Twenty-Five Years Ago

Why 25 years ago you dared to see the invisible, I do not know; I was not bold enough nor good enough to see hunger then. But you did choose to see—and more, you chose to insist that what we in our complacency would prefer to leave as invisible…. must become….visible. You saw hunger in America, and you acted—with relentlessness that now stretches across 25 years of impact.

Making the invisible visible, bearing witness, living purpose…this is the work of your 25 years. You have shown corporations and chefs and citizen souls waiting to serve in every major city in America—you have shown us the link between fine dining and dignity for the invisible guest—you created Taste of the Nation—not Taste of a Country, even the very name you chose reflected the mission you pursued. From the beginning, you aimed at the right target…because you knew, a country talks, while a nation…feeds its children.

You made the invisible visible—you did this. You taught the Frontline classes; put on the cooking demonstrations, created the Great American Bake Sale, you hosted the benefits in each others’ kitchens; you lived the ungainly and impossible collaborations that fed the imaginations of your diners, and the hunger in our nation, and in doing so, YOU created a wispy fabric of purpose and passion and near desperate poignancy, a gossamer that holds us together—as the souls that bear witness and share strength.

You are the nation we seek to become, in your diverse, eclectic, courageous, kind, powerful, unstoppable fashion. You are elegance and social change—you are eyes that see and hearts that feel and strengths that are shared, time and time again. You have borne witness, and you have shared strength—and our world has changed. My world has changed—

I keep a picture on my desk, from an invisible place and a long ago day….Immokalee FL…is nowhere…10 miles from the sandy beaches… a day of citizen service with Billy….and then a day of bearing witness…changed from his service t-shirt into a white button down shirt, crossing the street with no name…walking from trailer to trailer…no hollow photo op, rather a lonely man of faith on mission….speaking to humans with a smile and a touch, bearing witness to the inadequacy of all political rhetoric, confronting the limits of the generosity we posture as a nation, but fail to deliver……then, touring the battered women’s shelter, meeting the faded old African American woman in the kitchen, with creased skin, determined eyes… ”feeding them all”, meals for pennies a person… waiting, for the black and white driving the white suburban woman and her children to us, away from the battering husband, to this shelter amidst the pines, invisible 10 miles from the resorts…

You changed our company—like you have helped change corporations from A to Z, from American Express to Zwilling Henckels—I have watched out my window as our volunteer employees tear up the corporate lawn to plant victory gardens to provide produce to the NH Food Bank; I have watched our Board of Directors on a very mini-hinges of Hope in New Orleans begin to glimpse the invisible; I have sat in the Board room at SOS and listened to peerless leaders build a revolution from their hearts. And I watched and saw through our middle son’s eyes, as he embraced the invisible, teaching classes to other teenagers at Operation Frontline.

We will end childhood hunger, once and for all.

25 years later…there is so much to celebrate, so much to acknowledge. You have forced the invisible into our collective consciousness, with a sacred constancy. And so the 12.6 million children hungry tonight in America, a blue America, a red America, those hungry children are more real, are more felt.

25 years later, $200M raised and granted, and we dare finally to begin the actual construction of the Cathedral that has lived in our hearts and in our imaginations for almost too long. Now is the time for the strategizing to end, and the urgent building to begin. If it took us 25 years to make the invisible visible, we must find a different pace for the two tasks that remain before us.

Good to see the invisible—better, to see the face of the hungry child, and to hear his question: “How can this nation let me be hungry, now or ever?” To see and to hear—the experience of bearing witness—creates a moral covenant of accountability and action—we see your face, we hear your question—and we will answer your challenge. We will not just provide emergency food networks to feed you tonight—no, we will end childhood hunger, once and for all.

It is not a question of daring; no one could question the daring that prompted you to look at the invisible and see it. And it is not a question of resources—we have the resources. 55% of children eligible for a nutritious school breakfast—don’t get that breakfast. 90% of those eligible for nutrition when school is not in session—don’t have access to that nutrition. And 4 in 10 who qualify for food stamps don’t manage to get that currency into their stomachs. If by resources, you mean funding to feed our hungry—we have the resources. But good intentions are not enough—we must connect the resources to the real need, urgently. Do we have the will?

We have a plan that does not point at success, it demands it.

Share Our Strength has a 10 point plan that ends childhood hunger. Give a child a healthy breakfast; make healthy eating normative; help those acquire the food stamps and other economic supports that are already available to working families; add fresh produce and nutritional education to the food network that you helped build nationally; feed children after school and during the summer using programs that already exist; make sure pregnant mothers and pre-school children get the nutrition that WIC and other programs effectively deliver when there is access; build a systematic public understanding, state by state, community by community, of the resources that already exist in order to end childhood hunger.

In partnership with the best community based organizations, supported by a network that has survived hurricanes and defied cynics—we have a plan that does not point at success, it demands it.

This vision is not absurd, nor rhetorical; it is a truth we cannot simply aver, or a poetry we merely appreciate—it must be the dogma we live.

25 years later, the invisible hungry have a face. Now, we must give them a voice. And in this moment of witness, in this intimate experience of human connection, between you and me and our hungry children—good enough is simply not. Emergency food shelter is necessary—but not sufficient. Soaring rhetoric is inspiring—but cathedral building is also back breaking sweat drenching heart bursting tears wrenching work—and we must do it.

For what you have done, to unleash this revolution—I say in their name, thank you. For what remains to be done, I end in silence, in the hope that we can each of us hear their voice calling to us. To us falls the burden—we chefs and CEOs, we citizens and advocates, we eyes that see and hearts that hear—to us the challenge: we must enact in real terms the promise of America—we must end childhood hunger.