Mark Winne's Blog, page 13

Ending Hunger in New Mexico: Finding the Road to Beijing

 

The following is an excerpt of Mark Winne’s keynote speech delivered in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the New Mexico Hunger Summit on July 17, 2014

Like most of you, I’ve come to this gathering to ask the question that no one has yet succeeded in answering: How do we end hunger in New Mexico?

I’m one of those people who has attended countless gatherings across this state, and through my national work, in almost every state in the country, to ask the same question: how in a country as wealthy as ours do we continuously fail to find a solution to food insecurity and hunger?

In the fall of 2003, I stood on a stage very similar to this one at another hotel in Albuquerque. The occasion was then-Governor Richardson’s Hunger Summit, a gathering attended by about 300 people. That summit, by the way, was precipitated by USDA statistics that found New Mexico ranked number one in the U.S. in food insecurity.

The story I told then is the same one I’ll tell today. We must shift our attention from only addressing the symptoms, namely hunger and food insecurity, and stop ignoring the disease, namely poverty. We must emphasize the quality of food over the quantity in recognition of the severity of the obesity crisis before us. We must work together in a truly collaborative fashion, which means we each have to put aside something for the greater good. We must hold government accountable, no matter which party is in office. And we must ask ourselves hard questions about our own programs and organizations: just because we’ve been doing things one way for the past 20 years doesn’t mean we should do them the same way forever.

The report that came out of that 2003 Hunger Summit was startlingly clear, comprehensive, and held real promise for change. Its recommendations called for:

A unified approach to ending hunger that involved state agencies and non-governmental stakeholders
The continuation of a Hunger Task Force, the body that wrote the report
The development of a sustainable statewide food system that emphasized community based solutions and statewide networking
Higher participation in all federal nutrition programs
Improvement in the quality of food and the nutritional environment throughout New Mexico
An increase in the knowledge and skills necessary to choose and prepare healthy food
And lastly, it reminded everyone that food banks and pantries were not intended as long term solutions to hunger; they should refocus their efforts on services that help people exit poverty.

What became of these recommendations? Believe it or not, many concretes steps were taken:

Working with state officials, the Hunger Task Force simplified the food stamp application to help increase enrollment
A food stamp outreach campaign began
Summer meals and school breakfast received more promotion, attention, and financial support
Seniors received a small state-funded supplement to their small monthly food stamp allotment.

While not direct outcomes of the Task Force’s work, numerous indirect results can be linked to it including:

Better access to farmers’ markets by the state’s lower income shoppers
The formation of the NM Food and Agriculture Policy Council and four local food policy councils
Elimination of junk food from most public schools making New Mexico one of the first states to do so
Expansion of Cooperative Extension Services to tribal communities
Expansion of farm to school activities to almost half of New Mexico’s 345,000 school children.

But what else has happened since the 2003 Summit?

Well, the Task Force itself dissolved leaving New Mexico without a single, unified voice to oversee the implementation of the report’s recommendations. Why? Ask a dozen people and you’ll get a dozen different answers: lack of trust between members, lack of political will, and poor leadership that fluctuated between weak and overbearing, and finally, a lack of community engagement and too much reliance on a professional elite.

What else happened?

Well, food insecurity went from 14% to over 15% from 2002 to 2012, and very low food security, or hunger, grew from just under 4% to almost 6%.
Nationwide, SNAP participation soared to 48 million from 27 million people in 2007
State government, once a strong partner for ending hunger, backed away from that commitment. Recently, the New Mexico Law and Poverty Center documented that almost 13,000 New Mexicans are forced to wait over a month for food and Medicare benefits because the NM Department of Human Services is not processing applications fast enough.
Food banks didn’t shrink, they grew, expanding into ever larger facilities.
And obesity soared, eclipsing hunger as the state’s number one public health threat. According to the NM Dept. of Health, 20% of the state’s third graders are obese and 15% are overweight. Exposing the deep racial and ethnic disparities that exist in New Mexico, the figures reveal that 30% of the state’s American Indians third graders are obese; for Hispanics the rate is 23%, but for white children it is only 13%.

The hunger of the overfed and the hunger of the underfed cry out for our attention daily, and the perils of global food insecurity and the limits to our earth’s natural resources rarely escape our notice.

When I reflect on our efforts to end hunger I’m reminded of a Chinese proverb, one version of which goes like this: A powerful warlord was leading his army of warriors, horses and chariots down a country road when he came upon an old monk. The warlord asked the old man how long it will take his army to get to Beijing. The monk looked up at the warlord and told him that it will take him forever since he is going the wrong way. The warlord said, “Posh! My horses are the fastest in the land and my chariots are swift.” “With all due respect, Your Lordship,” replied the monk, “you are going the wrong way so you’ll never get there.” Now getting angry, the warlord shouted, “Disrespectful old fool! My army is the strongest and I am the boldest warrior in all of China!”  With that the monk said, “That may be true, your horses and chariots may be swift, and your army may be the mightiest, but you will never get to Beijing going this way.” With that, the warlord struck the monk with his whip as his horses and men charged off in the same direction.

As much as we must insist that our state and federal food programs are working well and are adequately funded, we must also engage the economic injustices and disparities that tragically underlie hunger. Without that kind of effort, we will never make it to Beijing.

Consider our food chain workers who pick, process, and prepare our food. They make up 15% of the U.S. workforce, the largest single occupational category. They have a median wage of only $9.65 per hour and only 13% receive a living wage. The vast majority of these workers are people of color. We depend on them for our survival yet they are paid so little they are eligible for food stamps one and a half times more frequently than all other workers.

This is but one feature of America’s single greatest socio-economic travesty: the yawning gap between the affluent and everyone else.

Because the top 1% of income earners in the U.S. control 40% of the wealth compared to 10% in 1973, everyone in this room must struggle harder to reduce the impact of those disparities on the people you serve.
It is why, according to the Institute of Medicine that among the 17 most developed nations, Americans have the lowest life expectancy, the highest poverty rate, spend the most for healthcare and receive mediocre results.
And it is why, when I interviewed a county food stamp director in New Mexico, I was told that food stamp applications were soaring even though the unemployment rate was 2%. Why? Because the county’s biggest employers were Wal-Mart stores.

Food insecurity in this country would virtually disappear if all Americans earned a living wage, which some cities are trying to set at $15 per hour. I’m proud to be from Santa Fe which, at $10.65/hour, has one of the highest mandated wages in the country.

Getting behind a new national minimum wage of at least $10.10 per hour is something we all must do. That would immediately lift three and a half million Americans out of poverty. We can no longer let business off the hook any more than we can let government off the hook.

With respect to the role of charity in addressing hunger, the Special Rapporteur for the United Nations Olivier De Schutter said that, “Food Banks should not be seen as a ‘normal’ part of a national safety net. They are charity-based, not rights-based, and they should not be seen as a substitute for the robust social safety nets to which each individual has a right….Governments should not be allowed to escape their obligations because private charities make up for their failures.”

To those who say that New Mexico does not have sufficient wealth to fight poverty, and therefore must tolerate high rates of poverty, I say poppycock. If enough of us speak up and fight for justice, a political leader of sufficient courage will one day rise with us to make the change we need a reality.

Returning to the subject of obesity, the simple, sad fact before us is that obesity will kill more New Mexicans than food insecurity and hunger. If we are not making quality, nutritious food a significant part of our response to hunger, we’ll stay on the wrong road to Beijing.

We must make healthy food the easy choice all the time: in school, at home, in the marketplace and workplace, on the road, at food pantries, at playgrounds and football games.

Cooking with Kids programs such as the ones in Albuquerque and Santa Fe must be expanded to every school district and school age child in NM.  

Like the WIC program, SNAP must do more to encourage the consumption of healthy food and discourage the consumption of unhealthy food such sugary soft drinks. Yes, there is more SNAP Education funding and flexibility, but tax payer dollars should not be used to subsidize unhealthy eating or the soda industry as it does now through monthly benefits.

And when Michele Obama said she’ll go to the mat to fight the Republican proposal to slow down the increase in healthier food in our schools, I say “Go Michele! I’m with you.” Three-quarters of NM’s school food services implemented the new, healthier food regulations well in advance of the July 1 deadline. All the others should do so immediately.

Physical activity whether through safe street programs, walking, biking, and more places to play must be connected to these efforts as well. Mom and dad, unplug your children’s electronic devices, hide the batteries, and send the kids outside to run, ride, and play.

Finally, as I said before, the problems before us are too big for any one agency or non-profit organization to tackle. They are too big for any one government, even the State of NM, to solve. We need a truly collaborative effort that is well-funded, well-led, and well-organized. It won’t be a place for big egos or self-serving organizations. It will be a place to you check your six-shooters at the door and work for the common good.

New Mexico has an excellent Food and Agriculture Policy Council. Perhaps it can incorporate a more comprehensive approach to ending hunger into its work.

We also need a plan. Cities, states, and countries are developing longer term food strategies, food plans, and charters. These actions are engaging citizens like never before in the policy making process.

Edmonton, Alberta committed $1 million to a process that engaged over 3,000 citizens in developing a food plan. On one occasion 700 Edmonton residents turned out at a public hearing about the proposed plan.

Michigan has a food charter, and the Santa Fe Food Policy Council is putting the finishing touches on a food plan for the city and county.

What this organized commitment to food planning represents is a kind of communal responsibility taking, a recognition that we all have a stake in our food system.

Continuing down the wrong road to Beijing is no longer an option. Carving out your own turf to only serve your own programmatic objectives is a disservice to your clients. Large business sectors that exploit workers, and governments that turn their backs on the poor can no longer be tolerated.

So unless you want to hear me say the same thing at the 2024 New Mexico Hunger Summit, we better get started. We’ve got 10 years to make it right. Let’s do it, New Mexico!

Thank you.

Summer and Fall Appearances – 2014

July 17 – New Mexico Hunger Summit – Isleta Hotel and Casino Resort – Lunchtime Keynote Address by Mark Winne. Contact Dolores Gonzales at doloresg@ncnmedd.com.

July 29 – Leominster, Massachusetts – 10:00 to 3:30; Training and networking session for New England food policy councils and similar organizations. DoubleTree by Hilton in Leominster, MA. For more information contact Kathy Ruhf at Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group kzruhf@verizon.net.

July 30 – Webinar on Food Policy Councils sponsored by Grantmakers in Health and the Sustainable Agriculture and Food System Funders. Open only to members of these two funder networks. For more information contact Colin Pekruhn at cpekruhn@gih.org.

August 2 – New Orleans, LA – Farm to Table International Symposium “In Process” - Food Policy Council Workshop Panel. For more information contact:  kchighizola@mccno.com.

September 17 – Wichita, Kansas – Keynote at the Kansas Built Environment and Outdoors Summit (conference center at the Hotel Old Town). For more information contact Elizabeth Stewart at estewart@sunflowerfoundation.org.

More to follow…stay tuned!

 

I Have Seen the Future of Medicine: It Is Doctor Yum

As a newly minted medical doctor, Nimali Fernando’s baptism by fire came in a Houston community pediatric clinic where she would see as many as 60 new-born babies a day. Long hours and a bone-crushing caseload that never gave her more than 15 minutes to spend with a patient took their toll. But it was the high prevalence of overweight and obese children that fanned the flames of her growing frustration with the way pediatric medicine was practiced in this country, a frustration that would soon sow the seeds for a new vision of medicine.

It would take nine more years in a traditional pediatrics practice before those seeds would sprout. During that time Dr. Fernando paid her dues by performing the requisite number of immunizations and treating more ear aches than any doctor should have to in a lifetime. She also continued to see her share of the 30 percent of children nationally who are overweight and obese. But it was the other 70 percent that began to seize her attention. The majority of these children, while not showing weight problems, had symptoms that were clearly linked to poor eating behaviors, including parents who simply didn’t know how to cook.

Dr. Fernando realized she was chained to a treatment treadmill that would never get her any closer to the root causes of her patients’ illnesses; that no matter how many hours she’d put in or prescriptions she’d write, nothing would change. It was then that she checked on those seeds that were now becoming vigorous plants, and decided the time was right to shed her white coat and the trappings of a conventional doctor’s office. And like a butterfly free of its cocoon, Dr. Fernando stretched her wings and morphed into Doctor Yum, food and health crusader par excellence!

Opened in 2012, Yum Pediatrics and its non-profit arm, The Doctor Yum Project (the brands that Dr. Fernando chose, trademark pending; www.doctoryum.com) is located in an unassuming central Virginia office park. Curiously, its neighbors include a Burger King, Giant Supermarket, and the county office of the Virginia Farm Bureau. But step inside and no matter how sick you feel, the cheery food- and garden-themed interior will brighten your spirits. There’s comfy, children-sized furniture, plastic fruit and veggie toys, a wide-screen TV on the wall with appropriate cooking shows running on a continuous loop, all set against a soft, pastel color scheme of pea green, carrot orange, and blueberry blue. And if you’re still not sure what Dr. Yum’s message is, the poster-size Michael Pollan quote on the wall – “Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants” – should clue you in.

The office was not open to patients on the Saturday morning Dr. Fernando showed me around, which was part of the reason she was wearing running shorts and a dirty pink t-shirt emblazoned with the word “Compost.” She apologized for her admittedly grimy appearance, telling me that she, her husband, and two young boys had just completed a two-and-half mile community mud run. Showing me around the examination rooms – “Pea Room,” “Carrot Room” – it was easy to see how children (to say nothing of anxious parents) would feel comfortable amidst the uncluttered environment that exuded warmth rather than sterility, beautiful graphics of fruits and vegetables rather than wall charts of body parts, and traditional Sri Lankan tapestries representing Dr. Fernando’s heritage. All manner of traditional pediatric medicine, including pediatric gynecology are practiced in this space, but the “treatment modality” that receives the most attention is eating.

That is why the largest room in the office – and the center of her practice – is the Dr. Yum teaching kitchen where the road to wellness begins for many. It is in this spacious, well-outfitted modern kitchen where Dr. Fernando and her associates teach cooking, eating, and tasting. If you have children, you know that it is the tasting that matters, which is why she has assembled an esteemed panel of “experts” – 24 taste testers whose ages range from 1 to 13. Using recipes for healthy food, e.g. the crunchy apple sandwich – two apple slices, unsweetened whole grain cereal, and sunflower butter – Dr. Fernando shares her creations with her young experts who report their reaction on Dr. Yum’s five-level rating scale: Super Yuck, Yuck, OK, Yum, or Super Yum, each one with its own happy/unhappy face emoticon.

Cooking classes are taught with children under 6 years old and their parents together, but with children 7 to 12, no parents are present. Dr. Fernando has found that mom or dad’s participation creates a weird dynamic that tends to reduce the child’s ability to learn. To teach how one can prepare and enjoy a healthy breakfast, she hosts a pajama party cooking class for kids who, of course, show up in their PJs. She has also developed her own food curriculum which is being piloted with a number of area teachers and about 200 children. As one teacher put it, “We can’t believe how the Dr. Yum curriculum has changed the way our kids eat!”

There’s also a garden, and not the usual Wal-Mart pot with a couple of scraggly cherry tomatoes struggling for life. The 900-square feet, fenced-in growing space attached to the end of the Yum Pediatric building will be going into full production this year. Robust tomatoes, however, were already growing from a dozen 5-gallon tubs, a peach tree was displaying its first marble-size fruit, and old rain boots had been repurposed as marigold pots.

Taking in this scene where the combined footprint of Dr. Yum’s kitchen, teaching space, and garden exceed that of the square footage devoted to treatment and administration, I couldn’t help but devise a ratio – call it the Winne Wellness Index – that might have implications for how we address health care in this country. This is best expressed as the combined space of gardens, kitchens, and food education (feel free to substitute dollars, hours, or healthy breakfast pajama parties) divided by the combined space of treatment and administration (dollars, hospital beds, or rip-off health insurance companies are also suitable metrics).

I can imagine that this relationship could be expressed mathematically as:

G + K + E  = (When the ratio is 1 or greater, the country’s overall health is high)

    T + A

Because we in the U.S. spend more on health care than any other nation, and generally are sicker than any of the 17 most developed nations, we have to ask ourselves how we’ve got it so wrong. A big part of the problem is that our health policies and agriculture policies are as distant from one another as Mars is from Venus. Based on these obvious disparities, one can imagine that if the Winne Wellness Index was applied to the U.S., the ratio would be something like .0000016, or only slightly higher than the life-span of a ripe cantaloupe. With a few thousand more Dr. Yums practicing pediatrics, supported by communities and schools that share Dr. Nimali Fernando’s theory of health, that ratio might one day begin to soar skyward. That would be Yummy!

Farm to School Graduates with Honors

It was the second week of June in 1995, and we had just scored several flats of Connecticut early season strawberries. The excited Hartford Food System staff had arranged the delivery to the city’s three pilot farm to school sites – two elementary and one middle school – and was anxiously awaiting the expressions of joy on the students’ faces. Eyes did indeed widen, many out of bewilderment as this was their very first fresh strawberry experience, and many out of embarrassment over the trickles of red juice leaking from the corners of their mouths. While the perceived ecstasy levels didn’t quite match our expectations, student feedback assured us that these gorgeous strawberries were almost as good as the ersatz chicken nuggets that dominated their cafeteria plates. Well, we surmised, this may take a little longer than we thought.

But the more discouraging response came from the school food service staff. When we asked them how easy the preparation was, they gave us a stunned look, “It was terrible!” they exclaimed to a person, “It took forever to cut the green stems off.” When we told them they didn’t have to do that – they were the “handles” the children grasped to eat strawberries – they looked back at us like we were crazy. Well, we realized, this will take a lot longer than we thought.

Hartford’s farm to school program, the nation’s first as best as I can tell, would grow throughout the state by fits and starts. A school district here and there would buy some apples from a local orchard, have a minor problem, and then decide it wasn’t worth the extra work. As a statewide initiative, farm to school limped along for a number of years until state legislation in 2006 directed the Connecticut Department of Agriculture to assist farmers and school districts in connecting with each other. According to USDA’s 2012 farm to school census, 80 Connecticut school districts (a little over half) serving 278,000 students now participate in farm to school. The total school food purchases in Connecticut are $30 million per year, $3 million of which now comes from local farms. The Connecticut Department of Agriculture states on their website that over 50 farms participate in the program.

Just two weeks ago, 1100 farm to school enthusiasts congregated under what felt like a revival tent in a downtown Austin, Texas conference center for the “7th National Farm to Cafeteria Conference.” They came to celebrate the explosive growth in all ways imaginable that locally produced food has found its way into institutional cafeterias. Organized by the National Farm to School Network, the faithful heard from Deborah Kane, USDA’s Farm to School Program Director who confirmed the gospel’s word is indeed spreading across the land. From its very humble beginnings in a few schools in the 1990s, Director Kane told us that 38,629 schools (a little over one-third of the nation’s schools) serving 21 million students have farm to school programs. And the economic and policy impacts are not to be sneezed at: over $354 million dollars of the multi-billion dollar school food purchases are going to local farmers, and 46 states have proposed or passed some kind of farm to school legislation.

One of those successful policy states is New Mexico. Starting over 8 years ago, the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council began pushing the state education department to get junk food out of the schools. Their advocacy led to a substantial revision in New Mexico’s nutrition rules which slammed the door on the sugar and fat crowd and opened the door to local fruits and veggies. And like a persistent wind that wears down the rock, the Council spent several years clawing a $325,000 annual appropriation out of the state legislature to purchase local food. This made New Mexico one of the few states to directly fund such purchases (Oregon is another having appropriated $1.17 million in 2013 for the same purpose). Today, three-quarters of New Mexico’s school districts are buying over 300,000 pounds of local produce, and by 2015, it is expected that all the state’s schools will participate.

As promising as this sounds, I have two concerns about the farm to school movement. Take New Mexico, for example, which ranks 50th in the nation when it comes to state government spending on public school education. Thirty percent of the public school students never graduate from high school – a number that’s higher in low-income school districts – and only 50 percent of the state’s students are proficient in reading and 42 percent in math. Poor performance in post-secondary education, the workforce, and life itself are the results, and certainly contribute to New Mexico’s equally high poverty rate. How will $325,000 in purchases of local food help this situation? The answer is probably not at all, not unless local food advocates also own the failures of our nation’s public education system and view the failures in school cafeterias as just one symptom of those larger failures.

As ardent a lover as I am of the sweet notion that school children should be eating local food in their cafeterias, I find myself bewildered at times by the frenzied support that farm to school churns up. In light of the decades-long downturn in U.S. public school education, farm to school advocates must step out of the warm and fuzzy glow of happy children crunching local apples to embrace the dark side of the America’s sorry education story.  When you appear, for instance, at a legislative hearing to speak in favor of funding for local food purchases, you should also appear at hearings to speak even more loudly in favor of adequate school funding.

My second beef (which has nothing to do with the conference workshop “Local Meat for School Lunch”) is directed at the question of whether or not the food movement is becoming fragmented by an over-emphasis on developing specialized segments. Like the food hub movement which just had its own conference about one month ago, or the anti-hunger movement that held their conference in early March – subsets, in other words, of what should be a larger, comprehensive initiative for food system change – farm to school is carving out its territory with a national network, conference, branding, and federal staff and funding.

Rather than connecting the many and important dots that populate the food system, and achieving some real synergy in the process, we are making each dot so large that its circumference becomes an impregnable border fence rather than a permeable membrane capable of merging with other dots.

I can’t but wonder if we are aren’t forging an allegiance to the parts rather than the whole. Yes, bigger tents are hard to build, and they sure flap around a lot in strong winds, but when standing firm and tall on a broad field they make a bolder statement than many little ones that can be picked off easily by hungry wolves.

Since the Farm to Cafeteria Conference was in Austin, it was mandatory that the former Secretary of the Texas Department of Agriculture, Jim Hightower deliver an inspiring keynote. He regaled the crowd with his progressive brand of Texas humor, and as one of six progressives in the state of Texas, I’m sure he enjoyed the crowd’s enthusiastic response as much they enjoyed him. But in addition to his folksy zingers (my favorite being his disparagement of Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz: “one-hundred thousand sperm and you were the fastest?”), his underlying message to the farm to schoolers was about public policy. He made it clear that this was the way to remedy many of the evils confronting America, and if we go soft on those who want to go hard on government, public budgets, and all the things that level this country’s increasingly uneven playing field, we’ve got to enter the policy fray. “Policy got us into this mess,” he said, “but it can also get us out of it.”

When it comes to the farm to school wins we’ve achieved over a two-decade long struggle, we have to recognize that many of them were achieved through engagement with food-ignorant local school boards, recalcitrant food service directors, unsupportive state departments of agriculture and education, and an indifferent Congress – the faces of public policy. It’s time to extend that engagement to other spheres of policy as well as the other segments of the food movement. We’ll be stronger together than we will be alone, and winning back the cafeteria should only be the first victory in winning the battle for a system of public education that nurtures the mind as well as the body.

The Poetry of Community Food Assessments

How has our approach to understanding community food systems become like our approach to poetry? I took some instruction recently from a former United States Poet Laureate, Billy Collins.

                                                                            I ask them to take a poem

                                                                            and hold it up to the light

                                                          like a color slide

                                                                            or press an ear against its hive…

                                                                            But all they want to do

                                                                            Is tie the poem to a chair with rope

                                                                            And torture a confession out of it.

                                                                            They begin beating it with a hose

                                                                            To find out what it really means.

 The more I see of community food assessments – a process whereby researchers and stakeholders gather information about their food system in order to better understand its strengths and weaknesses – the more I worry, that like Collins’s over-zealous students, we are torturing the subject while never getting to know its essence

Though there is some risk in comparing a food system to a poem, I find more similarities than not in our investigative methods reliance on quantitative techniques and an obsession with wrestling the “facts” to the ground. Like the innocent poem that is pressed against a slide for unrelenting dissection, we are launching waves of graduate student drones over target zones, laptops programmed and grids drawn.

Couldn’t we float and flit for a bit, and like butterflies that light on meadow flora, sniff, touch, and taste the place for a while? I like to look at a my surroundings through different lenses, hold them up for scrutiny in varying lights, and put my ear to the hive to check the buzz. When it comes to the community food assessments, we’re too much above it all and over-fueled with high-octane, evidence-based objectivity. The truth is on the ground where we belong, with our values and subjectivity fully on display.

Just as the imaginative reader of a poem holds hands with the lines and images until the molecules are absorbed through his skin, the food system investigator who opens up her sociological imagination might discover something unique, beautiful, and yes, often deeply disturbing. Instead of inducing rigor mortis with scientific rigor, as I have seen some community food assessments do, why not let the assessment process unfold slowly, even over a lifetime, by simply making it an everyday occurrence? And by “a lifetime” I certainly don’t mean that we twiddle our thumbs, waiting, as some groups have, for the data to tell them what to do. As a community food activist who should be immersed in your place, you will always be searching, asking questions, and keeping your ear pressed gently to the ground.

It was sometime after my fifteenth year of running the Hartford Food System before I felt like I understood what was going on in that city and the state of Connecticut. We had learned from firsthand experience that Hartford’s food was more expensive than that in the suburbs; we discovered that the city’s bus routes didn’t take people to supermarkets which had fled to the suburbs; we found, after watching farms disappear for a decade, that Connecticut was losing farmland faster than anywhere else in the nation. With a prima facie case in hand, we swooped in, gathered the evidence, secured an indictment, and started the corrections job as fast as possible. But it took 15 years of living and working in a place – looking under the hood and scraping our shins on the truth – before we got it.

I want science to be ruthlessly rigorous when searching for links between tobacco and lung cancer, or factory livestock operations and antibiotic resistance, but when it comes to understanding the community experience, something softer is called for, something perhaps more intuitive and anthropological. You see, our imagination is central to our work. Without it we never would have conceived of this thing we call a food system in the first place. The connections between food, health, environment; the idea of a feeding web; even ideas like social capital and community would have remained isolated within their own disciplinary boxes if we hadn’t sought a bigger horizon, one not constrained by reductionist thinking. While I may be quirky in finding beauty in a food system, I do believe we all find joy in the connection between two or more previously disparate things.

When it comes to how we assess a community’s food system, listening is the most important tool we have. I was reminded of this at a recent Santa Fe Food Policy Council meeting where we were discussing our food assessment and draft food plan. One member of the community had come to the meeting to put forward some unsolicited ideas. But, according to our public testimony rules, we only granted her two minutes to speak, much of which was consumed by her trying to keep her two overactive young children from disassembling the muffin tray. Frustrated and pissed, she corralled me afterwards in the parking lot where she went on at some length saying, “if you want the public there, if you want poor people there, you better have child care….” I listened hard; I agreed with her, and tried to relate and repeat what she said. I suggested that she set up a neighborhood meeting where we could discuss the food plan and hear her neighbors’ thoughts. She is now organizing that gathering.

Time is a great oppressor, a dictator that truncates the human experience to digestible data bits and highly efficient exchanges – life reduced to a hashtag. Our task is to slow down and slow dance, make eye contact, and when necessary, give ourselves a wide berth from the rules, the clock, and the agenda. As the Zen master Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot by watchin’.”

C. Wright Mills, the great lefty sociologist and Columbia University professor may have written one of the best treatises on social science methodology, The Sociological Imagination.  Published in 1959, it is worthy of a read by all food system researchers, assessors, and activists. Mills was an advocate of a more values-based approach to social science research and an early critic of the statistical slavery that was then overtaking his field. In one lashing he wrote, “The ‘empirical facts’ are facts collected by a bureaucratically guided set of usually semi-skilled individuals. It has been forgotten that social observation requires high skill and acute sensibility; that discovery often occurs precisely when an imaginative mind sets itself down in the middle of social realities.” While being overly harsh toward those we depend on for numbers, I have little doubt that Mills would agree with Billy Collins that a poetic sensibility and a sociological imagination are kissing cousins.

When I see our earnest food assessors serving their method before their community, I recall my favorite Mills’s admonishment: “Many…social scientists in America today…conform to the prevailing fear of any passionate commitment.” Trembling, unsure of which God they serve, the best and the brightest too often balk because the data has not reached their desired level of perfection – a bar they always push higher and often never climb over.

While the threats to our food system are far too urgent for us to succumb entirely to the sweet indulgence of poetry, I think there are lessons to be learned from those who desire more profound ways of understanding. If a poem sends an unfamiliar surge up my spine – whether disturbing or pleasurable – it has done its job, and I am now in a heightened state of readiness. While discussions of syntax, meter, and the poet’s sexual preference may provide a minimal amount of illumination, it is the generous beat of the poetic impulse that is the true torch.

To what end do we seek a better understanding of our food system? I suspect that it is for reasons more profound than simply producing the interventions that may follow. For if we have succeeded in establishing a food hub, or getting another serving of local vegetables on a cafeteria tray, have we truly done enough? If today’s industrial food system is guilty, as I believe it is, of feeding consumers to maintain their status as, what Mills calls “Cheerful Robots,” do we food advocates necessarily offer a qualitatively better experience? By adding more local and organic food to their diet, or securing a few more dollars to their monthly SNAP benefits, we may be doing nothing more than producing cheerier robots.

It seems that the task of any inquiry, including a community food assessment, should be the elevation of the human condition, not only through the addition of more and better goods and services, but by contributing to the growth of individual freedom and reason. “Freedom” as Mills says, “is the chance to formulate the available choices…and then the opportunity to choose,” a process that cannot occur without an enlargement in human reason. Spending more time interacting with people and their place – not more time refining the data – will enlarge everyone’s reason. This may make our work of understanding a food system a more difficult and longer enterprise, but it just may make it richer, more enjoyable, and in the long run, significantly more rewarding.

Access Games

Like all privileged liberals, I naturally assume I know what’s best for poor people. It begins with my Judeo-Christian ethic: what’s good for me is naturally good for them. If I can buy local, organic produce at my enthusiastically over-priced farmers’ market, so should they. If I can easily drive, or better yet, bicycle to any number of cool food stores, then so should the economically disadvantaged. And if I can purchase $20 a pound wild-caught salmon at Whole Foods and serve it up, elegantly accessorized with perfectly seasoned kale and a brilliantly selected wine to an intimate party of six, then why shouldn’t everyone? I guess you could call these my ideas of food justice.

This is why I’m experiencing a spasm of cognitive dissonance over recent articles and studies challenging the value of developing new retail food stores in “food deserts,” communities or neighborhoods which lack high quality and affordable grocery stores. Though the term food desert has stirred up a dust storm of angst among food activists, liberals generally like the phrase because it’s about as gritty as they allow their language to get, to say nothing of how its opposite – an oasis – conjures up paradisiacal playing fields of equity. In fact, for people like me and those who look like me, the concept of food deserts rattles our social justice bones like an 18-wheeler hurtling down a narrow city street.

So imagine my dismay when a study published in Health Affairs (February, 2014) concluded that adding supermarkets to areas with short supplies of fresh produce does not lead to improvements in residents’ diets or health outcomes. Apparently, a new grocery store that opened in a Philadelphia food desert had no appreciable impact on the BMI, fruit and veg intake, or perceptions of food accessibility among the store’s shoppers (“BMI” or body mass index is the most commonly used measure of healthy/unhealthy weight).

Reporting on the same topic, Heather Gilligan (Slate, 2/10/14) cited several studies, including a 2011 one in the Archive of Internal Medicine that showed “no connection between access to grocery stores and more healthful diets.” Ms. Gilligan went on to note that the Obama Administration had distributed $500 million under the government’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative in an effort to re-store food deserts and counter their negative health impacts. Another $125 million for the same purpose was recently included in the newly signed Farm Bill.

In a vigorous rebuttal on Huffington Post (2/20/14), three of the leading advocates of better food access (Don Hinkle-Brown, Yael Lehmann, and Judith Bell) reminded us that “healthy food can bring triple bottom-line benefits to communities – better health, new jobs, and a revitalized economy.” They of course cited their own phalanx of studies that supposedly demonstrated clear connections between better health outcomes and improved food access.

Since receiving a gentleman’s “C” in my undergraduate sociology methods course, I’ve been officially barred from commenting on the validity of social science research. But after working for 25 years in Hartford, Connecticut whose Saharan-size food deserts exacted a heavy toll on the entire city, especially lower-income neighborhoods, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would prefer to live in a place where healthy, interesting, and not-over-priced food is readily available. And I still believe in my liberal heart of hearts that everyone deserves the same, whether it’s good for them or not.

During my years in Hartford (chronicled in my first book Closing the Food Gap), I witnessed the exodus of 13 chain supermarkets, the metastasizing of a toxic food environment in the form of dozens of convenience stores, fast food joints, donut shops, and a tragic growth in obesity that paralleled the decline of the city’s food scape.

The deterioration of Hartford’s physical space and the rise in crime contributed to health problems as well. Mothers in the city’s toughest neighborhoods told me they would not allow their children outdoors for fear of being victims of drive-by shootings, or getting stuck by one of the discarded hypodermic needles that littered nearly every vacant lot. Unhealthy food, low incomes, and no place to play larded on calories that would never be burned off.

As I spelled out in Closing the Food Gap, the rise in obesity was not so much caused by the flight of supermarkets and the emergence of food swamps – places with an overabundance of junk food outlets. In fact, the flight of supermarkets was spurred by the city’s descent into poverty, and like everything else in the good-old-US-of-A, the abysmal wealth gap. As suburbs became richer and whiter, and the cities became poorer and browner, businesses, restaurants, and grocery stores fled to the ‘burbs. This is also the underlying point that Ms. Gilligan makes in her Slate piece, that more supermarkets won’t stem the tide of obesity – ending poverty will.

Maybe and maybe not. While we know that politicians have little appetite for ending poverty, we know they can be persuaded to spend money at the altar of free enterprise, e.g. investing in for-profit supermarkets. We also know that, in spite of growing public opinion that favors obesity reduction through the regulation of unhealthy food, e.g. soda taxes, banning trans-fats, those industries will spend tens of millions to fight regulation to the death. Terminating the advertising of junk food to children, valued at $4.6 billion annually according to Yale University’s Rudd Center, would also have a marked effect on childhood weight which, if kept at healthy levels in youth would be a lesser problem in adulthood. Yet, our policymakers have generally proven gutless when asked to stand up to Big Sugar and Big Fat.

Since the stick is politically unfeasible, we are forced to resort to the carrot as our next best policy tool; hence, the large expenditure of public dollars on the development of supermarkets. In light of my experience in Hartford, I find this course painfully ironic. Even if you accept the supermarket industry’s explanation for the wholesale abandonment of struggling cities – that they simply couldn’t make a go of it in impoverished communities – you can’t turn a blind eye to their moral culpability. After all, little evidence was provided to show that they lost money on city stores, we only knew they could make a lot more money on suburban stores. They turned their backs on the most socially and economically stressed places in America and cast a racist glance backwards as they outright “redlined” hundreds of communities.  These acts of injustice contributed significantly to making our cities some of the physically sickest places on earth.

So before we bathe that industry in public cash to entice it back into the hungry food desert marketplace, a market that they played a major role in creating, let’s at least be respectful of how we spend the taxpayers’ money. There are, after all, at least two definitions of justice: the one we liberals use which is to ensure that everyone has equal access to life’s necessities, and the moral one that says if you somehow escape punishment for your transgressions, you certainly shouldn’t be rewarded for committing them.

Meanwhile, back on the streets of my old hometown, Hartford continues to struggle with the legacy of supermarket abandonment. Obesity rates are still high – 37 percent of the city’s 3 to 5 year olds are overweight or obese according to a 2012 University of Connecticut study – but early intervention activities that target preschoolers are showing some promising preliminary results. Residents have more choice in their food supply due to a good number of medium-size independent grocery stores as well as seasonal farmers’ markets, but serious inequities persist. A recent study of the greater Hartford retail environment (University of Saint Joseph, Hartford Food System, and the University of Connecticut – January 2014) found that city stores gave residents ample access to affordable, healthy food, but the quality of large suburban supermarket stores and produce was far superior.

According to Martha Page, executive director of the Hartford Food System, city government and non-profit groups are making progress with the hoped-for development of a new supermarket in Hartford’s North End, an area that hasn’t seen one in decades. Recognizing that a supermarket is only part of the answer, however, Ms. Page said, “Simply opening a grocery store doesn’t guarantee anything, but without the access it provides, efforts to address affordability, cooking skills, nutrition, and the effective use of food assistance benefits [e.g. SNAP] become much harder to accomplish.”

Since this nation isn’t ready to tackle big ticket items like poverty, or stare down the black hats of bad food, we need to carefully consider the opportunity costs of various policy and programmatic interventions. What “we” think is good for others isn’t a bad place to start, but we better ask the nomads of our food deserts what they want before we get too far down one particular road.  It’s too easy to fixate on one high-cost strategy; let’s review the evidence first, and give equal measure to all actions. As in nature, diversity usually yields the best result.

Appearances – Winter and Spring 2014

2014

February 7 & 8: Springfield, Missouri – Missouri Organic Association Annual Conference – Workshop on Feb. 7 on Food Policy; Conference keynote on Feb. 8. For more information contact Angela Jenkins at angela@ozarksregionalfpc.com.

February 10: Santa Barbara, CA.

March 11 – 13: Baltimore, MD – Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future

March 19 – 21: Maine – Portland, Lewiston, and York County – Food Policy Council trainings. For more information contact Jim Hanna at jhanna@unitedwaygp.org.

April 15 – 19: Austin, Texas – National Farm to Cafeteria Conference – food policy council workshop and networking sessions. For more information contact Mary Stein at conferenceprogram@farmtoschool.org.

April 21 – 25: Bellagio, Italy – Transatlantic Meeting on Food, Agriculture, and Health Policy sponsored by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

May 20 -22: Detroit, Michigan – Kellogg Foundation Food and Community Conference.

June 9: Manhattan, Kansas – Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative Conference – keynote address. For more information see conference website: www.dce.k-state.edu/conf/ruralgrocery

 

Winne Divests Monsanto Holdings…Company’s Stock Tanks

At least that was the fantasy headline I hoped would appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But the one I feared would startle me awake one morning was, “Anti-GMO Activist Outed: Investment Portfolio Contains Monsanto Stock!” Imagine my chagrin when a couple of days after Christmas with not much else to do, I took a look at what my financial manager had selected for my modest retirement fund. “Holy #&*+!” I exclaimed, “I own 4.3 shares of Monsanto, Inc!”

If I didn’t act quickly, my activist cred would be forever sullied. Had I been a member of the French Resistance, I would have been executed for consorting with the enemy. Though our food movement tends to be somewhat kinder, I could definitely kiss those speaking invitations at Slow Food dinners goodbye as well as my reserved parking spot at our farmers’ market.

I called my Hartford, Connecticut-based financial manager immediately. Being it was the holidays, he answered his cell phone from a chairlift suspended 30 feet above an Aspen ski slope. Before he could say, “How was your Christmas, Mark?” I screamed, “Jesus Christ, Benson (the name has been changed to protect his firm from lawsuits by thousands of outraged food activists), didn’t I give you a long list of stocks I did not want to invest in, and wasn’t Monsanto at the top of the list? And don’t you remember that my op-ed strongly endorsing Connecticut’s GMO-labeling legislation (the first passed in the nation) ran in the Hartford Courant?” He said that he indeed remembered my list, but noted that it was so restrictive that it left little more to invest in than Mr. Cuddle Puppy, a free-range pet store chain that hasn’t paid a dividend in six years. He apologized and said he’d take care of the matter as soon as he got back to his timeshare.

How did this unseemly event come to pass? Over the course of 40 years as a community food organizer, my salary eventually soared to the mid-five figure range. This allowed me to squirrel away enough money to open a modest retirement account and begin to entertain hopes of passing away my final years in a state of blissful ease at Organic Acres: Righteous Living for Active Seniors. Their marketing brochure was seductive touting their sumptuous local, organic meals, fair trade denture cream, and GMO-free incontinence pads. Compared to Big Tony’s Discount Senior Village, whose “semi-sunny quads are cleaned once a week whether they need it or not,” Organic Acres looked pretty enticing.

But how would I ever save enough to pay Organic Acres entry fee and maintenance costs that required a lifetime among the one percent? It was then that I decided that I needed the services of a professional financial manager. While I was all for investing my funds locally, the prospect of earning .0001 percent at the Smiley Face Community Savings Bank was frankly underwhelming.  My money would grow faster if I planted one hundred dollar bills along the drip tape in my garden.

When my funds were augmented with a portion of my deceased father’s estate, I assumed that investment managers would be crawling all over me for my business. Think again. With my total funds available for investment considerably south of $500,000, all the potential managers I interviewed ended our conversation with a smug grin. For anything under half-a-mill, I was chastised, they would charge a management fee that might, in a boom year, keep my net earnings even with inflation. And when I added, in what I thought was a tone of humility that I was plagued with a nagging social conscience, and therefore my investments must adhere to socially responsible investment (SRI) criteria, the prospective advisor would suddenly pick up his cell phone. Funny I thought, I never heard it ring.

It was at this point that I turned to Benson, an old friend and former activist himself who, after setting his own eyes on Organic Acres, made a career switch to financial management. Since he was just starting out, Benson was hustling for clients, and though I was on the puny end of whom he wanted, he consented to take me on.

At about the same time that I entrusted Benson with a portion of my retirement funds, I began a more earnest investigation into the concept of SRIs. It was an emerging though murky sub-field that offered returns that were often below market, but earned the shareholder a greater sense of moral propriety. As the 1960s baby boomers started looking for places to put their money to avoid spending their golden years at Big Tony’s, more investment firms began luring this demographic with portfolios that mimicked the marketing prose of the SRI concept, but rarely its content. Like so-called “natural food,” many of their claims proved meaningless and often descended into financial “green washing.”

But my search yielded one firm that appeared relatively free of cant – the Calvert Social Investment Fund. It presented a portfolio that, while not pure by any means, possessed few if any of the gun-toting, cigarette smoking desperadoes that make up much of the American corporate experience. And even more impressive, Calvert had a respectable rate of return, though slightly below major indexes such as the Russell 1000.

It’s most recent annual report (September 30, 2013) leads off with this statement: “Calvert is the leading investment management firm using sustainability as a platform to create value for investors.” Besides listing their more conventional holdings – Wells Fargo, United Parcel Service, AT&T – they proudly featured community investments like WIN-WIN (Women Investing in Women) and Shangri-La Farms, a China-based company that trains minorities to be beekeepers.

Perhaps most shocking to me was the reflection by D. Wayne Silby, Calvert’s Founding Chair who observed that we may be approaching a period that some economists call the Great Stagnation, but that “perhaps these will be the times that remind us that true wealth is really in our relationships, our communities, and our spiritual practices. Maybe a more local focus, from the foods we eat to the ecological health of our immediate environment, will bring us sustenance and richness….” Whoa! I don’t know what drugs this financial guru is on but I sure want some.

Though a considerable wad of my cash ended up in the Calvert Fund, I’m not trying to promote their services or adorn them with garlands of gold. Their portfolio, for instance, also contains such purveyors of fat, sugar, and mischief as McDonalds and PepsiCo. According to Calvert’s annual report, the justification for keeping company with such companies was that as a shareholder, Calvert had the opportunity to engage them on “a range of corporate responsibility and sustainability issues.” In the case of McDonalds this has supposedly led to improvements in “its supply chain labor policies and practices, diversifying its menu options, and disclosing their nutritional content.”

In the case of PepsiCo, Calvert claims that “PepsiCo management credited our recommendations with influencing their decision to strengthen their human rights policy framework.” While I’m certain that a team of investigators could take exception with these statements, another team of ethicists would be equally consumed with the question of whether our responsibility is to disconnect from those who do some harm, or to stand in their midst with the hope of changing their behavior.

One certainty is that I am at least free of Monsanto whose midst as well as drift I would just as soon avoid. My chewing out of Benson should hopefully keep him more alert to the tendency of far too many money managers to allow the evildoers to get their noses under our tents.  But the larger question of personal responsibility remains, and will likely plague me until my ashes are mixed into the compost heap. If I don’t plan as responsibly as I can for my future, the burden will fall on my children or whatever remains of our nation’s civil structure to care for me. If I simply put my money in the bank, low interest rates and normal inflation will gradually erode my savings.

If I was only thinking of my future – which would sacrifice responsibility for other concerns like the environment – I could invest in Monsanto which achieved record annual earnings growth of 20 percent over each of the last three years ($14 billion in net sales in 2013 alone). Calvert at least offers the compromise of reasonable returns derived from a portfolio scrubbed of the worst of the worst, as well as a plan for engaging those portions of corporate America that are morally suspect. To invest with the highest degree of social purity, in other words, may be as irresponsible as investing in those with the fattest payouts.

In the meantime I will keep a watchful eye on my portfolio, struggle with life’s contradictions, and keep punching back at the dark beast who rules the night. And maybe with some luck I can work an angle with Big Tony for a double room instead of a quad and apply what’s left of my organizing skills to rally the residents for more local and organic food.

Famine

The accounts we read of famine never fail to rip our hearts to shreds. Mass human suffering taken to a slow, excruciating end, and the cries of hungry children with no hope of being fed sink us into an agonizing torment. We wonder which is more painful: the bearing witness to so many empty stomachs and the certainty of death, or the knowledge that there is a solution that our feeble political systems simply cannot deliver.  But extreme hunger on a countrywide scale also sends us spinning into a darker region of incomprehension where human depravity descends to levels unimaginable to any right-thinking person. These are the terrifying realities you confront when you read Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine – 1958-1962 by Yang Jisheng.

During the four-year period that Mr. Yang chronicles in this amazing book – you will hear the bones of his own ancestors cry out from their mass, unmarked graves – 36 million Chinese died from starvation while an additional 40 million children were not born due to maternal fertility disorders caused by extreme malnutrition. The wholesale elimination of this many people in so short a time is unprecedented in human civilization.

China’s famine deaths reached their peak only 54 years ago which makes Mr. Yang’s account all the more deserving of contemporary notice.  For it was not the usual culprits – drought, flood, pests, or even primitive agricultural methods – that were to blame. The cause, quite simply was political: the dictatorship of the supreme revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, the suppression of dissent and the control of information, and the belief, violently upheld by millions of party cadres, that there was only one way to feed the people: collectivized farms and kitchen communes. Nature could never be so cruel; only mankind has the will and the way to achieve (or prevent) annihilation on such a grand scale. As we look ahead to nine billion mouths to feed in 2050 and the uncertain outcome of now certain climate change, it would be imprudent to dismiss China’s lessons.

Be warned, this book is not for the faint hearted. The misery is rendered dispassionately by Mr. Yang, who has assiduously combed through provincial archives and recorded eye witness accounts of hundreds of survivors. Grim facts need no coloration, and human suffering is not enhanced by elaborate prose. The telling is enough.

To hear the exchanges between Mao, Zhou Enlai, and other high-level party officials while thousands of their countrymen were literally dropping dead in the agricultural fields is the kind of historical documentation that raises hairs on the back of your neck (it is no wonder that Tombstone is banned in China). You learn from Mr. Yang’s witnesses that all the trees in a village were stripped of their bark because that was the last thing for people to eat. And to read of such catastrophic events through an American food insecurity lens, one indicator of which are parents skipping a meal so that their children may eat, seems sadly meaningless when Mr. Yang tells us that some Chinese parents, driven mad by hunger, ate their own children.

Sichuan Province is known as Heaven’s Pantry because its excellent natural resources make it the breadbasket of China. But Mr. Yang tells us that “more than ten million people starved to death here during the Great Famine.” Why? The answer was mirrored across China, but it comes down to the fact that the mythological figure of the decidedly non-democratic Chairman Mao was so profound, it essentially paralyzed the people, and subsequently their reason.

After a visit by the Chairman to Sichuan, one provincial official reported a highly inflated rice harvest that he magically attributed to Mao’s visit. Agricultural experts immediately said the numbers were bogus; however, the absurdly higher figure was the one that was officially accepted. Assuming they had far more rice than they did, most of the actual rice was exported to China’s fast-growing cities (themselves a product of forced urbanization) as well as abroad, leaving the collectivized rural workers with almost nothing to eat.

Cultivation methods that destroyed the topsoil were promulgated from on high, effectively turning vast stretches of once fertile ground into barren hardpan. “Do what we’re told and be good sycophants” were the expectations.  Those at the bottom – those who likely knew the most – toadied up to the leaders in defiance of what they knew to be true, but had not the courage to reveal. This was how you got ahead in 1960 China, or more precisely kept your head.

Those who presented a different analysis than the centralized authority were “struggled,” a practice that went far beyond constructive criticism. This is what happened to one county official, Zhang Fuhong, who deviated from the party-line: He was “labeled a ‘right deviationist’ and ‘degenerate element’ [who] was set upon with fists and feet…during which Zhang was beaten bloody, his hair ripped out in patches…leaving him barely able to walk….When he asked for water he was refused. On November 19, Zhang Fuhong died.”

The loss of local leaders who were willing to speak truth to power was only the tip of the iceberg. Millions suffered and died because information did not flow from the bottom to the top and province to province. There were no systems in place, such as a free press, to facilitate that flow, even if the rulers were willing to hear the bad news. Local participation in problem solving and information sharing was discouraged since all the policies were developed and disseminated in Beijing.  If anyone wants to know if public policy matters to our food system, ask the 36 million who starved to death in China.

Local initiative and self-reliance were also sacrificed to the will of the state. When food ran short and the collectivized system of production and distribution failed to deliver the goods, households planted gardens, raised a pig or two, and fenced in some poultry. But as Yang reveals, individual initiative was not only discouraged, it was brutally suppressed. When famine’s jaws clamped down on the land, existing household vegetable plots and livestock were confiscated. In the same vein, one of Mao’s pet projects, communal kitchens, where all food was to be prepared, became the sole place to eat. As a result, people were often forced to give up their household cooking utensils. As Yang says, “When famine struck, families had no means of saving themselves and could only await death,” a fact that authorities in the U.S. who have stood in the way of local and community-scale food production should take note of.

Is China’s Great Famine merely a 20th century aberration, a product of revolutionary zeal gone temporarily awry, or are there lessons that even the United States food movement can learn? After all, China’s communist consolidation of power under Mao in 1949 followed World War II and a brutal war with Japan, a civil war, oppressive European colonialism, and centuries of disunited feudal rule that extended into the early 20th century. China was a peasant agrarian society that was still largely dependent on 19th century forms of agriculture. We could hardly expect it to immediately fall into line with western democratic principles and modern systems of food production.

Yet we can find in the Great Famine comparisons worthy of consideration for our ever evolving North American food system. As China amply demonstrates, and as we can see from the political transition of many nations over the past decades, shared leadership, citizen engagement, and transparent decision making are not the norms. While North America’s grass roots food movement may be moving in those directions, it is still a case of fits and starts. The more than 220 local, state, provincial, and tribal food policy councils may be the tip of the spear in democratizing our food system, working as they are to bring stakeholder voices to the policy making process, but they are still babes in the woods when it comes to the practice.

Many of America’s national food organizations are ideologically driven and out of touch with the “countryside,” which in this case are the grass roots organizations and local initiatives where authentic information about the food system usually resides. National actors often act as if they are the only authority, largely treating those in the trenches as nothing more than bit players. One’s turf – programmatic as well as geographic – is closely guarded thus limiting communication, innovation, and collaboration. Whether locally or nationally, the first loyalty is frequently to the organization’s mission or leader which can have negative consequences for engaging bigger, more systemic concerns.

When it comes to our state and national governments (local governments being a possible exception because they have shown promise by engaging citizens in food policy and social justice), money and power still trump majority rule. Accountability to the average citizen is a distant concern for most elected officials. The on-going failure to connect farm policy and health policy in any meaningful way illustrates the continuing dominance of special interests. And when it comes to money and power, the for-profit side of the industrial food system serves its own “dictator” – the bottom line. Large corporate interests automatically convert citizen power to consumer power: our only obligation is to buy as much as possible and otherwise remain silent.

The great lesson of the Great Famine is that without an informed and engaged citizenry who have easy access to information and who are confident that their voices are heard, the greater the risk that our food system will run amuck. The catastrophes may one day be appalling as they were in China only 54 years ago, or they may sneak up on us. A growing string of lesser events such as the loss of farmland and the decline of local farming, or the continuing erosion of means and access for America’s growing number of lower income families could slowly unravel America’s much touted food system. While citizen democracy may be a sluggish horse, it is still the best defense against food insecurity and hunger, the decline in healthy and affordable food, and a 21st century famine that may yet be gathering momentum not far from our shores.

Hitting Florida’s Food Policy Beaches

Leaving home at 4:00 a.m. to catch an early flight, the car’s thermometer read 8 degrees above zero. After a treacherous drive down an icy I-25 to Albuquerque, I boarded my plane and was airborne before even a hint of dawn had flickered across the Sandia Mountains. A few hours and a couple of hard bumps later, I touched down at Miami International Airport amidst swaying palm trees and a balmy 80 degrees. Being the intrepid trainer that I am, willing to go anywhere to serve anyone, I had selflessly volunteered for this mission to assist Florida’s food policy councils.

Amazing things happen when grant-making foundations show interest in an emerging trend. As we used to say in New Jersey, “money talks, nobody walks.” That’s not a mercenary statement of course, just an acknowledgement that a community’s hard work, in this case the struggle to form food policy councils in several Florida cities, is being recognized in the philanthropic marketplace. In the state’s sometimes swampy heat, non-profit groups, municipalities, and foundations are meeting up and down the Florida peninsula to forge partnerships for more just, sustainable and equitable local food systems.

Under the auspices of the Florida Partnership for Healthy People, Healthy Places and the South Florida Health Foundation, local groups are receiving training and technical assistance to enhance existing food policy council initiatives or to start new ones. At my Miami workshop there were representatives from the City of Miami, Dade County, West Palm Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, and Del Ray Beach. Earlier efforts to establish a Miami/Dade food policy council had floundered over the usual issues of leadership, turf, lack of focus and money. So by placing an emphasis on organizational development – giving particular attention to leadership, membership, and vision – participants saw that community organizing fundamentals and coalition building must precede the development of bold new policy initiatives.

Moving north to Orlando, the Disney World capitol of the world, our workshop was held at the recently opened East End Market. Not only does it have nothing to do with Mickey Mouse, East End is a lovely neighborhood market and cultural food hub inspired by Central Florida’s local farmers and food artisans. In the Market’s own words, it “strives to cultivate an appreciation for our true sustenance, a better understanding of our food system, and a dynamic local economy.” It also has a great community meeting space.

The workshop drew numerous urban gardeners, a food bank director, county health staff, and Florida State University Extension workers from around Orlando as well as from Sarasota, three hours to the west. Since Orlando’s food policy council is relatively well developed, I devoted more time to reviewing food policy options. Using a simple rating system based on such factors as economic and political feasibility, long term impact on equity, and ease of communication to the public and policymakers, participants were asked to choose from a list of possible food policy interventions.

After much robust debate, it was interesting to note their outcomes. While folks expressed sympathy for more aggressive strategies like labeling genetically engineered food products and banning trans-fats, they rallied around “doable” interventions with more immediate impacts such as promoting local food procurement for public schools and revamping zoning codes to invigorate urban food production. Not surprising perhaps since Orlando earned some dubious national attention when the city fined a homeowner for growing vegetables in his front yard. Subsequently, the light of reason cast its glow on local policy makers who quickly changed the “regs” to allow up to 80 percent of one’s front yard to be used for food production.

Jacksonville, located on Florida’s northeastern coast, was the site of the final workshop. Led by the indefatigable Cecil Williams, Duval County’s food policy council, working in cooperation with the very committed Duval County Health department, has been addressing food access problems such as those posed by the city’s several neighborhood food deserts. Though we focused equally on organizational development and food policies, workshop participants who were not already food policy council members enriched the discussion and networking opportunities. The food policy council took full advantage of these so-called interlopers by drafting them into service.

As we are seeing across the country, the emergence of local food policy councils is giving rise to statewide policy networks that in turn create potential for more statewide policy impact. Such is the case in Florida where a state food policy council, currently under the direction of Robert Kluson, may get a much needed boost from the energy generated by local policy action. And from what I can tell, the foundations are watching these developments with interest.

Clutching a carton of Florida citrus, I headed for the Jacksonville airport in the nick of time – the city’s nighttime temperatures were plunging to an entirely unacceptable 33 degrees just as northern New Mexico’s daytime temps were soaring to the same number. Hope to be invited back again real soon.