Friday, December 30, 2011 at 02:44PM Vermonters are known as trend-setters in farm-to-table eating from local producers. They're proud of their agrarian roots and what their farmers produce in a short growing season. Some community leaders share their predictions for 2012. Among them, that localvorism will be refined, and re-defined.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 02:25PM The Vermont Foodbank asks the public to do “Nothing” about hunger. Breaking away from traditional appeals, the Foodbank’s “Nothing” campaign evokes the desolation of hunger and offers something to do about it. Cans of “Nothing” – 14,000 empty cans with slots for collections – will be sold for $2.99 each at all Vermont Hannaford Supermarkets. Proceeds from the sale of each can benefit the Foodbank and help provide nourishing meals for Vermoners.
Monday, May 23, 2011 at 03:04PM The urbanesque Barre Town may seem an unlikely epicenter for a "food sovereignty" movement, but at last week's town meeting, residents quietly threw down the gauntlet for agricultural self-determination.
Link to full articleThursday, February 17, 2011 at 03:53PM Vermont continues to show improvement in its participation rate for the federal food stamp program, but advocates say it might be hard to sustain that growth in the face of cutbacks and an increasing need.
Link to full articleWednesday, December 22, 2010 at 09:12AM Some people don't have family to share the holidays with. And many elderly and disabled Vermonters are isolated by frailty, illness or the weather. It's these people that Meals on Wheels caters to. And as VPR's Nina Keck reports the people who make and deliver those meals say it's a vital service that gives both ways.
Link to full articleMonday, December 13, 2010 at 03:52PM Vermont was been ranked the sixth hungriest state in the country in a federal government report last year. Twelve percent of households struggle to get enough food on the table and one in 20 Vermonters is labeled “severely hungry.” At the same time, many Vermonters face hard choices between buying food and heating their homes. Vermont Public Television’s monthly “Public Square” program, airing Thursday, Dec. 16, at 8 p.m., will look at these problems.
Link to full articleFriday, November 19, 2010 at 03:11PM According to federal statistics more than 13 percent of Vermont households are classified as "food insecure." Speaking on Vermont Edition, John Sayles, executive director of the Vermont Food Shelf, told VPR's Jane Lindholm that the designation refers to people who may be skipping meals and relying on food banks and food stamps to get by.
Link to full articleThursday, September 30, 2010 at 03:15PM Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 04:57PM Vermont’s next governor will face a host of challenges — mounting budget deficits, an unsure economy, the future of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. But from the kitchens of beaten-down homes on the state’s back roads to the back rooms of apartments on the streets of Burlington, Vermont faces another problem, largely absent from day-to-day political wrangling — hunger. “I’ve seen a lot of empty freezers,” said Suzan Condon of the Central Vermont Council on Aging. “I saw one fridge that just had butter in it, and that was a dairy farmer! Nine times out of ten, our farmers are living in trailers, freezing to death in the winter.”
Link to full articleTuesday, May 18, 2010 at 11:50AM When Vermont anti-poverty workers learned of the death Monday of longtime advocate Edna Fairbanks-Williams, they marveled at everything the 77-year-old great-grandmother of 16 brought to the cause — and the humble, honest and occasionally humorous way she did it. For all their education and empathy, Shullenberger and most other social justice leaders lack such hardscrabble experience. Now that Fairbanks-Williams is gone, they fear the state has lost a valuable resource for connecting Vermonters with the human face of poverty. An estimated 65,000 Vermonters — 10 percent of the state's population — live below federal poverty levels.
Link to full articleTuesday, April 13, 2010 at 10:08AM C&S Wholesale Grocers has given $500, plus a sizable food donation, to assist the Vermont Campaign to End Childhood Hunger. Officials with C&S have provided the necessary materials to the campaign’s Cooking for Life in the county, a collaboration between VTCECH and the University of Vermont Extension’s expanded food and nutrition education program. The program is a six-week course designed to provide local participants an opportunity to learn essential cooking skills and how to purchase an affordable, healthy meal. Once the program is complete, participants will take home the groceries they need to recreate the meals they learned to cook within Cooking for Life.
Link to full articleThursday, January 7, 2010 at 01:26PM A record 83,342 or 1 in 8 Vermonters currently rely on 3SquaresVT (formerly Food Stamps) to buy their monthly food and participation continues to rise. 3SquaresVT is designed to be a nutrition supplement for limited-income Vermonters; yet as the economic recession lingers and jobs remain scarce, more Vermonters count the benefits as their only source of support.
Link to full articleVCF Staff
About one-fourth of the people eligible for food stamps have not signed up, according to a national survey of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which put Vermont's participation rate at 73 percent (compared to a national average of 66 percent).
Link to full articleWednesday, January 6, 2010 at 09:48AM Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 05:28PM Tuesday, September 8, 2009 at 02:37PM The Burlington Free Press reports that this September, national hunger action month, the Vermont Foodbank "is urging Vermonters to fight hunger in their communities." John Sayles, the CEO of the Foodbank, states in the article that "one in eight people in Vermont uses the charitable food system and more than 20,400 of them are children." Thus, "this month the food bank is calling on Vermonters to give a little, and feed a lot."
