Menu for Hope 4

Cincinnati Locavore is participating in the 4th Annual Menu for Hope! This annual online raffle by food bloggers around the globe raises money for hunger projects worldwide. In 2006 the project raised over $60,000 for the World Food Program. This year the project runs December 10 - 21. Bloggers all over the world donate food-related prizes, and blog readers participate by buying raffle tickets for the various prizes through online charity auction house Firstgiving.

Here at Cincinnati Locavore we're especially excited that funds raised this year by Menu for Hope IV are earmarked for the school lunch program in Lesotho, Africa. The Lesotho School Lunch Program is a model in local procurement, buying food locally to support local farmers and the local economy. Instead of shipping surplus corn across the ocean, the WFP through the Lesotho program buys directly from local subsistence farmers who practice conservation farming methods.

Other bloggers in our region participating in the project (along with the prizes they're offering this year) can be seen Monday, December 10th at the Central US Prize Roundup on Kalyn's Kitchen, the Utah-based host for flyover country blogs. For all prizes in all regions, visit Chez Pim. You can see all of last year's raffle prizes here.

And here's the really fun part: by "participating," we mean Cincinnati Locavore is offering a prize. We're not allowed to tell you what it is yet -- Menu for Hope likes to announce all the prizes at the same time on the morning of December 10th -- but we can promise this prize will make any serious cook drool.