Food insecurity focus of Eat. Grow. Share. in Cedar Rapids

CEDAR RAPIDS - One of every eight Linn County residents is food insecure and one in 20 Cedar Rapids residents live in areas with low food access.

That's according to the Food Environmental Alliance, a group of individuals and organizations working to address issues food insecurity.

Statistics like these were the focus at this year's second annual Eat. Grow. Share: Fighting Food Insecurity in Linn County event on Saturday at the NewBo City Market, 1100 Third St. SE in Cedar Rapids. Various organizations from around the county gathered to bring awareness to the issue of food insecurity.

'I think that people can really tend to get isolated and not be aware of what's going on in their very own community,” said Sofia Mehaffey, community health and nutrition director with Horizons. 'I think we hear of hunger and we think about some of these faraway places that may be struggling but we don't realize that some of our friends and neighbors, people that we know, people that we live next door to, are struggling with some of the very same issues.”

The event aimed to educate the community about how hunger and nutrition issues affect every family. Attendees also had the opportunity to sign up for volunteer opportunities with area organizations and to donate food and funds.

'There is a lot of need in the Cedar Rapids area and in the community that we're trying to help,” Mehaffey said. 'We want to make sure that as many people as possible understand what we're dealing with. We need volunteers all the time and we are always accepting donations to help us support our programming.”

Along with having informational booths and volunteer opportunities, Eat. Grow. Share. also brought back the Chop Hunger! Chefs' Challenge this year in which local chefs compete against each other to make a dish using the contents of an emergency food box that people can pick up from the Hawkeye Area Community Action Program - or HACAP - if they are in need of food.

Items in the emergency food box that the chefs could use included mac and cheese, Honey Nut Cheerios, peanut butter and canned foods. They also got to use fresh produce that was donated by Matthew 25 and Feed Iowa First and herbs from Frontier Herbs.

The goal of the challenge was to create a dish simple enough for someone who was to get an emergency food box to recreate themselves while still making it appetizing.

'I think the big thing is being able to use all the ingredients from the emergency food box as much as possible,” said Sam Butz, executive retail chef at Marion Hy-Vee, as he prepared to take on the challenge. 'It will be tough.”

Butz was one of four chefs who participated in the challenge.

'(Food insecurity) is an issue and I don't think a lot of people realize it and take a lot of things for granted,” Butz said. 'They don't realize that people actually need help.”

Mike Tertinger, a staff person to the Linn County Food Systems Council, said that an event like Eat. Grow. Share. is necessary to make people aware of the issue of food insecurity.

'To make it more visible. To let people know that we do, even in Linn County, have a certain significant portion of our population that is food insecure,” he said. 'And whether we want to see it or not, an event like this brings it to the forefront for people who haven't considered it as an issue here in Iowa, Linn County or Cedar Rapids specifically.”

l Comments: (319) 368-8538; elianna.novitch@thegazette.com