Food Justice with the Oregon Food Bank (podcast)

Welcome to another installment of the Oregon Brewery Running Series Podcast; Inspiring Oregonians to Be Active, Have Fun, and Give Back. We host family-friendly, 5K fun runs that start and end at some of Oregon’s best breweries.

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Today on the podcast, we are talking again with Kyle Hummel, the Corporate and Community Relations Officer for the Oregon Food Bank. We’re partnered with the Oregon Food Bank as part of our virtual challenges this summer.

RELATED: The Emerge Stronger Challenge with Kyle Hummel from the Oregon Food Bank.

In this episode, Kyle shares a brief update with us about how the Food Bank is doing since we last spoke with him in May. He talks about the behind-the-scenes operations of the Oregon Food Bank, gives an update about how they are distributing food during the COVID crisis, and also how we can all help.

We also talk about the connection between social justice and food justice and how you can’t have one without the other.  The intent of this conversation isn’t a history of the systemic food injustices that exist in our country. Rather, we talk about what’s currently happening as a way to further educate ourselves to look holistically at food insecurity and how we might start looking to solve these issues together as a community.

Listen now!

Stats and Quotes

Kyle shared several powerful quotes and stats with us during the call. Please listen to the full episode to hear them in context, but here are a few that jumped out to me.

…food justice is racial justice and that also extends into commonplace equity. It’s LBGTQ equity, it’s equity for migrant workers, etc…

…there can’t really be food security and food sovereignty without sovereignty for all people.

…minority groups are four times more likely to live in food deserts.

…Basically the lack of access, lack of capital leaves a lot of minority groups in a position where they’re disconnected from their food and from the community. And it’s difficult to establish a sense of place that’s rooted in their meals, because it’s about more about survival.

…Normally in a single year, the Oregon Food Bank would have about a $500,000 purchase budget… we’re spending a million dollars every week right now, purchasing food to distribute because of the amount of demand there is.

… According to Feeding America, our national partner, they estimate for every 1% in unemployment rise, it’s 86,000 more Oregonians that become food insecure.

…93.6% of every dollar (raised by the Oregon Food Bank) goes directly to the mission to fighting hunger.

…food is a basic human, right. So let’s link those things together and we can create…. communities of power that will never go hungry.

Graphs Shared During the Call

About The Oregon Food Bank

When Drew and I were thinking of a non-profit to partner with for our virtual challenge, we knew we wanted an organization that has a strong track record in the community. We also knew we wanted to partner with an organization that wasn’t just doing stuff for COVID relief, but would be around for awhile. It was also important that it was an organization that was meeting very immediate and necessary needs.

This is how we found the Oregon Food Bank and the more we get to know what they’re doing, the more we like them.

Here an excerpot from their website:

We’re probably not what you expect when you think of a food bank. In Oregon, we do things differently.

We started off like most food banks did back in 1988. That’s when Interagency Food Bank and Oregon Food Share merged to become Oregon Food Bank, and we distributed USDA Commodity Supplemental Food to over 200 hunger-relief agencies. Today, Oregon Food Bank collects food from farmers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, individuals and government sources. We distribute that food through a Statewide Network of 21 Regional Food Banks and approximately 1,200 food assistance sites serving all of Oregon and Clark County, Washington. It seems like a big job, and it is. We absolutely couldn’t do it alone. But, distributing food is not the entire job. Like we said – we do things differently in Oregon.

As you probably know, the COVID pandemic has closed most locations where people experience food insecutiry typically rely on for meals (schools, community centers, churches, etc). This has created a big gap in the way kids, seniors, and other at risk populations find food. To respond to this unprescidented need, the Oregon Food Bank has issued the #EmergeStronger Challenge. This is intended to not only meet the current need, but also emerge strong once we go back to “normal” whatever that may look like.

Join our Fundraising Campaign!

With the help of the Oregon Food Bank, we’ve created this special giving page to raise funds to go directly to their #EmergeStronger Challenge. Our goal is to raise $5,00-0 through our May and June challenges. If you are able, contribute something to the campaign.