Volunteers Helen Preston, left, and Ron Fuller work with garden coordinator Amanda Morse to ready the soil where seeds will be planted at the Community Food Bank garden.

photos by benjie sanders / arizona daily star

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Ending local hunger will take a group effort, and apparently not enough of us are pitching in.

Sure, we donate to Tucson's Community Food Bank, but officials there say not enough of us are aware of its long-term goal — eliminating the need for emergency food boxes. That goal has proved more than elusive.

The food bank is giving out more than 15,000 emergency food boxes a month, a 25 percent jump over this time last year. A food box is designed to feed a family of four for three or four days.

Such numbers are bad news for employees in the food bank's Food Security Center, who work full time on eliminating hunger in the community.

While higher gas prices and a weaker economy are bolstering demand at the food bank, one problem is that not enough people understand the concept of "food security," said Kitty Ufford-Chase, faith-communities coordinator for the food bank and a member of its food-security team.

A community is "food secure" when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient food to meet their dietary needs for a productive and healthy life.

"We're hoping to reach people, who might not focus on food (policy) in their daily lives, to focus on food as another justice issue," she said.

To that end, Ufford-Chase has organized a dinner-and-conversation event next week with Brother David Andrews, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross religious order and an expert in national and international food policy.

Andrews said the need for soup kitchens, emergency food boxes and other such Band-Aid remedies to hunger can be reduced by having a community-based food system with community gardens, shared kitchens, and education about such food-preservation techniques as canning and freezing.

"The new era we're entering is a more ecological approach to food, so it's more a theme of sustainability in light of climate change and peak oil and the economic realities that those things are driving," said Andrews.

He is the former executive director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and a board member of Heifer Project International.

He predicted that in the future, more local labels will appear on supermarket shelves. "It will bring us back to a more diversified food landscape, and I think that is already emerging as a reality," he said.

Since processed food is less healthy than fresh produce, Andrews said it's also important that food banks have access to as much locally grown and produced food as possible.

One of the keys to food security is hooking up food banks with fresh, wholesome foods from community-supported agriculture — not the heavily processed items that typically go into food boxes, he said.