For over a decade, Melony Samuels has tirelessly advocated against hunger. Her fight began, she says, after meeting a fellow mother of four who “was having a tough time taking care of her family.”

Melony brought food from her cupboards to the family and when the news about her good deed spread, she began to help more and more people.

Today, Melony is the heroine behind the Bed Stuy Campaign Against Hunger in Brooklyn. Each month, she helps to meet the needs of over 10,000 New Yorkers.

Her organization, she explains, wasn’t built over night. It’s success has come from listening to the needs of her community.

At first, Melony says, “we were giving out pre-packaged bags of food and we noticed that people were bartering or taking out food and leaving it on the street.” She and her team quickly realized they were not meeting the community’s nutritional needs. Twenty-three percent of the people they served were diabetic and others suffered from heart disease.

“By us adding all this salt and sugar and not having whole grain, lean meat and a healthy surplus of fruit and vegetables, we were not doing justice to the pantry or to the community,” Melony says.

While some cities have decided they would rather arrest people who show off their home vegetable gardens in their front yards, Los Angeles appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

By way of the fine folks at Curbed, we learned that planning officials in L.A. are debating a proposal to allow Angelenos who grow their own food to set up farmer's markets in residential areas. According to Curbed, the proposal:

will allow farmers' markets in residential zones (with a permit) and streamline the approval of farmers' markets in other zones (i.e., agricultural, commercial, manufacturing, and parking zones). Farmers' markets are currently banned in residential neighborhoods, but, in keeping with the trend for retro-agrarian chic, the new ordinance would allow homeowners to grow and sell food at their homes. This follows the 2010 ordinance that allows people to grow fruits, nuts, and flowers at their houses with the intent to sell.

The entire proposal is billed as a way of increasing Angelenos' access to healthy food. Check out all the details over at Curbed. 

On the surface, the two executions that took place in the United States on Wednesday could not seem more different. Troy Davis was an African American from Georgia. Lawrence Brewer was a white supremacist from Texas. Davis was convicted of the shooting death of white Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989. Brewer was found guilty of murdering James Byrd, an African American man in Jasper, Texas, in 1998.

The Internet is notably not aflame with sentiment that the racist murderer from Texas should be alive in his cell today rather than nailed up in a cheap coffin.

Davis’s guilt has been called into question. Brewer’s role in dragging Byrd from a pickup truck until the black man’s head detached from his body was never in doubt. Davis’s last words, reportedly, were, “I am innocent.” In his sole interview after being convicted of Byrd’s murder, Brewer said: “I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth.”

Stark contrasts extended to the victims’ relatives:

Here's one ingredient you won't find on the label of that canned food you're serving your kids: Bisphenol-A (BPA), a chemical that has been linked to a wide array of health issues such as reproductive abnormalities, cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

The fact that BPA is found in food packaging is nothing new. But a new study from the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund found BPA in all six canned foods that it tested that are marketed directly to kids.

The study looked at Annie's Homegrown Cheesy Ravioli, Campbell's Disney Princess Cool Shapes, Shaped Pasta with Chicken in Chicken Broth, Campbell's Spaghettios with Meatballs, Campbell's Toy Story Fun Shapes, Shaped Pasta with Chicken in Chicken Broth, Chef Boyardee Whole Grain Pasta, Mini ABC's & 123's with Meatballs, and Earth's Best Organic Elmo Noodlemania Soup.

Food samples from all six tested positive for BPA contamination, with the Disney Princess and Toy Story pasta meals testing highest:

The levels of BPA we found in these canned foods marketed to children are of great concern because BPA disrupts the body's delicate hormonal systems. While a child-sized serving of these foods may result in BPA exposure at a level of concern, the repeated servings of canned soups, pastas, vegetables, fruits that a child eats in a week, in a year, and throughout her developing years, are what drive our Cans Not Cancer campaign.

The Breast Cancer Fund has several tips for reducing your risk and enjoying your favorite foods without resorting to cans.

After years of being one of corporate America's bad boys, Walmart has been on their best behavior lately.

Last year, the retail giant donated $72 million to environmental causes. Then there was their Michelle Obama-endorsed pledge to sell more fresh produce at affordable prices. And to top it off, last week they donated a million dollars to Milwaukee-based Growing Power, a well-known urban farming nonprofit headed by "genius" grant winner Will Allen.

Now, Walmart wants you to know that they care about renewable energy as well. Yesterday, the company announced that it plans to install solar panels in 60 additional stores in California, bringing the clean energy to an unprecedented 75 percent of their stores in the state.

“California presents a great opportunity for Walmart to make significant progress toward our sustainability goals by installing solar power on more than 130 store rooftops throughout the state,” said Kim Saylors-Laster, Walmart vice president of energy.

“Walmart has reduced energy expenses by more than a million dollars through our solar program, allowing us to pass these savings on to our customers in the form of everyday low prices.”

That's right, consumers, they're doing it for you. But jadedness aside, utilizing solar energy in California is a pretty smart idea. Not only will it provide for up to 30 percent of their total electric needs, the company will be doing the equivalent of taking 4,100 cars off the road by utilizing a clean energy source—pretty useful in the smog-filled state.

But as green as Walmart tries to be, they're not off the hook. The billion-dollar behemoth still weaseled their way out of a massive sexual discrimination case earlier this year, and hasn't changed their policy of suggesting their own employees take advantage of government programs like welfare and food stamps to feed themselves.

Here's an idea: Instead of passing along your solar saving to consumers, why not pass them on to some of your workforce? Now there would be a Walmart announcement worth waiting for.

You've heard of farm-to-table? How about tarmac-to-table?

OK, while they're not exactly growing the produce right on the tarmac, the folks who run Chicago's bustling O'Hare International Airport have come up with a novel way to both calm passengers and feed them local produce: grow the food right in the terminal.

According to ABC7:

Swiss chard, red habanero peppers, and onion chives are just a few of the 44 different types of organic herbs and vegetables growing in the middle of busy O'Hare Airport. The garden is tucked in the rotunda building, the area that connects terminals 2 and 3. Aviation commissioner Rosemarie Andolino hopes it will become a calming oasis for weary travelers.

ABC7 has all the details in the video below:

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Subject: Medical science deniers.

Occupation: Using debunked and unproven fears to create alarmist anti-vaccine attitudes.

Crime: Reversing centuries of progress in medical science.

Nemesis Reach: A 2010 national poll conducted by C. S. Mott’s Children Hospital found “vaccine safety” was parents’ number-one priority in children’s health research.

Recent Offender:  “A woman came up crying to me tonight,” said Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. “She said her daughter was given the vaccine [against human papillomavirus]. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences.”

Consequences of Bachmann’s Offense: University of Minnesota scientists offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who can verify a single case of mental disability caused by the HPV vaccine. The money has not been claimed.

Typical African Nemesis: Some voodoo practitioners of Benin have proposed a connection between childhood vaccinations and “the evil eye.”

African Nemesis at Work: Vaccine-preventable diseases kill more than 1 million people in Africa per year.

Typical Sub-Asian Nemesis: Pakistani Taliban commander Maulvi Faqir Mohammed has declared that polio vaccines are against Islam, claiming they are made with “extracts from bones and fat of an animal prohibited by God—the pig.”

Sub-Asian Nemesis at Work: Pakistan has the world’s highest incidence of polio.

Typical American Nemesis: American parents who choose not to vaccinate their schoolchildren tend to be affluent and educated.

American Nemesis at Work: In 2011, the United States was hit with the largest measles outbreak in more than a decade. The Centers for Disease Control reports that 90 percent of those infected had not been vaccinated.

Nemesis Roots in Academia: Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner, founder of the Waldorf educational method, also developed anthroposophical medicine, which encourages adherents to decline vaccinations.

Academia Nemesis at Work: In April 2011, Roanoke, Virginia’s Blue Mountain School—a “Waldorf-influenced” institution—closed temporarily when 23 of its 45 students contracted pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes uncontrollable, violent coughing. All of the children with whooping cough were unvaccinated.

American Nemesis Fallout at Home: Parents who refuse to vaccinate their own children and put babies too young for vaccines at risk (pertussis killed nine California children under 6 months old in 2010) are said to “have very particular concerns around the health and welfare and schooling of their children.” There are other words for it.

Nemesis Fallout in Developing Countries: In 2010, anti-vaccination movements in the rest of the English-speaking world led many South Africans to refuse the MMR vaccine. Hundreds of children died in the subsequent measles outbreak.

September is Hunger Awareness Month and there are many ways you can reach out to help the millions of people suffering from hunger in America.

Here are five ways you can make a major impact.

1. Volunteer at Your Local Food Bank

Follow the link and click on your state to find volunteer opportunities at a local food bank near you.

2. Take the Hunger Quiz

How much do you know about hunger in America? Take Feeding America's hunger quiz and get educated on the issue.

3. Dine Out to Help End Childhood Hunger

There's still time to eat out and help alleviate childhood hunger in America! From now until September 24, you can help feed a child by dining out at one of over 5,000 participating restaurants. Share Our Strength's Dine-Out is just one way the organization is tackling childhood hunger. Click here for more ways to take action.

4. Learn About Programs Addressing Hunger, Poverty and Unemployment

The D.C. Central Kitchen is one of the many organizations that is tackling hunger head-on. They turn leftover food into millions of meals, offer culinary job training to once homeless and hungry adults and teach urban kids about healthy foods. Take a look at their website, learn what they do and how similar models can be implemented in your community.

5. Donate to Wholesome Wave Programs

Wholesome Wave programs are designed to make nutritious, locally grown food available and affordable to America’s underserved urban and rural communities. What sets them apart is how they facilitate the link between local agriculture and federal benefit recipients through incentive-based programs. You can help by making a donation today.