By Vraj Patel
“The Hunger Free Zone” is a non-profit organization of ISKCON Baltimore with a mission to distribute prasadam to the community at large. With its own food truck, devotee volunteers go out every day, except Sunday, to distribute free vegan prasadam to the people of Baltimore City. Since its inception three years ago, the Hunger Free Zone has distributed over 167,600 free vegan meals.
Grateful recipients note that the food is delicious and shared freely with all. “I’ve partaken of the generosity of the food truck. It’s good vegan food. I like the macaroni and the porridge [halva]; it’s a little sweet.” said one of the regulars, Clement Parker Bay. “It’s lunchtime, and I was just thinking how hungry I was, and then you guys pulled up. So that was like right on time, God sent you,” said Mrs. Haney recently.
No matter the weather, the devotees gather to serve Srila Prabhupada’s mission: “that no one within a 10-mile radius of any temple should go hungry.” After a festival in Mayapur, West Bengal, Srila Prabhupada looked down from the balcony of his room. He saw children and women eating leftover scraps in heaps of trash. After this, he gave us this lifelong service of distributing prasadam worldwide.
In the early days, the ISKCON Food For Life (FFL) program utilized many different methods for distributing prasadam, including kitchen services, mobile orders, vans, mass distribution during emergency relief, and many others. After the 2004 tsunami disaster, FFL volunteers in India and Sri Lanka were the first to respond on the scene. They provided over 350,000 meals in the first few months, including clothes, water, shelter, and medical care.
Nowadays, FFL programs are still operating strongly across the world. But, in the West, this type of food distribution started to dwindle. That’s why Sankirtan Yajna Das, a disciple of Bhakti Tirtha Swamis and temple president Neela Madhava Das, a disciple of Gopal Krishna Goswami, decided to start this program here at ISKCON Baltimore. The poverty rate in the city hovers around 20%, so the need is acute. Sankirtan Yajna Das is a skilled devotee cook with years of experience, so he thought, “Well, why don’t we go out and distribute food daily.”
Read more: https://iskconnews.org/hunger-free-zone-in-baltimore-serves-thousands-with-prasadam-outreach/
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