Ending Hunger Via a 40-Pound Cabbage

What do a nine-year-old girl, a 40-pound cabbage, and 100 vegetable gardens have to do with ending hunger in America? Well, Katie Stagliano.s story will connect the dots.

When she was a third-grader in Summerville, South Carolina's Pinewood Preparatory School in 2008, Katie's teacher gave her a cabbage seedling to plant in her backyard for a class project. She cared for that seedling, and it kept growing and growing until it reached 40 pounds. If you're like me and not particularly well-versed in normal cabbage sizes, Katie explained to me during a Christopher Closeup interview, "Forty pounds is ginormous for a cabbage!"

Katie noted that her father had always taught her not to waste food because there were people who went to bed hungry every night and had to rely on soup kitchens for their only meal of the day. Therefore, she decided to donate her cabbage to a local soup kitchen run by Tricounty Family Ministries. The soup kitchen's grateful director asked her to come back and help serve the cabbage.

Katie said, "I wasn't sure what to expect. But when I got there, I was so surprised at how many people were in line. The faces looked like families just like mine. You never know who the faces of hunger may be. It may be your friends, or your neighbors, or someone you see at school every day, who'd just fallen on hard times…I ended up helping to feed 275 people. And after seeing all their faces, I thought, 'If one cabbage can help to feed 275 people, imagine how many people an entire garden could help feed!'"

That was the moment that inspired the youngster to create Katie's Krops, a charity that would feed the hungry. Initially, she asked her school for a little plot of land where she could plant produce to donate to those in need. Instead, her school gave her space the size of a football field! It remains the flagship garden of Katie's Krops and produces 3,000 pounds of food a year with the help of students, staff and the community at large.

Why do so many people get involved? Katie said, "A lot of my friends come to the Katie's Krops dinners and actually get to serve the meals that they make from these vegetables to those in need in our community. And so it's really great to get to meet everyone that you're helping, to feed and grow relationships with them."

Katie's Krops has now grown into a national youth movement that aims to end hunger one vegetable garden at a time. Young people around the country are choosing to grow produce on their own to donate to local soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Katie's Krops will even provide funding grants for some of them. They have 100 gardens in 32 states - and they're still adding more!

That mission spread even further with the publication of the children's book Katie's Cabbage which won a Christopher Award. Katie, now age 17, concluded, "For the future of Katie's Krops, our main goal for right now is to expand to 500 gardens in all 50 states. Once we hit that, I'd definitely love to go global and try to make as big of a difference as we can. Because our overall goal is to help make a difference in ending hunger, which I know is something that's very big. But working together, we can make a huge impact."

This essay is a recent "Light One Candle" column, written by Tony Rossi, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)

Background information:

The Christophers

Katie's Krops