Do you know this famous photograph by Dorothea Lange? It was taken in 1936 at a camp for seasonal agricultural workers north of Los Angeles. The woman was the 32-year-old mother of seven children, all of them living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. They were on the brink of starvation. After returning home, Lange alerted the editor of a San Francisco newspaper to the plight of the workers at the camp, presenting him with two of her photos. The editor informed federal authorities and published an article that included Lange's images. As a result, the government rushed a shipment of 20,000 pounds of food to the camp. It's hard to imagine that such acute hunger could still exist in America, but it does. Today I'm joining bloggers around the nation in drawing attention to the food insecurity that is rampant in our country, in the hope that we can come together to put an end to hunger.

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I've lured you here today with this picture of mouthwatering chocolate meringues but it's just a ruse to make you sit still for a bit of a rant. A number of things converged in the past couple of weeks and I've really got to share this stuff with you. I had the opportunity to attend the Brooklyn Food Conference in Fort Greene and sit on a panel to discuss "women's place at the table." Frankly, I was a bit miscast as this conference is heavily oriented toward policy and the other panelists were talking about single mothers, the struggling poor and disenfranchised immigrants (and me, with my penchant for expensive ingredients!), but I was able to chime in a bit about the importance of gardening. I remembered this article, about a single mother of three who had to go back to the land to feed her family—in Brooklyn!—and wound up eating better than ever before for much less money. The idea of community gardens—even a few raised beds for growing vegetables—could help change the lives of people eating in food deserts. Then I read about Seattle's new project, creating a 7-acre "edible forest" of fruit-bearing trees and plants as part of an effort to rehabilitate their local ecosystem, and I began to have some hope for the future.
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