Alison Cross and her older brother Alphonzo saw a vast need for fresh food in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood of Atlanta, where they’d spent time since they were kids. The community, which is adjacent to the Atlanta University Center, had seen both vibrance and decay, and was begging for transformation.

So the siblings decided to fill that need, and hatched a plan to open The Boxcar Grocer, a new food business. Alison, who studied architecture and worked as a video editor, and Alphonzo, with a background in fashion, describe the independent grocery store, which stocks local, organic, whole foods, as being at “the intersection of food justice and high-concept retail.”

And they’re right; it’s not your average corner store. The market looks modern, with lots of light, stainless steel, and wood. The shop, which had a “soft” opening in late October and celebrated its grand opening last Monday, sits in an area dotted with old railroad warehouses. African Americans own the majority of the storefront businesses. The neighborhood is undergoing a renaissance with small art galleries, graphic design firms, and a tattoo parlor that attract the typical urban mix of students, artists, and free thinkers.

Alison, 36, has also written about the personal inspiration for Boxcar (“This is Our Land“), the socioeconomic challenges of the food movement (“All the Foodies are Rich, All of the Farmers are White, But Some of Us are Still Cookin’“), and its shortcomings (“A Limited Engagement“) on the store’s blog.

I spoke with her recently about her hopes for the family business and the obstacles she and her brother have faced along the way.

Why did you decide to open a corner store in Atlanta?

For years we recognized a lack of stores in the area where we could get food we liked when we came to town. The space became vacant in May 2009 but we couldn’t find anyone willing to put in a store. So we researched, wrote a business plan, and started submitting to banks for financing.

In the meantime, I was working at The San Francisco Foundation part-time and part-time at Feldman Architecture, so I was getting this great vision of what could happen when social ideals merge with beautiful design. We felt no one had done that. And there were very few people actually creating something new in terms of for-profit business models for food access. We also figured if we were going to uproot our lives and move away from the Bay Area, it had to be for something extraordinary.

Did you run into any challenges?

Unfortunately, the economic crisis meant the process took us two years to complete. Banks flat-out weren’t lending, especially not commercial loans to novices. But we kept charging along. We applied to nine different banks and one foundation and all said no. All we needed was one yes, and that happened in March 2011.

Did you get support from the healthy corner store movement?

People we approached in the national food movement didn’t really take us seriously until we actually opened the store. Maybe it’s because we came out of nowhere. We were not involved in politics, nor did we run in foodie circles. We’d meet people at food movement events and when I mentioned opening a store I got the sense that people were dismissive.

What kind of response have you had from local residents?

We have had overwhelming support from the community. That’s a wonderful validation because for so long it was this thing rattling around in our heads and on paper. People have been amazingly patient with our mistakes. People are just so grateful to have a grocery store here after all these years. On opening day–which we tried to do quietly to work out the kinks–there was so much buzz about the business we had a line outside the door before we even opened. It was insanity.

Locating local farmers has been a discovery process–we thought we’d be dealing with rural farms–so to find such well-established urban farms as Truly Living Well, Metro Atlanta Urban Farm, HABESHA, and Patchwork City Farms right here in the inner city has been incredible. It’s allowed us to tap their network of supporters and access a knowledge base that is helping us learn about organic farm operations.

I spent last summer riding my bike from farmers’ market to farmers’ market meeting vendors, tasting food, and connecting with the producers.

What about some of the craft products in the store?

One couple make these phenomenal pulled pork sandwiches and organic barbecue sauce called The Heat Legend. A product like that speaks to our diverse community. It allows us to meet people where they are with their diet but offer a healthier option that is culturally appropriate. Another producer makes these kale salads with sun-dried tomatoes that people go bananas over. We can barely keep them in stock. It feels good to offer a healthy fast food that people can snack on.

What’s it like running a business with your brother?

It’s awesome. We’ve always been close and we’ve always wanted to work together. I’m in awe of his creativity, social nature, and energy. He appreciates the way I dig down in the details and my diligence in seeing things through. We respect each other’s visions and know that we get more done together than we do on our own because of our complementary skills.

Can you give us some background about your own relationship to food?

I was a notoriously picky eater as a child. Left to my own devices I’d consume nothing but Frosted Flakes and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Both my parents cooked. My mom made Cajun spiced red snapper, jambalaya, and gumbo, foods influenced by her mother, who was from Louisiana. My dad liked to cook us breakfast. We weren’t really allowed candy or lots of fast food, which was maybe a once-a-month treat. After my dad passed away in 2001, I went to Grenada, West Indies. It was the first time I was really surrounded by utterly fresh food. I was eating fruit right off the trees, vegetables directly from the ground, and seafood caught the same day it ended up on my plate. It was healing and cleansing and opened my eyes to what a difference food can make.

What does food justice mean to you?

It means approaching food access as an issue that is not reduced to a socioeconomic determinant. It means adding more faces to the cause so people can identify and desire to be part of a lifestyle shift. If Jay-Z and Kanye can create a lifestyle brand that people in urban and suburban areas aspire to, regardless of their actual income, why can’t we do that with organic food?

We have had family members and friends who are highly educated and in the middle class develop diseases directly related to the food they are eating. I like to tell people that we are not in competition with Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. We’re in competition with KFC, Burger King, and McDonald’s, who are marketing directly to people like me. The food [access] movement is looking at low-income people and telling them to eat better, but not necessarily including the people who CAN afford to eat better but don’t think it’s important or don’t connect with how it has been presented thus far.

What does the future hold for Boxcar?

We have always envisioned Boxcar as a national model. We wanted to be able to create something that would inspire other social entrepreneurs to replicate and hopefully get more healthy corner stores popping up in food deserts to show the demand is there for these businesses. What Alphonzo and I have done is an incredibly risky venture from a financial perspective. But we made a healthy gamble that was deeply rooted in the strength of our education, experience, work ethic, and commitment to seeing the model thrive in different incarnations across the country.

For now, we are focused on building this brand into a strong foundation. We would love Boxcar to be the Walgreen’s of healthy corner stores. We’d like to see at least another five to 10 stores like Boxcar in the next five years.

Originally published on Grist

Rural Food Deserts

Despite being regions of food production, many rural areas are food deserts, defined as particular geographic areas where there is insufficient quantity and quality of food, or where food prices are systematically higher than in other regions.

According to one source, over 800 counties in the U.S. are considered to have low food access with the largest concentration in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions. In a survey of 1,500 residents in four non-metro counties in Iowa, most lived 20 miles or more from a major food retailer. All of these counties had four or fewer grocery stores. About 10,000 farm workers live in Iowa year round. And while food insecurity rates for the state in 2002 were quite low (6.5 percent), 37 percent of households were in poverty and 21 percent of Hispanic households were food insecure.

Access to food is a critical factor in rural California as well. One study compiling data from county-level food assessments shows that a lack of fresh food options, few retail locations, and lack of transportation in rural areas all create barriers to accessing healthy foods. According to the same study, almost 60 percent of rural Californians live more than three miles from a grocery store and only nine percent live within a mile from one. When there is also a lack of transportation choices, food insecurity increases.

Farm Laborers and Hunger

Many workers coming to the U.S. for agricultural jobs are coming specifically to overcome hunger and diminishing opportunities at home. They are leaving rural regions, primarily in Mexico, where they are no longer able to survive as farmers due to the impacts of global trade agreements and national policies. They find themselves working in an environment where they have less control over the production and consumption of their food. In addition, their wages, though high by the standards of their country of origin are extremely low by U.S. standards. According to the National Agricultural Worker Survey, the median income among farmworker households nationally is between $7,500 and $10,000 and over 60 percent of these households are in poverty. When combined with the fact that they are remitting a sizable proportion of their income to their families at home, this poverty is entrenched.

In 2009, about 15 percent of American households weren’t getting enough food for their families. The Salinas Valley, located in Monterey County, is the third highest grossing crop producing county in the nation. But the people growing our lettuce and strawberries are likely worse off. One exploratory study found that during 2009, 66 percent of farm workers interviewed in the Salinas Valley were food insecure.

Monterey has the highest proportion of food insecure households in California at almost half. But its percentage is not unique: In Fresno County, the country’s most productive agricultural county, 45 percent of farmworkers are food insecure. Those who are indigenous Mexicans are at even higher risk: A  survey of Mixteco-speakers showed 76 percent were food insecure in the winter, when employment is limited and incomes are lower.

California is not alone when it comes to hunger among farmworkers. North Carolina data from four studies executed between 2002 and 2004, show that among households where there is a farmworker, 49 to 71 percent are food insecure. Texas has the second highest rate in the nation of food insecurity and the second largest agricultural income.  A sampling of 100 migrant and seasonal workers in Texas showed that 82 percent were food insecure.

Solutions

Food insecurity is a product of the global economic system and the dynamics of domestic food production. Yet, the agricultural base remains the best solution to rural poverty and food insecurity. There are several promising strategies aimed at addressing rural food deserts. Community owned grocery stores, like the Gove Community Improvement Association in Kansas, and rural distribution systems, like the Oklahoma Food Cooperative and Gorge Grown Mobile Market, are innovative solutions developed by rural communities to address their food access needs.

But change must also trickle downwards through increased private and public funding aimed at developing community resources and safety nets. A recent study of the top 1,000 grant making foundations showed that annual giving from these foundations to rural communities was only 6.8 percent of their total giving. There is room for improvement.

Federal policies need to be enacted as well to address the most marginalized populations. Public funding could affect rural development, transportation infrastructure, improved competitiveness of smaller scale producers, increased availability of school lunch reform and food stamp utilization, and access to low- or no-interest loans for rural residents. In addition, labor policies that allow for agricultural exclusion to labor laws need to be changed.

Rural counties make up the large majority (340 of 386) of counties with persistent poverty. And the more rural an area is, the poorer it is. The discussion of the farm worker population, inequality of food access in food producing regions, and rural poverty, must come to the forefront of the community food security movement.  Collaborative efforts for change require a common understanding and focus on issues of poverty and social justice.

We should take John Steinbeck’s 1936 portrait of American agriculture as a long overdue call to arms:

“The green grass spreads right into the tent doorways and the orange trees are loaded. In the cotton fields, a few wisps of the old crop cling to the black stems. But the people who picked the cotton, and cut the peaches and apricots, who crawled all day in the rows of lettuce and beans, are hungry. The men who harvested the crops of California, the women and girls who stood all day and half the night in the canneries, are starving.”  

The surprise darling of the Community Food Security Coalition conference last May was a little-known city councilman from Cleveland. He spoke fervently about his city, a city of flourishing community gardens, backyard bee hives, and chicken coops, a city where all farmers’ markets accept food stamps, where schools get discounts for sourcing local food, and where both trans-fats and smoking on playgrounds are banned. His name? Joe Cimperman.

A 4th term Democratic city councilman whose parents hail from Slovenia, Cimperman is a vocal advocate of community gardens, which create community and self-sufficiency. He told of coming together with community leaders, public health officials, doctors, and foundations to pass the Healthy Cleveland Initiative — a series of audacious policy goals that will improve the health of Clevelanders for years to come. (That is, if Ohio’s Republican-majority legislature doesn’t pre-emptively squash them.) He ended with this rallying cry: “Why are we in food policy? Because we want our friends to live longer!”

What are Cleveland’s secrets for becoming a food justice utopia? I recently interviewed Cimperman to find out.

How did you get involved in food justice issues?
It was Marge Misak at the Community Land Trust, Kristen Trolio, who is a community organizer and a farmers’ market pioneer, and Morgan Taggart from OSU land extension. In about 2002, they came to me about the garden on west 45^th Street, St. Paul’s Patch, asking me how we could preserve both the garden and the housing next door. The developer was working behind everyone’s backs and told the community gardeners that it was city-owned land and zoned residential. He wanted to turn the garden into a parking lot and evict the family next door.

I had barely been on the council for a term — I had no clue about anything. They said, “The only way you’re going to change anything is if you change the zoning code.” I thought, well this sounds like a great idea, and these are people who I admire and trust. I’m learning from them. So we did it.

So all of a sudden people in the community started saying, “Hey, what about this? And what the hell are you doing about this?”  It was the education of a Councilman. They started to pull me under their wings and say, “You don’t have to think about this now, but this is something you’re going to have to think about in five years.” We’re servants so we have to fix these things.

So, Cleveland really was the first city to pass an urban farm zoning law?

Well, we passed it in 2007. The only way to create justice in this situation was to create a permanent garden there — change the zoning of the community garden. So we start calling around — Portland, Boston, Seattle. No other cities of any size had such a law. That’s when we wrote the legislation ourselves. It ensures that no one can rip out the community’s investment overnight. After that, community gardens would come forward and say, “We’d like to zone our garden this way, too.” People think twice now about threatening gardeners because it’s there.

What other efforts is Cleveland taking to ensure that all residents have access to affordable healthy food?

A funny thing happened on the way to the community garden. There are so many people out there doing urban gardening and agriculture that it’s changed the tenor of the city. So much so that the City of Cleveland has said, “This is important enough for us to change laws. Now the city gives out $3,000 forgivable loans to market gardeners — more and more people are keeping their own chickens and bees. There are 250 community gardens that we know of and we think that there are an additional 75 that operate with some support from the city.

There’s also a strong agricultural ring around Cleveland and that has yielded a great farmers’ market situation. Amanda Dempsey, who is now managing Cleveland’s West Side Market, is the reason we’re having an international Public Markets Conference in Cleveland. I’m really proud of what Cleveland is doing.

All of Cleveland’s farmers’ markets now accept food stamps (aka SNAP benefits), right? That’s impressive. How did that come about?

John Mitterholzer at the Gund Foundation has a real passion for social agricultural justice. He came to me and said, “I’d like to fund a program to give people on food stamps an incentive to shop at farmers’ markets.”  We meet, come up with an idea on four specific farmers’ markets which were willing to accept both EBT (the debit card for food stamps), and a $5 matching program. In some cases, the number of food stamp shoppers doubled. Then we did a study with John, on the zip codes around the farmers’ markets and showed the amount of money available if everybody with food stamps and WIC used the farmers’ market.

Farmers were like, “You mean, I get to go home with an empty truck? And I get to sell to people who really need this food?”

Everyone agreed it was a good idea but it had been kicked around for a decade. With the Gund Foundation and people in policy and politics like me backing it, it was hard for farmers’ markets to say no.

[Today, 14 of Cleveland’s 15 farmers’ markets accept food stamps and 13 are part of the EBT Incentive Program.]

You gave a rousing talk in May at the CFSC food policy conference in Portland, Oregon. Portland is often cited as a model for farm-to-school and urban agriculture. What can Cleveland take from Portland’s example?

I was out on Sauvie Island to visit Sauvie Island Organics and the Food Works youth gardening program. I saw four school buses pull up while I was there. If you want to educate kids in every way, that’s how you do it. I want to figure out how to do that in Cleveland. The conference was great — we got so many ideas and talked to so many people. There are many programs on the horizon in Portland — beautiful new public housing projects like New Columbia, which has a community garden called Seeds of Harmony. They’re opening up corner stores with affordable, healthy food like Village Market.

There’s a debate about whether or not it’s necessary to bring full-service grocery stores to food deserts. Some in the food justice world think you can you just bypass the big box grocery stores in favor of community gardens and family-run bodegas (that are stocked with lots of fresh produce). What are your thoughts on this?

In the 90’s, there were areas of Cleveland where there were 100 blocks where you couldn’t get fresh produce. The Department of Economic Development is working on changing that — they’re giving huge subsidies to local grocery store chains such as Dave’s (a family-owned chain with great labor relations).

Now we’re doing the bottoms-up approach. We have a pharmacy, Sheliga Drug, that’s started carrying a line of produce. They’re supported by the Ohio State extension. There’s a hardware store in a Latino community that has bins of apples, bananas, everything else. We’re definitely not where we need to be — but my opinion is that if we start from the grassroots, do the community gardens, family-owned shops and so on, somewhere heaven and earth will meet.

Tell me about the Healthy Cleveland Resolution.  What part of it are you most excited about?  What’s going to be the most controversial aspect?

We are going to have Dr. Anthony Iton, the doctor from Place Matters, come back to Cleveland, and we’re going to do a day-long session for thought leaders: politicians, foundation people, corporate folks.

What I’m really excited about is that our school system has shown itself to be very interested in food justice. They want to help us achieve a garden per five blocks, by reinstating this program that came from the Victory Garden movement. Cleveland was the leader in school gardens nationally back then. There’s a new book about it called Cleveland School Gardens by Joel Mader.

We’re also working with cafeterias, which are continuing their progression of sourcing healthier food.

The chief purchaser for the Cleveland Public School District was nominated for something called the Walnut Award. His name is Regis Balaban. He has figured out how to get sugared cereal out of the schools by getting wholesome cereal with skim milk and fresh fruit. He said to me, “Please don’t stop passing legislation.” I said, “It’s kind of funny you’re saying that to me, because you’re exempt from the stuff I’ve been pushing through.” But then he said, “I can use what you’re doing to force my providers to provide us with better food.” For me in terms of food justice, that’s kind of the big.

At the CFSC Conference, you said that the life expectancy discrepancy between an African American community in Cleveland and the white community was 24 years. Fully half of those years were attributable to smoking and diet.

In neighborhoods with community gardens there is less crime. There are more people attending school. We have a high-rise in downtown Cleveland that’s 22 floors. There are about 24 seniors who live there — mostly African American. They’re petitioning me to purchase containers because they want a container garden on the rooftop. They left their homes, they like walking to the theatre without the burden of a mortgage.

It’s not specific to one community, though. The fact of the matter is that the neighborhood that has the 24 year disparity, Hough, is almost 100 percent African American. There are a lot of other issues, of course: violence, the ability to access health care.

As you and I speak, the Ohio state senate has introduced legislation into the budget banning the city of Cleveland from banning trans-fats. Let us die early! Let our children be morbidly obese! They admitted that their restaurant industry wrote the legislation.  So now the battle for food justice has begun.

If the state senate does this, it’ll strike down Cleveland’s law. [Last month, that's exactly what the Ohio state senate did, tucking the provision into a 5,000-page budget law. Cimperman has said he'll challenge it in the courts.]

It’s ridiculous! The trans-fat ban came from doctors and public health professionals. The four major health systems in the state  — Cleveland Clinic, St. Vincent’s, MetroHealth, and University Hospitals — have all signed on to the Healthy Cleveland Resolution. The hospital systems are the number one job provider in Ohio. How do you say to these hospitals, “You don’t know what you’re talking about”?

I may not understand trans-fats, but why the hell is the government telling locals what we can and cannot do?  They haven’t found a way to ban community gardens.

Here’s my gut feeling. What’s going to happen when those 300 gardens that we have in Cleveland double? When in 2020 the city of Cleveland will have a community garden within five blocks of every resident? All of a sudden, local grocery stores are working with local farms. What’s going to happen when the hoop houses start to provide food three seasons a year? What happens with canning? What happens when agribusiness starts to see this? We have a multinational food production company here in Cleveland. I was at a meeting a couple months ago and some folks from this company started asking me about local food. I think we’re starting to get people’s interest. We’re not a threat yet, but what happens when we become a threat?

What can other cities learn from Cleveland when it comes to food justice?

We let the policy be informed by the practice. We have a lot of people who have been doing this for generations. There’s recognition of that: the importance of learning from our elders. Also, we all really like each other. We enjoy each others’ company. Entire weddings are filled with friends and guests who they meet from within the food justice world. Regardless of your political background or racial background or your proficiency in English, there’s something about the gardens that brings people together!

Community gardens just make us a nicer city. They make us share more, pay more attention to each others’ kids, understand each others’ cultures more. There are just so many ancillary benefits to community gardens — we can’t imagine.

The business community is also excited about the hope of urban agriculture and food justice. It means so many things in terms of employment and in terms of people having a purpose and getting out and getting to know your neighbors. I think if we can keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to be in a really good spot.

Originally published on The Faster Times

Washington, D.C. sports its proud identity as the nation’s capital, but it also suffers the typical problems of urban blight, including food deserts, impoverished areas with limited access to healthy food. Almost 16,000 people reside in such food deserts within the city.

Fortunately, a number of forward-thinking organizations have resolved to end food insecurity in the nation’s capital through food access, affordability, and community education. As a result, D.C. capitalizes on its dual local/national character and acts as a role model for initiatives that support access to good food throughout the nation.

How do we lead the shift from processed, unhealthy products to fresh, nutritious food? While accessibility and affordability are certainly crucial, community education is a key component, notes Neighborhood Restaurant Group’s Michael Babin, and founder of the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food & Agriculture.

In a comprehensive solution, Arcadia will launch a mobile farmers’ market, a yellow school bus retrofitted to carry about 50 crates of fresh produce. The mobile market will educate schools and neighborhoods on healthy food choices, traveling to food deserts filled with fast food restaurants and convenience stores. In a counter-intuitive business strategy, the long-term goal of the mobile farmers’ market is to become obsolete, by encouraging grocery stores to open in low-income areas.

Two traditional farmers’ markets are playing their part as well. Both the long-established Ward 8 Farmers’ Market and the Aya Community Market (launching at the end of this month), provide fresh produce while empowering local residents and entrepreneurs to participate in local commerce. Chris Bradshaw, Executive Director of Dreaming Out Loud, founded Aya Community Market as a self-sustaining enterprise, empowering high school students, formerly incarcerated residents, and low-income members of the community to claim ownership of their marketplace through employment at it. Aya Community Market accepts EBT food vouchers, and to increase buying power, vendors at Ward 8 Farmers’ Market markets will double the value of SNAP, EBT, WIC or senior food vouchers, up to $10.

As the idea of food access becomes visibly linked with community empowerment, economy, and health, farmers’ markets emerge from the grass-roots movement with a holistic focus. Aya Community Market provides services for spiritual and financial health, such as yoga and credit counseling. Live music, acupuncture, and cooking demos are also offered as an integral part of the plan to educate and include community members. DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), an organization committed to strengthening DC’s local food system through food distribution, job training, and community-building projects, is present in its community through a culinary training program.

The Culinary Jobs Training Program is a 12-week program, which trains unemployed, previously incarcerated, and homeless adults in the skills necessary to rise out of poverty. It also coaches students on basic life skills, such as résumé writing and computer literacy. DCCK was also selected to run a pilot program to provide made-from-scratch meals for seven public elementary schools in food deserts.

These initiatives have been hugely successful in improving the quality and nutrition of school lunches, and the quality of life for at-risk populations. In elementary schools, DCCK’s pilot program meals are complemented by hands-on learning experiences through local farms, cooking clubs, and the use of composting bins. When an 11-year old student told his parents that they “must go shopping every weekend to buy vegetables like they have at school,” Michael Curtin, Executive Director of DCCK, saw this as a great measure of success.

Targeting institutions and retail markets is a smart strategy for reaching large audiences in need of healthy food. Schools are one such building block, supermarkets are another. To encourage existing retailers to stock fresh food, the Ward 8 Farmers’ Market, DC Hunger Solutions (DCHS) and DCCK are involved with convenience stores. DCHS conducted the Healthy Corner Store Program in DC food deserts for two years, but due to lack of funding, the pilot was halted about 18 months ago.

Thanks to new funding from the DC Department of Small and Local Business Development (DSLBD), DCCK is launching the more expansive Healthy Corners Program, and will use their resources to provide a larger distribution network of affordable produce and more comprehensive business development assistance. The program will also purchase produce from local farmers and employ graduates from their Culinary Job Training Program. DCCK has wisely engaged DCHS as a partner, who is lending their expertise and community connections from their pilot program to DCCK’s outreach efforts and store owner training activities. Participating retailers will receive refrigerated display cases and fresh food deliveries, and can return unsold items, creating a zero-waste solution. This means convenience stores can stock fruits and vegetables without the threat of financial loss.

The city continues to make healthy food and access to it a priority. Food Day, a nationwide event to be held on October 24, 2011, aims to expand access to healthy food and alleviate hunger. This event provides opportunities for everyone to participate in and contribute to their local good food movement with organizational and administrative support on a national level.

In February 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama said, “Our goal is ambitious. It’s to eliminate food deserts in America completely in seven years.” She is making great strides with her Let’s Move campaign. This week, she announced a $35 million commitment by the administration, a 2012 budget proposal of an additional $330 million, and a plan to use such funds to leverage additional financial support from the private and non-profit sectors.

In support of the First Lady’s campaign, retail giants Wal-Mart, Walgreens, and SuperValu, along with regional retailers have committed to open or expand over 1,500 stores to bring more healthy, fresh food to areas with limited access. The First Lady said that such commitments can be a “game-changer” for underserved communities across the country. Her call to action requires vision and initiatives such as these to change a food system. In Washington, D.C, commitments to achieve such goals by forward-thinking organizations has established a barometer for healthy, sustainable food solutions around the country.

Access to fresh, nutritious, affordable food is one of the most important factors in quality of life, personal well-being, and the overall health of a community. Areas in which there is limited access to wholesome food—often called “food deserts”—are starting to receive the attention they desperately need. Earlier this year, the Obama administration launched the $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative, but change is slow to come and requires action at the local level.

The Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores, a coalition of more than 30 community, faith, and labor leaders, is taking that action in Los Angeles. Sounding the alarm, they just released the first-ever Grocery Chain Scorecard. The report issues grades to grocery chains on three key areas: Food access, store quality, and job quality.

Food access is judged by the proximity of a chain’s stores to underserved areas of Los Angeles. The Alliance looked at the number of stores per capita, adjusted by rates of diet-related illness, which revealed the areas most in need of access to healthful food. They considered if the chains accepted purchases with food stamps or through the Woman, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program. They also gave points if the store offered a free shuttle service for residents, since many residents do not own cars and bus routes are being scaled back.

Store quality scores are based on the availability and variety of healthful foods, the condition of the food, cleanliness of the store, and the overall shopping experience. The Alliance looked at the variety and freshness of produce, dairy, eggs, and lean meats. They considered if the stores offered environmentally friendly items, such as organic foods, recycled paper products, or compact fluorescent lamps. Other criteria included services such as a pharmacy, ATMs, or check cashing services.

Job quality ratings compare the wages, benefits, and employee relations of the chain. Workers at stores in West L.A., for example, earn an average of $7,000 more a year than those in East L.A. or South L.A.

Although some chains performed well on one or two of the metrics, not a single chain scored well across all three. The chains that have the strongest presence in underserved communities, such as Superior, Food 4 Less, and Super A, generally ranked lowest on store or job quality. Specialty stores, including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, received high marks for store quality, but failed when it came to food access.

At the unveiling of the report, organized by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and the Progressive Jewish Alliance, I stood alongside more than 60 members of the community, listening as City Councilmember Paul Koretz called for grocery store accountability, emphasizing that, “Grocery chains have a responsibility beyond the bottom line.” The aim in this scorecard was not to ridicule companies for scoring poorly, but rather to encourage them to do better. As Koretz said, “Hopefully soon we won’t have communities where junk food is the only option.”

A recent report by the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) and Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) called “Real Food, Real Choice: Connecting SNAP Recipients with Farmers Markets,” gives detail to the economic, social and technological roadblocks that often prevent many Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants from buying fresh and healthy food at their  local, or not so local, farmers markets. Is the real issue access or affordability? Michel Nischan, CEO and President of Wholesome Wave, talks about how their innovative programs are helping to avert a national health care crisis.

Q: If you had to use only one word to describe what Wholesome Wave does, what would you say?

A: That we catalyze. We basically fund markets that are accepting federal food assistance benefits, food stamps now called SNAP or WIC, but we need to have a funder that’s willing to support that particular market because we are not an endowed foundation.

For instance, look at our Double Value Incentive Program [DVCP]. We increase fruit and vegetable consumption for families that are on Federal Food Assistance who really don’t have the luxury of choice to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.  We could have been a local grass roots non-profit that only focuses on farmers markets in Connecticut and have DVCP as a marquee program, we could have found funders who would have been happy to fund us as an organization that does nothing but double the values of food assistance at farmers markets. But our end game really is finding market-based innovative approaches nationwide where there are feasible sources of ongoing funding that can be deployed that would have tremendous benefit to all tax payers. We seed the idea and then find the right non-profit that believes in these communities.

Often the non-profit comes to us and asks to get on board. And if there is a matching funder, we will provide them the training, the technical assistance, and then provide them the funding to kick it off. And in return, they have to provide the data that shows what happens with redemption rates, consumption, impact on the farmers, impact on the under-served community, etc. We’re now in 18 states and counting, and we watch how the program works everywhere because we are collecting information to build a case and say hey, no matter where we go, people in under-served communities want fruits and vegetables, they know what to do with them, and they just can’t afford them. So by being a catalyst for change, we see these ideas and so that we can show there is a broad indicator that can lead to a positive change.

Q: When it comes to increasing participation of federal nutrition program participants at farmers markets, is the issue about access or affordability?

A: It’s not as much of an access issue frankly as it is affordability. We’ve seen numerous farmers’ markets open near under-served communities. Many say that there’s a lack of demand. And it’s not a lack of demand, it’s a lack of affordability. A SNAP recipient receives an average of three dollars a day for food. So they made it through breakfast and lunch only because their kids are on the free breakfast and lunch programs at school—maybe they’d have two dollars for dinner. If you can get them to a grocery store—which is usually three bus transfers away–if you can get them there at all, if they can even afford the bus transfer which is actually more expensive than the SNAP dollars that they have, then you’re already putting them in a deficit just getting them to the store. But say they get there, and they have the two bucks, they look at a head of broccoli that’s $1.89 and a four pack of instant noodles that’s $1.69 – what are you going to put in front of your family? A quarter head of broccoli or four bowls of something hot? So it’s not Twinkies. It’s not Happy Meals. It’s a terrible, terrible misconception about what’s going on in these neighborhoods. It’s not like a lot of people make it out to be.

So when we double the coupons, yeah, ten to twenty dollars a week makes a huge difference for these families that have their backs against the wall. When you can provide them that affordability, because they have become so frugal and so expert at, at rubbing the pennies together, they will actually now put a cup of noodles in front of their family with a quarter head of broccoli and some fresh potatoes or some radishes or some roasted peppers, depending on what they buy at the Farmer’s Market. And now they’re getting a balanced meal instead of eating nothing but processed carbohydrates.

Q: Do you work out of Washington DC?

A: This is where Gus Schumacher [Wholesome Wave’s Executive Vice President] comes in. He is so brilliant and such a policy wonk—he created the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, which led to the cash vegetable vouchers, and the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition program. He’s amazing. We have a grant writing team and they help our partners leverage Specialty Crop block grant funding, farmers market promotion funding. Gus has worked in Washington DC at the administrative level of FNS, Food Nutrition Services [division of the USDA] AMS, [Agricultural Marketing Service] etc sharing the successes of these incentive programs, and he has succeeded in getting the demonstration pilot waivers eliminated, the alternative currency waivers and all of the data collection, just to accept SNAP, and now if you are a farmers market you can get approved and get an FNS number and get approved within 10 days when it used to take 45-90 days. All of these grant level and policy level changes have occurred as a result of this work.

We are not lobbyists, we don’t spend a dime, we don’t get paid to go to Washington DC. We figure out ways to rub nickels together. Gus goes in and gets people excited. And we see movement. Take Roots of Change, Michael Dimock’s program. He took over our program in San Diego and now we are serving 45 farmers market and 6 food sheds across California because he turned it into a state wide program with Gus’s assistance. Because of Gus there is soon to be a state wide program in Massachusetts and in Illinois.

Q: What’s the next big thing for Wholesome Wave?

A: The Fruit and Veggie Prescription Program is the next big one, and we believe it is a source of sustainable commercial funding eventually. Our lead partner in this is a Massachusetts-based organization called Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited (CAVU) along with Dr. Shikha Anand, in cooperation with Mass Farmers Market, and what we do is administer fruit and vegetable prescriptions to at-risk families so that they can increase their consumption significantly—a full serving of fruits and vegetables per day per person. And then as a result, because people get this free benefit as a prescription just like they would get their diabetes medicine, they have to come back every month to have their height, weight, blood pressure and BMI measured.

Our hope is to draw a direct correlation between increased access to the most vulnerable populations and increased consumption of these fruits and vegetables. There’s health reform now, it’s happening and it’s going to shift the system dramatically, from instead of rewarding health care providers and health care insurance companies to treat, it’s going to reward them to prevent. So when you can provide measurable prevention there’s an opportunity. So instead of getting $200 worth of Lipitor or Avandia or some other drug that week, you get $100 worth of fruits and vegetables for your family. The doctor will write you a prescription! And you’re getting a better health result.

In Native American reservations and in severely under-served rural and urban communities where people don’t have the access to healthy food, they are eating all these highly processed carbohydrates and they are becoming diabetic at an early age. And the peril of this, when you look at type 2 diabetes in children, those drugs that treat type 2 diabetes, have long term negative implications for human health, liver problems, all kinds of terrible, terrible side effects that weren’t an issue before. If you are 11 years old and you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and you have to take something which will cause your liver to fail in 25 years, well that’s a pretty big problem. So this can be prevented. The only reasoning why it’s happening is because the only thing these families can afford to feed their children are these highly processed, highly complex carbohydrates.

Q: What does it mean to you now that Wholesome Wave’s Double Value Coupon Program has been mentioned in the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity Report to the President as a program that increases SNAP and WIC use at farmers markets by 300%?

A: That we are on the right track, and that our partners are doing an excellent job. Washington DC understands what is going on, why we are so unhealthy, why health care is so screwed up and we are looking for innovative ways to move us in another direction. We’re identified within 75 potential recommendations that can help reduce childhood obesity by 2015.

The valet made me do it. We bared our souls and talked with each other about food. We did it in the middle of the tastefully decorated lobby of a reputable Cannery Row hotel in Monterey, CA. It began as a very unexpected moment, and has become one of my all-time favorite experiences talking about access to good food. Because it was a conversation not with a chef, foodie or expert. It was with a regular person who longs to connect to food and is somehow stuck, marooned on an island alone, full of latent desire.

The valet—let’s call him Paul—asked me the very question I yearn to hear, and with him I had the discussion that I never tire of. Paul had parked my car when I checked into the hotel, had smiled professionally at me and held the door three mornings in a row when I sashayed excitedly out into the sunlight. The cause of my excitement was a food issue conference hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The Cooking for Solutions Sustainable Media Institute is an annual gathering of journalists and experts who cover food system issues ranging from sustainable seafood to GMOs. It is the highlight of my year, second only to the Ecological Farming Association annual meeting.

The third morning, Paul held the lobby door open and commented that I looked happy. I told him yes, I was happy because I spent the last three days at a conference talking and thinking about food. He immediately grabbed my arm. He looked a bit shocked at his intensity, but recovered quickly and said: “You were at a food conference. Tell me, what should I eat? And why? I know there’s a big debate now about food but I can’t follow it. I can cook, but I’m confused about what’s good for me. The grocery store? I go in there, I walk around…it feels wrong, and I come out with stuff I don’t like. Can you talk with me for a minute?”

Although he spoke quietly, his interest was so intense that the small lobby grew quiet. The receptionist, guests checking out and the other staff stood waiting for my answer. Where to start? Full disclosure: I’m a communications professional who relies on the power of my words to make a living. I know I’ve got about six seconds to keep him or lose him. Do I start with a slogan: Know your farmer, know your food? Nope, too abstract. Do I punt to Michael Pollan’s now famous: Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much? Nope, too abstract again for a lobby conversation. Marion Nestle wrote a huge book about this, like War and Peace for the American eater.

Plus, do I need a pundit or am I ready to be my own? I took a deep breath: “I like to shop at farmers’ markets because they sell food that’s grown right up the road. I bet there’s one near here. I walk around the market, talk to a few farmers, see what looks good to me and buy what I can afford and know I can handle in the time I have available in my basic kitchen. Did you know artichokes are grown in Castroville, just a few miles away from here, and you can steam them in about five minutes?” He burst into a smile. “I’m Italian, from Florida. My family loved artichokes! Growing up we’d save money to buy the good ones, from Italy, in olive oil, in a glass jar, for pasta. You mean I can get them fresh here?” Ah, what a moment.

Several contradictions bear illustration: We’re on Cannery Row in Monterey, CA, where super-green list sustainable seafood sardines had their heyday until the species collapse in 1950s. Right near Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the shrines of ocean conservation, sits the restaurant Bubba Gump, a shrine to farmed shrimp redolent of butter, garlic and disgusting chemicals like disinfectants, pesticides and antibiotics used to keep filthy shrimp ponds teetering on the brink of legal seafood production. Another contradiction: My food conference is teeming with experts on food system sustainability. A few hundred feet from that, a hotel valet wonders what to eat, and has the guts to talk to me about it. If only more people dared to, and if only we could build a real community around real answers. And buy those artichokes from right up the road.

For me, Paul is an archetype of the struggle around food access. He didn’t just open the door for me mornings. He opened the door to a conversation that needs to happen in every walk of life. Where do we find food that speaks to us? What impact might a deeper connection with food have on our local communities, our health and our environment? We all want to know how to make this connection.

Paul isn’t the only one who wants to talk. I frequently find myself drawn into these conversations. My neighbors, strangers on public transportation, and also people at farmers’ markets want to engage around food. Seems everybody always wanted to make five minute blender mayonnaise but it takes a catalyst in the community to make it happen. We should all share knowledge, not just about the joys of homemade mayonnaise, but also about why we should use a pastured egg from a farmer we know rather than an organic supermarket egg. And we should be talking how to cook a beet and why it has a low carbon footprint. It probably helps when information is shared from simple home cooks, not chefs. What’s clear to me is that engaging with each other around food is the gateway, the first step to transforming our relationship. It has to come from each other, no matter how unexpected the place or the time.

I recommended Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything to Paul as a straightforward tome featuring all the basics, then riffs, galore. But I don’t think cookbooks are the silver bullet. A community connection which starts that dialogue would be a better answer. Steps away from where Paul parks cars and opens doors every day, a food conference was trying to open the door. But it didn’t go far enough. For this movement to thrive, it will take community, connection and deeper dialogue. Let’s start a conversation about food with unexpected people in unexpected situations. I think we’ll all benefit from the results.

Shakirah Simley is a food justice activist with an unusual weapon: pectin. She’s the founder and creative force behind Slow Jams, a socially conscious artisanal jam company in Oakland, Calif. She also works full-time for the public health organization Prevention Institute, a not-for-profit dedicated to addressing health disparities and food and recreational inequities.

Born in the South Bronx, Simley grew up in Harlem the eldest of four kids, raised by a single mom who worked full-time while attending school. At the University of Pennsylvania, where the younger Simley studied cultural anthropology and urban studies, she led a successful effort to reform Penn’s curriculum to include a cross-cultural analysis requirement, as well as launched a unionization-and-fair-wage campaign with Jobs with Justice on behalf of security guards at Penn and Temple University.

While her career path has focused on social justice, her real passion is “food — specifically food justice,” she says.

Before moving West, Simley was one of the first Human Rights Fellows for the City of New York. She also volunteered as a community chef with Just Food in NYC, teaching families about eating and cooking in a local, sustainable, and culturally-appropriate way. She’ll soon be heading off to study for a year at Italy’s prestigious University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded by Slow Food International.

Q: What makes Slow Jams different from other tasty jam makers at the farmers market?

A. We’re committed to using urban and rurally sourced fruit, and our brand has a younger, progressive, and fresher feel to it. Plus we offer interesting but accessible flavor pairings such as Strawberry Lavender, Vanilla Grapefruit Jelly, and Onion Fennel Bacon Relish.

Q: How did Slow Jams come about?

A. I taught myself how to can, and through many hours of practice, voracious reading and research, my canning expertise has developed immensely with very successful results.

While some folks grew up canning, I did not. Growing up in low-income neighborhoods, we hardly had access to fresh, affordable, abundant (never mind local or organic) produce. Whenever my siblings and I did have fruit, it was mostly during summer months — my mom would specifically get fruit from street vendors located in wealthier neighborhoods and bring it uptown. Welch’s [jelly] was a requisite for our PB&Js.

When I moved to the Bay Area, I was amazed at the year-round produce availability, the varieties, and the strong connection to and support of sustainable, local food systems. My desire to make jams and preserves and start a socially conscious company like Slow Jams is heavily influenced by my experiences growing up with a lack of access. As I steadily scale up my business over the next year, I want to ensure that values such as “high-quality, local and organic” and “culturally appropriate and accessible” are not mutually exclusive.

Q: Explain how Slow Jams incorporates those values.

A: I’m committed to sourcing a significant percentage of my ingredients and produce from urban growers. Over time, my company will work to build a sustainable network of urban producers including urban farms, community gardens, neighborhood fruit trees, urban backyards, and wild and foraged food. By creating positive economic activity through the vehicle of a local food/food-justice enterprise, I hope to stimulate the local economy through urban-ag and green-job development, utilize the untapped market of urban farmers and producers, provide opportunities for local non-profits with similar value systems that serve as potential producers, and create more viable urban micro-foodsheds.

I’m also receiving input from and holding focus groups in communities of color to determine the ways in which I can come up with products and services that would best serve those communities to widen the accessibility of Slow Jams. I’m also researching very small-scale local female farmers and farmers of color that could serve as direct suppliers; oftentimes these groups are excluded from mainstream distribution channels.

Basically, I want to make damn good, high-quality jams and preserves that are priced reasonably and distributed equitably. Slow Jams was recently accepted into La Cocina‘s Incubator Program in San Francisco, so I hope this vision will be brought to reality.

Q: Have you always been interested in food?

A: Social justice, yes. Food, not necessarily. It wasn’t until college that I started making the connections between food, access, and inequality with the help of one of my political science professors, Mary Summers.

After I graduated, moving back home to my old neighborhood in Harlem and seeing the food environment, I was struck at how hard it was for me and my family to eat healthily. I missed the farmers market at Clark Park in Philadelphia and having access to better grocery stores. Yes, having limited means doesn’t allow for the best food choices, but it’s no coincidence why certain calories are cheaper than others, why fruits and vegetables were too expensive and sub par and why finding whole grains, unprocessed or unpackaged food required a trip downtown.

My — and my mother’s, neighbors’, and family’s — pocketbooks were no match for the corporate control of our food system, and the institutionalized and systemic policies that keep this control in place. That’s why I’m starting a progressive food business and completing research that challenges this system and offers viable, inclusive and sustainable solutions.

Q: What was the biggest obstacle you’ve faced in this business?

A: Moving to California and starting from scratch. I didn’t have any job prospects, an apartment lined up, or a large social network when I moved to San Francisco. I was terrified. I feel incredibly fortunate to have come so far. Being a woman from my background presents certain challenges in a societal context and in starting a business, but I don’t view this as an obstacle per se, more like fuel for my future ambitions and creating social change.

Q: Who do you look to for inspiration?

A: I mainly look to the women in my family, to activists like [Growing Power founder and urban farmer] Will Allen, who are really making it happen. I also think working out of communities with more liquor stores than supermarkets is an inspiration in and of itself.

Q: What books do you keep by your bedside, literally or metaphorically?

A: Poetry by Sonia Sanchez, a journal, and if I could have all of Wendell Berry’s writings too, I would. Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter and Diet for a Hot Planet by Anna Lappé are next up on my list.

Q: What keeps you up at night?

A: My business, literally. And, as my friends jokingly say with fists clenched, “Injustice!”

Q: What advice would you give someone who is thinking of a career in artisanal food?

A: Take the time to develop and craft your business acumen and savvy. The best folks in artisanal food are not just great at making jam or pastries, cheese, or wine; they’re hustlers in the best sense of the word. Be consistent about networking and building relationships with others. Also, always remember why you decided to go into artisanal food in the first place – that’s critical to staying grounded, focused, and encouraged.

Q: What’s your earliest food memory?

A: On super hot and humid days, running down the street with my younger siblings to catch the Mister Softee ice cream truck for a vanilla ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles. Following the jingle of the Coco Helado vendors to get a mango and coconut ice in those squeezable paper cups. Black Cherry Jell-O moulds and Cool Whip with my Grandma Becky in Queens.

Q: Do you have a food-related guilty pleasure?

A: My sweet tooth is my biggest weakness, for things of the ice cream and baked-good variety. I will trek across the Bay Area for a certain slice of pie, cupcake, ice cream flavor, or some ridiculous dessert. Support small, local businesses, right?

Q: Company drops by unexpectedly around dinnertime. What do you do?

A: Put them to work! I’m a strong believer in making and sharing meals to build community. Surefire recipes include Bryant Terry’s Coconut Sweet Potato Puree, my very special pork tenderloin, and homemade pastry cups with fresh berries and Slow Jams’ urban Meyer lemon curd.

Q: You recently won a Fulbright to study at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy. What will you do there?

A: I did! And I’m super excited. My project is to analyze the Slow Food model in its home country. I want to determine the correlations between food, class hierarchy, and inclusion in Italy to see if it can present a model for achieving food equity across socioeconomic lines. Exploring class and race dynamics presents an opportunity to determine who has a seat at the Slow Food table, and thus who can help advocate for a more equitable food system.

Originally published on Grist.org

I’ve never told anyone this other than Barry Estabrook: I grew up eating tomatoes planted in soil nourished by my own poop. My family’s zeal for organic gardening was unmatched. No, we did not have a composting toilet. Instead we used a 5 gallon white plastic bucket, filled up regularly, and carefully composted the old-fashioned way—in a steaming heap.

My family was a clan of Boston and Brooklyn-bred urban hipster homesteaders in the 60s, far before the trend. In the 70s, they went whole hog and bought 100 acres of land in the deep South where they could count on the sunshine and knowledge of neighboring farmers to help them carve an existence from the land.

Eco-freaks with art and design pedigrees, my family hated waste and respected art born from the crucible of a closed loop ecosystem. So they recycled cow bones, from the Chicago meat packing plants that supplied McDonald’s, into gorgeous jewelry that graced the pages of Vogue and the halls of the Smithsonian Galleries.

On the land, our access to food was limited by our skills and dictated by our natural environment: we grew most of what we ate, hand-pumped water from a well, bathed in the creek, heated with wood, kept bees, and aimed for the lightest possible footprint. We would consume meat only if we hunted it ourselves or if a neighbor did; luckily or not, we were in NRA and NASCAR country where hunting was de rigueur.

Occasionally when the wind howled and pickings were slim in our winter garden, we made soup from those Chicago bones. The soup was my favorite part of the whole operation. I’d spend hours prepping, stirring, and analyzing the flavors. Poop, reclaimed bones, then honorable soup seemed like a natural order. I partly resented our lifestyle, but mostly I was reverential, as I knew it had deep meaning. It was clear for me that the culmination of our ethics came together in the soup pot.

Fast forward from that white plastic bucket and the poop-nourished tomatoes. I didn’t stay on the family land. Still, my upbringing was simply too cool to rebel against. Goats in the living room would have been fine, so the best I could muster for backlash was to spend a decade in corporate environments, mastering the black art of communications, while my self-sufficiency skills marinated on the shelf.

In my adult life, I blamed my peripatetic career path for my mostly-tepid backyard vegetable gardening commitment. Instead of getting my hands in the dirt, I went after the best tasting authentically sourced food I could find–that was ethics enough for me. I remained serious about the kitchen: For years I was a foodshed nomad, living, working and sniffing out peak eating and cooking experiences in North Carolina, Japan, and Israel. I even tried Guatemala, with not much luck. Didn’t I earn that separation from the land after years of pooping in a bucket in service of that soil?

Returning to the U.S., I applied my communications chops in the Fair Trade movement, fighting for fair pay for farmers in developing countries. I loved my work, but I ran smack into monster-sized contradictions. I felt compelled to hide my love of food. It was not cool to rhapsodize over my homemade shallot sherry vinaigrette when coffee farmers were starving in Nicaragua. Visiting my friends, do-gooders like me employed at environmental and social justice organizations, I would cringe when I saw their kitchen trash cans stuffed to the brim with packaging from frozen processed fare—often vegan or organic—but inevitably from Trader Joe’s. Then again, who was I to tell them to shell fresh favas while Guatemala City sunk into chaos and poverty? I wished the social justice and environmental movements would ally with the good food advocates but the gulf was too wide. Where did this basic and critical connection of loving food fall flat for these otherwise enlightened people?

Over and over again, I saw the same issues: No time to cook, no skills to cook, no community with whom or for whom to cook, no cultural precedent, no acceptance of food beyond fuel. These challenges faced even those burning with desire for good food and thoroughly committed to their definition of what “good” was. I was sad that where everyone got off kilter was exactly the place where change could happen, three times a day: the market, the kitchen, and the table.

Now I am settled in Oakland, CA into a hybrid life of sorts. The native California grapes are ripening on the vines, my cucumbers are showing promise, and the solar panels are doing their thing on the roof. Sushi is a short walk up the hill, public transportation infrastructure is excellent, and the low-flow toilet sits serenely upstairs. My kitchen is not fancy, but it is the heart and soul of my house. I feed my friends who work for social justice and my neighbors who are too busy to cook. This morning I argued with my husband about soil amendments. A no-holds barred native-plant gardener, he strongly believes that a plant must make it on its own with minimum assistance. I know that to produce food from plants, you need to give the roots easy access to nutrients. You have to lend nature a helping hand, whether in the garden, in the kitchen, or in your own personal work for the roots of change.

I plan on sharing my stories about ironies, surprises, and challenges that accompany food to the last mile: from where we shop, to the kitchen, and to the table. I hope to make some new connections by telling stories about contradictions I see as the movement for good food gains steam across the country. In kitchens, at farmer’s markets, in community groups, in my backyard, and at work, tensions and stumbling blocks abound. Looking back at my family life, as committed as we were to sustainable food production, contradictions showed up there too.

The system’s level needs improvement and so do our individual relationships with food and with each other. We all have more work to do so that artichokes and beets make the leap from good-concept-but-daunting-preparation onto our forks. (Spiky thorns and red-stained fingers, oh my!)

I plan on creating a conversation, and perhaps offering tools, to make that last mile trip to the table a reality instead of a pipe dream. Stay tuned for my next post, an intense conversation with a valet in a Monterey, CA Cannery Row Hotel, who asks me what to eat, how to cook what he finds, and why he should bother. Plus, there is more to come including: crying over a corndog in Japan, generic cheese in Israel, and a pile of fava beans in Oakland.

Welcome to the Last Mile Access.

Photo courtesy of Vanessa Barrington

In the next sentences, she gives a clue about what “tools” she might be referring to by praising the Green Revolution — without noting the depleted water table, reduced soil fertility, massive farmer debts and increased rates of farmer suicides left in the wake of the failed experiment in India.

The Green Revolution was a product of a biotechnological approach to feeding people, the thinking being that we could create ways of tricking nature in a lab: ridding ourselves of pests and weeds, increasing yields and efficiency. Unfortunately pests and weeds have become more virulent in these systems, as they evolve to withstand higher and higher doses of chemicals. These “monocultures” — field plantings of a single crop, usually corn, cotton or soy — have relied heavily on oil and resource inputs the third world can’t afford. Furthermore, these systems have yet to actually improve yields. Efficiency has been the greatest achievement of biotechnology; however, as Michael Pollan and others point out, redundancy, though counter-intuitive, is the only way to ensure food safety. But biotechnology companies like Monsanto have a huge lobbying presence in Washington, and corporate shills like Nina Federoff have the ear of Secretary Clinton. So its no surprise that in the name of philanthropy, the US has begun to adopt the “feeding the world” mantra of Big Ag.

The focus has been mostly on Africa, where a third of the population is malnourished, and where groups like the Gates Foundation are among the newcomers trying to renew the idea of creating a “Green Revolution for Africa,” using many of the same methods that have been so bad for India.

Meanwhile, here in the US, 36 million people are food insecure, and yet we are one of the biggest agricultural producers in the world. Given the fact that these commodity crops cannot be eaten until processed, it turns out that what Big Ag is feeding us is not nourishing us. So it seems that hunger is not just a function of yield, but involves distribution, concentrations of power, and policy.

At the end of the day, do we actually seek to feed these hungry people, or to feed our bottom line? Because in this instance, we can’t do both.

Raj Patel put it succinctly in a recent email exchange:

Everyone agrees that African farmers need support. But this story is like the vacuum cleaner salesman who dumps dirt on your floor to show you how his product can pick some of it up. In Africa’s case, the dirt was dumped in the 1980s, when US-led economic policy from the World Bank actively prevented African governments from investing in their farmers. The results were, the Bank now admits, a disaster. Into this disaster now steps biotechnology, offering to fix the problem. Actually, it’s a bad metaphor. This makes it sound as if GE crops can actually increase yields. The problem of hunger in Africa today has very little to do with seed quality, and a great deal to do with poverty, chronic underinvestment in agriculture, and an active stamping-out of the agroecological alternatives that have proved so successful in fighting hunger. Why are these alternatives being suppressed in US government policy? Because they’re not profitable for the US biotech industry, and the US government has, since Vice President Dan Quayle shepherded legislation in the US to support the industry, been an aggressive supporter of genetic engineering.

Patel is co-author, with Eric Holt-Giménez, of the forthcoming book, Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, which outlines the conditions which led to the global food crisis of 2008, and some of the many steps we can take to solve hunger. The book ties the issue of hunger to a growing dependence on our imports:

The profits and concentration of market power in the industrial North mirror the import dependence, food deficits and the loss of control over food systems in the global South. Fifty years ago, developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion. Today, after decades of development and the global expansion of the industrial agrifoods complex, the Southern food deficit has ballooned to U.S.$11 billion/year (FAO 2004). The cereal import bill for Low Income Food Deficit Countries reaching over U.S.$ 38 billion in 2007/2008 (De Schutter 2008). The FAO predicts it will grow to $50 billion by 2030.

Instead of teaching poor countries to fish, so to speak, we are selling them the fish with the hook still in its mouth.

That hook infers dependence, but there is also another catch: depleted resources. Biotechnology as it is used right now cannot be sustainable. It relies heavily on three things that are waning: surplus water, cheap oil and a stable climate. As much as biotech proponents claim their technologies could be used for sustainable aims, we don’t have decades to wait while the technology is perfected. And what if it is never perfected? In addition, in putting all of our eggs in one basket with biotech, the problem is misrepresented, and solutions that are already out there are being ignored.

It seems, therefore, that the only real solution to hunger is to transform the food system from the ground up. In Africa, 80% of the population is rural, and there are 33 million small farms (those farming less than 2 hectares), which produce 90% of the continent’s food (Patel and Giménez, 2009). Why don’t we, then, instead of promoting an intensive agriculture that is ruining our environment, our health and is lining the pockets of a few corporations, increase aid to agriculture? There is plenty of fertile land in Africa, much of which is being snatched up in massive land grabs by the Chinese and other countries foreseeing their own imminent food insecurity. Perhaps its time to invest in agriculture for Africans, before it’s too late.

This was the recommendation of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science, and Technology for Development, or IAASTD, which was a joint project of the World Bank, FAO and UNDP that determined in 2008 that a complete overhaul of the food system was necessary. 61 countries signed onto the findings of the panel. Patel and Gimenez sum up the IAASTD thusly:

IAASTD’s four-year analytical exercise started with a collective framing of the core problems of hunger and environmental destruction. Scientists then identified and evaluated the most appropriate actions and solutions to these problems, locally, nationally and internationally.

The IAASTD team found that the limiting factors to production, equitable distribution and environmental sustainability were overwhelmingly social, rather than technological in nature. Further, many proven agroecological practices for sustainable production increases were already widespread across the global South, but unable to scale up because they lacked a supportive trade, policy, and institutional environment. This is why IAASTD recommends improving the conditions for sustainable agriculture, rather than just coming up with technological fixes.

Somehow this gets swept under the rug of policy in the US. But if we are committed to actually helping, it would behoove Secretary Clinton, and others in this administration, to read the findings of the IAASTD and consider it before making policy.

Again, from Patel and Giménez:

Who improves African agriculture, how, under what agreements and by what means, will determine whether the efforts to end hunger in Africa succeed or fail. Lack of attention to these issues runs the risk that the long-overdue support to African agriculture will be used as prop for a flawed global food system when what is needed is a thorough transformation of agriculture.

Will Africans be a cog in our capitalist machine, or will we follow through with our promises to end hunger?