This week in class we watched a video called “Food Frontier,” a project by Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future meant to showcase six projects around the U.S. working to increase access to healthy food. In class, we’ve been learning about gardening and the difference between local, organic foods versus imported and heavily processed foods. This video’s six very different stories about pioneering food projects added a lot to my learning by showing the varied and effective ways basically anyone can make a difference in their food community.
Community Access
In the video, a lot of different people were shown increasing their community’s access to food. They range from people in positions of power to the everyday citizen, but each played an important role in the positive changes made in their community.
One type of player is, to many people, the obvious one when the issue is of the social or political type -- the legislator. In the video, Representative Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania worked very hard to bring farmers markets to the ‘forgotten’ neighborhoods in Philadelphia, using his government position to effectively bring about the change.
Another channel for change in food communities are nonprofit organizations. Through the video, a number of nonprofit organizations, founded by regular people who wanted to fight for access to fresh, healthy food, were shown as successful changemakers. Students also have great power to make change in their area. In the first story showcased in the video, a group of students in Cady, Nebraska, succeeded in building and running the first grocery store in their town, supplying the residents with easily attainable healthy food for the first time. Students may not be able to directly create change the way a legislator might or have the time and resources to found a nonprofit, but students are able to raise awareness in a very noticeable way and often have the drive and creativity to make change in unique and rewarding way.
Rural Food Desert
The first story in the video, the tale of Cady, Nebraska, introduced the concept of a rural food desert. A food desert is defined by the USDA as “living more than 10 miles from a grocery store.” According to the Rural Sociological Society, nearly 98% of these food deserts are in non-metropolitan areas -- and the rural food desert is born. These deserts occur as result of negative feedback loops. After World War II, rural populations started declining as urban areas began to grow. Because of this, grocery stores began to shut down, which in turn caused more rural residents to move to bigger cities, which caused even more grocery stores to shut down, etc. Eventually, this resulted in too few people in these areas to support a grocery store and retailers reluctant to cooperate with a grocery store “in the middle of nowhere.”
This, however, means the people remaining in these tiny rural areas are suddenly left, sometimes literally, high and dry. Suddenly, buying groceries -- something most of us take for granted -- can mean driving 40 miles or more to the closest store, which comes with high gas prices low-income or elderly residents may not be able to afford. As well, people living in rural food deserts often depend on canned, pickled, or non-perishable foods -- foods more processed and often sodium-rich.
One possible solution for people living in these rural food deserts or people working to fix these situations is to create gardens and non-commercial farms that provide local, fresh food that allow them to remain in their area with a self-sufficient, healthy diet.
Food Choice In A Community
In the video, each of the stories showed a way to encourage your community to make wiser, healthier decisions when it comes to shopping and eating.
In the video, the Philadelphia nonprofit worked to provide incentives for low-income shoppers to buy fresh produce, such as food stamp and food coupon bonuses at farmer’s markets. This was one effective way of encouraging healthy choices, because it made fresh food, usually the more expensive option, cheaper.
The final approach mentioned in the video was in multiple stories -- public money was put towards a Fresh Financing Initiative. This money was leveraged to make more money, which could be put to ensuring those communities had better access to fresh food.
These ideas inspired me to come up with my own ideas to encourage better food choices in communities. One way that might be successful would be to work with officials to regulate the distribution of fast food restaurants vs. organic grocery stores throughout a city, making the grocery store the easier, close option for the neighborhoods where there are currently none.
Another method, inspired by last week’s video, “What’s On Your Plate?” is the idea of a mass printed cookbook pamphlet, detailing easy-to-make, healthy meals, that can be distributed throughout the community.
Lastly, you could host food fairs, where farmer’s markets, organic grocery stores, and chefs could come together to create an event where the community could come together and sample and buy foods made from local produce, along with recipe cards that they could take home to try the healthy dish themselves.
School Food
In the video, two of the stories in the video were set in California -- both about school lunch.
In Claremont, for a long time, the food they provided for students every day was always prepackaged, processed, and frozen. The school district announced that given financial constraints and the need for minimal effort, they “couldn’t buy local food." In Riverside, however, the school is part of a food hub -- a system that connects farmers and school districts to provide thousands of children with fresh, locally grown food for lunch. These two schools provided examples of two ends of a spectrum -- the easy way, and the healthy way.
The lunch, however, should be changed to a caterer that doesn’t just claim to be nutritious and palatably pleasing, but one that actually is. A major obstacle here is money. Currently, LJA can only afford our current caterer and quality of food, and unlike in Riverside, we live in Minnesota -- we’re not next door to a fruit orchard. To remedy the situation, students could help fundraise for LJA, or specifically raise awareness and funds for improving school lunch in particular. They could identify a local farm or organic caterer and use these funds to improve the health and taste of school lunch without straining the rest of the school’s budget.
