The Gathering Table serves anywhere from 50-120, as-local-as-can-be, mostly organic, veggie-packed meals every Thursday night at the Cashiers Valley Community Center. The kitchen is musty, the refrigerator donated, and the clientele diverse. Tonight’s feast consists of salmon croquets, mashed potatoes, organic carrots, cabbage, lentil soup, southern white biscuits, and leftover pecan pie from a community church function.

Diners grab themselves a drink and sit around plastic tables listening to Jay Drummond’s volunteer bluegrass band while waiting for Chef Donna Few, farmer and Gathering Table founder, to fix their plates. Whatever ingredients are not purchased from the Manna foodbank network or donated by the Fishes and Loaves food pantry across the street, Donna and the other farmers in the Blue Ridge Farmers Co-op contribute to the meal.

Volunteers come to help but also to hang and eat. The energy’s always good and everyone enjoys themselves. (This week’s kitchen banter is about how “Yankees put sugar in everything they try to make southern!”) David Ward, dedicated Gathering Table dish washing volunteer, feels the Gathering Table is special. He says, “This is a small town. People are sometimes scared to go to the ‘soup kitchen’ because of their pride and the small town chitter chatter. We invite anyone and everyone to come eat with us, the rich and the poor, anyone who wants to just gather.”

David’s right. Cashiers is a vacation town with no middle class. People are either wealthy second home owners on vacation or they live paycheck to paycheck. The town is in the middle of Jackson County where today 20.4 percent of residents live below the poverty line while 29.9 percent of children under 18 in all of Western North Carolina are food insecure.

There is a disconnect between the people who support the town financially and those who actually work there. The Gathering Table not only brings attention to the hunger needs in the community but more importantly invites everyone to come and eat together. Donna calls The Gathering Table the “Church of Food.” The focus is on relationships built around quality food that’s served for free, not on necessarily serving “poor people.” People from all walks of life who typically would never cross paths converse and share life over deliciously whipped up veggie meals.

People who are hungry hear about the meal through church bulletins and Spanish and English fliers plastered around town. More mountain people join for the meal during winter since there are no crops in the coldest months and fewer vacationers come through Cashiers to support their local businesses. Those who aren’t so hungry hear about the meals through Facebook, other friends who have dined there, or The Gathering Table’s loud and proactive board members.

Last year when Donna started The Gathering Table, she faced opposition from several Cashiers stakeholders who frankly said there was no need for a soup kitchen. She decided to start it anyway, focusing on good food and inviting anyone and everyone to come eat. Fast forward a year, and today The Gathering Table receives donations and volunteer support from established community member, and people from all over the socioeconomic spectrum come out and dine on Thursday nights.

Soon The Gathering Table will start serving meals on Monday nights, too. Funny how bringing everyone to the table changes minds and opens eyes to the needs of others, dissipating opposition and leaving one town a little less hungry and a little more tight knit.

Trueman: We produce more than enough food in the U.S. to feed every man, woman and child. In fact, we’ve got such a surplus that we throw away almost half of it. But more than 47 million Americans–including roughly 16 million kids–struggle with hunger.

And with budget cuts undermining our food stamp program, aka SNAP, this problem’s only getting worse. Who has the power to change this shameful state of affairs, and how?

Nestle: I’ve just seen A Place at the Table (a film in which I briefly appear), which lays out today’s hunger problem in a particularly poignant way. It was clear from the film that its low-income participants had to deal with what is now called “food insecurity,” meaning that they couldn’t count on a reliable supply of adequate food on a daily basis and sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. But they also had to deal with another problem: the food that they did get was mostly junk food. So the question really should be worded somewhat differently: How can we ensure that everyone in America can afford enough healthy food?

I’m guessing that the makers of A Place at the Table intended it to do for the 2013 version of food insecurity what the CBS television documentary, Hunger in America, did in 1968. That film showed footage of children so starved and listless that they might as well have come from countries at war or refugee camps.

What seems impossible to imagine in 2013 is the effect of that documentary. It shocked the nation. Viewers were outraged that American adults and children did not have enough to eat. Within that year, President Nixon called a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health to recommend programs and policies to end hunger, and Congress appointed the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (the McGovern committee) to develop legislation. This worked. Food assistance and other programs reduced poverty and hunger. Our present-day WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and SNAP (food stamp) programs are the legacy of that outrage.

Where is that outrage today? Without it, Congress can ignore the millions of people who depend on SNAP benefits and view the nearly $80 billion cost of those benefits as an enticing target for budget cutting.

Who has the power to do something decent about hunger? In a word, Congress. Unlike the situation under presidents Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson—all of whom took decisive action to help the poor–hunger in America today is nothing but a pawn in Washington power politics. We have come to value personal responsibility at the expense of social responsibility. It’s hard for many Americans to think that we must be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers when our own economic status feels at risk.

If we can’t count on Congress to do the right thing, we have to try to create our own local food security and engage communities in helping to care for one another. This means advocacy and coalition-building on two levels: national and local. On the national level, it means exercising democratic rights as citizens to lobby congressional representatives to address poverty and its consequences no matter how futile that may seem. On the local level, it means working with community residents to address their needs. It means engaging the media to get the word out.

That’s where Food Bloggers Against Hunger can help. Your job is to generate outrage and to encourage your readers to act. Go for it!

To gather ideas for aspiring city gardener leaders, I turned to two people with deep knowledge of the topic. Josh Singer is the co-founder of Wangari Gardens, a rapidly expanding project in Washington, D.C. Natasha Bowens is the photographer and writer behind the upcoming book The Color of Food and has traveled the U.S. collecting stories of food sovereignty. Here are the top five tips I gleaned from these young experts:

1. Communicate with the Community.

First, “there has to be cultural understanding and trust,” Bowens says. “So many people assume that because some communities are lacking food access and have high health problems that gardens are the solution,” she wrote in an e-mail. But this is not always the case, she felt, and for transplants to a city, checking in becomes even more important. “You have to understand you’re a guest,” says Singer. This can apply to members of a service corps, too.

From respectful conversations, Singer learned that his Northwest D.C. community did want a garden, and in fact had started efforts in the past. He also learned that while social media spurred the recent Arab Spring, a successful first spring at Wangari meant hitting the pavement and printing fliers.

Volunteers canvassed the neighborhood, attended advisory neighborhood commission meetings, and handed out hard copy communications in English and Spanish. They went to front doors and church sanctuaries. Community meetings then brought everyone together and shaped a vision of a mixed-use park.

2. Get Logistics in Place.

Another important step is finding a spot and figuring out who oversees it. If you think this sounds simple, think again. Some city governments put out the red carpet for community gardens or offer a convenient Google Earth guide to lots and parcels, but in other municipalities, “be prepared to do a lot of footwork,” says Singer.

He hoofed between city agencies, each of which denied having jurisdiction over the bowl-shaped piece of land he had his heart set on. After months of this, Singer went to the office of the surveyor to research for himself.  Others have spent years slogging through red tape.

Next to securing land, finding a water source is the second most important and difficult element to obtain. Bowen and Singer have seen everything from government-granted access to water lines to high-tech rain-catching systems to plot holders painstakingly carting water from a nearby house.

New organizations should look into the local municipality’s rules, get a free utility check, obtain a permit if necessary, and think outside the box. Wangari came up against some challenges with water delivery, but eventually pioneered a system that starts at a fire hydrant across the street, sends water through a rope of multiple hoses wrapped with tape to withstand the traffic, and delivers it to a 28,000-gallon cistern.

Also scope out ways to obtain inexpensive building materials, garden tools, seedlings, and supplies like mulch and soil. Singer swears by Craigslist’s free section for many garden needs. Local businesses have also come through with donations, sometimes relieved at the chance to unload surplus materials.

3. Make it Sustainable.

Once the project gets off the ground, organizers must set up a sustaining infrastructure. This means more than volunteers. A dedicated head of the garden, preferably full time, is a necessity, says Bowens. This person can oversee operations, make sure details like soil testing are taken care of, and know which community partners to call for an emergency fence repair or load of soil.

Interns who work 10 to 20 hours a week can provide important continuity and focus. Wangari Gardens brought in an additional work force by offering some free plots to low-income community members in exchange for general garden maintenance.

On the legal side, new gardens should link up with an established 501 (c) 3 organization that can act as a fiscal agent. This opens access to a host of resources. This relationship can come with the mentorship of experienced nonprofit administrators, a must for gardens to eventually launch as an independent entity.

Continued outreach is also key. Block parties and gardening or cooking demonstrations in nearby schools open the garden up to a larger audience and reach more potential plot holders.

4. Don’t be Afraid to Step on Toes and Tap Friends.

When Singer set out to start Wangari Gardens, he learned that he wasn’t the first to try. He just happened to be the first with the time, tenacity, and thick skin to refuse to take “no” for an answer. Singer felt the power of allies early on when a staff member in the office of the surveyor took on the garden research himself. Garden founders went on to partner with a parent-run program for neighborhood kids, city organizations with similar missions, and a number of dedicated volunteers and plot holders.

Allies come from all backgrounds. In many cases, gardens link up with youth organizations or summer work programs for adolescents to find willing hands. In one case, an Atlanta garden partnered with a facility for men who are homeless and recovering from addiction. Clients serve as stewards and garden workers, then enjoy the food in their meals.

Web-savvy constituents can help out virtually, providing tweets, Facebook asks, blog posts, and e-mails. Wangari Gardens handily funded a Kickstarter campaign on a wave of social media.

5. Look Within.

In many cases, gardens hold a bounty of resources within their own sub-community. “I’ve seen examples of reaching out to community elders–who can teach us all a thing or two about growing–and offering them a free plot in exchange for helping maintain,” Bowens says.

At Wangari Gardens, an in-reach committee plans cook-outs, family festivals, and other bonding activities. Many gardens have seen their own plot holders give workshops on preserving food, extending the growing season, using medicinal herbs, and other specialized knowledge. These initiatives go a long way in keeping energy up and costs down.

In the end, the goal of urban community gardens and the key to their success is the same, says Singer: “It’s about growing community.”

Image 1: A staff member (left) and youth intern (right) walk through East New York Farms in Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Natasha Bowens

Image 2: A hand-painted sign depicts the logo of East New York Farms, a community garden in Brooklyn, NY that follows the tip to include local youth. Photo by Natasha Bowens.

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Resources for community gardens, from the American Community Gardening Association:

10 Steps to Starting a Community Garden

The Rebel Tomato interactive tool for designing and planning community gardens

Their new food documentary, A Place at the Table, seeks to uncover the stories of a few families who face poor quality of life and food insecurity due to lack of nourishing food in their daily lives. This film is a history lesson that chronicles the rise of hunger over nearly a century of time. The facts are presented by academics who lend statistics and social theory to our understanding of the plight. Beyond revealing that there is indeed a hunger problem in the U.S., this film and its social action campaign have the potential to reach a wide audience. But I kept wondering, while watching the film, what empowerment really means once a film’s popularity wanes and only the stalwart individuals are left to lead the charge.

One in six Americans are hungry. Thirty percent of U.S. families are food insecure. Fifty million Americans are food insecure, meaning they do not know where their next meals will come from. How did we get here?

President of Environmental Working Group Ken Cook says in the film: “The subsidy system that we now have actually started back in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Farmers were the first to be hit hard when the economy went bad. The programs in the great depression of course were emergency programs. The idea was that if we could on a temporary basis help support the farm products that would get through this difficult period. And then we would let the market take over, except we never let the market take over.”

Since 1995, the USDA has spent 1.4 trillion dollars on farm subsidies. The “domain of support” within the agricultural sector, as Raj Patel tells viewers, is provided to mega farms and mega corporations. But if we take a step back, previous Nixonian-era policies of the 1970s made positive and significant changes to government food programs: The food stamp program increased to national coverage, the school lunch program from the 1940s was revamped, school breakfast was instituted, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) programs were created.

The Reagan presidency created different objectives for government assistance. Military spending increased and directly caused federal cuts to food programming. And as Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University tells us, the price of fresh fruit and vegetables has gone up by 40 percent since the 1980s as well. Not surprisingly, the relative price of processed food has gone down by 40 percent. Farm policy is subsidizing the wrong foods and the cheapest calories.

In one scene, a visual ticker illustrates the direct relation between the rise of hunger and the passing of time. We see newsreels of our presidents–Reagan Era: 20 million hungry; H.W. Bush: 30 million hungry; Clinton: 33 million hungry, G. W. Bush: 49 million hungry; and Obama: 50 million hungry. One thing the film fails to mention, but that is important to know is that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (once called “food stamps”) is the top funded program within nutrition programs regulated by the Farm Bill. In fiscal year 2012, the government spent $74,619,460,715 on SNAP benefits. (By comparison, $11 billion was spent on hotly contested crop insurance, the biggest form of farm support, in 2012.)

People who do not have enough to eat, are hungry regardless of what the numbers show.

Mother of two, Barbie Izquierdo, explains the harsh limitations of food stamp qualifications. Toward the end of the film, Barbie achieves what should be a triumph: She secures a full-time job. But with her salary above $24,000, she no longer qualifies for federal funding that provides her children with free breakfast and lunch at school. Employed, but without sufficient funds to choose healthy foods for her children, Barbie gains zero empowerment to make the right choice. This is a case of poverty predicated on a welfare system which does not provide transitional support for people emerging from dependence on government support.

Second grader Tremonica is eight years old and obese. Sitting in a mobile medical unit with a health professional, she is asked what she eats at home for snacks. When her answer is chips and cookies, the health attendant responds: “Maybe you can ask Mom to start buying you some apples.” The child clearly does not understand the benefit. And why would she when she is sitting in a doctor’s office being questioned by a stranger?

It is exciting when we see the same girl pictured in the classroom of Odessa Cherry at Jonestown Elementary in Mississippi, where food education is an interactive taste experience. Her students taste honeydew melon, feel its weight and texture, and learn to identify the fruit as something delicious, sweet, and juicy–and a food they might desire. But for those children to ask their parents to buy honeydew melon instead of cookies, the price must be right.

We see the paradox first-hand in Barbie’s story:  A first frame films her celebrating her new full-time job, the second frame films her three months later, in tears, as she finds she still can only afford Chef Boyardee for her children–or maybe only Hot Pockets at the month’s end. It is not that her children would reject healthier foods if given the opportunity. The opportunity just does not emerge, on a budget as tight as Barbie’s. These are the lives which relay an important imbalance between achieving parts of a healthy lifestyle–financial security, nutrition education, taste appreciation–and total freedom from poverty.

Ree Harris is a mother of four boys. She is also a life-long resident of Jonestown, Mississippi. Her food story is illustrated through an animated visual that charts the 66 miles of her roundtrip, and the money spent on gas, to shop at a supermarket stocked with fruit and vegetables. For Ree, the extra effort and expense put into escaping her food desert for better purchasing options, is possible–even if it is tiresomeness and inconvenient. But others are not as free.

As a viewer of this film, I came away appalled by the problems, but uncertain of real solutions. It did not feel like enough to sign up for an action alert e-mail from A Place at the Table on Take Part. After reading Andy Fisher’s conclusive take here on the contradictions within the anti-hunger movement, it did not feel like enough to take the No Kid Hungry pledge sponsored by Share Our Strength (an organization whose core partner is Walmart).

I want to find real examples of people at the local level who are creating social, progressive change that affects the communities they live in. I want to find examples of what empowerment really means, even if our government’s valuation of food is to miraculously change toward subsidizing healthy foods.

The steps outlined by Jeff Bridges’ End Hunger Network boldly dictate what the government and local leadership must do to eradicate hunger by 2015. While policy must change and political will must emerge to ensure it passes, there are organizations that have begun the work necessary to bring communities out of poverty–and thereby hunger–on the local level. Organizations focusing on community food security, state-wide networks of leaders and institutions, and food sovereignty, create opportunity for empowerment and sustained freedom by strengthening communities from the ground up.

A Place at the Table succeeds at telling a gripping story about communities and people who are wanting. What we need now is a convergence of powers to rework our public policy and restructure our societal hierarchy so that everyone is given the opportunity to gain a place at the table. We need an honest, democratic, and progressive plan to eradicate hunger in America.

Recently, musician, and Bay Area food activist  AshEl put his concerns about the way we eat to music, in the song Food Fight! He asked filmmaker Ben Zolno, of New Message Media, to help him create a music video for the song.

The resulting video is an in your face story with what Zolno calls a dynamic “Boys N the Hood” on its head. It’s graphic and attention grabbing. In Food Fight! bad guys who might be robbing a convenience store are now actually putting bad food into the store. Zolno says that the story “seemed a natural response to the irony that people in suits get rich for helping kill kids through diabetes and conversely starving large parts of the rest of the world.”

He explained his intention for the video: “I feel like solving our food problem is the answer to so many of our problems–malnourishment, global food price instability, herbicide pollution, fossil fuel waste, etc. Ash’s lyrics succinctly provoke a potentially wide audience to think in a new way about virtually everything unsustainable about our current agriculture system, so I said, let’s do this.”

Food activists of color think that the video is by and large effective.  Bryant Terry, vegan chef, and author of Vegan Soul Kitchen said, “I think that  when we talk about these issues, there is the matter of personal responsibility, but it is larger than that. We have to look at the larger structural issues.” Terry not only writes about health and the connection to food, but also connects with young people as he tours the country. He said the video visually shows a balance between the structural challenges and the personal responsibility of eating well.

Kendra Lee, a long time health journalist and editor thinks the video is heavier on “these are bad” than “here’s what to eat to replace bad,” and there’s nothing about portion control (or where the communities this is trying to reach should buy healthier foods). “I’d give it a C+ on getting the message across, though I’m not sure exactly what their message goal is,” she said. And she takes exception to parts of the video: “I’m not too crazy about the simulated shooting, but that might work with young folks.”

Malik Yakini, a urban farmer in Detroit and blogger at Be Black and Green gives the video high marks.  “I am a fan of Stick Man and Dead Prez,” Yakini said of the musicians who lend their talents to the message.  “I liked incorporating Vandana Shiva, talking about the control of seeds and thus humanity. It’s a little bit graphic for my taste, but will probably be a good tool for driving home the point to young people whom have grown up in a culture dominated by gangsta rap videos.”

Whether it tells a larger story or not, LaDonna Redmond, a Minneapolis-based food justice advocate said, “I think it gives kids and community the context of the food fight that we are in. And it does that in a context that they can relate to, and the reality is that the system (food and others). It’s violent and pervasive.”

Some of those who live in the urban reality portrayed in the video, including Jenga Mwendo, a New Orleans-based food and community activist and founder of the Backyard Gardeners Network in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward found the video resonated with them, “Love it,” Jenga said. “Yes, it’s a bit graphic, but necessarily so.” In terms of getting the message out, she thought it was a good start: “I think we could go even farther with messaging like this to show what’s actually in these ‘foods’ and what they do to us,” she said. “Granted, it needs to be entertaining to be well-received. But I’m not sure how seriously it would be taken by young people. It’s definitely a good basis for a conversation about food choices.”

Vanessa Carter, an educator and the creator of the curriculum for the video says the video “invites students (just students?) to question their relationships to food, food deserts, food access, global food sovereignty, ecological justice, stereotypes, drug use, racism and more.”  According to Carter, young people are experts at consuming media.  She said that this film asks them to polish their media literacy skills, question their relationships to the systems around them and join a movement. “The best chance we have of the long battle to point our food system toward sanity is to reach the youth, so I hope teachers pick up the video to start the discussion,” she said.

The very passionate Zolno thinks that this project is just the beginning: “It is ultimately the choice of many individuals who will step up, once we are awoken by leaders in the movement who can show us that choice.”

Watch the video for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments section below.

In the food retail sector, unfortunately, raising the minimum wage might not make much of a difference to those employees that are most vulnerable. Grocery stores and other food retail outlets are already avoiding minimum wage and benefit requirements for many workers by keeping them in part-time jobs. Realistically, if a worker can’t get scheduled for 40 hours per week of work, then minimum wage requirements cease to be effective in ensuring an annual income floor.

With support from federal and state governments as well as private foundations and businesses, communities across the country are beginning to engage in efforts to increase the number of food retail outlets in low-income “food deserts.” This is tremendously important work – according to USDA statistics, almost 40 percent of low-income Americans lack adequate access to a full-service grocery store. But as a growing body of evidence shows, there is a great deal of variation in the quality of food retail jobs, and food retail outlets focused on customer-service and sustainability are more likely to pay higher wages and provide full-time jobs than are other retailers that are narrowly focused on cost cutting.

One might ask, “Why do employers want to keep workers part-time? Can’t a business case be made for investing in employees?” The answer is simple: because they can get away with it. With high unemployment rates concentrated in low-income communities (to give one example, unemployment in parts of West Oakland is over 40 percent), employers are free to treat workers as expendable commodities. Employers know that these workers will take whatever hours they can get, even if it means waiting by the phone to hear whether they are on the schedule for that very day.

In some states, California included, the most egregiously exploitative practices are formally prohibited. If an employer sends a California worker home two hours into an eight hour shift because business is slower than usual, the employer must pay the worker for at least half (or four hours) of the hours that were originally scheduled. But perhaps unsurprisingly, research has shown that violations of the law are widespread, particularly in lower-income communities where workers are more desperate for work and have less access to legal representation and resources.

As we think about using tax credits, public investment funds, and other public resources to bring full-service grocery stores to low-income, underserved communities, we need to think creatively about how to hold these businesses accountable for providing good, sustainable jobs:

1. Tax Giveaways – We should support efforts to reform California’s state enterprise zone tax giveaway program. The program costs taxpayers over $700 million a year, and it is so broad that it competes with efforts to bring retailers to underserved “food deserts.” It also ties tax credits to all new hires, regardless of whether these represent real jobs, and provides no incentives to compensate workers above the required minimum wage and benefits. The California Labor Federation and partner groups are leading efforts to reform enterprise zones in California – support their work by attending public hearings and responding to other calls for action.
2. Local Incentives – In designing loan, grant, tax credit, or zoning incentives to draw full-service grocery stores to otherwise underserved food deserts, we should consider including a “good jobs” provision. This could be as simple as requiring benefits parity for full-time and part-time workers. This is a regulation used in Europe to avoid a disparity in fixed-costs between workers classified as full-time versus part-time. Another option would be to levy a fine when businesses go above a certain cap on the proportion of workers who are part-time.
3. Enforcement – We need to engage as community members to help with the enforcement of existing labor laws. This means providing workers with access to essential legal resources, as well as acting as citizen investigators ourselves. As shoppers, we should be asking managers and workers about the store’s practices, making it known that we care about the quality of jobs for all workers in our community.

Access to full-service grocery stores and good, sustainable jobs in food retail will not solve all of the problems faced by low-income Americans. But as more of us begin to understand the link between these two important goals, and to work for solutions that encompass them both, we will start to see progress.

Originally posted on Western States Council blog.

All across the country—in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Oakland, Milwaukee, and New York, just to name a few—residents of low-income neighborhoods have rallied to get healthy food into their communities. There are hundreds of nonprofits dedicated to building organic gardens in peoples’ backyards, teaching inner-city kids how to cook nutritious meals, or boosting fresh produce in corner stores.

In Oregon, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO), has been a pioneer of food justice. For over 15 years, the association’s Interfaith Food & Farms Partnership (IFFP) has helped churches, synagogues, Muslim community centers, and Hindu temples source healthy, organic food from local farms. IFFP assists congregations in launching farm stands, food buying clubs, cooking classes, and even community gardens—all of which are open to members of the community, too. (And there’s no proselytizing. You can have access to healthy food whether or not you attend a service.) Right now, five congregations in the Portland area have farmer tables where parishioners and community members can use SNAP benefits (food stamps) and WIC vouchers to buy local food. There’s even a food buying club, held at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, which also allows members to purchase local produce, eggs, and bulk goods at wholesale prices with SNAP and direct nutrition assistance vouchers

One of the most exciting projects underway at IFFP is a grassroots “community food assessment” of one of Multnomah County’s poorest neighborhoods, Rockwood. Like many poor communities, Rockwood has an abundance of fast food outlets and few grocery stores (and unlike inner Portland, not a single farmers’ market). Instead of swooping in with solutions to the food swamp dilemma, IFFP, with funding from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the Presbyterian Hunger Fund, and the USDA Community Food Projects grant, hired eight Rockwood residents to go door-to-door in their own neighborhood and ask people what types of food outlets they’d like to see more of.

“The focus is on getting people in the community to come up with solutions for the community,” says Jenny Holmes, director of environmental ministries at EMO.

Eager to see a community food assessment in action, I tagged along with Marisela Hernandez and her colleague Jose Luis Hernandez Avalos a few months ago. Language barriers posed a challenge—most of the residents spoke Arabic (or broken English)—but eventually they found some English and Spanish-speaking residents who agreed to take the  survey. Marisela, 17, greeted each neighbor with a brief overview of the community food assessment. “We’re trying to bring more resources to the community so we can bring healthier food to the neighborhood,” she’d say. Even though we were often interrupting residents’ dinners, once they heard what we were up to, they were eager to share their thoughts.

Several residents said they have to leave Rockwood for groceries, trekking by bus to a WinCo nine miles away or a Food4Less five miles west on Powell and 82^nd, making their total travel time anywhere from forty to sixty minutes. Many also said that they run out of SNAP benefits before the end of the month and have to rely on the Oregon Food Bank for emergency food. One of the questions on the survey—“Do you want more places with healthy food in your neighborhood?”—elicited adamant yeses from a young mother of five and a 65-year-old woman from Micronesia, whose grand-daughter translated for her. Several said they’d like to see more affordable food in their own neighborhood in the form of farm stands, community gardens, and farmers’ markets.

Once Marisela and Jose Luis and their team finish canvassing the neighborhood, IFFP will summarize the data in a report that will be shared with the community and elected officials this spring.  With any luck, Rockwood will soon have more affordable outlets for healthy food.

Maybe Roger Cohen is right—to a point. You don’t see working-class folks and struggling immigrants shopping at Whole Foods, per se. But to assume that means these people don’t want to eat healthy, local, and yes, even organic, food is misguided. Whenever communities figure out how to prioritize healthy food (making it more ubiquitous and less expensive), you see people of all income levels stocking up.

Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon makes it easy for congregations from around the country to steal their brilliant ideas.  Free resources, including “Food Sovereignty for All: Overhauling the Food System with Faith-based Initiatives,” a guide to starting community gardens, cooking classes, and farm stands, are available on the EMO web site.

But it hasn’t always been this way. As one of the founders of the nonprofit People’s Grocery in West Oakland—the Bay Area’s most notorious food desert—he and his colleagues started out with more affordable, less ambitious projects, like a mobile food delivery service and a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) box. But it quickly became clear—as several grocery chains tried to enter the neighborhood and failed, and residents were left relying on corner stores or taking long trips by public transportation to other neighborhoods—that the area needed a reliable, independent grocery store.

“Residents said, ‘What you’ve brought to the neighborhood is great, but it’s far from a complete solution,’” Ahmadi recalls.

So, he left People’s Grocery, spent time in business school where he became an expert on community grocery stores, and then secured a possible matching loan from the California FreshWorks Fund for around a third of the funding. Ahmadi then hatched a plan to raise the remaining $1.2 million needed to start the People’s Community Market through what’s called a direct public offering. In other words, he’s inviting California residents to invest in fresh food — literally. For a mere $1,000, anyone in the state can become a shareholder.

As focused as Ahmadi is on getting this project funded—and he is, very—he’s also well aware that grocery stores are only one piece of the puzzle in a neighborhood where fresh food is hard to come by and 48 percent of residents are obese or overweight.

A rendering of the planned People’s Community Market in West Oakland, Calif.

“Education and access are two sides of the same coin,” says Ahmadi. “You can’t make healthy food available and just expect people to buy it. We’ve never thought that would work, we’ve never seen that work. And it’s not a very successful strategy to support people becoming more knowledgeable about their dietary choices without having a built environment that supports a change.”

That’s where the relationship between People’s Grocery and other community organizations come into it. Ahmadi envisions nutrition counselors on-site in the store offering advice, classes, and health screening. “We consider the education and health support service element to be core to the business model, not peripheral,” he says.

And that’s not the only way the People’s Community Market will differentiate from other, larger grocery stores. With a community advisory council (a group of neighborhood folks who will advise on things like planning, outreach, marketing, and recruitment), a commitment to hiring at least 50 percent West Oakland residents, and an eye toward community participation at every turn, Ahmadi hopes the market will succeed where bigger chains have failed.

While a cool grocery store will no doubt put the neighborhood at increased risk of gentrification, Ahmadi says, that fact simply can’t be a seen as a deterrent.

“Does that mean that out of your fear of [gentrification] you leave the community in the condition it’s in?” he asks. “That’s just not a very good a choice for us. Gentrification is a reality that goes far beyond what we’re doing here.”

Ahmadi also points to other examples of independent groceries in food deserts, such as Detroit’s Metro FoodLand, and the ways they have used community investment to stay viable in a market that’s less hospitable to chains like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. As Ahmadi tells it, Metro FoodLand owner James Hooks bought the store from Kroger when the chain decided to close all its Detroit stores.

“For the first few years after Hooks took over, the shrinkage [i.e. theft] and employee turnover were both really high,” says Ahmadi. (The average grocery store suffers from 3 to 5 percent shrinkage.) So Hooks started to do what only a small, independent grocer can—he got to know his workers and his customers. “He reformed his employee policies—to treat his workers better and give them more meaning. He also focused on relationship-building with the customers, and reformulated his products based on what they asked for … and as a result, he has dramatically reduced those numbers.” These differences—while the may seem small—have kept Metro FoodLand in business in a neighborhood where Kroger couldn’t survive.

“There’s a lot of research that shows that larger chain stores are not well suited for these types of demographics. They don’t have the ability to customize because they’re so centralized,” Ahmadi says. For instance, West Oakland shoppers aren’t likely to spend all their grocery money all at once, but they shop often, spending around $20 at a time. So Ahmadi plans to build a store that is smaller than the average supermarket, with less overhead and around 40 percent fewer items in stock.

“If I was an executive at a major chain, beholden to my shareholders, and needing to maintain large profit margins, I probably would say don’t open a store in West Oakland,” Ahmadi says.

Of course, if all goes well, the People’s Community Market will have shareholders, too—just a different kind.

“We’re trying to create an exciting proposition that offers a shift away from Wall Street. We hope our investors will also be proud allies and supporters who care about impacting our mission,” says Ahmadi.

Not that there isn’t money involved, of course. In fact, according to a study conducted by the People’s Community Market, around 70 percent of West Oakland residents’ grocery spending—or $58 million a year—is currently being spent out of the neighborhood. Ahmadi says he hopes to absorb around $10 million in gross sales, by serving, and employing, a significant portion of the community.

“We need a new kind of model for food deserts,” says Ahmadi. “I believe it can work—but it takes a lot more work.”

An earlier version of this story appeared on Grist.

Sam Kalalau, a Native Hawaiian who lives in the isolated, rural town of Hana on Maui’s eastern edge, has a dream for his people, many of whom suffer from chronic conditions with dietary links such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Hana is known mostly for its lushness, postcard-perfect beaches, and spectacular oceans views, and less so for its fertile fields. But this produce whisperer helps run Hana Fresh Farm, a seven-acre, certified organic farm situated on a gentle slope and filled with tropical fruit trees, heirloom greens, and fragrant herbs. The 60-year-old also seeks to educate locals and visitors alike about the health benefits of homegrown foods like avocado and papaya over the canned and processed goods transported from the mainland.

Hana Fresh sells freshly picked crops at a roadside stand in front of Hana Health, the squat community wellness center that sits between the popular produce stand and the farm, which also grows gourmet greens and exotic fruits for high-end restaurants, resorts, and grocery stores on the island. Fresh food from the farm is incorporated into the site’s senior meal program. The Hana Fresh Market also sells prepared foods and complete meals in addition to produce and locally sourced fish. Profits from the farm and stand help support the medical facility; last year $60,000 went to fund community health programs, according to the nonprofit’s Executive Director Cheryl Vasconcellos.

For local residents, many of whom are Native Hawaiians, Hana Fresh offers one-stop wellness shopping. “I’d love to see our elders go in for health checkups and come out with a prescription for kale,” says Kalalau. “We’re working on ideas like that now.” He and other staff lead tours of the farm, where visitors can learn about the challenges of growing food in the tropics and traditional Hawaiian medicinal ways.

Most tourists think of Hana—reached by navigating a stunning stretch of “highway” with hundreds of hairpin turns and dozens of one-lane bridges—as a patch of paradise with gorgeous waterfalls, verdant landscapes, and serene swimming holes.

But people live here too. And the roughly 2,200 residents of this remote area rely on Hana Health and Hana Fresh for routine things most tourists take for granted, like primary medical and mental health care, dental cleanings, and access to nutritious food. Hana is a federally designated underserved area, and the organization’s mission is to provide a safety net and improve the health and wellness of the community, particularly for Native Hawaiians and others who are at risk due to financial, cultural, and geographic barriers. “Many of our patients go straight out the door from their medical appointments to buy vegetables, pick up a salad or smoothie for lunch, or even dinner,” says Mary Hanchett, a medical receptionist who has worked at the clinic for nine years.

The 35-year-old mother of two was born and raised in Hana, and relies on the farm stand as well. Hanchett is healthy, but she keeps close tabs on her blood pressure and cholesterol, since there is a history of these conditions in her family. “I’ve always been careful about what I eat because of my genetic disposition,” she says. “I do enjoy Hawaiian food—like pork—but I also eat a lot of vegetables and the farm and market make that easy for me to do. There was nothing like this when I was growing up here.”

Native Hawaiians like Hanchett are at greater risk for a slew of health conditions: The population is three times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes compared to white folks, and they face twice the risk of heart disease compared with other ethnic groups. Hawaiians are also 70 percent more likely to have high blood pressure than their white counterparts, according to the U.S. Office of Minority Health.

Preventing such conditions takes education, community outreach, and money. The recently constructed on-site kitchen, the Hana Nutrition Center—which took about 10 years to complete—is key to the program’s continued economic sustainability, as it allows the facility to expand its prepared food line and make value-added products such as preserves and pickles. It will also allow Hana Health to expand its nutrition, meal, and obesity-prevention programs, says Vasconcellos. The organization previously ran its programs out of a 75-year-old, 100-square-foot building.

Hana Health supports healthy lifestyles and hopes to prevent chronic medical conditions on what Vasconcellos calls “a stealth basis.”

“We make sure we have good food that people will want to eat at the market,” she adds. “We don’t ever refer to it as ‘healthy.’ We refer to it as ‘really good.’ And it’s taken off.”

The facility is experimenting with incentives to attract locals to come in for regular checkups. A women’s health initiative will include a “no fee” health exam, pap smear, half-hour traditional lomilomi massage, wapine (lemongrass) ice tea, and a $75 gift certificate for the farmers market. A school-focused effort will give elementary-age students a pedometer, and, upon walking to school two mornings a week, a healthy snack once they get there. Children with the most activity for the week get gift certificates for fresh fruit smoothies at the farm stand.

For the past three years, the medical center has been tracking residents’ fresh produce consumption, and they’ve seen it increase by one serving a day. It’s a modest improvement in diet, which the Hana Fresh staff hope will rise and translate into improved health over the long haul, says Vasconcellos. Anecdotally, she’s seen health benefits in the local population who access the nonprofit’s services. “We know that there is still just one patient receiving dialysis, and this has not changed in several years,” she says, as another indicator of the community’s health.

The farm has operated in earnest since 2006, although prior to that a large on-site garden provided fresh produce for seniors, says Vasconcellos. The stand started in 2007, and moved to a daily market three years ago. The medical facility dates back to the 1940s plantation era, when six sugar companies operated in the area and several thousand people called Hana home.

In addition to her official administrative, financial, personnel, planning, and public relations duties, Vasconcellos can also be found pulling weeds and serving meals. There is no room at the nonprofit for slackers, she says. Running a farm business is rewarding—but it’s also a lot of hard work. There’s some overlap in job descriptions, but the organization employs about 36 people: 17 in the clinic, 14 in the farm and farm stand, and five in the nutrition center.

“On any given day you can find me harvesting carrots, baking banana bread, or washing dishes, depending on what needs to get done at the time,” says Vasconcellos. “It’s the nature of working in Hana. We have to be self-reliant. It’s not for everyone.”

But it’s clear that the work suits Vasconcellos, a resident for 15 years. “Hana Health is on the cutting edge of so many issues,” she says. “It’s exciting, challenging, and often frustrating, but I think we are on to something important and hope that future health indicators bear this out.”

Solving the community’s food supply problem—by growing its own—seems like a good place to start.

Photos: Above, Hana Fresh Farm’s executive director, Cheryl Vasconcellos, is in the front row, center. Farmer Sam Kalalau is sitting on her right. Below, Visitors to the Hana Fresh Farm Market.

Originally published on Grist.

In large part fueled by Michelle Obama’s goal to eliminate food deserts in seven years, Walmart has set the PR machine in motion around its new battle cry: “The Great Grocery Smackdown:”

“If you’ve always lived near a grocery store or fresh market, here’s something you’ve probably never considered: There are neighborhoods across the United States where it’s nearly impossible to find fresh produce. These places are called ‘Food Deserts’ and Walmart is committed to removing them from our communities.” The Walmart proposal for Chicago has been framed as “the beginning of a major private-sector effort to address the food desert problem on the South Side.”

Walmart sees Chicago’s South side as the key to the rest of the city–in fact as the key to all cities. According to the Chicago Tribune, in a recent meeting with Mayor Daley Walmart offered to open grocery stores in food deserts in exchange for access to the other, more desirable locations. “We have very small market share in the large cities within the United States, so we see a big opportunity for us to grow in those urban markets,” said Hank Mullany, who runs Walmart stores in the Midwest, Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions.

Not only will the company bring fresh produce in smaller grocery stores, the employer claims it will bring 12,000 jobs to Chicago.

A recent study out of Loyola University in Chicago focusing on the impact of a Walmart that opened on the west side of Chicago in 2006 indicates that the new facility cost the local economy as many jobs as it created. The Loyola University study also examined tax revenues for 18 months before and after the retailer opened its doors and found no evidence of increased local economic activity.

In 2008, Walmart settled 63 cases of wage theft for a total of $352 million. Even when the company does pay the agreed upon wage, workers still come up short. According to Good Jobs First, taxpayers subsidize Walmart stores through numerous forms of public assistance–Medicaid, Food Stamps, public housing–that often allow workers to subsist on the company’s low wages. A report by the House Education and Workforce Committee conservatively places these costs deferred by the retail giant at $420,750 per store; the Walmart Foundation’s per-store charitable giving is just 11 percent of that amount ($47,222). Now adding to the pot of public funds to be had, Michelle Obama and other well intentioned groups concerned with food deserts may have made these areas much more profitable than they once were. As part of her Let’s Move campaign the First Lady has pledged $400 million/year to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable food. In the words of Brahm Ahmadi, founder of People’s Grocery in West Oakland:

“We’re seeing a lot of funding being rolled out, but also what we’re seeing is the corporate retail industry who literally two to three years ago wouldn’t even talk to you about this [food deserts], now almost salivating over the opportunity for the windfalls that will come from free public money, essentially. Even though they could easily finance themselves to open stores in the inner city neighborhoods, why should they when the administration is perfectly happy to give them more money to do it?”

Walmart is not the only major grocery chain salivating at the thought of public subsidies: Tesco, Target, Safeway and Supervalu have all announced plans to open stores in urban centers.

But hunger and food security stem from poverty, that in the U.S. comes from unemployment and poor wages. The solution to food security in America must come through a revitalized food economy–one that pays workers a living wage, that includes worker and minority owned businesses, and that keeps food dollars in local communities. Walmart does none of that.

Seventeen percent of American jobs are in the food system, and those jobs are among the lowest paid in the country. If food industry leaders are serious about improving food access, they need to start by tackling food insecurity where it starts–with sub-poverty wages. No amount of fresh produce will cure America’s food and health gap unless it comes with a commitment to fight its root causes–poverty and inequality. To really fight food deserts, the Obamas should start by supporting living wages for workers and support the food businesses that create true economic development in the communities that need it most.

With Annie Shattuck and Zoe Brent

Originally published on Huffington Post