starts developing a canopy, so even in the first year you already have some benefits—the leaves and some twigs that women can use as firewood in the kitchen. And by year two or three, certain trees will be taller than you and me.

DE SAM LAZARO: The leaves form livestock fodder and trap moisture in the soil. Improved soil fertility can mean better harvests, and already some villages have surpluses.

The surpluses have been gathered into a grain bank in Dansaga and about 20 other villages that are part of one aid group’s pilot project. Drought took a severe toll on the harvest last year, they say. But it hasn’t translated to famine.

WOMAN: The grain bank is helping us a lot. It is keeping our children fed until the harvest comes in.

REIJ: In a sea of difficulty, we find here examples where a surplus, a grain surplus, has been produced in the drought year 2011.

DE SAM LAZARO: Reij says Niger could some day become self-sufficient in food if villages like this are replicated on a large scale. But that “sea of difficulty” makes it daunting. Experts say it will require education and family planning. Literacy is just 30 percent, and the average woman bears seven children—a rate that will triple Niger’s population of 16 million by 2050, offsetting any gains in food production.

Then there are immediate, pressing needs of children like Amina. U.S. Ambassador Williams is optimistic Niger can make progress over the long term—also that a catastrophe can be avoided from this year’s famine. But she says it won’t be easy.

U.S. AMBASSADOR BISA WILLIAMS: There are at least 15 percent of children under two that are really, really hungry, so you are right, there is no magic bullet. It’s not—this is not something that has a quick fix to it. Development by its nature is a long-term process.

DE SAM LAZARO: For his part, President Issoufou says he’s acutely aware of Niger’s chronic neediness and of so-called donor fatigue.

PRESIDENT ISSOUFOU: I understand why donors would be tired of supporting our population. We ourselves are tired of needing the help, of not being able to feed our own people. For us in Niger, it’s a matter of shame not to be able to feed our children. That’s why we say: Please, don’t give us fish to eat. Teach us to fish for ourselves.

DE SAM LAZARO: Niger does have a head start. Remember the 1970s satellite picture? This one is from 2005. By Chris Reij’s count, Niger has grown 200 million trees over the past two decades—the only country in Africa to have actually added forest cover in the period.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Niamey, Niger.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: If growing old means growing slow, well then 89-year-old Delmar Holbrooke hasn’t gotten the memo.

DELMAR HOLBROOKE: I’m really getting ready for 90, “the big 9-0.” My family is already planning it. I am going to ski up at Mountain High early in the morning, come down and play a round of golf, and then head out to the beach to surf.

GONZALEZ: You’re not a sit on the couch kind of guy?

HOLBROOKE: No way.

GONZALEZ: Holbrooke credits his energy to a life of exercise and healthy eating, but also his faith.

(to Holbrooke): Would you be as healthy as you are, in your opinion, without your faith?

HOLBROOKE: Oh, no, no. I am what I am because of my faith. To me that is just as clear as can be.

GONZALEZ: Like many other residents of Loma Linda, California, Holbrooke is a Seventh-day Adventist. That’s the Christian denomination that observes the Sabbath on Saturday. Adventists also emphasize a healthy diet and lifestyle as important expressions of their faith, and because of that emphasis, researchers say Adventists often have remarkably good health.

PROFESSOR LARRY BEESON (Loma Linda University): Adventists have an evidence of living longer and dying at a later age. They die of the diseases of the general population, but at a much later age—eight, ten years later.

GONZALEZ: Larry Beeson is an associate professor of public health and epidemiology at Loma Linda University. It’s a health and science institute affiliated with Seventh-day Adventists that’s been studying members of the faith since 1958.

(to Beeson): And they get to that age…?

BEESON: …through a variety of different things. It’s not just one thing. It is their religious—how they relate to God and their fellow man, their diet, their exercise, their avoidance of tobacco and alcohol. All of that collectively contributes to longevity.

GONZALEZ: And because it has such a high percentage of Adventists who live long and active lives, researchers have dubbed Loma Linda one of five so-called health Blue Zones in the world.

BEESON: A Blue Zone is just an area where there is an unusual occurrence or more than what we would expect of people who live to be the late 90s, early 100s.

GONZALEZ: Diet seems to be especially important to Adventists’ good health and long life expectancy. Nearly 30 percent of Seventh-day Adventists practice some form of vegetarianism compared to only about three percent for the US population as a whole. In fact, at many Adventist institutions, such as the Loma Linda Health Center, only vegetarian meals are served.

PASTOR DANIEL MATHEWS(Loma Linda University Church of Seventh-day Adventists): I do follow a plant-based diet and have followed a vegetarian diet all my life, and I know you and all your viewers are going to look at me strangely, but I never tasted any meat.

GONZALEZ: Dan Mathews is a third-generation Seventh-day Adventist and a pastor. We talked to him about the connection between diet, health, and religious belief within his faith tradition.

MATHEWS: Genesis 21:29 states that God gave mankind grains and fruits and nuts and herbs bearing seeds—the initiation of a plant-based diet. To not take care of our bodies, which is a part of the stewardship of the earth, to not take care of our bodies is an affront to our God.

VIRGINIA CROUNSE: I feel good. Yeah, I do. I feel energetic.

GONZALEZ: We met seventy-three-year-old Adventist Virginia Crounse as she was relaxing in a whirlpool. She shared her diet and fitness routines with us.

CROUNSE: I actually eat most of the time two meals a day. I’ll eat like granola or oatmeal for breakfast with two or three fruits, fresh fruit. As long as I can remember, I exercise daily, at least six days a week. I walk at least two miles, rain, sun, or snow.

GONZALEZ: It’s not well known, but Seventh-day Adventism has already made its mark on American culinary history in what millions of people eat each and every morning. It’s the creation and mass marketing of breakfast cereal by a guy named Kellogg. That’s John Harvey Kellogg and his brother, Will Kellogg, both Seventh-day Adventists who developed corn flakes, one of the first mass-marketed breakfast cereals, in the late 19th century. They saw cereal as a health food alternative to the fatty breakfast foods of their day.

BEESON: Corn flakes and the other kinds of foods that came out of the Kellogg’s industry was really trying to deal with the whole grain thing and not trying to throw away all the nutrients when you refine and become white bread. You’re throwing a lot of nutrients away.

GONZALEZ: In our own time, as Americans search for ways to improve their diets and health, some researchers believe they can borrow some simple lifestyle ideas from Seventh-day Adventists.

BEESON: Reducing your smoking, reducing your saturated fat intake, exercising more—all that can be done by anybody. They don’t have to become an Adventist to gain the benefits that we’ve observed in the Adventist health study.

GONZALEZ: It is accessible to all of us.

BEESON: Absolutely.

GONZALEZ: At the pool, Delmar Holbrooke has his own advice.

HOLBROOKE: You have to keep your mind alive and continuing to grow, and your body just as much.

GONZALEZ: For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Loma Linda, California.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: For Eastern Orthodox Christians this is Great Lent, the 40-day period of strict fasting leading up to Easter. The Orthodox are supposed to observe fasts of one kind or another nearly all year; no meat on some days, no dairy or oil on others. Their calendars serve as reminders. The discipline of fasting is supposed to help focus the mind on God and bring the person fasting closer to God. Catherine Mandell of Clearfield, Pennsylvania talked with us about her family’s fasts.

CATHERINE MANDELL: The church generally gives us a calendar to help us track those days that we are to fast and which days we’re allowed not to fast. We have several others fasting periods during the year. If you take all those days together you are fasting for more than half the year.

The fasts vary in strictness. Great Lent is obviously the most strict of the fasts because it is the biggest feast that we’re preparing for—for Easter. We fast Wednesdays and Fridays during the regular parts of the year. We don’t eat meat. We don’t eat dairy products. We don’t eat eggs. We don’t eat fish, anything animal-related. We don’t cook with oil at all on the days that we fast from oil. We tend to abstain from alcoholic beverages and wine.

If you are an able-bodied person and you are healthy, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to fast. That being said, if you are aged or infirm, if you have some kind of illness, then you need to make adjustments in your diet.

I was born Orthodox. I don’t have any memories of not fasting from meat. We didn’t fast from dairy products or fish. When my husband and I were married, we decided that we wanted to be a little more strict, that we wanted to follow the church’s teaching that we would fast from meat and dairy and oil, so my children have no recollection of not fasting, ever.

It was very difficult at first. We ate a lot of spaghetti and tomato sauce, and we ate a lot of split pea soup, because basically those were the things I knew that I could make that tasted good, to make it more interesting. I pulled from different cultural and ethnic types of foods—Indian curries, Asian stir fries, or Middle-Eastern cuisines—to try to make food that was more tasty, more diverse, so that you’re not eating the same thing day after day and getting so frustrated and so bored with fasting foods.

ZACH MANDELL: It’s amazing when you have the resources. I mean you could make something different every day, and you wouldn’t get bored with anything. At school it’s a little trying, but I make do as best as I can.

CATHERINE MANDELL: You get so many questions about fasting when you’re an Orthodox Christian because we’re so strict with our fasting in comparison to the other churches. Fasting is not about deprivation. It’s not about suffering. It’s something that you make a choice to do that you’re supposed to do in freedom and joy so that you can get ready for the resurrection of Christ. You do it for yourself, you know, and the Bible even says fast in secret, and if for some reason you break the fast because you’ve gone somewhere and you’ve been served something, instead of proclaiming yourself as fasting you humbly eat what is served to you. Then you fast twice as hard in secret.

During Lent we don’t only want to fast from food. You fast with your mouth and your ears. You hold council with your tongue, so that you’re fasting from gossip and slander. You don’t have sex during Great Lent because you’re abstaining from the passions of the flesh. You do more acts of charity, and you spend more time in prayer. You spend more time in reading the Scripture. because that’s what makes the fast. It’s not just what you eat. It’s how much you’re eating. It’s a concept called “right eating,” eating the right foods at the right times in the right amounts for the right reason, how to correct yourself and what you need to do to get to the celebration of the resurrection, because ultimately you’re working toward getting into the kingdom of heaven.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: For decades, religious organizations such as the National Council of Churches, the Catholic bishops, and others have been working with labor organizers to try to improve conditions for farm workers, and there’s been some success, most recently in the tomato fields of south Florida, where immigrants harvest nearly all the winter tomatoes this country grows. Our report is from Saul Gonzales in Immokalee, Florida.

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Florida may be better known for its oranges, but it’s tomatoes that rule in the farm fields surrounding the small town of Immokalee. In fact, during the winter months, nearly all of America’s domestically grown tomatoes, still green when they are picked, come from this part of south Florida, and it’s a large and poor immigrant workforce that’s essential in getting that crop from plant to plate.

Tomato harvesting is still very much a “by hand” work? There is no machine that exists that does this?

STEVE MCHAN: That is correct.

GONZALEZ: Steve McHan is harvesting manager for Pacific Tomato Growers, a major producer in Florida.

MCHAN: The production volume from here is somewhere around 1,200 to 1,400 boxes per acre, and we pack 25-pound boxes is what we’re averaging.

GONZALEZ: So it’s industrial scale?

MCHAN: Industrial scale, correct.

GONZALEZ: However, Florida’s tomato industry is a business that’s long been accused of exploiting its workforce through overwork, underpay, and mistreatment. That’s turned these fields into the frontlines of a high profile national campaign to improve the lives of farmworkers.

JORDAN BUCKLEY: People who work in agriculture are among the least paid, least protected workers in the whole country.

GONZALEZ: Jordan Buckley and his colleagues are with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, CIW, and the Interfaith Action Network, which works with faith groups to help farmworkers.

BRIGITTE GYNTHER: For people of faith, for us this is a moral issue. You know, how the people who pick our food our treated.

GONZALEZ: Now to understand the plight of farmworkers you have to know something about their place in America’s industrial food economy.

BUCKLEY: They are some of the poorest workers here in our country, and yet not for a lack of hard work. It’s not some dearth of industriousness. In fact, the reason is because the increasing consolidation of purchasing among retailors. So where you have the fast food and food service and supermarkets squeezing their suppliers and demanding ever cheaper costs for their tomatoes, that’s resulted in growers squeezing their farmworkers, and that’s why farmworkers haven’t seen a real wage increase in upwards of three decades.

GONZALEZ: Florida’s tomato workers are usually paid by how much they pick, traditionally getting about 45 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket they fill. That means to make a day’s minimum wage, each worker has to pick two-and-a-half-tons of tomatoes a day. What does that kind of work pay mean for the daily lives of farmworkers and their families? Twenty-eight-year-old Darinal Sales struggles to support his wife and two girls on what he makes in the fields. Because four other farmworkers live in the same dilapidated trailer, his whole family shares one small room.

GONZALEZ: Ustedes viven aqui?

DARINAL SALES: It’s because of the situation at work that we live like this. Our pay just doesn’t last and allow us to live in better way.

GONZALEZ: Immokalee is a town full of young men from Mexico, Central America, and Haiti, many undocumented, who have come here to scratch out a better life for themselves by harvesting Florida’s tomato crops. Some of them end up victims of the industry’s worst abuses, including incidents of modern day slavery.

BUCKLEY: There have also now been nine federally prosecuted slavery operations in just the last 14 years here in Florida agriculture.

GONZALEZ: Slavery?

BUCKLEY: Yeah, literal slavery. Right here on Third and Boston we go down four blocks. That’s the site where workers were locked in the back of a cargo truck, literally shackled. We saw bruises on their wrists where they had been literally restrained by their employers.

GONZALEZ: Yet despite the dangers and pay, farmhands are eager to work. To see how eager, you’ve got to get up very early. Every morning in the pre-dawn hours this parking lot in downtown Immokalee becomes a giant open-air labor market. Hundreds of farmworkers come here looking to make contact with labor bosses. If they’re lucky they’ll be picked for another hard day of work in the tomato fields. The men and women selected are the ones boarding buses that take them to the fields. It’s in this parking lot that we met Aurelia Hinajosa, who’s worked in Immokalee’s tomato fields for nearly 30 years.

AURELIA HINAJOSA: Americans really like their vegetables and fruits, and who is going to pick it? The people born in this country have better kinds of work, and they’re not going to go to the fields.

GONZALEZ: But things are slowly starting to get better for Florida’s tomato field workers. Last year, after more than a decade of patient organizing work, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers reached a landmark agreement with growers and corporate tomato buyers like McDonalds and Burger King. The agreement gives farmworkers a penny more for every pound of tomatoes they pick. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but that one cent increase translates into an additional 32 cents for every bucket picked by workers. That in turn will boost each farmhand’s pay by about $5,000 a year.

BUCKLEY: We are basically on the threshold of entering into this new industry in having rights protected and their being this consensus among buyers that we demand humane labor conditions in our supply chain.

GONZALEZ: The agreement has also made some in Florida’s powerful tomato industry question their past actions and attitudes.

SARAH GOLDBERGER: Historically, it has not been the poster child for good behavior and good treatment of its workers.

GONZALEZ: You admit to that?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Sarah Goldberger is a spokesperson for Pacific Tomato Growers. She says the agreement between workers and the tomato industry has replaced tension with cooperation.

GOLDBERGER: It has been so non-adversarial. It is a pleasure, quite honestly.

GONZALEZ: That’s a big change?

GOLDBERGER: Yes.

GONZALEZ: Other changes in the fields, like this one owned by Pacific Tomato, include greater access to drinking water and more rest periods, regular bathroom breaks, and a zero tolerance for verbal abuse and sexual harassment by field bosses. Now that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and it allies have an agreement, they’re spreading the word about it. The small community radio station they run in Immokalee regularly tells workers listening about their rights, pay, and future organizing plans.

Radio (In Spanish): The campaign to improve the work conditions and pay in the state of Florida.

GONZALEZ: Worker advocate and former field hand Lucas Benitez met us at the early morning labor gathering to talk about how important these changes are to the men and women who pick America’s tomato crop.

LUCAS BENITEZ: That’s what we want, work with dignity. Where every worker, every person who goes to the fields feels pride in being part of the agricultural industry that is putting food on millions of tables every day and that the worker is getting paid enough to put food on the table of his own home.

GONZALEZ: However the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its allies in religious and faith groups say they have much work left to do. That includes a new national campaign focused on  supermarket chains which have declined to  participate in the penny-per-pound pay agreement.

BUCKLEY: There are three principal sectors of tomato retail: fast food, food service, and supermarkets, and now the leaders of the fast food industry are on board. The leaders of the food service industry are on board. All that remains are the supermarkets.

GONZALEZ: To keep pressure on the stores and to make sure gains are protected, farmworkers regularly reach out to religious leaders and congregations.

And so I’m joined by Darinal and Oscar from the CIW.

GONZALEZ: This morning, Jordan and workers from Immokalee, including Darinal Sales, are addressing a Presbyterian church in Naples, Florida. These speaking engagements are part of a sustained campaign to get people of faith thinking about their fairness and justice when they sit down to eat. Brigitte Gynther of Interfaith Action has been working in Immokalee for eight years on behalf of workers.

GYNTHER: You know, there are many times when we say grace we are grateful for the food on our plates. But where did that food travel? Who picked it? How did it get to us? And that is something we don’t often think about. But I think as people of faith we are called to think about the connections between us and the people who toil in the fields day in and day out to put food our plates.

GONZALEZ: For the men and women who pick Florida’s tomatoes their most important harvest has been some measure of justice and respect.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Saul Gonzalez in Immokalee, Florida.

BOB ABERNETHY: One important lobby is the Christian group Bread for the World, which fights hunger here and abroad. Reverend David Beckmann, a Lutheran pastor, is president of Bread for the World. David welcome.

DAVID BECKMANN (President, Bread for the World): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: Bring us up to date, how many hungry people are there in the United States?

BECKMANN: It’s now 1 in 7 Americans who lives in a household that runs out of food.

ABERNETHY: Runs out of food what? Each month or?

BECKMANN: The typical pattern is the last 2 or 3 days of the month, people run out of food. So the kids may not eat for the last couple days, the mom may not eat for 4 days, it’s 1 in 4 children under the age of 5 who lives in one of those households and that kind of moderate under nutrition does permanent damage to children.

ABERNETHY: Now the supercommittee in Congress failed this week to come up with any plan about the long term control of the deficit. What does that mean for you and the people who are trying to fight hunger? There was to be an across the board cut that was gonna kick in if there was this failure. Is it going to kick in and if so what does that mean for hungry people?

BECKMANN: Well, Bread for the World and other faith groups have been fighting for a circle of protection around funding for hungry and poor people because we can reduce deficit spending without making hungry people hungrier. And we were able to secure in the Budget Control Act that established the super committee and these automatic cuts a provision that will exempt some of the low income programs from cuts if those automatic cuts go into effect. So I would have liked to see the super committee reach a deal but the automatic cuts aren’t necessarily a disaster for poor people.

ABERNETHY: Because of the exemption?

BECKMANN: Yeah, and because people of faith pushed for it.

ABERNETHY: What about overseas? What’s going on there with American food aid?

BECKMANN: Well we were terrified earlier this year because the House of Representatives voted on a deep cut in food aid. Their cut would have thrown 14 million of the world’s most desperate people off food aid rations this year. So we really sounded an alarm about that, we talked to Mr. Boehner’s office, we talked to the President himself and in the final bill which passed this week they backed away from that really disastrous cut for hungry people.

ABERNETHY: A few weeks ago we heard that there were 7 billion people on Earth and the forecast was this would be going up to 9 billion by 2050. Can all those people be fed?

BECKMANN: Well I think we need to curtail population growth, but those people can be fed, and the key is an expansion of the productivity of poor farmers in poor countries. They can grow more to feed their own families, to raise their incomes. That’s where the food will come from for poor countries.

ABERNETHY: You mean rather than have it grown here and shipped someplace else?

BECKMANN: I think expanding demand for food will also be good for US agriculture but the bulk of the supply needs to come from the expansion of poor country, poor farmer agriculture.

ABERNETHY: And this week you came out with a proposal to change the system between the government and farmers in this country. What do you want to do?

BECKMANN: Well, we think it’s possible to develop a system that would be better for farmers especially small medium scale farms, fruit and vegetable growers, better for hungry people, better for a healthy food supply and that would cost the government less money. So this is an area where we want to support cuts but we don’t want the cuts to come from the nutrition assistance to poor people that’s included in the farm bill. On all these things basically we have to create the political will to overcome hunger. When we’ve had that political will to reduce poverty we’ve been able to do it in our country, and that’s what we need to mobilize now.

ABERNETHY: If all the federal aid for hunger, to prevent hunger, went away, could private charities pick up the slack?

BECKMANN: No, absolutely not. People think that but in fact all the food that we collect from all the churches and synagogues in the country, all the food banks, it’s important but it all amounts to 6% of the food that poor people get from the federal food programs. That’s food stamps, school lunches, WIC. So if Congress decides to cut the federal food programs by 6%, 12%, there’s no way that churches and charities can pick up the gap. We need to also get our government to do its part to end hunger.

ABERNETHY: David Beckmann of Bread for the World. Many thanks.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: It’s here at the Ethiopia-Somali border that some 400 refugees arrive every single day, most of them women and children, most of them fleeing not just famine, but fighting.

So far this year, 135,000 mostly women and children have registered here in this harsh but promised land for refugees. They have suffered for months and walked for days to get here. There’s food and some basic medical care — just barely enough.

LINN BIORKLUND (Doctors Without Borders): I think it’s important to point out that the emergency’s not over. It’s ongoing. We continue to see people coming and these people are living here in camps and they are in great need of humanitarian assistance.

DE SAM LAZARO: For humanitarian agencies, the challenge is to sustain the supply pipeline and keep the attention in donor countries focused on this remote region that’s seen hunger and conflict for decades. It’s an ongoing, perennial and at least partially man-made disaster. In the minds of donors, that’s very different from sudden disasters, says Mike Lloyd.  He heads a Minnesota-based group called Kids Against Hunger.

MIKE LLOYD (Kids Against Hunger): When the earthquake struck in Haiti, there was a tremendous outpouring for that event. It went on for several months. We had groups all over country wanting to pack meals, and it was a real scramble for us to meet that demand. Of course, donor dollars followed that demand for packaging the meals. When the Joplin tornado happened, of course we had a similar experience.

DE SAM LAZARO: This year, Kids Against Hunger volunteers will pack some 50 million ready-to-mix meals to be sent to needy regions around the world.  Lloyd says the response to the crisis in East Africa has been much smaller.

LLOYD: Situations like we see in the Horn of Africa are long term, they are political, at least partly political, they’re somewhat related to the drought situation but it’s been a long term political struggle in those areas and that has not excited the packers and the donors in the same way.

DANIEL WORDSWORTH (American Refugee Committee): It’s not so much about compassion fatigue. I think people are as compassionate today as they ever have been. For us, it’s actually more a belief fatigue.

DE SAM LAZARO: Daniel Wordsworth heads another Minnesota-based group, the American Refugee Committee.  ARC also saw a huge response to the Haiti earthquake.  But support for Pakistan, hit by massive floods a few months later, was far weaker.  Initially, Wordsworth says, there also was indifference toward the Horn of Africa.

WORDSWORTH: I think what we see in both Pakistan, and we’re seeing it very strongly in Somalia, is that — and it really is almost confronting to us – is the lack of belief that people have for that country. So it’s not that they don’t feel compassionate. They just can’t make the connection. They don’t believe that either change is possible there or that their money, or their resources, what they give, will actually translate into something different on the ground. That’s the crisis that we’re seeing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Wordsworth says it’s the deeds of one percent of the population that have given Pakistan and Somalia their reputation as hostile terrorist havens.  So in its fundraising campaigns for Somalia, the American Refugee Committee has tried to “de-fang” Somalia’s image, drawing heavily on the fact that the largest Somali-American community is right in its home base in Minneapolis.

WORDSWORTH: Our doctors may be Somali, our local business professionals Somali, our taxi drivers Somali. We actually get to meet the 99% on a regular basis.

Video clip: Hi, I am a star…

DE SAM LAZARO: Somali-Minnesotans — prominent and otherwise — have led a varied media campaign, drawing in the larger local community.

Video clip: We hosted a charity dinner… I’m a star because I donated money that I earned from a car wash… I organized an art show… I collected pennies for Somalia…

WORDSWORTH: It’s a whole different side of Somali culture that people don’t normally see. And then through, I think, that lens, you can see a dynamic, amazing group of people and your ability then to believe that if this country is full of people like this, there’s huge hope for that country.

DE SAM LAZARO: Is it working?

WORDSWORTH: It’s working really well for us.

DE SAM LAZARO: How do you know?

WORDSWORTH: Actually we are seeing the same outpouring of compassion that we saw for Haiti. I think we will be one of the very few organizations in the world that can say that – that we’re tracking about the same.

DE SAM LAZARO: In response to crises, donors fall into two distinct categories, according to Mike Lloyd. He says grassroots campaigns and images of suffering are less effective with large donors and philanthropists than they are with individual givers.

LLOYD: Those gifts are given from the heart. They really react to the emotional sense that they’re making a difference in the individual’s life. And when we talk to corporate givers or large donors, their dollars are usually more intended, in their minds at least, the things that are going to have lasting impact. So they’re less likely to be driven by the emotional aspect of having an impact on an individual and what’s going to happen to my dollars. Are these going to really change anything or is it just going to be the same after the dollars are gone?

DE SAM LAZARO: The American Refugee Committee says it has gotten some major corporate donations, most likely because they’re local, says Wordsworth.

WORDSWORTH: Groups like Best Buy, General Mills, the Mosaic company, U-Care, a health insurance provider. Because they’ve got Somali staff, they can see it more quickly and then the rest of the staff and the rest of the company comes around behind them and shows some solidarity

DE SAM LAZARO: ARC has used its donations to run a hospital in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The recession at home has not hurt contributions. The group says people tend to be more sympathetic and responsive in tough times. Larger donors, though, need more convincing that their dollars, should they contribute, will bring enduring change over the long term in addition to easing the immediate suffering.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro in Minneapolis.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, guest host: We have the story of an organization founded after federal agents raided the nation’s largest kosher meat-packaging plant in Postville, Iowa, and discovered widespread mistreatment of workers. The group, Uri L’Tzedek, which means “awakened to justice,” wants more transparency in the kosher industry, and they’ve started with restaurants.

RABBI SHMULY YANKLOWITZ (Founder & President, Uri L’Tzedek): What became clear to me in Postville was that we had to take responsibility. Not a one time act like a boycott, but something systemic and sustainable that would ensure that there was ethical transparency in the industry.

RABBI ARI WEISS (Director, Uri L’Tzedek): The Tav HaYosher, which we translate as an “ethical seal” for kosher restaurants, is an initiative that we launched in May 2009. We don’t charge anything for this seal. We have a licensing agreement which they sign. The criteria for our certification is, first and foremost, we want to make sure that people get at least minimum wage, and we want to make sure that overtime based on that minimum wage is given. Then we also want to make sure that people are respected, and work is dignified.

YANKLOWITZ: When we started the Tav HaYosher we said, let’s strive for the ideals. We want health care, we want animal treatment, we want environmental standards, we want fair trade, we want workers comp, all these issues, and we went into restaurants finding workers getting paid $2 an hour, $3 an hour. Ridiculous! So we said we have to first just meet law.

WEISS: One of the really exciting things about this program is that it’s a grassroots program. The people who actually go into the restaurants are volunteers, college students, graduate students, young professionals who care deeply about this mission and about this project. Every two or three months or so we have a training, and then we actually assign restaurants to each of the compliance officers.

YANKLOWITZ: There is nothing easy about the work we’re trying to engage in. We are sending young volunteers to ask owners to open their books, to speak with workers about very sensitive issues.

WEISS: We take them aside so that we create a safe space away from management, and we ask them questions to verify what the payroll actually says. How many hours have you worked? What is your pay? What’s it like to work here? Do you feel ever harassed? The feedback we receive from restaurant workers, we keep it anonymous, and we also have an anonymous tip line.

SHLOMIT COHEN (Tav HaYosher Compliance Officer): We’ve approached locations that initially didn’t meet standards. We spoke with them, encouraged them and were able to come back and actually sign them on.

YANKLOWITZ: Sitting in a dark basement with a worker who paints black and white cookies black, white, black, white all day, every day and seeing his eyes tear up when for the first time there was a customer concerned for his welfare, that rocked me spiritually, emotionally to feel the impact of merely showing somebody else that we’re present for them. We’re an advocate for them.

WEISS: We see this very much as a partnership between workers, the community, and restaurant owners.

NOAM SOKOLOW (Owner, Noah’s Ark/Shelly’s): I think I just felt as a good person, someone who believes in doing the right thing. I think it was important to set the standard. We’ve actually gotten numerous phone calls and numerous comments from customers who have come in and let us know that they are supporting us because of the fact that we have the seal.

YANKLOWITZ: This is a new wave of activism, an activism through what one eats, that what we eat and what we buy is a vote of confidence in our highest values.

DE SAM LAZARO: Tav HaYosher has certified over 90 eating establishments in 13 states and Canada.