Hunger Issues

Loaves and Fishes

Every other month, a group meets at the Dorothy Day Center in St. Paul to serve an evening meal to nearly 300 homeless individuals and families. Rice Krispie bars welcomed in the kitchen by noon on serving day. Contact Chris Egge at 651-426-3731 to register. Next dates: November 27.

Meals on Wheels

This program helps seniors and people with disabilities remain in their homes by providing a hot meal and daily contact. St. Andrew’s serves the Mahtomedi/Willernie area for one week every month. Regular routes are available or volunteers may be on call. Meals and containers are picked from St. Andrew’s Village and training is provided. Time commitment is about one hour midday.

Holiday Food Programs

Throughout the year, St. Andrew’s provides food baskets for families and individuals in the area. Programs are held around Thanksgiving, Easter, and the Fourth of July. Baskets include fixings for a family of four and an activity bag for children of all ages. Additionally at Thanksgiving time, St. Andrew’s offer a Feast program that brings hot food to local shelters, group homes, and halfway houses. These programs provide over 5,000 meals annually.

Food Shelf Support

In addition to the weekly food shelf collecting that supports the White Bear Area Emergency Food shelf, St. Andrew’s has a special emphasis in March on collecting food and financial donations to support food shelves in Woodbury, White Bear Lake, Stillwater, Mahtomedi and North St. Paul. Other programs throughout the year help to supply our local area with donations.

Bill’s Pantry

This organization provides healthy nutritious food for persons living with HIV and Aids throughout the metro area. Over the last several years, St. Andrew’s has included their program within our holiday food basket distribution. For more information, visit their website.

Addressing World Hunger

By Paul Pallmeyer, St. Andrew’s Member

More and more of our neighbors need help these days just to eat! The rapid rise in the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, use of corn for the manufacture of ethanol, and the weak economy are some of the causes. But the low-wage earners in our midst are especially pinched, and more and more of them come to our food shelves to supplement what they are able to purchase on their own.

St. Andrew’s can be proud of how we have been responding to this growing problem.  Alone and in cooperation with other churches in the area, we have been involved in numerous food collecting and distribution efforts in our community. Just recently, the Food Outreach distribution, in partnership with Second Harvest, St. Jude’s, Trinity Lutheran, and funded by Thrivent Financial for Lutherans (North Ramsey County Chapter), served 282 households in need.

Serious as the situation is here, it is minor when compared to hunger elsewhere.  A cartoon in a recent issue of USA Today illustrated the reality.  It showed Uncle Sam clipping coupons out of a newspaper headlined “Food Crisis” while next to him were a woman and child with an empty bowl labeled “Poor Nations.”  The woman is saying, “Coupons? We’ve been cutting out lunch!” 

But even that cartoon understates the problem. It’s not only lunch that is being sacrificed. Many don’t even get one good meal a day. Startling as it sounds, more than 800 million are malnourished and 25,000 die every day from hunger or a disease caused by poor diet.

Can we ignore this? Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer we say, “Give us this day our daily bread.”  The “us’ in that sentence are not just our immediate neighbors but all the people in the world. So in this petition we who have enough food are asking God to move us to feed those who do not – wherever they may be. 

The good news is that it can be done.  We have enough food for everyone. But we need the will to see that everyone is fed. Just distributing our food surpluses, though necessary now, won’t solve the problem. We need to help those in impoverished countries produce their own food by supplying them with fertilizers, giving them the resources to dig wells, supplying seeds, etc.  ELCA World Hunger Appeal and Lutheran World Relief do things like this.

We at St. Andrew’s want to be a part of that effort.  This fall we hope to introduce a way in which we can all participate to eliminate hunger in our lifetimes. But for now, here’s a fun way you can get started:  Log on to freerice.com. See how many words you know. For each correct answer sponsors of the program will contribute 20 grains of rice to the world’s hungry.  You will increase your vocabulary and you will help someone somewhere eat.

If you are interested in helping us move forward here at St. Andrew’s with our effort to fight world hunger or address issues more locally, call Susan Asplund at 651-762-9124.