Flickr Slideshow: "Faces of Moveable Feast"

Moveable Feast will be posting a new Flickr slideshow every few weeks! Here is the first one - a quick look at some of the people around our organization :) 

To see the high-quality version on Flickr.com, click here!!

Weekly Health Tip: Fish Oil Supplements!

Fish oil is great for your health and has a wide range of benefits. This is because it contains a huge amount of the essential omega-3 fatty acids. This supplement helps reduce cholesterol levels and the risks of heart disease. It improves immune system strength, memory, concentration, and brain health, helping against the onset of conditions such as dementia. It even improves skin and hair texture! 

As we all know, breast cancer is related to Moveable Feast's mission. We were happy to see that last month, CNN and Health.com published an article - Fish oil linked to lower breast cancer risk. Many cancer research centers have found that eating a fish oil supplement daily can reduce the risk from heart attack! Great news!

Best of all, it can be picked up from your local supermarket or drugstore for a very reasonable price.

Mark Paul: Counting my Blessings

Saturday I went to the Waverly market – the market was filled with the bounty of summer.  Squash of every color, tomatoes of every shape and size, fruit galore and more.  It is the time of year when I buy bushels of tomatoes and make my tomato sauce to can for the winter months.  Loaded up with bags of all sorts of tomatoes, garlic and basil, I came home and started cooking.  After cooking on Saturday, Sunday night I did not feel like making dinner, so I ordered in Chinese.

My weekend may not seem extraordinary in any way – I picked up fresh produce, cooked, and decided to order food in for dinner.  But for other people in our community struggling with a life threatening disease and little means – access to nutritional meals is a daily struggle.  Without proper nourishment, HIV, breast cancer and other diseases can thrive and take advantage of someone’s disadvantage.

By supporting Moveable Feast, I support those in our community who need our help.  Moveable Feast provides over 52,000 meals a month (13,000 per week) to our clients – many of whom would have no other means or the energy to prepare nutritious meals for themselves.   I think about our clients living alone faced with the stigma of being HIV positive – where a hug and support from MF's driver delivering meals makes the world of difference because it shows someone cares about them.  I think about the stories of mothers fighting breast cancer whose children meet our driver at the door to receive meals for the family and the children, even at a young age, who will heat up the meals for the family.

My visit to the market and my cooking this weekend reminded me that I am blessed. I am blessed by the little things in life  – I just need to remember that more often.

Mark Paul Lehman is on the Board of Directors of Moveable Feast.

Weekly Health Tip: What's in Blue Crabs?

Hello Marylanders! We certainly love to eat our blue crabs. Let's take a look into the nutritional value of our tasty little friends.

Blue crabs contain about 2 ounces of crab meat (about equivalent to the weight of 2 or 3 slices of bacon).

Crab meat is an excellent source of high quality protein, vitamins, and minerals. In particular, it's a great source of phosphorus, zinc, copper, calcium, and iron. Blue crabs are also very low in fat, especially saturated fat (the worst kind of fat).

However, crab meat is pretty high in cholesterol. Just three (3) blue crabs would give you all the cholesterol you should eat for one day! 

FoodNetwork has a great recipe online that I might try here! Share your favorite recipes as a comment!

Tom's Story

These are tough times to be leading non-profit organizations. The challenge of engaging donors, identifying potential Board members, raising funds, creating innovative approaches to programs and services seems overwhelming at times. Still, there is a passion that drives me to do this work and ensure that Moveable Feast succeeds in its mission and vision to feed people, fight disease and foster hope. I have worked in the nonprofit, human services field for more than 25 years. Living in one of the most affluent countries in the world, I am personally committed to the issue of poverty and, thus, the impact areas of basic services: food, clothing, housing, and health care. These are the immediate impacts of poverty; without these basic needs secured each day, people cannot function. Poverty robs your quality of life: depletes your self-esteem so that you don’t recognize your own face in the mirror. In the face of poverty you can’t provide for your family; can’t maintain employment; have no money for health care; don’t care about tomorrow. In the face of poverty you are forced to surrender choices; live where others tell you; eat what is unhealthy; you can’t provide for your kids as you would like; you have limited choices for education… and on and on. 

For years I heard the adage: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a life.

It sounds so simple, but it is a complicated and oftentimes an arduous task. By the time the boy who has grown up in poverty is a man and ready to “learn to fish” poverty may robbed him of the basic foundations on which “learning to fish” is built. It’s a costly investment of resources: time, talent, and commitment of individuals and organizations to be in there for the long haul, not for a band-aid moment.

If Moveable Feast brings comfort and assurance of a daily meal to one person who is sick and alone (and we do this for more than 1100 people a week) – than we have maintained quality of life for that individual. Imagine being poor; being critically ill and being alone. I have been all three in my life, never at the same time. How about you?

Thomas Bonderenko is the Executive Director of Moveable Feast.

Weekly Health Tip from our Dietitians

Our lovely dietitians Jinee, Sara, and Betty have volunteered to post a weekly health tip about any health topic. This week, we have a tip they use from personal trainer Elijah Sacra. 

Yoga Seated Spinal Twist

We all spend our lives sitting, standing, and lying in a linear fashion.  This can cause tension in the back and weaken your abdominal muscles.  Most back injuries happen when people either twist to pick something up or even just twist to the side.  A great way to combat injury, and strengthen the core is the Yoga Seated Spinal Twist.  From a tall seated position in a chair, reach your hand to the outside of your opposite leg.  Use your hand as a lever to slowly twist your body to one side and hold.  Inhale and exhale through the nose five times while maintaining good posture.  Repeat on the other side.  Enjoy!

It's a Food Fight

Every day at Moveable Feast, vans drive out, stuffed with brown paper bags filled with frozen microwaveable meals. But these meals are not your typical TV dinner from Stouffer’s or Hormel. These meals are carefully designed by dietitians and meticulously put together by chefs to meet the nutritional needs of HIV-positive people who are so ill that they are too weak to leave their homes.



Yet…isn’t HIV a manageable disease with today’s advanced antiretroviral drugs? And hey, wasn’t there that huge breakthrough in HIV/AIDS treatment a few months ago? How many people could possibly have HIV and also be homebound, with all of these resources at their disposal?



Thankfully, HIV is no longer popularly construed as a disease that affects only homosexuals and drug users. But we often perceive HIV as a foreign or ‘African’ issue. The truth is that HIV is a poverty issue. The CDC found that 1 in 42 people living below the poverty line have HIV. And poorer people simply have a harder time working against the debilitating effects of HIV/AIDS.



The average antiretroviral drugs cost about $10,000 to $15,000 per year. As of August 2010, the Census Bureau defines the poverty line for an individual as an income of less than $10,830 per year. Yet 1 in 42 people living below this amount will have HIV. That’s a lot of people.

Poorer people also have less access to stable healthcare and housing, and endure the higher rates of violence that exist in poorer neighborhoods. Nutrition falls low on the priority list when a person is struggling with all these other problems.


But nutrition is incredibly important in fighting HIV. The idiom “feed a cold” has never been more pertinent.


That’s where Moveable Feast comes in. We provide nutritious food at no cost, so our clients can focus on getting better and maintaining their health. Because against HIV/AIDS, it really is a “food fight,” and we’re helping each of our clients win, day by day.

Up & Running!

Stay tuned for our first official blog post soon!