What If We All Helped Mel?

October 25, 2012
By Mickey Friedman

I spent Thursday and Friday mornings with Mel Greenberg. Mel Greenberg feeds people.

On Thursday, I went with Mel and Jurek Zamoyski to Big Y, Berkshire Co-op Market, to Guidos, The Marketplace, and Mazzeos, the Great Barrington Bagel Company, Home Sweet Home Donut Shoppe and The Meat Market. We picked up bread and cookies and bagels and donuts, vegetables, meat and fish.

We dropped off some food at People’s Pantry, located at Cavalry Christian Chapel on Route 41 in Great Barrington. Some of the food fed 70 people at the Breaking Bread Kitchen Community Dinner at 5 PM that night in Sheffield.

On Friday, Mel and I made more food pick-ups and dropped off food at the Women’s, Infants & Children program (WIC) located at the Community Health Program complex in Great Barrington. The rest of the food went to the Berkshire South Regional Community Center on Crissey Street to supplement their free Monday night community dinners.

Mel’s organization is called Berkshires Bounty. He wanted to be sure I understood how many different people contribute to this effort: the many folks in all the stores who give, and the folks who distribute what’s been given. The local churches and synagogues whose volunteers supervise the Thursday morning food distribution for People’s Pantry.

Mel been doing things like this his entire life. I got to know Mel when he asked me to create a website to highlight the work being done for seniors by the non-profit group, the Friends of the Claire Teague Senior Center.

Mel is a people person. And he is able to summon up such extraordinary perseverance because he sees what’s at stake.

There’s been all this talk about safety nets, and most recently about Mitt Romney’s contempt for the 47%. You listen long enough to the politicians and experts pontificate about social and economic policy and real people disappear.

Mel knows hunger is about people. Young people and old people. People of many colors and backgrounds. Forget about policy. See the people.

My parents grew up really poor. My mother’s Italian father, a widower by the time my mother was two, made a meager living picking up garbage. He could barely speak or read English. He surrendered his kids to Catholic charities and my mother grew up in a series of foster homes. My father’s Hungarian father died when my dad was eight, and as the oldest male child, he went off to work as a boy.

My mother and father were proud, hard-working people and by the time I was born they had risen to just poor. By the time I was twenty-five my mother had gotten her Master’s Degree and was a teacher in the Bronx and my father was the Night City Editor at the New York Post. They had worked their way up to the middle class.

I know what Mitt Romney doesn’t know. Most poor people are proud and uncomfortable asking for help. There are many ways people become poor. Serve our country in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and come back hurt. Work until you get too old to work. Get sick and spend your savings on hospital bills. Pick the wrong stock or trust the wrong financial adviser. See your job sent to El Salvador, China, or Indonesia.

Simply put, the poor are us. Not all of us, because the Romneys and the Robber Barons of today have pretty much gamed the system. But the poor are, and can, at any moment, be the rest of us.

Here in Berkshire County, close to one in five families with kids experience what the government now calls “food hardship” or endure “food insecurity.” I’ll just call it hunger.
When the school bus drives by, take a look. Make it real. One out every five of those kids probably isn’t getting enough to eat.

A new study by Feeding America shows 47 million Americans do not always know where there next meal will come from. 29 percent of those people earn too much to qualify for government assistance, but not enough to pay medical bills, utilities, mortgage, rent, and food. They rely on charitable food assistance. They depend on food banks, on Berkshires Bounty.

My heartfelt thanks to Big Y, the Co-op, Guidos, the Marketplace, Mazzeos, The Meat Market, Great Barrington Bagel Company and Home Sweet Home Donut Shoppe. To People’s Pantry, W.I.C., Berkshire South, Calvary Christian Chapel and the American Legion Hall in Sheffield.

The folks at Big Y in Great Barrington help Mel help feed people.

What if The Best Small Town in America voted at Town Meeting to donate $10 per person each year to help feed our people? What if we used our old Firehouse to house People’s Pantry so people could more easily pick up their food?

And sent our tax-exempt donations to Berkshires Bounty, 248 East Road Alford, MA 01266 or emailed greenberg.mel@gmail.com or called 413-528-4201 to volunteer.

What if we all helped Mel?