When Jeanette Meldrum heard about a program in Chapel Hill-Carrboro that collected food donations left on people's front steps, she and her friends Lesli Garrison and Chasie Harris wasted no time in establishing a similar program in Durham.

PORCH (People Offering Relief for Chapel Hill-Carrboro Homes) helps fill pantries and backpacks of local school children. That was something Meldrum could relate to - as a child, when her father was out of work for a spell she received a reduced school lunch as well.

In Durham, the need was obvious. The Inter-Faith Food Shuttle - one of the key underpinnings of the food justice movement in Durham - already had a Backpack Buddies Program and agreed to transport the stuffed backpacks to a number of schools on behalf of PORCH-Durham.

The Durham organizers started small, calling upon their own neighborhoods and friends. Today PORCH-Durham ( porchdurham.org), less than a year old, fills 200 to 300 backpacks of food each weekend of the school year to eight elementary schools.

And it's just one example of the food justice scene in Durham these days. I think that this was a natural evolution. When foodies and do-gooders become one, the result is a robust food justice movement - we are not a community to rest on our tasty, tasty laurels.

For a long time folks have been gleaning the leftovers from farmer's fields to bring to places like Urban Ministries and other soup kitchens. But now there are both LLCs and nonprofits working to educate people from all walks of life about nourishment through the use of community gardens, among other things.

Green Space Initiative ( gsi-food.com) was started by Kifu Faruq and Melanie Wilkerson, partners both in life and in business.

In its simplest terms, they aim to "connect urban Durham communities back to their agricultural roots."

Faruq rattled off a dozen projects they are invested in right now, with an equal number of partnerships. She and Wilkerson offer youth and adult workshops for those interested in urban farming, cooking, and even starting a small business. They also have a mobile market and farm stand project in the works.

In the same vein is Elizabeth Newman, the Durham Community Garden Coordinator for the IFFS ( www.foodshuttle.org). The newest garden is at 707 Kent St., where every Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon volunteers come out to coax as many fruits and veggies out of the soil as the urban plot will yield.

The stress is on teaching folks. There are special workshops for cultivating apartment stoop gardens - it's about being realistic, she said.

And there are groups of people who are meeting with the interest of feeding the hungry, and doing so in an earth-friendly and sustainable way, like Transition Durham ( transitiondurham.org).

This group has hosted a number of free films that address these issues in the hopes of opening a solution-based dialogue. The last in this series, "Fresh," is slated for 6:30 p.m. Oct. 20 at the Community Family Life & Recreation Center at Lyon Park.

Perhaps one of the most exciting elements of this movement is the Durham Food Prosperity Council, a collective of foodie do-gooders who hope to streamline the interest and resources of all those interested in making healthy food much less a privilege.

If you're interested in getting involved, don't feel like you need to make your efforts strictly gourmet. PORCH-Durham wishes they could offer fresher foods, Meldrum said, but the whole bringing food home on a bus in backpack thing makes that tricky. A first-grader might forget the bananas in her backpack until Monday morning.

And this is by no means a complete list of the folks in Durham who are taking their interest in food beyond their personal palettes. This column would be incomplete without mentioning the work done by SEEDS ( www.seedsnc.org) to educate urban youth on gardening, eating, and fiscal management and Bountiful Backyards ( www.bountifulbackyards.com), which seems to have a hands in everyone's food justice cookie jars with their community gardens, sliding-scale workshops and edible landscaping.

If you peruse even just one of these websites, you'll soon find that like the root vegetables we are about to start enjoying this autumn, there is far more that lies beneath the surface in terms of opportunity.

All you have to do is start digging.

Tasty tidbits

The World Beer Festival kicks off another year Saturday, Oct. 8, at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. The afternoon session runs noon to 4 p.m., the evening session 6 to 10 p.m. Both sessions cost $40 - visit allaboutbeer.com/ for details and to purchase tickets. Volunteers still needed, by the way, which gets you in for free!

There are still plenty of Meals from the Market you can participate in to raise money for Durham Central Park. For a list and to register, visit www.durhamcentralpark.org/

Sadly, the sixth annual Taste of Durham festival has been postponed over venue complications.