Let’s be friends!
We’re so excited to announce the creation of our membership program, Friends of PA Eats. Since our founding as a nonprofit, we’ve gotten numerous queries about how our readers can support us. We are so grateful for this interest, and our Board has come up with a new circle of community support: Friends of PA Eats.
Friends of PA Eats consists of two membership tiers: individual and business. The annual donation for individuals or families is $30, and for businesses is $100 — although, if you give more you can help more!
This commitment will allow PA Eats to:
- Continue and further our mission to showcase the stories of people, places, and products that make Pennsylvania food culture so wonderfully diverse.
- Create educational resources that support and empower food insecure Pennsylvanians.
If you care about local food and agriculture and want to fight against hunger across Pennsylvania, we urge you to stand behind our mission.
If you pledge to support us, every penny will go toward our mission, and anything above that, we’ve committed to Feeding PA, so it can continue to purchase locally grown food to supply food banks throughout the Commonwealth.
Christa Barfield of FarmerJawn
Our work reflects our love of Pennsylvania’s food culture and our passion for battling food insecurity in multifaceted ways. Through our Meet the Farmer series, we tell the stories of people tilling the local soil, and we’ve also created comprehensive guides to help our readers shop online for local agricultural products, from cheese to meat to produce to spirits.
In addition to highlighting local artisans, showcasing iconic PA foods and spotlighting local farmers, PA Eats develops content for Feeding PA.
Our Nourish PA and Nourish PA for Kids series are produced specifically to provide accessible recipes and how-to videos that use ingredients commonly found in food pantries across the state. With guidance from Feeding PA, we take items that they say people often ask about, and, often with the help of local chefs, dream up delicious, healthy recipes that don’t require a lot of equipment, and that also come in at under $2 per serving.
For instance, our contacts at Feeding PA told us that dried beans are ubiquitous at food pantries, but many people aren’t sure quite what to do with them. So, we developed a tutorial on preparing dried beans, and then a bunch of recipes to use the beans, like Smashed Beans on Toast and Chickpea Salad with Greens.
When Feeding PA shared that more kids would be home this summer because of camp closures and might be cooking for themselves, we developed kid- and family-friendly recipes that can mostly be made without sharp knives, and without turning on the stove or oven. We incorporated ingredients that food pantries have in abundance, like dairy and peanut butter, which we did in recipes for Banana Snacks and Yogurt Pops.
These recipes and videos are available to watch on PAEats.com, and they are also turned into recipe cards that Feeding PA includes with food boxes distributed throughout PA. In this way, we aim to use our love of cooking and passion for local produce to help empower everyone to prepare delicious, nourishing meals at home.
Food insecurity is a huge issue across Pennsylvania. Before COVID-19, hunger affected 1.5 million of our neighbors in PA — that’s 1 in every 8 people. Because of the COVID-19 crisis, there are now 2.04 million Pennsylvanians (including nearly 630,000 children) who are now food insecure. This includes people of all ages, including children and seniors, living in all parts of the state.
Will you join us to play a part in fighting food insecurity in PA and amplifying the voices of the bakers, brewers, farmers, chefs and other culinary pros who make Pennsylvania such a special place to call home? As a Friend of PA Eats, we’ll list your name as a supporter (with your permission, of course!) for one year on our website. There are some other member benefits in the works that our friends will be the first ones to know about!
We appreciate any and all support from our wonderful community — thank you so much, in advance!
- FarmerJawn photo: Courtesy of Viva Leaf/FarmerJawn
- All other photos: Dish Works
