World Food Day 2019 (Part 1): A Locally Sourced Path to #Zero Hunger

Sarah Montgomery, The Garden's Edge

This year's global celebration of World Food Day (a Healthy Diets for a #ZeroHunger World) calls for action across sectors to make healthy and sustainable diets affordable and accessible to everyone. At the same time, it calls on everyone to start thinking about what we eat.

As part of our celebration in Albuquerque, we invited three organizations that promote the cultivation of locally sourced and native plants to help address the food gaps in the Albuquerque area.

The East Valencia Urban Garden Program, The Garden's Edge and its Guatemalan partner Qachuu Aloom, and  the South Valley farmers association Agri-Cultura Network offered examples of how they promote sustainability, availability, and local options for food production. Two students and the principal from St. Therese school also spoke about the vegetable garden and greenhouse present on the school grounds.

A Focus on Human Needs
As a secondary theme, we looked on efforts to address local human needs, including  the five faith communities/organizations that came together during a refugee crisis, the challenges faced by two schools in the Albuquerque South Valley with primarily Latino and immigrant populations, and a collaboration between The Lighthouse of New Mexico mosque and the Albuquerque Baha’i community to offer meals for homeless people in Albuquerque. Videos and/or accounts of all our stories will be featured in subsequent posts.

Manjeet Kuar leads Sikh chant

In between the seven stories that resonated with nearly 70 people who attended the event, we were also fortunate to have two prayer/reflections from the Albuquerque Sikh Gurdwara and a Cherokee closing blessing

As has been our tradition for the past four years, David Poole taught participants the World Food Day chant that he composed (words and music) for our first celebration in 2016. Keri Sutter developed some movements to go along with the chant, which we have used for all four of our annual celebrations.