A new federal program will allow low-income families to eat healthier food and spur the local economy at the same time.
The Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI), approved alongside this year’s Farm Bill, will put $100 million over the next five years into the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, aka food stamps). As CBS News reports, the money will go towards programs such as Double Up Food Bucks, which allows farmer’s markets to match the amount a SNAP recipient might spend, meaning they can double up on fresh fruits and vegetables. According to NPR, the $100 million will also be matched by private funding, so there’s a potential of $200 million going towards the program.
Crossroads Farmers Market, outside of Washington D.C., is one of the many farmer’s markets that already run a similar program. Rosie Sanchez, a SNAP recipient and market volunteer, tells NPR that the program “is very important…You know why? Because I get up to $15 for free. So I have $30 every week. With my $30, I’m able to buy fresh, local — it’s not expensive. It’s the best!”
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The initiative is important because the average daily amount offered to low-income Americans through SNAP is only $4.50 a day. And because fruits and vegetables at the grocery store tend to be more expensive than, say, a bag of chips, recipients can develop health concerns due to poor diets, such as heart disease, diabetes or obesity. Thanks to the new program, SNAP recipients have effectively doubled their purchasing power for healthier fare.
A policy brief from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Johns Hopkins Center found that “if Americans increased their daily consumption of these foods to meet federal dietary recommendations, the nation’s costs related to the treatment of cardiovascular disease alone could drop by $17 billion.”
Another plus with FINI is that it entices communities that are considered food deserts (low-income areas with limited access to fresh produce) to start farmer’s markets. Encouragingly, access to local fruits and vegetables is already increasing, the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) found that the number of farmer’s markets increased from 2,863 in 2000 to 7,175 in 2011.
An investment of $100 million over five years doesn’t sound like a lot of money when the payoff could be much bigger.
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Tag: farmer’s markets
Why Public Markets Are So Important
Who doesn’t love a public market?
After all, they provide a great opportunity to buy local food, expanding your culinary tastes in the process. But despite our adoration for these markets, we may not realize the full impact they have on the people working the booth. Elijah Anderson, a Yale sociologist, coined Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market a “cosmopolitan canopy” because it is a place of equal opportunity for all genders and ethnicities. Philadelphia is not alone, though, as public markets across the country give everyone the chance to succeed.
Public markets are on the rise again, as noted by Project for Public Spaces (PPS), who found that the number of farmer’s markets increased from 2,863 in 2000 to 7,175 in 2011. The rise can be attributed partly to the help of organizations that assist in linking farmers with land — many of whom are minorities.
FARMroots is one such group. Since its formation in 2000, it has been connecting Latin American immigrants with land in New York State. Recently, they have expanded into the city, supporting urban farms, a growing industry. This is possible through partnerships with Black Urban Group and second-career farms, which are run mainly by women. In addition to minorities, women are also new titans in the sustainable agricultural business. So far this year, FARMroots has helped raise and market 20 new farm businesses.
Further, farmers are also doing business with SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) customers, resulting in increased small business development and food access.
These initiatives aren’t limited to just the Northeast though. PPS has recently been working with a Hmong population in Missouri. Originally from Minnesota, the transition was rough due to a different growing season and less interest in Asian foods. However, with the help of a grant from the Kellogg Foundation through PPS, these Hmong farmers have been given another chance, with a grant that allowed them to participate in training sessions — resulting in sales increases ranging from 200 to 800 percent.
Although these minority and women farmers may experience some discrimination, overall public markets give them the chance to expand their businesses and improve their lives. Therefore, next time you drop by a farmer’s market, realize that not only are you helping yourself, but you are benefiting the lives of those selling to you, too.
MORE: From Seed to Harvest, These Green Thumbs Nourish Chicago School Gardens
Short on Cash? That’s No Problem at This Farmer’s Market
The way it typically works at a farmer’s market (and with just about every retailer, in fact): You pay money and in exchange, you go home with a bunch of fresh produce.
But at the go-go fresco farmer’s market in Charlotte, North Carolina, if you don’t have enough money to pay for your greens, you don’t have to worry.
Huh?
If you’re telling yourself that there must be a catch, there’s not. The farmer’s market frequently operates on the pay-what-you-can principle that’s already the basis for many cafés across the country.
Even better: You might not have to drive across town to visit go-go fresco, since it visits 10 different locations each week, with the goal of bringing fresh produce to people who might not be able to access it otherwise.
Two of the locations are designed to reach low-income families and that’s where patrons can pay what they care to — either the suggested price, a bit more to help another shopper out, or less if that’s all they’ve got. Go-go fresco also accepts food stamps and often donates produce (which it buys from local farmers) to the non-profits that host their mobile market: The YWCA and the Children and Family Services Center.
“We have good weeks and some bad weeks, but it balances out,” Nick Knock (who founded go-go fresco with Leconte Lee) told Mark Price of the Charlotte Observer. “It’s inspiring to see the hearts and generosity of people who don’t think twice about paying more so someone in need can get fresh food.”
Knock told Price that there have been a few times when he wondered if patrons were taking advantage of the pay-what-you-want option, “But then I saw that they only had $3.19 left on their (food stamp) account, and I got choked up. They were spending what little money they had left at our market. It was mind-blowing when you think they were able to get food because of us.”
MORE: The Restaurant Without A Cash Register
10 Chefs Who Are Bringing a Food Revolution to America
1. Mario Batali
Home base: New York, N.Y.
Noted for: Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, Del Posto, Otto Enoteca Pizzeria
Cause: Hunger relief
How he’s changing America: With a slew of Manhattan restaurants, regular television appearances and famous friends like Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali is hands down one of America’s most visible chefs. But behind the scenes, the man in the orange Crocs is equally hard at work at the Mario Batali Foundation, which has taught low-income families about nutrition and healthy food preparation since 2008. Batali has also raised nearly $8 million in the last decade for the Food Bank for New York City, a nonprofit hunger-relief organization where he serves on the board of directors. In 2013, the Mario Batali Foundation partnered with the Food Bank for New York City to create the Community CookShop, a program that has taught more than 1,400 people at 24 food pantries and soup kitchens how to maximize their food budgets and cook nutritious meals.
2. José Andrés
Home base: Washington, D.C.
Noted for: Jaleo, Zaytinya, Minibar by José Andrés
Causes: Hunger relief, culinary training
How he’s changing America: When José Andrés moved to Washington, D.C., one of the first people he met was Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing poverty and hunger in the nation’s capital. Humbled by the group’s efforts, Andrés began helping on a number of their initiatives, including a culinary training program that teaches homeless vets and former prisoners food preparation and cooking skills so they can find jobs in the restaurant industry. In 2010, Andrés formed World Central Kitchen, which aims to replicate the success of DC Central Kitchen on an international scale by teaching vulnerable citizens how they can grow, cook and preserve their own food and become self-sustaining communities. “As chefs, we are in a position to influence how people eat and how they think about food,” Andrés says. “Yes, we cook for the few in our restaurants, but we have the power and knowledge to cook for and feed the many.”
3. Cat Cora
Home base: Santa Barbara, Calif.
Noted for: Kouzzina by Cat Cora, Cat Cora’s Kitchen
Cause: Hunger relief
How she’s changing America: In 2005, Cat Cora made history by becoming the Food Network’s first and only female Iron Chef. And yet the Mississippi-bred chef may be best known for her work as president and founder of Chefs for Humanity, an organization that aims to provide nutrition education and hunger relief around the world by rallying culinary experts to raise money for disaster-affected populations and to teach low-income communities about healthy eating habits. In 2005, Cora and fellow chefs worked with the American Red Cross to help feed victims and volunteers of Hurricane Katrina, which left a trail of destruction in her home state of Mississippi. More recently, Cora has partnered with Michelle Obama on the first lady’s Chefs Move to Schools program, which invites chefs to help eradicate the childhood obesity epidemic by creating healthy meals and menus.
4. Bill Yosses
Home base: Washington, D.C.
Noted for: White House executive pastry chef
Cause: Food literacy
How he’s changing America: Many chefs would consider a tenure in the White House to be the gig of a lifetime. Bill Yosses can claim that honor twice, as he has whipped up delicious desserts for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama as the White House executive pastry chef. This summer, Yosses will depart 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for New York City, where he plans to form a foundation to promote healthy eating habits for adults and kids alike. “There’s much talk about STEM in schools — science, technology, engineering and math,” Yosses told The New York Times. “Food knowledge should be part of a complete curriculum.” And while the White House kitchen will no longer be his domain, its hallowed halls won’t be far from his mind. Yosses’ plans are reportedly inspired in part by Michelle Obama and her White House garden, which provided ingredients for healthier desserts during his stint.
5. Michel Nischan
Home base: Fairfield, Conn.
Noted for: Wholesome Wave
Cause: Sustainable farming
How he’s changing America: Though he grew up in the Chicago suburbs, Michel Nischan spent the summers of his formative years on his grandfather’s farm in Missouri. There, he learned how to raise animals, can veggies and drive tractors. “It’s where my passion for food comes from,” Nischan says. “It’s also where I learned about the role and importance of people who produce that food.”
In 2007, Nischan co-founded Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit that partners with farmers across the country to provide underserved communities with better access to locally grown foods. Wholesome Wave is perhaps most famous for its double- value coupon program: Food stamp recipients get double the value of their government-issued food dollars if they shop at participating farmers’ markets rather than traditional grocery stores. In 2011, in an effort to lower obesity and boost health, Wholesome Wave launched its fruit and vegetable prescription program, in which doctors write patients “prescriptions” for fruits and vegetables that can be cashed in at farmers’ markets. The program was introduced in Massachusetts, Maine, California and Rhode Island (New York City adopted it in 2013).
6. Ann Cooper
Home base: Boston, Mass.
Noted for: The Lunch Box
Cause: Healthy school lunches
How she’s changing America: Ann Cooper realized there was a problem with our food culture when her own niece informed her that strawberries were grown on trees, not bushes. Since then, Cooper has become an advocate for childhood nutrition, a fight she’s led for more than 20 years. “So many of our kids don’t know where real food comes from — that it doesn’t come in plastic wrap in a box,” Cooper says. The Boston-based chef has been dubbed the “Renegade Lunch Lady” for her efforts to bring healthier foods to the public school system, having launched several nonprofits and websites in support of these initiatives, including The Lunch Box, an open-source community that provides free recipes, video cooking tutorials and other tools to families who want to eat better. In 2010, Cooper also teamed up with Michelle Obama to start Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, an effort to bring 6,000 salad bars to school cafeterias across the country.
7. Christina Tosi
Home base: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Noted for: Momofuku Milk Bar
Cause: Immigrants
How she’s changing America: One of Christina Tosi’s earliest dreams was to own a bakery. In 2011, she checked that item off the bucket list when she became chef, owner and founder of Momofuku Milk Bar, the dessert branch of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurant group. It’s only fitting, then, that her philanthropic efforts are with an organization that also loves baking: Tosi serves on the board of Hot Bread Kitchen, a Spanish Harlem-based nonprofit that trains low-income, immigrant women in artisanal baking skills, which can help them secure management jobs within bakeries, where minority women are particularly underrepresented. (In New York City alone, just 500 of the area’s 6,000 bakers are minority women.) Founded in 2007, Hot Bread Kitchen has already helped 12 of its 39 trainees find full-time work as bakery shift managers, with plans to train 30 new participants this year.
8. David James Robinson
Home base: Columbia County, N.Y.
Noted for: “Learn How to Cook (and Eat Your Mistakes)!” DVD program
Cause: Job training for veterans
How he’s changing America: Having cooked for more than 35,000 guests in his career, including presidents, Academy Award winners and professional athletes, chef David James Robinson has a wealth of culinary knowledge to share. His DVD program “Learn How to Cook (and Eat Your Mistakes)!” offers beginner chefs lessons from food prep to chopping. A spin-off, called Culinary Command Training, is a 45-day program for vets and select active-duty soldiers eager to learn skills that would prepare them for a culinary career. The program, which takes place twice a year in Chatham, N.Y., is free for military participants and funded by donations.
9. Hugh Acheson
Home base: Athens, Ga.
Noted for: Five & Ten, The National
Cause: Food security
How he’s changing America: Hugh Acheson lives in Athens, Ga., about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where more than half a million people live in food “deserts” —communities where citizens, the great majority of whom receive benefits from the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), live more than a mile from the nearest grocery store.
Acheson has been one of the loudest advocates for those living on SNAP, donating money to organizations that help underserved communities access nutritious foods and running cooking demos for low-income citizens who want to learn how to make the most of their food stamps. “People forget that SNAP is supposed to supplement — not serve as 100 percent of anyone’s food budget,” says Acheson, whose demos focus on how to make sustainable meals from vegetables and grains, which are considerably cheaper than meat. “I don’t want to raise a bunch of chefs in America,” he says. “I just want to raise a bunch of people with basic cooking skills so they can feed themselves.”
10. Rick Bayless
Home base: Chicago, Ill.
Noted for: Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, Xoco
Cause: Local farmers
How he’s changing America: With multiple restaurants, cookbooks and even his own PBS show dedicated to Mexican cuisine, it’s no wonder that Rick Bayless was invited by the Obamas to be the guest chef at an official state dinner in 2010 for Felipe Calderon, then president of Mexico. But he’s not letting that national attention get to his head. For decades, Bayless has helped out small farmers who supplied food to his restaurants, and in 2003 he founded the Frontera Farmer Foundation to support local Chicago farmers through grants for capital improvements; to date, the foundation has given $1.2 million to 71 farms. “They’d tell us they needed a little help with this project, with that project, and we wanted to see them thrive — not the least bit because we wanted to continue getting product from them — so we’d help them out whenever we could,” Bayless says. “And eventually we thought, ‘Hey, this is part of our mission, it’s part of what we
do, we should just make it official.’” But for Bayless, the decision to support farmers goes beyond his three Chicago restaurants. “I just didn’t want to see our food systems go completely corporate and globalized,” he says. “I wanted to eat food that was grown in the Midwest, the same way people in Mexico eat food that was grown just a few miles away…the same way we all used to do that. It’s about health, it’s about the planet’s health, it’s about flavor, it’s about stories and it’s very much about people, the farmers who make their living growing food for us to eat.”
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Michel Nischan, CEO of Wholsome Wave, has become a NationSwell Council member.
Thousands More Angelenos Can Now Enjoy Farmer’s Market Produce
While this sounds downright strange, the sale of cigarettes is giving some California residents access to healthy fruits and vegetables.
Thanks to a new $2.5 million grant from First 5 L.A. (a nonprofit funded through California taxes on tobacco products), thousands of low-income families in Los Angeles are going to be crunching into healthy farmer’s market goods.
The sizable grant was given to Market Match, a program that provides a dollar-for-dollar match at farmer’s markets to shoppers receiving economic assistance through EBT (Electronics Benefits Transfer, which is more widely know as food stamps) or WIC (the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children).
According to the Los Angeles Times, the new funds could triple the impact of Market Match over the next several years. James Haydu, the executive director of Sustainable Economic Enterprises-Los Angeles, told David Karp of the Times, “It will not only expand the countywide program, but through the next five years it will make it far easier to be able to quickly explain how the system works to ensure that as many people as possible can take advantage of it.”
In 2010, Market Match started with only $3,000 of funding, serving just two farmer’s markets. With such a tiny amount of money available, the dollar-for-dollar matches quickly ran out. But with a projected $80,000 available to fund next year’s program, many more families will be able to enjoy the benefits of fresh fruits and vegetables. Market Match is now available at 14 L.A. farmer’s markets, and organizers hope to expand it to 37 markets during the grant-funded period.
Martin Bourque, the director of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, that manages the Market Match program, said that the funds will not only benefit low-income people in Los Angeles, but also enhance the health of California’s rural lands and its economy. Their survey of farmers at the markets indicated that 80 percent of them sold more produce as a result of the program.
“It’s important to remember that in addition to serving low-income shoppers, every dollar they spend is going to one of California’s small family farmers,” Bourque said. “So every dollar is doing double-duty — not only helping poor people in Los Angeles, but reaching out and helping some of California’s most economically devastated rural communities as well.”
Who knew the simple purchase of some locally-grown strawberries had the power to accomplish all that?
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How to Break the Northeast’s Biggest Farming Rule
The Philadelphia area has plenty of affluent communities ready and eager to participate in local shopping at farmers’ markets, but not far from those neighborhoods are vast food deserts. It’s a dramatic disparity, but local farmers have the power to help overcome the local food problems. Malaika Spencer is one of the farmers working to improve the local healthy options, and to do it she has transformed one of Bucks County’s traditional farms into a fully organic local resource. She has a revolutionary approach to the calendar, ignoring the Northeast’s standard six-month schedule. Instead, she’s using “storage crops like potatoes, winter squash, onions, garlic and turnips” to maintain her output through all four seasons. This way, her CSA shareholders enjoy her produce year-round and she becomes ingrained in the community’s agriculture, economy, and community.