Starving in Seattle

Originally I decided to do my summer internship with Lettuce Link because it seemed like a fun an interesting thing I could do over the summer and still recieve academic credit. I am an Environmental Studies major at the University of Washington, and I saw volunteering with an organic urban farm as a good way to put my knowledge acquired, thus far, into a real world perspective and within the environmental realm. However, as my time with the internship unfolds I realize that, here, in Seattle, there are a lot of people who are relying on the services Lettuce Link provides in order to not go hungry. There is a serious problem in this city of food insecurity- that is many people living without access to a consistent and reliable source of nutritous and safe food. People are literally starving. I have only been with the program for about 3 weeks now and I have seen multiple examples of this: I see it with the children's program I work with, when we ask the children what they had for breakfast that day and they have nothing to say, or when I pass by food bank locations and see lines that span entire blocks waiting for the doors to open, and then I read statsitics put out by Solid Ground (who runs Lettuce Link) that rank Washington State as 12th in hunger in the U.S. and estimates that 275,000 households live with hunger or the threat of going hungry. It is unacceptable. Until I began this internship I never even realized this was going on in Seattle, it is either a very silent problem, or we are so wrapped up in our own lives that the problem is going unnoticed. No matter which is the case, it is a serious problem, starvation in Seattle does exist, but it can be helped and it is now that I have seen it, it is my personal goal to help solve it.