Christina Chan connects with her family through food.
As a first-generation Chinese-American, Chan searches for ways to embrace her Chinese heritage. She doesn’t know much of the language and she doesn’t hold the same traditional values of her parents. But she does share a mutual love for soup dumplings.
And a love for traditional Cantonese dishes. And a craving for simple dishes, like Chinese leafy greens steamed with oyster sauce. When she eats, she’s connected to her roots.
“Not only do we use food to show each other care and affection, but it’s the part of my culture that I can understand the most,” she told NationSwell.
While her family’s shared culture is a major part of her identity, it’s not the only one. She is also a farmer, which is part of why she’s committed to eating local organic produce.
But Chan struggled to find organic versions of her favorite Chinese vegetables in New York. When walking through Chinatown or Jackson Heights, she couldn’t find t organic versions of the vegetables she grew up eating. “It felt like I had to choose between that part of myself or my culture,” she said.
Chan’s struggle represents a bigger problem in American farming. The crops our country grows aren’t diverse, and it’s partly due to a lack of diverse farmers.
The 2017 USDA Census on Agriculture surveyed 2.7 million principal producers in the United States. Of the 2.7 million, only 16,798, or .7%, identified as Asian. 38,000, or 1.4%, identified as black or African American. At 2.6 million of the 2.7 total, white farmers made up a majority of the principal operators.
The statistics in Chan’s home state, New York, show a similar pattern — 97% of farms belong to white men, and their average age is 57 years old. While a majority of owners are white, farmworkers are overwhelmingly Latino.
“A system where over 90% of the people are white men is not a resilient system,” Gabriela Pereyra, the Beginning Farmer Program manager at GrowNYC, told NationSwell. “A system that is resilient, it must have diversity.”
The lack of diversity impacts communities in all kinds of ways. It means individuals living in New York City, one of the world’s most diverse populations, don’t always have access to fresh produce used in traditional recipes. It means young people don’t have mentors in a potential career path. It means that communities are disconnected from farmers, and therefore, disconnected from their food.
So GrowNYC set out to narrow the diversity and age gap between farmworkers and farm owners. “We needed a new generation to bring food to the city,” Pereyra said.
The nonprofit knew there was a population of young, diverse farmworkers, but because many were immigrants, they lacked the knowledge to navigate the U.S. farm system and establish their own business, explained Pereyra.
In 2000, GrowNYC launched the New Farmer Development Project, a program to support Spanish-speaking farmers interested in starting their own agricultural business. A decade later, the program merged into what’s now called FARMroots. FARMroots offers both technical assistance for established farmers and a Beginning Farmer Program, open to any farmer with less than 10 years of experience.
While any new farmer, regardless of background, can apply to the Beginning Farmer Program, the nonprofit is focused on cultivating a diverse group. This year, 40 people applied who immigrated from seven different countries and speak 12 different languages.
The program is structured as an eight-week course where the 15 accepted farmers will learn every aspect of farming: Finances, land ownership, crop rotation, tractor driving, greenhouse management and land access are just a few they’ll delve into.
After the course, GrowNYC pairs the novice farmers with an established farmer. They’ll spend 200 hours on the established farm and gain firsthand experience.
“We’re not only talking about farming. We are creating the new generation,” Pereyra said. “A new generation that speaks about diversity, equity, community.”
Kama Doucoure is one of those farmers. After completing the Beginning Farmer Program in 2017, he launched his own farm this March.
Doucoure, who immigrated to the U.S. 12 years ago from Mali, Africa, had been farming since he was 6 years old, Pereyra said. But when he got to New York, he couldn’t find an entry point into farming. Instead, he worked “every single job you could imagine.”
Meanwhile, his community, which is largely West African Muslim, didn’t have the proper foods to celebrate religious holidays. Doucoure was connected with FARMroots, where he completed the Beginning Farmer Program. After, Pereya worked with him to find the right land and location for his farm — he now works in Saugerties, New York, a two and a half-hour drive from Manhattan.
As FARMroots developed its program, Chan was on a winding path to discovering her career in farming. She had initially planned to attend vet school but pivoted and earned a master’s in conservation science. She quickly learned that fieldwork wasn’t a long-term career route for her, so she went to London to volunteer at an urban farm. “And that’s when I kind of put all of these pieces of the puzzle together,” she said.
Chan loved being outdoors. She loved eating. And farming was at the crossroads.
She came back to the U.S. and started an apprenticeship in Hudson Valley. She then worked as a farmer and educator at Randall’s Island Park Alliance. There she met her boss, an alumnus from the FARMroots program, who suggested she apply.
“They really helped take what is the fuzzy farm dream and bring it into focus,” Chan said.
Chan still works on an urban farm in the city, and once or twice a week she takes the subway to Astoria, Queens, where she grows produce for a local chef in a backyard.
In raised beds, she’s grown four types of basil and Korean perilla. Along the entryway to the garden, Chan points out a Thai eggplant and bright red chili peppers.
“Really this year zero for me is to kind of try varieties and figure out what grows well here, what’s productive, what tastes good and just kind of refine my skills with certain things,” she said. She plans to spend 2020 on a production farm or completing another apprenticeship.
Her long-term goal is to feed the community. She plans to find three to five acres of farmland in Hudson Valley where she can bring produce to the Asian communities across New York City.
“There’s not really many people selling the types of vegetables that are things I would see in my household growing up,” she said. So she’s taking the first step to change that.
Chan has the group of farmers she worked with in London to thank, as well as her boss on Randall’s Island.
But she also has GrowNYC to thank, too. Chan and Pereyra have stayed connected as Chan begins the hunt for farmland.
“You’re not doing it for you,” Chan said. “You’re doing it for the community.”
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Tag: food insecurity
Providence Restaurant Serves Up Second Chances
Jeff Bacon has worked in kitchens his entire life, but it was only after a brush with the law that he realized food could change lives. “I ended up mixed up with drugs and alcohol, running with a wild crowd, losing job after job … I was great at what I did, but I wasn’t a very good person,” Bacon says.
After serving two years in prison for drug possession and resisting arrest, Bacon says he experienced a spiritual awakening. “I firmly, firmly heard from God, ‘This is not what you’re supposed to be doing with your life. You need to do something more, and you need to give back the second chance that you got.’”
Bacon wanted to use his passion for food to give back to the community of Winston-Salem, N.C., where one in seven people struggles with hunger. After years of pitching the idea of a culinary training school, Bacon was finally able to launch Providence Culinary Training Program through a partnership with the Second Harvest Food Bank.
The program trains people in all aspects of food service, and students prepare meals for local community members in need. “It’s not the food scarcity and the food insecurity, though that is a crushing and urgent and acute problem… but it’s the root causes,” says Bacon. “[It’s] the root causes of poverty, the inequalities of our society — we’re not just ill-prepared to deal with them, we’re ill-prepared to even discuss them intelligently.”
Through the Providence program, students receive 12 weeks of culinary training, as well as connections in the food industry and opportunities for long-term internships and jobs. Many of the participants enter the program facing obstacles to stable employment, such as a criminal background or a lack of higher education. But after completing their training, 87 percent of graduates retain steady employment one year later.
Watch the video above to learn more about the Providence program and meet some of the people who have turned their lives around through it.
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In Atlanta, This Group Fights Hunger With Tech and Found Fruit
Off the Atlanta BeltLine, about 20 feet from the Freedom Parkway bridge, as teenagers skateboarded, joggers pushed strollers and couples walked hand-in-hand, Logan Pool looks up.
“Do you think this tree can hold my weight?” he asks Katherine Kennedy, executive director of Concrete Jungle, the nonprofit that organized the day’s fruit pick.
Kennedy chuckles. “I’ll let you make that call,” she says.
The branches above him hang heavy with reddening plums the size of golfballs. Farther up the hill, six volunteers pull plums from other trees, filling quart-sized containers with the sticky-sweet fruit.
Concrete Jungle aims to address two connected issues. On the one hand, thousands of fruit trees grow unattended — their ripened fruits drop and rot, contributing to the 40 percent of agricultural products in the U.S. that go to waste, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. And alongside that food waste, people are going hungry. In Atlanta 19 percent of adults and 28 percent of kids are food insecure — a phrase that, in practical terms, means skipping one meal a day based on necessity. Although food pantries and soup kitchens alleviate some of that need, it’s often with donated pantry staples and processed foods, rather than fresh, vitamin- and mineral-rich ones.
Since 2009, the organization has mapped 4,700 neglected trees to create Atlanta’s only fruit-tree map. It’s allowed the small group — which has just one employee and 10 board members — and their volunteers to maximize the harvest and minimize wasted fruit. To date, more than 33,000 pounds of produce have been donated to those in need.
For most of the 10 hunger-relief organizations that partner with Concrete Jungle, this is the only fresh produce they can provide to the families they serve. Subsequently, in places where Concrete Jungle drops off contributions, the fresh produce is used immediately, whether it’s set out for people to grab or set aside for volunteers to prepare as part of a meal.
“Concrete Jungle was the first and remains the most consistent donor of fresh-picked and farm-grown fruits and vegetables for our community,” Chad Hyatt, pastor at Atlanta’s Mercy Community Church, says. “Getting food donations isn’t hard; getting healthy, nutritious, fresh food is.”
Growing Roots
Concrete Jungle started with two friends and some apples. Craig Durkin and Aubrey Daniels had a cider press but, as broke students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, they didn’t have the money for the abundance of fruit required to use it. So they scouted out apple trees in the area and started picking. Before long, they realized the scope of the fruit available in Atlanta — a metro area with so much lush green space it’s widely known as “the city in the forest.”
Sometimes referred to as “gleaning,” this age-old practice gathers whatever crops remain on a farmer’s land after it was harvested. And Concrete Jungle isn’t alone in gleaning food donations. “Urban fruit foraging” organizations — a more modern term for the practice — have popped up in cities such as Seattle; Louisville, Ky.; Philadelphia; Boulder, Colo.; and Los Angeles.
For volunteers, these organizations provide a novel experience that harkens back to childhood tree-climbing or family trips to orchards. “They can now see Atlanta in a new light,” Kennedy says. “They can see fruit trees all over the place.”
That was one of the main draws for Erin Croom, who came out to the plum pick with her two sons, five-year-old Thomas and four-year-old Henry.
“I love showing them that there is magic in ordinary and familiar spaces,” says Croom. “They are so proud to gain new knowledge — like being able to identify new trees — and do something that helps others.”
Back by the parkway bridge, Pool has successfully climbed the plum tree and is diligently harvesting from halfway up its branches, although a few plums have ended up in his mouth.
“I’m only eating the bruised ones!” he calls down, laughing.
A Better Bounty
Beyond a growing volunteer base, Concrete Jungle has technology on its side. Because it’s difficult to keep an eye on the thousands of trees the group has mapped all across Atlanta, they’ve partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Public Design Workshop to better monitor their potential crops.
First, to reduce the amount of time spent driving to a picking site, the team deployed drones to take photos and videos of the trees. (The drone is currently grounded due to FAA regulations and licensing requirements.) Now they’re creating sensors that will be directly placed in trees to monitor fruit growth. Cameras take weekly pictures of tree branches, and a bend sensor measures a branch’s angle (as fruit grows bigger and heavier, it weighs the branch down). And an electronic nose, still very much in the development phase, aims to “smell” gases as they’re released from growing fruit. Once the gases reach a certain level, the fruit is ready to pick.
Last year Concrete Jungle donated 16,000 pounds of produce, a harvest record they’re hoping to double this year.
On this afternoon, eight volunteers collect 98 pounds of plums, some of which end up at Mercy Community Church, hand-delivered, like most donations, by Kennedy.
A group of predominantly homeless men is gathered for breakfast and prayer. Pastor Hyatt loads some of the plums into a bowl and passes it around. “Concrete Jungle is an example of fundamental justice,” he says, “of seeing a resource and a need and doing the right thing by rolling up your sleeves and dirtying your hands to get the resource to those who need it.”
Correction: This article originally referred to Atlanta’s BeltLine as the Beltway. NationSwell regrets the error.
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Fighting Food Waste, One Sector at a Time
America is one of the largest offenders of food waste in the world, according to a recent survey. Every year, roughly 1.3 billion tons of food is thrown out worldwide, a considerable problem given that agriculture contributes about 22 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions and 12.7 million people go hungry in America alone. Entrepreneurs across several sectors have created ways to repurpose food. Their efforts are admirable and economical, but the biggest difference will be if you make food waste reduction a daily habit.
On College Campuses
On average, a student who lives in university housing throws out 141 pounds of food per year. Multiply that by the number of residential colleges around the country, and it becomes a huge problem, says Regina Northouse, executive director for the Food Recovery Network, the only nonprofit dealing specifically with campus food waste.
WATCH: How Much Food Could Be Rescued If College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
Northouse’s group reduces waste by enlisting the help of student volunteers at 226 universities. This manpower shuttles still-edible food from dining halls that would otherwise be thrown out to local nonprofits fighting hunger. Northouse estimates that since 2011, Food Recovery Network has fed 150,000 food-insecure people.
On Farms
If a carrot isn’t quite orange enough, odds are it’ll be tossed. Blemishes and unattractive produce make up nearly 40 percent of discarded food, according to a 2012 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Though some unused fruits and veggies can be sent to food manufacturers, farmers lose profits from about a quarter of their crops because of cosmetic imperfections. To put money back into their pockets, box subscriptions services, such as Hungry Harvest, have found their way into the ugly food market.
“We started out with 10 customers at a stand,” says Stacy Carroll, director of partnerships for Hungry Harvest. “We now have thousands of customers every week buying thousands of pounds of food that would, in the past, have been thrown away.”
Roughly 10,000 subscribers along the East Coast receive weekly boxes of recovered produce from the Baltimore-based company (which was started by the founders of Food Recovery Network). In addition, food insecure families who use SNAP benefits can purchase boxes at 10 Hungry Harvest sites. All in all, the organization redistributes between 60,000 and 80,000 pounds of food through its subscription service each week.
At Food Retailers
For merchants, food wasted is also money wasted. Across the U.S., the cost of tossing food runs upward of $165 billion annually.
MealConnect, a tech platform launched in April by Feeding America (a nationwide network of food banks), allows retailers to post surplus meals and unused produce on its app, which then notifies local food banks workers to pick it up and redistribute it to those in need. The company has recovered 333 million pounds of food by working with large retailers like Walmart and Starbucks. MealConnect also allows merchants to recoup some of their outlays (via tax deductions).
In Restaurants
In 2015, the aptly named food popup wastED found itself in the heart of a media frenzy because of what was on the menu: trashed food.
Since then, a handful of other restaurants in urban areas across the world have used recovered produce in their meals.
“We’re offering our cooks the opportunity to be creative and come up with menus instead,” says Brooklyn, N.Y., chef Przemek Adolf, owner of Saucy By Nature, which uses leftovers from previous catering events to create daily lunch and dinner specials.
In Your Own Kitchen
Individual families throw away nearly $1,600 worth of food per year, according to the EPA, which has spurred the federal government to step in and help.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture created the app FoodKeeper, which informs consumers on how long an apple can last in the fridge, for example, and proper food storage techniques to extend shelf life. It also sends out reminder alerts to use up food that’s in danger of spoiling. The desired outcome? People changing their behaviors, ultimately buying less and consuming what they do purchase.
Erecting Skyscrapers With Climate Change in Mind, Coping With Pain Through Virtual Reality and More
Building to the Sky, With a Plan for Rising Waters, The New York Times
As climate change becomes impossible to ignore, real estate developers are adjusting their plans for rising storms and sea levels. A new waterfront property in New York City features generators with the ability to power tenants’ refrigerators and power outlets for a week, because “if you have your phone and your refrigerator, you can survive,” as one designer put it. After devastating hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, “resilient design” has become the buzzword in architecture.
Virtually Painless — How VR Is Making Surgery Simpler, Science Focus
Could VR headsets replace painkillers? That’s what a handful of surgeons are betting on in regions where sedatives are expensive and hard to come by. Once a high-tech luxury, virtual reality is becoming ever more mainstream and affordable, and has proven to reduce patient pain by up to 50 percent.
First Class Meal: Could the Declining U.S. Postal Service Deliver Food to the Needy? The Guardian
A creative proposal from students at Washington University in St. Louis aims to turn the stagnant U.S. Postal Service into a thriving food delivery service for underserved communities. A number of organizations are working to curb food waste in a nation where, despite its wealth, one in seven residents experiences food insecurity. But most lack a sustainable transport system to get surplus food to those in need. With vehicles, routes and workers already in place, the declining postal service could be an invaluable resource in the fight against hunger.
Continue reading “Erecting Skyscrapers With Climate Change in Mind, Coping With Pain Through Virtual Reality and More”
This Chef Has Been Putting Food Sustainability on the Table for Decades
Back in 2007, there were only two farmers’ markets in the country that offered a special deal for poor families: one in New York City and another in Columbia Heights, Md. That’s before Michel Nischan, a James Beard Award-winning chef long associated with the sustainable food movement, got involved. His grassroots organization, the nonprofit Wholesome Wave, helped persuade Congress to provide low-income families with extra bucks if they bought healthy, local fare. NationSwell spoke to Nischan by phone about his efforts to end food insecurity.
Wholesome Wave aspires to make healthy, local food more affordable to low-income shoppers. How have you accomplished that goal?
The target of our activity is federal dollars. The average person’s benefit through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) is about $4.20 a day — and that’s to spend on breakfast, lunch and dinner. When that’s all you have to spend on food, you’re really forced to make choices that you might not want to make.
The 2014 Farm Bill included the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program, with $100 million dollars in federal funding that has to be matched in full from the private sector to double SNAP dollars spent on fruits and vegetables. We wanted to level the playing field between healthy food and artificially inexpensive foods, like instant rice and noodles or snack chips, which are cheaper because of agriculture policies, tax breaks for large manufacturing facilities and transportation subsidies that scaled system enjoys. We raised private money to double SNAP and started with fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets. The message to the consumer was “Spend your SNAP on anything you want, but if you come over here [to the farmers’ market], you double your money.”
Why do fruits and vegetables often cost more than less healthy foods?
The major reason some foods are so incredibly inexpensive is the public support for soy, corn, rice and wheat. Cereal companies often pay a price that is below the cost of production. After world wars I and II, these crops were favored as the future, and we produced a lot of them, because whichever country or ally bloc had the most food for its marching armies would be the one to win a war. When we learned how to process food to make it last 10 years, how to make it lighter so it’s cheaper to transport, how to put nitrogen and phosphorous and potassium in the ground so things would miraculously grow, we felt secure. And we also thought we could end starvation and feed the world. In that compelling moment, it was really easy to get the American public and Congress on board. It wasn’t to give one sector an unfair advantage, but those systems are still in place. It’s kind of a false economy; it’s not a true free market. [The question now is], how do we create a case to shift all of that public money that goes to funding these artificially inexpensive foods, which we now know are not good for us and the environment, to the types of foods that are good?
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What has building this grassroots organization taught you about leadership?
We need people to understand what they can align on. What I’ve learned over the years — and I think this is endemic in our society — is that we only want to work with people who think just like we do. Whether it’s in business or nonprofits, you’d much prefer working with someone who shares your core values. People ask us, “Is Wholesome Wave anti-GMO?” Why are you asking us that question? We’re about affordable access. Let’s align on that. If the thing you deeply, personally believe in is migrant farm-worker rights, equitable access to land or a ban on GMOs, work on those things. But there are other ways, while we’re doing our work, to come together on food justice.
What can the rest of us do to help further this movement?
I think food is one of the most powerful lenses to evaluate the quality of a lawmaker when we’re going to the polls. What’s their stance on abortion or marriage equality? All of those are important things and informed by deeply held religious beliefs. But if you’re going to take a meal a day off the table of a child by eliminating nutrition in schools, or you say that you don’t see the point of paying for healthcare in schools, you’re probably a jerk. How they vote on food and hunger is a great lens into their soul. Personally, I want an honorable, good person in office making decisions on my behalf. When you show up to vote, make sure you know what these folks do with food votes. You can go on Food Policy Action, put in your zip code and get a score for your representatives based on how they vote on food issues.
What books would you recommend to read up on the current system?
I’d recommend Michael Pollan’s “Botany of Desire,” Wendell Berry’s “The Unsettling of America,” Mas Masumoto’s “Wisdom of the Last Farmer,” and “Fair Food” by Oran B. Hesterman. Still, none of those really touches on the potential power of changing the decision you make at the grocery store. Food has the amazing potential to fix human health, the environment, our economy and our society, and people need to be inspired.
What other innovations are you excited about right now?
With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, we see an opportunity in the way Medicare and Medicaid dollars are spent, now that we’re shifting to more of a prevention culture rather than a fee-for-service model. We could potentially see billions of dollars put toward creating a fruit-and-vegetable prescription program. [In 2011, Wholesome Wave launched the Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program to encourage healthcare providers to prescribe fresh produce to patients.] Doctors, nutritionists and nurse practitioners can work together to diagnose an at-risk patient, work to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables, and then measure that for health outcomes.
It’s actually less expensive to feed a family of four fruits and vegetables for 20 years than it is to have one person go on dialysis for four years. Dialysis from diabetes and kidney failure is the most expensive line-item in Medicare and Medicaid. And if we could get certain healthy food item SKUs coded as reimbursable for prevention, that would unlock billions of dollars and affordability for the country’s 66 million food-insecure people who are having difficulty making the lifestyle changes to prevent diseases that cost us over half a trillion dollars a year.
Dine Out, Feed the Hungry
In New York City, nearly 235 million meals are missed every year due to poverty, but one former bartender in the Bronx has a technological solution to end that.
Spare, a mobile app launched last September, allows diners to automatically round up their restaurant bill and donate extra change to one of the city’s major food banks. Developed by Andra Tomsa, a onetime cocktail waitress and financial advisor, the app has 7,000 users who are each donating an average of $15 a month through their small change. While the user base is still small, Tomsa is aggressively pursuing partnerships with restaurants to offer loyalty coupons (think: a free drink for every third donation) to get to 400,000 users — the magic number she believes can end the meal gap in the Big Apple.
“The overwhelming majority [of those who are food insecure] are working poor. They have two to three jobs, trying to support their families, the elderly and their children on a minimum wage,” Tomsa explains. “The last week of the month, they are choosing between the electricity bill and groceries. They are going to the food pantry to supplement their budget.”
As a student at Fordham University in the Bronx, Tomsa studied the “extreme poverty” of the developing world, but only later did she realize some of those living on less than $2 a day included her neighbors in New York’s poorest borough. In December 2012, she decided to focus her attention on her immediate surroundings, including the area around Yankee Stadium where she lives. Knowing “even millennials who have no money, have money to buy beer,” she started with an analog version of Spare, by collecting dollars at six bars through an extra line on the bill (in addition to tips). But with a newborn son, collecting cash from these nightlife establishments posed logistical problems.
In November 2013, on a date nonprofit workers now call the “Hunger Cliff” because federal budget cuts to food stamps resulted in more than 1 million New York City residents having less to spend at supermarkets, Tomsa’s project took on new urgency. She decided to scale her idea by going virtual. Developing an API (a for-profit venture that her nonprofit Spare leases for a small fee) that tallies donations based on a bank statement, Tomsa was able to automate the collection process.
For those who have money to spare on restaurants, the least they can do is remember those who can’t afford dinner that night.
Homepage photo by John Moore/Getty Images.
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Ask the Experts: How to Bring Fresh, Healthy Food to the Neediest Families
We are a nation where rolling plains are covered in fields of wheat and corn, where rivers are filled with tumbling salmon, where orchards abound and valleys are filled with row upon row of vegetables. And yet millions of families live within our borders with empty cupboards and hungry children. In 2011, about 18 million households in the United States were described as “food insecure” — having limited or uncertain access to safe, nutritious foods — according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “More importantly, households with children are nearly twice as likely to be food insecure,” according to a recent analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Share Our Strength, which noted that about 4 million American families have children who lack access to adequate nutritious food. For children, food insecurity heralds a lifetime of future problems, including deficits in health and academic achievement.
Simply providing government assistance isn’t enough. A 2012 study at the Harvard School of Public Health found that people participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), often referred to as food stamps, eat less healthy diets — with fewer whole-grain products and more potatoes, red meat and sugary soft drinks — than people who didn’t receive SNAP benefits. The study didn’t make clear exactly why this is so, but part of the problem has to do with access. Many residents of low-income neighborhoods, urban or rural, don’t have easy access to grocery stores or other fresh-food options — the so-called food desert problem.
It’s an issue that’s received a lot of attention, but so far, few scalable solutions. So NationSwell asked the experts to weigh in on this question: How can we bring healthy food to our neediest neighborhoods? Read below for their hopeful responses, and then leave your thoughts in the comments box below.
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Could You Survive on Less Than $1.50 Worth of Food Today?
When you have plenty of food to fill your belly, it’s easy to forget about those whose stomachs are empty.
And that’s just what New York City’s Hugh Evans wants to change.
To engage people in the fight against hunger, Evans, co-founder of The Global Poverty Project, is inviting people to join the Live Below the Line campaign, which runs from April 28 to May 2. Participants will live for five days on only the food and drink they can purchase for $1.50 or less a day — which is the amount of money some 1.2 million people have to feed themselves daily — and donate their savings to charities working to solve hunger, including Heifer International, The Hunger Project, and World Food Program USA.
Started in 2010, Live Below the Line has had 50,000 participants, raising $10 million for charity. Evans told Charles Lamb of the Christian Science Monitor that people get creative with their limited funds: “You’re allowed to buy your own seeds and plant your own food,” he said, so some plan ahead and plant crops they can eat for the week, while others pool their funds together to make it stretch farther.
The 31-year-old Evans is especially interested in engaging young people in the effort to fight hunger. “I really believe that every generation is called upon to leave a great mark on this planet,” he told Lamb. He believes Americans “have a wonderful tradition of philanthropy,” and hopes that generosity continues with today’s tech titans in Silicon Valley. “I think it’s crucial that the tech community and the new generation of wealth in America steps up,” he said.
A good way for them to start? By figuring out how to stretch a bowl of ramen during Live Below the Line week and donating the savings.
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This Florida Non-Profit Is Leading the Food Recovery Movement
As executive director of Boca Raton food bank Helping Hands, James Gavrilos saw firsthand the toll poverty was taking on his community. He also saw that too much good food was going to waste. The U.S. Department of Food and Agriculture has estimated that of all food produced in America, 30 to 40 percent of it is thrown away. People like Gavrilos are working to educate restaurateurs and grocery managers that they will face no liability from donating leftover food, and they can receive a tax deduction for their donation. “The food recovery movement is just beginning,” he told Anne Geggis of the Sun Sentinel. Helping Hands has recently added a new refrigerated truck and two more delivery trucks, managing to triple the amount of food donations they previously received from restaurants and supermarkets. The Whole Foods in Boca Raton regularly donates from every department except seafood, meat, and vitamins. Bill Harper, Helping Hands’ director of food and warehouse operations, told Geggis, “Everything we get is typically in the clients’ hands or being cooked within 72 hours. We are going to be there when we say we’re going to be there.” And Boca Raton’s neediest residents are thankful for that.
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