The latest forecasts on food prices were released Friday, and economists now think food will spike at least as much this year as it did in 2007.

The USDA Economic Research Service upped its 2008 forecast to between 4 and 5 percent for this year's increase, compared with last year's final 4 percent hike for consumers. That hike was the highest since 1990.

Some soaring categories — including cereals and bakery products, and fats and oils — have forecasts of between 8 and 9 percent more than the 2007 Consumer Price Index numbers provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It's a global problem, one that United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday doesn't have a single cause or solution as he appealed for help in the face of growing hunger and global instability.

But there are plenty of people looking for answers. And closer to home, there are some who've taken an ancient strategy to the problem of hunger into the 21st-century world.

It's called gleaning, a practice in the Ancient Near East world that early Judaism was a part of, that calls for some crops to be left on the stalk or the vine at harvest time for those in need.

And in the Hoosier state, the North Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church is taking an active role in taking it out into the field — literally.

At a Warsaw-based office of the church's Society for St. Andrew, volunteers gather year-round to head out to area farm fields and glean potatoes and other crops.

A map on the organization's Web site locates almost all of the gleaning, done in partnership with area farmers, in a circle stretching from the state line north of South Bend to below Logansport. From west to east, volunteers work fields from beyond LaPorte toward Fort Wayne.

The church group reports that picking up the "leftovers" has taken 2.5 million pounds of potatoes and other crops to local dinner plates since the program began early this decade.

But they're just a part of a much larger movement, the USDA reports.

Many people have heard of Second Harvest and other types of food banks, many of whom are having their own struggles in these difficult economic times.

But there's also From the Wholesaler to the Hungry (FWH), an effort to get fresh, unsold produce to the poor that began in 1987 when one California man watched 200 flats of raspberries get tossed in a dumpster and thought there must be a better solution. And there's also Foodchain, a national network that "rescues" food from restaurants and corporate cafeterias, the USDA says.

And even the agricultural agency sends 150 pounds of its own food each Friday from the cafeteria at the Washington, D.C., headquarters to area soup kitchens.

The cost of lost food — food that farmers can't take to market because of "slightly irregular" shape or other imperfections, food that institutional kitchens usually toss in the trash — costs an estimated $31 billion, the USDA reports.

That's about 130 pounds per person that ends up in landfills and didn't need to, the agency added.

The USDA describes four different techniques for "food recovery," described as a basic humanitarian ethic for "the collection of wholesome food for distribution to the poor and hungry." They include the field gleaning practiced by the Methodist groups, salvage efforts like the FWH work, work with industrial kitchens like Foodchain's and a fourth practice of nonperishable food collection.

For more information, call the national hotline at (800) GLEAN-IT or check out some of the local partners.