GET OUT AND GIVE BACK/Food for Thought

Courtesy Photo Sharing a meal on the train from Venice to Florence. This is how we eat on a train...when we're famished.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. -I love to eat.

In fact, I’ll eat just because I’m happy, sad, nervous, relaxed, angry, stressed or excited. Sometimes I’ll even eat when I’m not even hungry if there’s food is in front of me.

And so it was quite the scary experience for me recently when, aside from half of a chicken sandwich and an apple, I was unable to eat for 36 hours.
 
Through a combination of bad luck and bad timing, my husband and I were halfway through an 18-hour train ride in Europe when I realized that the apple and sandwich were all I’d eaten since the night before.

My stomach was growling and rumbling, demanding to be fed. No worries, I thought. The past two legs of the train ride had dining cars (which we regretfully didn’t use) so I planned to visit the dining car on the next train, which we were boarding in ten minutes.  

Except this particular train didn’t have a restaurant car, or even a guy who would walk up and down the aisles selling candy. It was an overnight train and apparently it didn’t accommodate late night snackers.

So not only was I starving, but it would be at least seven hours before I’d even have access to food. It was not an option. Food simply wasn’t available.

And I panicked.

Of course it all ended well and I bee-lined for a Snickers bar the minute the overnight train pulled into the next station, but it really gave me time – seven hours of time, to be exact - to think about the millions of people who wake up hungry each day and wonder if they’ll have food sometime in the next seven hours.  

Or seven days.

It reminded me of the volunteer work I’d done in the last few months at our Alexandria church and Food and Friends (www.foodandfriends.org). The church project required making 50 turkey and cheese sandwiches, stuffing them in a baggie, and placing them, along with two Oreo cookies, in a paper bag for next-day distribution to the neighborhood’s needy.

In contrast, Food and Friends was a sophisticated operation where I placed premade meals on a conveyor belt that automatically sealed them, and then another volunteer would label them and place the sealed meals on a tray inside a wheeled cafeteria cart. If I was too slow in my tray-placing, the conveyor belt would get ahead of me and I was trapped in that famous Lucy-and-Ethel scenario at the candy factory.

But the common thread for me was that until my teensy brush with the possibility of real hunger, I had worked both projects rather mindlessly, thinking more about when I’d be finished and where I’d go to lunch afterward (really). I remembered a conversation with a friend not too long ago, where she viewed such rote work as unchallenging.

Maybe it is. But someone has to pack the lunches because someone, maybe closer than you think, is hungry and can’t get to food.  

Get out and give back.  

Jane Hess Collins of Old Town, Alexandria is a retired Air Force colonel who writes to inspire people to contribute. She is also a public speaker, conducts workshops for clients to discover their most intrinsic way to serve, and has established game nights for at-risk families throughout the country. You can contact her for speaking engagements or workshops at www.getoutandgiveback.com.