Hunger smarts.
A group of elementary students from a Morgantown area school found that out just before the pandemic three years ago.
That was when a representative of Empty Bowls Monongalia came calling on this particular morning – with a unique lesson plan all about belly economics.
Empty Bowls is the local organization that fights food insecurity across the region.
To be food insecure means you’re simply not getting enough food to sustain yourself, nutritionally.
That’s 1 in 7 children across West Virginia, according to Feeding America, the national watchdog group.
Even in relatively prosperous Monongalia County, around 15% of school-age children are food insecure, Feeding America reports.
The new executive director of Empty Bowls Monongalia County, was, well, a little bowled over by that initially, he said.
“I was surprised by the level of poverty in Mon when I moved back here,” Brian Diller said.
That was from Tennessee, where Diller, a West Virginia native who grew up in Charleston, embarked on a productive career in Nashville as a professional guitarist.
In between studio work and gigs in touring bands, he gravitated toward the outreach agencies there for people, who, in a place where not everyone is a millionaire by way of the recording industry, were daily singing the hunger and poverty blues.
Putting a turnaround into that sad song came naturally to Diller.
Back home in Charleston, his mother, a fierce proponent for social justice, was always lending her time and talents for those less fortunate in the Kanawha Valley.
So her son quit picking guitar full-time and picked up a new gig, as he went on to direct several of those agencies in Nashville.
Life delivered him back to the Mountain State from Music City – he was newly divorced and his children were grown – and life, he said, is what gets people mired in poverty here for generations.
A certain outreach organization in the University City hired him in late 2020 at the height of the pandemic.
A serving of (serious) fun
Most people here know Empty Bowls for its visually compelling Soup and Bread Luncheon, which is held every February.
Attendees get to enjoy soups of all kinds from area restaurants while taking home a bowl crafted by local potters and painted by local artists – as a reminder of those with growling bellies and soup bowls that aren’t always full.
The opening act to that event happens Oct. 14 from 5-10 p.m. at WVU’s Erickson Alumni Center.
Empty Bowls is hosting its annual Fall FUNraiser that evening with cocktails, a live auction and music by West Virginia’s renown jazz pianist (and “Mountain Stage” band member) Bob Thompson, who mentored Diller
during his fledgling guitar-playing days as he was coming up.
Visit www.ebmon.org for ticket prices and other details.
“This is our fifth year,” the Empty Bowls director said of the event.
“Everyone enjoys it,” he said, “and it’s a chance for us to attract corporate sponsors. This is such an unselfish community. It’s the generosity of people that keeps us being able to do what we do.”
Such generosity has helped Empty Bowls fill its altruistic coffers with more than $1.5 million since its founding in 2007.
The outlay goes to the support of 23 partner agencies which directly serve people and families facing food insecurity.
Some of that support comes in the form of appearances before audiences that are especially impressionable.
Appearances such as the aforementioned pre-pandemic outing with those elementary schoolers.
Always something
Household budgeting – and how food insecurity factors in – was the lesson of the day.
Smarties, the popular candy, stood in for money and food in the exercise about juggling tough choices in a paycheck-to-paycheck house.
One Smartie represented one meal a day.
Two Smarties meant bus fare, which was good, since you couldn’t afford a car payment, anyway.
Three Smarties meant you had a budget that allowed for either three meals a day – or a trip to the doctor or dentist.
One or the other, not both.
Participants ate the candy accordingly, as they worked through it all.
They didn’t know the exercise was designed to fail.
There are about 15 Smarties per roll. This exercise, however. carried more than 15 domestic circumstances.
Smarties were all the time being shifted and juggled as all the socioeconomic stumbles and pratfalls entered the narrative – from unexpected trips to the ER to cars that gave up the ghost in the driveway.
The class decreed that it wasn’t easy.
“I ate all my Smarties,” one student reported.
“And that was after I said I couldn’t afford to go to the dentist.”
