Film captures human face of local hunger
Toolbox
By Mel Huff Times Argus - Published: May 31, 2006
MONTPELIER – Last October after students at Doty Elementary School in Worcester saw "The Red Wagon," a 45-minute documentary about hunger in Vermont, they took action.
They formed work groups, developed action plans, gave a presentation at town meeting with slides from the film and sponsored a community dinner that raised a thousand dollars to create a snack shelf for hungry children at their school.
On Thursday, June 1, the public will have an opportunity to see the movie that moved the Doty students to action. "The Red Wagon: Facing Hunger" will be shown at 7:30 p.m. at Woodbury College, and the screening will be followed by a question-and-answer period with Jim Ritvo, who directed the film with Dave Raizman, and Christine Foster, chief development officer of the Vermont Foodbank.
This will be the first time since the film played to a standing-room-only audience at the Green Mountain Film Festival that "The Red Wagon" will be shown in Montpelier.
Ritvo and Raizman, whose Montpelier company, 132 Main Productions, makes films for nonprofits, call themselves "visual storytellers."
"We wanted to put a human face on this invisible network of people who are in need of food," Ritvo says. "Dave Raizman, my partner, and I were just amazed at the magnitude of this problem here in Central Vermont and throughout the state and then throughout the nation. It touches every community."
When he and Raizman started thinking about the project, they were surprised to learn how many people in the upscale community where they have lived for 30 years go to free meals provided daily by the local churches and synagogue.
"People are in need," he says. "At some point Dave and I realized this is going on every day right in Montpelier."
Deborah Flateman, chief executive officer of Vermont Foodbank in South Barre, says that national hunger surveys conducted in 1997 and 2005 show the hunger caseload doubling in that period.
She estimates that this year 140,000 different Vermonters will access the state's charitable food distribution system.
"Some are chronically involved; some face a specific hardship, dip into the system and get back out," she says.
Vermont Foodbank plans to distribute close to 7 million pounds of food this year, up from 2 million pounds in 2001. "Even at the level we're distributing, we're not meeting the need," Flateman says. "Our goal is to just get more food out into the system."
What most surprised an audience of Middlebury College students who saw the film this winter was the extent of childhood hunger. Joanne Heidkamp, program director of the Vermont Campaign to End Childhood Hunger, notes that of about 100,000 school-age children in Vermont, 30,000 qualify to receive free or reduced-price school meals. That means that nearly a third of Vermont school children live in very low-income households.
And the rate of severe hunger – where "adults in the household cannot protect the children just by depriving themselves or adding more pasta to the stew" – has doubled over the most recent three-year period. Vermont is the only state in the nation that has seen such an extreme increase, Heidkamp says.
The question that most frequently comes up in discussion of the film is why so many of the hungry are obese. A nutritionist from the University of Vermont explains in the film that if you don't know when you will eat again, your self-regulation process becomes distorted and you hoard food. "People don't understand that one," Ritvo observes.
Reaction to learning the extent of hunger varies. "Some people want to do something. Some people get angry. It's visceral," Ritvo says. "It really strikes people. I don't think we really realized it until people started seeing the film."
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