Food For Hope by Jeff Gottesfeld

In Food For Hope, the founder of food banks is profiled as well as the topics of food insecurity and poverty.

John van Hengel was waiting in line to enter a dining room for the needy. The food wasn't great - soup, rice and beans  but John was hungry and he was happy to be able to eat.

John had grown up not knowing hunger. His father owned a drugstore and his mother was a nurse. He grew into a handsome, athletic and successful man. He moved to California, got married and had two sons, living in a house near the ocean. But suddenly life got difficult and he lost everything. He found himself so poor, he wasn't able to feed himself. 

At the dining room, John met many of the people also eating there - veterans, homeless, poor families and those with disabilities. With the help of Father Ronald at St. Mary's Church, John found faith, and he was hired at the kitchen. He also found a place to live above a garage.

John wanted to offer the hungry more variety and better food. He drove an old truck to the nearby orchards east of town and with a volunteer crew, collected the grapefruit that had fallen onto the ground. There was so much fruit that he was able to give to other charities. 

At one of the charities John overheard an unemployed mother claim that her family ate very well from the supermarket dumpster. She took a disbelieving John to the dumpster and he saw it was filled with damaged tins and boxes of food as well as bruised but edible vegetables. She told John she wished she could "bank" the extra food.

This encounter gave John the idea of creating a food bank - "a place to share food that's being thrown out." Father Ronald thought it was a wonderful idea and encouraged John to act on it. When John protested that he was too busy, Father Ronald told him it was his choice to act. And so he did.

St. Mary's Food Bank opened in an abandoned bakery six months later. The food came from supermarket warehouses. In its first year of operation, St. Mary's sent one hundred twenty-five tons of food to various charities. Even John's adult sons came to help.

John soon started another charity called Second Harvest which opened many food banks throughout America. Large amounts of food were donated to his charity and volunteers we able to distribute it all.

Discussion

The world's first food bank was St. Mary's Food Bank which opened in 1967 in Phoenix, Arizona. It was founded by John van Hengel.

Van Hengel was born in 1923 in Waupun, Wisconsin. He graduated from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin and went on to attend graduate school. He then studied broadcasting at UCLA. John had many jobs including working as a magazine publicist, in advertising and even driving a beer truck in Hollywood. He married Beverlee Thompson, a model, and they had two sons, John and Thomas. At this time he was a division sales manager.  

But in 1960 his marriage ended in divorce and van Hengel returned to Wisconsin where he lived a very different type of life. He worked in a quarry and ended up injuring his back breaking up a fight. Van Hengel moved to Arizona, hoping the warm, dry weather would help. A devout Catholic, he took a vow of poverty, volunteering at the St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen and working as Immaculate Heart Church in Phoenix.

As Gottesfeld relates in his picture book, it was an unemployed mother who told Van Hengel about the surplus food being discarded by grocery stores. After convincing store managers to let him have the food, van Hengel had so much food that in 1967 with a three thousand dollar donation from St. Mary's Catholic Church and the use of an abandoned bakery, the St. Mary's Food Bank was born.

In 1975, van Hengel received federal grant money to open more food banks and in 1976 he started Second Harvest. Today the food bank concept has spread throughout the world, often with mixed opinions about whether they are helpful. The first food bank in Canada opened in Edmonton, Alberta in 1981.

Food For Hope offers young readers the back story of the food bank movement. Most young people have heard of food banks, and in these difficult economic times, it's very likely there are many young readers whose families may use food banks to supplement their meals. Many schools in the United States and Canada have food drives, as do many churches and other organizations. This picture book shows how the movement began, with the determination of one man to help those struggling to find enough to eat in a country of plenty. In the process, it also focuses on the topics of food insecurity, poverty and food wastage.  

To write Food For Hope, Gottesfeld  used published newspaper accounts and interviewed van Hengel's sons, John Jr. and Thomas as well as Stephen Morris a friend and volunteer at St. Mary's, and Jen Tresinski, a historian at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Waupun, WI. The colourful digital illustrations were done by Michelle Laurentia Agatha.

To help readers learn more about John van Hengel's life and food banks, Gottesfeld has included an informative Author's Note and Terminology which defines what a food bank is. A timeline of the food bank movement is also included. 

Food For Hope shows how one person can make a huge difference in the world. Food banks have an impact directly on the lives of individuals: children, single parents, the elderly and the very poor. Van Hengel initially felt he was too busy to take on the development of a "food bank" but he was told that the call had come, and he was the one to answer it. The choice was his. As he said, "The poor we shall always have with us, but why the hungry?"

Book Details:

Food For Hope by Jeff Gottesfeld

Creston Books      2023