According to a couple of European commonplaces, the US are the land of opportunities… with a lot of overweight inhabitans. We would never think that 40 million Americans grow fruit and vegetables in their home gardens. We wouldn’t even think that home gardens actually exist in the US. But America is not all about Law and Order and Sex and the City. Like Desperate Housewives has taught us, there is life in the suburbs, people actually live there and apparently they also have gardens .
What American tv series haven’t showed us yet(and probably never will) is that there are 50 million people living below the poverty line in the country. 10 percent of them live in a family household where at least one family member has a stable job. They are called the “working poor” or the “hidden poor”. They are an increasing number of people for whom a car failure or an unexpected bill, jeopardizes the security of having three regular meals a day seven days a week.
40 million people who have food growing right in their household, versus 50 million who are at risk of hunger. It didn’t take much to gardener and social innovator Gary Oppenheimer to do the math. In 2009, after seeing the amount of wasted food in the country’s gardens he decided to take action and created AmpleHarvest.org, a project to help gardeners eliminate hunger in their community.
The website connects home gardeners to local food pantries and encourages them to donate their excess harvest to the food pantries in their community.
In just two years AmpleHarvest.org has distributed 20 million pounds of fresh food to local pantries. If Jamie Oliver would probably call it a revolution, Oppenheimer refers to it as an “evolution”. “Giving people access to a healthy diet, means having a healthier population and this is the only way to cut health care costs”, he says “and who doesn’t want to save money at a time like this?”
