Just a peek inside our world here at CitySquare

4 Greatest Needs in "Tent City" under I-45

During the 2016 "point in time" homeless census, we asked our homeless neighbors in "tent city" what were their four most pressing needs. The graphic below makes the answer very, very clear.

  Imagine if this were you and me.

Food Desert Atlas

Now you can identify "food deserts" by address!   To check out this useful tool, click here.

Ironically, inadequate access to food drives the growing problem we have with obesity.

Food, Inc. to show at CityWalk!

Private Screening of "Food Stamped"

CitySquare exists to fight the root causes of poverty by partnering with those in need. Working together as a community, we feed the hungry, heal the sick, house the homeless and renew hope in the heart of our city.

From the beginning, addressing the hunger needs of our neighbors has been at the heart of our work. In 1988, CitySquare began as a small store front food pantry. It is from this humble beginning that the work of CitySquare has grown.

Please join CitySquare for private screening of Food Stamped and find out exactly how tough it is to adequately nourish your family on food stamps.

When:  Thursday, March 10, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.

Where:  Angelika Film Center & Cafe (5321 East Mockingbird Lane, Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75206)

Food Stamped is an informative and humorous documentary film following a couple as they attempt to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet on a food stamp budget.

Nutrition educator Shira Potash teaches nutrition-based cooking classes to elementary school students in low-income neighborhoods, most of whom are eligible for food stamps. In an attempt to walk a mile in their shoes, Shira and her documentary filmmaker husband embark on the “food stamp challenge” where they eat on roughly one dollar per meal.

Along the way, they consult with food justice activists, nutrition experts, politicians, and ordinary people living on food stamps, all in order to take a deep look at the struggles low-income Americans face every day while trying to put three-square meals on the table.

To register for the showing click here. 

Don't miss it! 

[Brought to you by the Public Policy Department of CitySquare.]

Hunger, pressing reality

Help CitySquare (formerly Central Dallas Ministries) fight hunger and its devastating results in the lives of children and adults. Make a generous year-end gift today at www.CitySq.org.

Thanks!

[Note: David Beckman, President of Bread for the World and featured in this video report, will be our featured speaker at our annual urban ministries prayer breakfast next spring.]

Hungry nation

Here's the latest on "food insecurity" and hunger in the United States today from Daily Kos.  The work we do in our Food Pantry on a daily basis keeps families, working families going in inner city Dallas.  Demand is way up.  Want to help?  Visit http://www.citysq.org/ to lend your hand and engage your heart.

One in four Americans gets government food assistance
by Joan McCarter
Tue Nov 16, 2010 at 08:36:03 AM PST

We really don't need more austerity right now in America.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that in 2009, nearly 50 million Americans -- 15 percent of U.S. families -- were "food insecure," meaning they were "uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their family members" -- either they didn't have enough money or lacked other resources to buy food. One in 10 families with children worried about food at some point in the year. Between 500,000 and 1 million families were so strapped the children had to go without eating at some point....

The United States is increasingly a safety-net nation, with one in four Americans now enrolled in one of the 15 federal feeding programs. Forty-two million people currently receive monthly benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps. That's up by 10 million from a year ago....

Feeding America, an organization that runs a nationwide network of food banks and bills itself as "the nation's leading domestic hunger-relief charity," said the number of people seeking help from its food banks has increased 46 percent over the past four years, from 25 million to 37 million.

This is just one part of why every reputable poll in the past two years has shown jobs and the economy far and away the most important issue for Americans. Food insecurity has reached deep into the working and middle classes. These people have had their fill of austerity in trying to conduct their daily lives. The last thing they need is their government imposing more on them.

To visit this site click here.

What can you do today to help a neighbor?

1)  Organize a food drive in your neighborhood, church, school or community group and bring what you collect to 409 N. Haskell in Dallas, Texas.

2)  Even better, make a check payable to CitySquare with a note in the Memo line: "food products."  We will go to the North Texas Food Bank and obtain food for a shared maintanence fee of about 20 cents per pound, much more than you can buy in a retail store.

3)  Raise the issue of domestic hunger and food insecurity in your circle of influence. 

4)  Come down for a visit at our Food Pantry and observe and hear the need first hand. 

Food, markets, hunger and profit

The July 2010 issue of Harper's Magazine contains a most disturbing story by Frederick Kaufman, "The food bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it."  If you are looking for a story of how greed and unregulated business practices on Wall Street and beyond affect life, literally in "life and death" scenarios, this is one you need to read and understand.  The essay is long.  I've cut and pasted pieces for your consideration. You may want to pick up a copy and read the entire essay. 
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The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment.

Agriculture, rooted as it is in the rhythms of reaping and sowing, had not traditionally engaged the attention of Wall Street bankers, whose riches did not come from the sale of real things like wheat or bread but from the manipulation of ethereal concepts like risk and collateralized debt. But in 1991 nearly everything else that could be recast as a financial abstraction had already been considered. Food was pretty much all that was left. And so with accustomed care and precision, Goldman’s analysts went about transforming food into a concept. They selected eighteen commodifiable ingredients and contrived a financial elixir that included cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs, and a variety or two of wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.

As was usually the case, Goldman’s product flourished. The prices of cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, and wheat began to rise, slowly at first, and then rapidly. And as more people sank money into Goldman’s food index, other bankers took note and created their own food indexes for their own clients. Investors were delighted to see the value of their venture increase, but the rising price of breakfast, lunch, and dinner did not align with the interests of those of us who eat. And so the commodity index funds began to cause problems.

Wheat was a case in point. North America, the Saudi Arabia of cereal, sends nearly half its wheat production overseas, and an obscure syndicate known as the Minneapolis Grain Exchange remains the supreme price-setter for the continent’s most widely exported wheat, a high-protein variety called hard red spring. Other varieties of wheat make cake and cookies, but only hard red spring makes bread. Its price informs the cost of virtually every loaf on earth.

As far as most people who eat bread were concerned, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange had done a pretty good job: for more than a century the real price of wheat had steadily declined. Then, in 2005, that price began to rise, along with the prices of rice and corn and soy and oats and cooking oil. Hard red spring had long traded between $3 and $6 per sixty-pound bushel, but for three years Minneapolis wheat broke record after record as its price doubled and then doubled again. No one was surprised when in the first quarter of 2008 transnational wheat giant Cargill attributed its 86 percent jump in annual profits to commodity trading. And no one was surprised when packaged-food maker ConAgra sold its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion. Nor when The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number.

Nothing had changed about the wheat, but something had changed about the wheat market. Since Goldman’s innovation, hundreds of billions of new dollars had overwhelmed the actual supply of and actual demand for wheat, and rumors began to emerge that someone, somewhere, had cornered the market. Robber barons, gold bugs, and financiers of every stripe had long dreamed of controlling all of something everybody needed or desired, then holding back the supply as demand drove up prices. But there was plenty of real wheat, and American farmers were delivering it as fast as they always had, if not even a bit faster. It was as if the price itself had begun to generate its own demand—the more hard red spring cost, the more investors wanted to pay for it.

“It’s absolutely mind-boggling,” one grain trader told the Wall Street Journal. “You don’t ever want to trade wheat again,” another told the Chicago Tribune.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade, told the Washington Post. “This isn’t just any commodity,” continued Voge. “It is food, and people need to eat.”

The global speculative frenzy sparked riots in more than thirty countries and drove the number of the world’s “food insecure” to more than a billion. In 2008, for the first time since such statistics have been kept, the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward. The ranks of the hungry had increased by 250 million in a single year, the most abysmal increase in all of human history.

Then, like all speculative bubbles, the food bubble popped. By late 2008, the price of Minneapolis hard red spring had toppled back to normal levels, and trading volume quickly followed. Of course, the prices world consumers pay for food have not come down so fast, as manufacturers and retailers continue to make up for their own heavy losses.
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Imaginary wheat bought anywhere affects real wheat bought everywhere. But as it turned out, index traders had purchased the majority of their long wheat futures on the oldest and largest grain clearinghouse in America, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. And so I found myself pushing through the frigid blasts of the LaSalle Street canyon. If I could figure out precisely how and when wheat futures traded in Chicago had driven up the price of actual wheat in Minneapolis, I would know why a billion people on the planet could not afford bread.

The man who had agreed to escort me to the floor of the exchange traded grain for a transnational corporation, and he told me several times that he could not talk to the press, and that if I were to mention his name in print he would lose his job. So I will call him Mr. Silver.

In the basement cafeteria of the exchange I bought Mr. Silver a breakfast of bacon and eggs and asked whether he could explain how index funds that held long-only Chicago soft red winter wheat futures could have come to dictate the spot price of Minneapolis hard red spring. Had the world starved because of a corner in Chicago? Mr. Silver looked into his scrambled eggs and said nothing.

So I began to tell him everything I knew, hoping he would eventually be inspired to fill in the blanks. I told him about Joseph in Egypt, Osaka in 1730, the Panic of 1857, and futures contracts for cat pelts, molasses, and onions. I told him about Goldman’s replication strategy, Gorton and Rouwenhorst’s 2005 paper, and the rise and rise of index funds. I told him that at least one analyst had estimated that investments in commodity index funds could easily increase to as much as $1 trillion, which would result in yet another global food catastrophe, much worse than the one before.

And I told Mr. Silver something else I had discovered: About two thirds of the Goldman index remains devoted to crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, and other energy-based commodities. Wheat was nothing but an indexical afterthought, accounting for less than 6.5 percent of Goldman’s fund.

Mr. Silver sipped his coffee.

Even 6.5 percent of the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index made for a historically unprecedented pile of long wheat futures, I went on. Especially when those index funds kept rolling over the contracts they already had—all of them long, only a smattering bought in Kansas City, none in Minneapolis.

And then it occurred to me: It was neither an individual nor a corporation that had cornered the wheat market. The index funds may never have held a single bushel of wheat, but they were hoarding staggering quantities of wheat futures, billions of promises to buy, not one of them ever to be fulfilled. The dreaded market corner had emerged not from a shortage in the wheat supply but from a much rarer economic occurrence, a shock inspired by the ceaseless call of index funds for wheat that did not exist and would never need to exist: a demand shock. Instead of a hidden mastermind committing a dastardly deed, it was old Mike Mullin’s “brainless entity,” the investment instrument itself, that had taken over and created the effects of a traditional corner.

Mr. Silver had stopped eating his eggs.

I said that I understood how the index funds’ unprecedented accumulation of Chicago futures could create the appearance of a market corner in Chicago. But there was still something I didn’t get. Why had the wheat market in Minneapolis begun to act as though it too had been cornered when none of the index funds held hard red spring? Why had the world’s most widely exported wheat experienced a sudden surge in price, a surge that caused a billion people—

At which point Mr. Silver interrupted my monologue.

Index-fund buying had pushed up the price of the Chicago contract, he said, until the price of a wheat future had come to equal the spot price of wheat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—and still, the futures price surged. The result was contango.

I gave Mr. Silver a blank look. Contango, he explained, describes a market in which future prices rise above current prices. Rather than being stable and steady, contango markets tend to be overheated and hysterical, with spot prices rising to match the most outrageously escalated futures prices. Indeed, between 2006 and 2008, the spot price of Chicago soft red winter shot up from $3 per bushel to $11 per bushel.

The ever-escalating price of wheat and the newfound strength of grain markets were excellent news for the new investors who had flooded commodity index funds. No matter that the mechanism created to stabilize grain prices had been reassembled into a mechanism to inflate grain prices, or that the stubbornly growing discrepancy between futures and spot prices meant that farmers and merchants no longer could use these markets to price crops and manage risks. No matter that contango in Chicago had disrupted the operations of the nation’s grain markets to the extent that the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs had begun an investigation into whether speculation in the wheat markets might pose a threat to interstate commerce. And then there was the question of the millers and the warehousers—those who needed actual wheat to sell, actual bread that might feed actual people.

Mr. Silver lowered his voice as he informed me that as the price of Chicago wheat had bubbled up, commercial buyers had turned elsewhere—to places like Minneapolis. Although hard red spring historically had been more expensive than soft red winter, it had begun to look like a bargain. So brokers bought hard red spring and left it to the chemists at General Mills or Sara Lee or Domino’s to rejigger their dough recipes for a higher-protein variety.

The grain merchants purchased Minneapolis hard red spring much earlier in the annual cycle than usual, and they purchased more of it than ever before, as real demand began to chase the ever-growing, everlasting long. By the time the normal buying season began, drought had hit Australia, floods had inundated northern Europe, and a vogue for biofuels had enticed U.S. farmers to grow less wheat and more corn. And so, when nations across the globe called for their annual hit of hard red spring, they discovered that the so-called visible supply was far lower than usual. At which point the markets veered into insanity.

Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money, and a billion people went hungry.

Mr. Silver finished his bacon and eggs and I followed him upstairs, beyond two sets of metal detectors, dozens of security staff, and a gaudy stained-glass image of Hermes, god of commerce, luck, and thievery. Through the colored glass that outlined the deity I caught my first glimpse of the immense trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The electronic board had already begun to populate with green, yellow, and red numbers.

The wheat harvest of 2008 turned out to be the most bountiful the world had ever seen, so plentiful that even as hundreds of millions slowly starved, 200 million bushels were sold for animal feed. Livestock owners could afford the wheat; poor people could not. Rather belatedly, real wheat had shown up again—and lots of it. U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics eventually revealed that 657 million bushels of 2008 wheat remained in U.S. silos after the buying season, a record-breaking “carryover.” Soon after that bounteous oversupply had been discovered, grain prices plummeted and the wheat markets returned to business as usual.

The worldwide price of food had risen by 80 percent between 2005 and 2008, and unlike other food catastrophes of the past half century or so, the United States was not insulated from this one, as 49 million Americans found themselves unable to put a full meal on the table. Across the country demand for food stamps reached an all-time high, and one in five kids came to depend on food kitchens. In Los Angeles nearly a million people went hungry. In Detroit armed guards stood watch over grocery stores. Rising prices, mused the New York Times, “might have played a role.”

On the plane to Minneapolis I had read a startling prediction: “It may be hard to imagine commodity prices advancing another 460 percent above their mid-2008 price peaks,” hedge-fund manager John Hummel wrote in a letter to clients of AIS Capital Management. “But the fundamentals argue strongly,” he continued, that “these sectors have significant upside potential.” I made a quick calculation: 460 percent above 2008 peaks meant hamburger meat priced at $20 a pound.

On the ground in Minneapolis I put the question to Michael Ricks, chairman of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Could 2008 happen again? Could prices rise even higher?

“Absolutely,” said Ricks. “We’re in a volatile world.”

I put the same question to Layne Carlson, corporate secretary and treasurer of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. “Yes,” said Carlson, who then told me the two principles that govern the movement of grain markets: “fear and greed.”

But wasn’t it part of a grain exchange’s responsibility to ensure a stable valuation of our daily bread?

“I view what we’re working with as widgets,” said Todd Posthuma, the exchange’s associate director of market operations and information technology, the man responsible for clearing $100 million worth of trades every day. “I think being an employee at an exchange is different from adding value to the food system.”

Above Mark Bagan’s oversize desk hangs a jagged chart of futures prices for the hard red spring wheat contract, mapping every peak and valley from 1973 to 2006. The highs on Bagan’s chart reached $7.50. Of course, had 2008 been included, the spikes would have, literally, gone through the roof.

Would the price of wheat rise again?

“The flow of money into commodities has changed significantly in the last decade,” explained Bagan. “Wheat, corn, soft commodities—I don’t see these dollars going away. It already has happened,” he said. “It’s inevitable.”

Food Facts. . .

In Texas, 1.3 million people experience hunger daily. 

Almost 15% of our residents are hungry and food insecure.  Texas experiences the highest food insecurity rate among children in the nation. 

Many of the 3 million children who participate in the free lunch program in our public schools go without a meal on the weekends and when school is closed during the summer and on holidays and school breaks. 

--Texas Hunger Initiative

Community Impact

Take a moment or two and receive an encouraging update on what's happening in our world!

Just click here. 

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From the First Lady of the United States and President Obama

Tomorrow, many of us will gather around the table with family and friends to give thanks over a feast of turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy -- and let’s not forget pumpkin pie!

But for some in this country, the feast will not be as bountiful. In fact, it won’t be much of a feast at all. Hunger is on the rise in America -- hitting its highest levels in nearly 15 years. A recent report released by the USDA reveals that in 2008 an estimated 1.1 million children were living in households that experienced hunger multiple times over the past year.

To combat hunger this winter, we’re launching, in coordination with the Corporation for National and Community Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the United We Serve: Feed a Neighbor initiative -- a program that empowers you with all the resources you need to mobilize against the hunger crisis in your community. Learn how you can get started today here.

Barack and I are committed to doing all we can to end hunger by making food programs more accessible to eligible families. But government can only do so much -- it will take all of us working together to put an end to hunger in America.

That’s why we’ve made it easy for you to get involved at Serve.gov. Find local volunteer opportunities like delivering meals to homebound seniors, offering your professional skills at a food pantry, or planting a community garden and sharing produce with your neighbors. You can also create your own volunteer opportunity using our anti-hunger toolkit.

holiday season let’s recommit to serving our communities and working together to feed American families.

Get started giving back today.

Thank you,
Michelle

First Lady Michelle Obama
The White House

Friday at Central Dallas Ministries Resource Center

This is the scene that greeted us on Friday morning.

A line of neighbors over 100 strong strung out in the heavy rain.

Why?

Waiting to receive groceries, including fresh vegetables and fruit.

The need, the food insecurity, the hunger--it's all on the increase, and dramatically.

Out my front door. . .

The photos below aren't so clear--taken with my phone from across the street and from an upstairs window.  The first shot doesn't capture very well the long line of men, women and children extending down the sidewalk to the left from our front door all the way to the corner, but they are there.

I wanted to capture the scene and the moment without being obvious or intrusive on our friends and neighbors. 

Over 100 folks waiting outside our door when I arrived for work at about 8:00 a.m. on Friday. 

This is reality outside my door most every day. 

So far in 2009, over 1.5MM pounds of high-quality, mostly nutritious food products distributed to the community in an attempt to provide a helpful supplement to household resources, mostly on the decline. 

Much to do. 

Much to consider. 

Arguments about responses of people of faith pretty well evaporate for me when I see scenes like this one. 

Our latest E-magazine

Check out Central Dallas Ministries' latest e-magazine here.

Reactions welcome!

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So, I'm a thief. . .

Not long ago on a Monday evening after work, I broke into the Central Dallas Food Pantry.

Big time no-no, I'm telling you.

Place was locked up tighter than a drum.

No staff.

No interview process.

No forms to document output or outcomes.

Just me, using my key to get inside the food storage area after hours.

Total disregard for policy, protocol and process.

So, I'm a thief.

The saga began when I noticed an extremely skinny, as in skin and bones, Willie Nelson looking fellow climbing out of one of the trash dumpsters back of our building.

In his hands he cradled a discarded mess of shredded cabbage packed in a plastic bag.

Must have been near 100 degrees. No telling what the expiration date read on the package.

I approached him and introduced myself.

"Where did you get the cabbage?" I asked.

"Out of your trash," he replied.

"I just got out of the hospital this afternoon and I'm not doing so good," he added. "My stomach is hurtin' something awful."

"Gee, I'm sorry to hear that," I said, wondering what his plans were for the evening.

"Could you get me a few cans of food from inside?" he asked.

"Inside"--there's the term. After hours everyone who comes by because their hungry knows that "inside" is where the relief is to be found.

"Sure," I declared without much thought.

Immediately, an internal conversation got underway in my head, as I reviewed our "rules and regulations" about how to use and access the Food Pantry.

The way I figured it, I was in violation of about 100 rules and procedures.

The word "thief" rose up in my throat. I quickly pushed it back down and encouraged my new friend to follow me.

He rode a bicycle weighed down with plastic bags filled with soft drink cans for recycling. Guys like this keep our neighborhood cleared of all such trash.

"You can park your bike inside the back door and we'll go up and around back down to the Food Pantry," I laid out our plan of attack.

Luckily my keys worked! I've done so little in this part of what we do over the past many years that I wouldn't have been surprised if they had changed the locks on me. The Food Pantry was our only hope since I was flat broke!

The door opened and we were in!

I had to urge my buddy to fill up two shopping bags.

"I don't want to be greedy," he told me.

Now the guy is flat killing me.

"No chance of that here," I reassured him.

He told me that he had a small trailer parked over on Good-Latimer in South Dallas, so he wasn't without a roof over his head.

"I sure wasn't looking forward to that cabbage!" he exclaimed.

He finished packing away the loot and we made our escape.

No one saw us.

But, I had to get it off my chest.

We broke several rules, I'm sure.

I just can't stand seeing a man fishing "food" out of our trash.

Maybe I'll throw myself on the mercy of the court!
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Urban farming

Urban farming changes communities, and is a movement sweeping across urban America.

As a result, fresh vegetables and fruit, often virtually inaccessible in many inner city neighborhoods, become available.

Community cooperation emerges from "ownership" in such endeavors that serve as community development and organizing labs.

The gardens can even serve as solar energy classrooms, crime watch tools and opportunities for residents to take hold of more control over their environments.

Watch this CNN video. Then, share your impressions. Anyone out there had experience with an urban garden or farm?

Food

Food is important.

I take it that you've noticed that, right?

It is especially important if you find yourself in a situation where it is not available to you or your loved ones.

These days more and more people are coming to us for help with their nutrition needs. Most are from working families. All attempt to make it on very low, inadequate income resources. Some work at more than one job. Many are elderly neighbors and children, beautiful children.

For years we've struggled to provide enough food to these growing numbers of people who need help with their grocery costs. While we have served more people than any other organization in town, we haven't been the leader in quantity of nutritious food products delivered. The leader in Dallas when it comes to pounds distributed and quality of food products is Crossroads Community Services (CCS), an outreach ministry of First United Methodist Church located in Downtown Dallas.

Rev. Jay Cole serves as the Executive Director for CCS. I'm very proud to say that Jay spent time with us at CDM as an intern while at Perkins School of Theology. While he was with us, he taught us more than we taught him!

Jay has developed the most innovative system for food distribution in the city, possibly in the nation. His plan links individual and family food selection to a number of indicators, including family size, lifestyles and health indicators. Jay's system is tied directly to the U. S. Department of Agriculture's new food needs pyramid.

Earlier this year CCS and CDM worked out the details of a collaborative partnership to do even more in response to the food needs of low-income neighbors in Dallas. Some of the improvements resulting from our new connection include the fact that we order food from the North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) together in a joint, collaboration account. Together we are serving more people than we were apart. CDM has adopted the CCS database and reporting model, as well as the food selection methodology and we are now distributing twice as much food product as before we the new relationship.

In the future we hope to develop an expanded network of food distribution sites that link up with smaller organizations across the city in an attempt to cooperate with our partners at NTFB. We are feeling very optimistic about our future.

I'm grateful for CCS and Jay Cole and his entire team. I'm also very thankful for all that Keith Ackerman has done on the CDM side to establish and solidify the new relationship. Of course, none of this would have been possible on our side without the hard work and positive, cooperative attitude of Agapito Perez, the Director of the CDM Resource Center. He has the new, bulked up system working like a well-oiled machine.

We hope to respond to the pressing, extremely important food needs of our neighbors no matter how severe they may become.


If you'd like to help us, give me a call!

Retro message for these times: The Grapes of Wrath

Quote without comment:

The decay spreads over the state, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people come from miles to take the fruit, but this could not be… And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit – and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

…Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

(John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, pp. 362-363).

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Check out our latest e-magazine. . .

Take a moment for an inside reality tour of Central Dallas Ministries here.

Hunger, health, housing and hope--all these mission targets focus our work.

Reactions welcome!

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Demand way up. . .funds in decline

This is our reality these days, too. What our friends at the Wilkinson Center are seeing is what we are seeing, as well.

As demand goes up, our unrestricted funds used to support hundreds of new families falls.

Pray.

Give.

Care.

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