The nouveau reach: Kellermeyer says most Americans have become wealthy, but just haven't realized it yet (photo by michael persico).

Starvation Riot

A Hunting Park activist takes a stand against global hunger.

by Tara Murtha

Ryan Kellermeyer, who grew up working farm fields of rural Indiana, is the unlikely resident-activist rabble-rouser of North Philadelphia’s Hunting Park. The neighborhood, anchored by its notoriously dangerous namesake park off Roosevelt Blvd., is a grid of tightly packed rowhomes with small front porches secured by locked iron cages jammed with takeout menus.

Looking out from Kellermeyer’s house on Ninth Street, the park looks downright Currier & Ives on a recent afternoon, covered in blankets of snow and dotted with barren trees twisting up into a clear February sky.

The tall, baby-faced 31-year-old bought his house eight years ago at a time when he was sick of “Christian campus suburban living” at Eastern University.

Now he’s dug deep roots here. As head of the civic association, Boy Scout leader and director of development at the Ayuda Community Center, he’s dedicated the last eight years of his life to making Hunting Park a better place.

On Jan. 1, Kellermeyer took his can-do activism to the next level by starting a one-man campaign to eradicate global hunger.

“Simple Size Me,” Kellermeyer’s new project, is inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary Super Size Me. The campaign is similar to the film, but in reverse: Instead of chronicling a skinny guy growing fat by eating junk food to raise awareness about the fast-food industry, it stars Kellermeyer as a big guy—called obese by his doctor, though he doesn’t agree with that—shrinking by subsisting on only brown rice and water to raise money to eradicate global hunger. His motivation? It’s estimated that between 24,000 and 30,000 people around the world die each day of starvation.

Kellermeyer raises awareness about the crisis by posting project updates at simplesizeme.com, and he generates money for the cause using the Network for Good Facebook application. Each day, in the spirit of what he calls “charitable democracy,” Simple Size Me Facebook group members vote on which organization will receive the next day’s funds.

So far, Kellermeyer’s lost 35 pounds and raised more than $3,100 for global hunger organizations. The website, emblazoned with the motto “HUNGER SUCKS, WE’RE RICH, GIVING IS FUN,” has garnered more than 2,300 hits.

He plans to keep going until he gets sick or raises a million dollars, whichever comes first.

It hasn’t been easy. The charismatic Kellermeyer, who smiles a lot and quotes Scripture without coming off creepy, readily cops to wolfing down a few slices of ham and knocking back three whiskeys in moments of weakness. There’s also that glass of O.J. he feels bad about. But other than these few transgressions, he’s stayed strong.

Kellermeyer says the jump from living on mostly Taco Bell and Dunkin’ Donuts—a bad habit he picked up partly from living in a neighborhood lacking real restaurants—to rice and water was a shock to his system at first, and he suffered the usual headache and fatigue symptoms of detox. Now, other than the occasional bout of hunger he tries to quell by loading up on more rice—he’s up to about 126 bowls—he’s feeling pretty good.

Though he hasn’t formally studied the problem of global hunger, Kellermeyer says, “If you can sit in a Phillies game and recognize that an amount that large will die from hunger tomorrow, most of them children, you don’t have to be an academic to grasp that or feel inspired to want to change that.”

The activist and Christian in him—he attends the Spirit and Truth Fellowship church across the street from Ayuda and quotes Isaiah when he really gets going—dictates the first of his two goals: to make people see that a human being starving to death matters. The second goal is to make people understand that they can do something about it—especially since, from his point of view, ending global hunger is really only a matter of finding the right distribution system.

Bill Clark, president of Philabundance, Delaware Valley’s largest food bank, says Kellermeyer’s on to something. The problem is that the food bank system we rely on here and in other First World countries doesn’t work when applied to developing nations.

“I spend every waking hour trying to feed people, and I can tell you that my job, as difficult as it is right now, is entirely different than if I was in a developing world dealing with a drought,” says Clark. “I couldn’t fix that with my tools.”

Here at home, the demand for food has spiked 31 percent in the last year. Meanwhile, corporate donations to food banks have plummeted. Everywhere you turn the recession paradox rears its ugly head: As demand goes up, resources go down.

There is one sliver of data that transcends this paradox, and it’s showing up in the books at both Philabundance and Ayuda: Individual donations are skyrocketing.

Philadabundance, which distributes food to 600 local agencies, reports that food-drive donations are up 70 to 80 percent. Individual donations to Ayuda shot up 24 percent this past December.

Kellermeyer says that being kind of broke—he picks up freelance work and DJ gigs whenever he can—didn’t matter once he realized that from a worldwide perspective, he’s actually rich.

“My combined income is about $35,000, which a lot of people would say is kind of low. Whatever. It puts me in the top 4.6 percent of the world, so that means 95.4 percent of people are more poor than I am,” he says. “Globally speaking, I’m the rich guy in the room.”