Mark Winne's Blog, page 14

Let Us Now Thank Famous Foodies

Rather than offering up paeans to those fabulous Brussels sprouts I grew this year, I want to devote my harvest message to three people I’m grateful for: Bob Lewis, Kate Fitzgerald, and Hugh Joseph. To protect the innocent, let me declare from the outset that not one of this trio had any idea I was singling them out for thanks. They may be embarrassed when they read this, as much as by being placed on display as by the factual errors this piece probably contains. But I was reluctant to sacrifice the element of surprise for the hard data that phone interviews would have surfaced. After all, gratitude need not be burdened by facts. My memory, unfiltered and uncorrected, is my transcript.

Let’s begin with Bob Lewis who announced his retirement this month from the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. Most of us who have worked with Bob hoped that he would never retire, and those few who hoped he’d retire sooner had probably been victims of his singled-minded determination to do the right thing. His tenure in the food movement, which extends beyond the birth dates of many readers of this blog, began (I think) in the 1970s with New York City’s first GreenMarkets.

With his New York accent and remarkable resemblance to Woody Allen, it sometimes strained your credulity to realize that Bob was the face of New York state agriculture in New York City. But Bob’s feet have always been rooted in the earth, and as a college geology major his understanding goes far deeper than topsoil. Ignorant as I was of igneous rock, a vigorous walk with Bob one day up Fifth Avenue taught me why the story of Manhattan and its soaring towers is as much geological as it is financial.

Bob has always been a Renaissance man, holding forth with equal ease on the cello or when singing with his community opera company as he is discussing New York politics. But it is his commitment to joining regional farming with the nutritional needs of New York’s large lower income populations that makes him worthy of endless kudos. Through the department of agriculture he quickly made New York’s WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program the biggest in the country. Whether you were choosing from the three growers at a remote Adirondack farmers’ market, or dazed by the seemingly endless market stalls in Union Square, you eventually saw farmers’ market vouchers, EBT cards, and other non-cash payments being used by WIC moms, senior citizens, and SNAP recipients. And because of the growth of these efforts in New York, which is largely due to Bob’s passion, I would hazard a guess that the state has more people of limited means enjoying the delights of local food compared to any other state in America.

I first met Kate Fitzgerald in the same context as Bob Lewis – through the development of the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program. Like Bob, she was working for state government, which in her case was the one-term administration of Jim Hightower’s Texas Department of Agriculture. Rarely have I met a woman so clear-eyed, so focused, and yes, so Irish. When the TDA horse was shot out from under her by the oligopolistic forces of Texas agribusiness, she started a non-profit food organization in Austin known as the Sustainable Food Center. I can remember walking the city streets with her as she showed me the food deserts and neighborhoods that Austin’s tourists rarely visit. She put the troubling problem of poor food access and insecurity on the city’s public policy plate, but more importantly, she planted the seeds and instilled the vision that has made the Sustainable Food Center one of the nation’s model community food organizations.

Her mix of fiery Celtic stock and Quaker heritage gave Kate both the drive for social justice and the patience to mediate tough battles. It is a little known fact that by exploiting her well-developed Texas political contacts, she played a pivotal role in bringing about the passage of the Community Food Projects Competitive grant program in 1996. As a result, tens of millions in Federal dollars have been used to develop hundreds of badly needed local food projects. She continues to employ those well-honed negotiation skills today as a free-lance government affairs consultant working for food and farm organizations who need an intelligent and experienced voice in Washington.

I’ve known Hugh Joseph longer than anyone else in the community food field, so long in fact I can’t remember how long. I know we found ourselves starting community gardens and farmers’ markets at about the same time in our lives, I in Hartford and he in the gritty old factory towns of northeastern Massachusetts. One seminal moment occurred when our paths crossed at a New England conference where he told me about a pilot project they had just completed in Massachusetts that gave vouchers to WIC moms for use at farmers’ markets. I thought the idea was so cool I promptly approached the Connecticut Department of Agriculture to do the same thing in our state. And like states almost everywhere, the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program, including its variations and permutations since the 1980s, made a mighty contribution to the growth in Connecticut’s farmers’ markets which now number about 130.

When he is not teaching future foodies at Tufts or helping various new farmer initiatives, Hugh is performing his wizardly duties behind the ComFood listserv curtain. And just so historians of the community food movement can avoid endless debates about its origins, let me say for the record that ComFood grew out of the Northeast food listserv (NeFood) which in turn grew out of a Northeast region food conference we held in Hartford in the mid-1990s. For the most part, both NeFood and ComFood are Hugh’s brain children. Today, with some 7,000 subscribers, ComFood is arguably the most effective networking and communication tool available to the community food movement. Hugh continues to guide, manage, and moderate ComFood, tasks for which, to the best of my knowledge, he’s earned little but gray hairs.

So there you have it, the three people I’m most grateful for this holiday season. I suppose you could say, by dint of their longevity, that they deserve lifetime awards for their service to the movement. But lacking authority to bestow such honors on my peers, I’ll simply pause this Thanksgiving, just prior to spearing my Brussels sprouts, and quietly thank Bob, Kate, and Hugh. And maybe each of us in our own way can think of three people that we are grateful for as well. I think it makes a difference.

 

The Fundraising Letter I’d Like to Receive

Since I speak and consult with many groups around the country, I often find myself placed on their donor solicitation lists. Many of the subsequent fundraising letters I receive are from food banks which urge me to help them feed the hungry. The letters rarely vary in their message, stressing the unprecedented demand on their services, the increase in food “poundage” distributed this year, and a personalized story of hardship faced by a person like Julie or Jessica or Tameka.

Three central messages often rise to the top of these letters. The first, of course, is childhood hunger which we all agree is an unacceptable condition in America. Apparently, in spite of tens of billions of dollars spent by the federal government through child nutrition programs like school meals, WIC, and SNAP (food stamps being the largest child feeding program), to say nothing of tens of thousands of private feeding sites, millions of children remain hungry on a daily basis.

The second message employs the two-sided coin of exclusion and guilt. This technique has special seasonal appeal such as the one I received this summer that painted the image of a typical American family cookout where plates were loaded with chicken, corn, and salad, while “empty plates and empty stomachs are the norm” for many children in that state. And of course we’re all familiar with Thanksgiving, which, according to another letter I received, “is not a joyous time [for the hungry but] just another day of looking into an empty refrigerator.”

The third component of the “ask” is designed to touch the MBA in all of us. You see, it’s not enough to be charitable and compassionate in America, we must also be efficient which means that charities, like everyone else, must secure a respectable return on investment. To this end the solicitation letters often inform me of how the food bank’s large scale of operation allows them to handle and distribute more food for every operating dollar (a little like Wal-Mart), and how many people my donation will feed.

While I am not immune to these tugs at the heart strings, nor do I want to see my donation frittered away, what these letters so sorely lack is any information about how the organization is attacking the root causes of hunger, namely poverty. Are they simply doing the same thing they’ve been doing year after year, only more of it, without making any appreciable difference in the underlying problem, or are they heading off in bold and promising new directions? After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but getting the same unsatisfactory results.

So rather than wait for food banks to send me the letter I’ve been hoping for, I thought I’d write that letter myself – to me and from an executive director I hope will one day emerge. It goes like this:

Dear Mr. Winne,

We have great news for you this year! We at the Food Bank are happy to report that for the first time in our history we have donated less food this year than the previous year.

Why are we happy about that? Well, it’s because of what happened to Sally Jones, a former client of the Food Bank. Sally is a single mother of two children. She works part time at a nursing home and now takes regular classes at the community college to become a nurse practitioner. She is a former client of ours because our city passed a living wage law that requires employers to pay their workers $12.50 per hour. This replaces the terribly unfair minimum wage of $7.85.

The extra income, coupled with the free day care and health insurance she now receives, enables Sally to put food on the table without our help. While we miss seeing Sally around the food bank, we do see her occasionally at our community garden where she and her children are growing vegetables, vegetables that, by the way, she learned to prepare in healthy and delicious ways at our Cooking with Community program.

All of this progress, including the drop in pounds of food distributed, was made possible by donors like you, Mr. Winne. Your hefty two-figure contribution, when joined with those of somewhat more munificent donors, enabled the Food Bank to dedicate an ever greater share of its budget to advocacy training and public policy work.

This work persuaded our city council to pass a living wage ordinance, and the state legislature to fully support ObamaCare as well as adequate funding for child care and our community colleges. We also worked to ensure that Congress fully funded nutrition programs.

But you know what the best news is? It wasn’t just our paid staff who worked for these changes, it was also our hundreds of volunteers and thousands of donors who wrote letters, made phone calls, and showed up in the bus loads at public hearings.

And you know who else showed up, Mr. Winne? Sally Jones, because we helped her gain enough confidence to tell her story to our lawmakers, and to tell them that she only wanted a fair chance for herself and her children; she wanted a helping hand, not a handout.

So please help us continue our work of empowering more and more of our clients and neighbors so that we can distribute less food year after year.

With appreciation,

The Executive Director

PS. And by the way, Mr. Winne, if there’s any chance you can bump your gift up to perhaps, the low three-figure category, we’d be eternally grateful.

 

Republicans to Park Goers: “Take a hike!” But Not in the National Parks

Place: Rocky Mountain National Park – Alpine Visitors Center

Elevation: 11,796 feet

Date: September 2, 2013

 “The National Park Service budget is down seven percent due to sequestration. We had to close the Morain Visitors Center and the Glacier campsite as well as some parking areas. We have fewer rangers and park police.” That was what the baby-faced ranger wearing the Smokey Bear hat told me. Both of us were leaning on the Visitor Center’s sales counter, me out of exhaustion from a seven-mile trek across the Ute Trail’s treeless tundra, and he because it was the end of his shift. As if to prove that they could “tough it out,” an elderly woman volunteer staffing the cash register chimed in, “We have 1700 volunteers alone at Rocky Mountain National Park.” And from what I could see gazing out across the vast, road less expanse of jagged mountain peaks, they needed every one of those mostly retired and usually senior citizen volunteers to keep the burnish on this national jewel.

Only the day before I had taken a “warm up” hike to Gem Lake located along the Park’s eastern boundary. With less than a 1,000 feet of vertical to ascend, I regarded it as preparation for the more strenuous assaults to follow in the coming week. But what struck me that day wasn’t the easy and pleasant way I found my way to some of the most breathtaking views in America, it was the throng of people whose quest for quality time with nature had surmounted daunting physical limitations.

As I sure-footed my way over roots and rocks with the goal of reaching the peak before lunch, I came upon a middle-aged couple leading their blind son up a steep section of trail. He cautiously picked his way step-by-step with his cane while mom and dad took turns giving him voice instructions. “One more little step to the right; careful, you’re very close to the edge of the cliff,” they told him. “I guess I shouldn’t look down,” he quipped (blind humor, I assumed). The exhilarating look on the young man’s face was one of either joy or terror but the trio were clearly in thrall to their collective determination to surmount an endless series of obstacles.

Equally courageous was the red-haired, teen-age fellow whose physical disabilities were so severe that his father had to brace his son’s every lunging movement. One hard, pounding stride was followed by several short stumbling shuffles until his balance was regained. The pair would stop to catch their breath, the father sweating profusely while his son’s visage shifted between fear and bewilderment. I passed them on the way up, and noticed they eventually made it to the top. Together, up and down, father and son would take several hours to travel the 3.5 miles that I traversed in 90 minutes.

The beauty of the day and place only reflected the beauty of its visitors. These were a veritable United Nations of hikers – besides the spoken languages I recognized there were several about whose origins I was clueless. The race, age, and ethnicity of the trekkers was as multi-varied as it was multi-hued. African-American and Latino families were prevalent, and so were the elderly, some of whom were in such good shape they politely asked if they could pass me.

And then there were the obese, some panting so hard I hoped for their sake that an evacuation helicopter wasn’t far off. But like everyone else who didn’t fit the standard REI profile, they were out there trying real hard. Whether they were heeding the call of the wild that yelped at them from within, or responding to Michele Obama’s call to “Let’s move!” they were striding, some gracefully and some much less so, in one of our Nation’s grandest public places. Paying no attention to how they looked or what anyone might think of them, their every stretch and every reach were informed, in some cases heroically, by unbridled enthusiasm.

Fast forward 30 days and now even the most earnest National Park volunteer will make no difference. Whether there are 1,700 or 17,000, they can do nothing since the Republican members of Congress have locked the gates to the people’s parks. The heroism I saw that day on the Gem Lake trail has not been matched by anything remotely heroic among the knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who cynically call themselves the Tea Party. For those whose fiery spirit and determination lifted them like angels that day in the Rocky Mountain National Park, please know you deserve better, and please, please, never give up.

“No-Nonsense Guide to World Food” Makes Perfect Sense

Before he was a food activist and manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Wayne Roberts was a union leader in Ontario and a Greenpeace organizer in northern Canada. While I can’t imagine what those experiences were like, they sound rough, frigid, and unresponsive to the gentler sensibilities of today’s foodies. It must have been in such places where Dr. Roberts nurtured his feisty nature which is clearly on display in his new edition of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food.

As expected, he takes on the oligopolistic forces of multi-national agribusiness. Roberts maintains, mustering more than enough evidence, that our industrial food system has left us starved for healthy and affordable food, showered our environment with pollutants, and sucked the social marrow from the bones of our communities. Though the radical Canadian populist in him eviscerates, the foodie in him levitates.  No-Nonsense is as much an anthem to class struggle as it a psalm to the delights of good food and vibrant communities.

Roberts’s main line of attack starts with a clear and compelling description of the food system. By thinking about the entire chain of food events from seed to table as a complex and interrelated system, our solutions to today’s food problems (and a host of other associated problems) become richer, more nuanced, and decidedly more creative. Roberts “passes a dessert tray” of examples like the flat city roof “converted to a garden using soil enriched with compost from food scraps…[and] watered by rain that otherwise spills into an [overburdened] city sewage system.”

Likewise, he tells us about unused land turned into community gardens by “at-risk youth hanging out on the vacant lot. The youth gain both general employment-readiness skills, specific gardening skills, and make a fresh start. The neighborhood delights in the garden which generates enough surplus for a donation to a local church which uses its previously unused basement kitchen equipment for a community kitchen that teaches neighbors cooking skills.” And on it goes in a multi-dimensional web that beholds, as Roberts puts it, “food as a many-splendored asset.”

If Roberts makes a joyful noise unto the virtues of a multi-functional and community-based approach to food and farming, he replays the dissonant notes of a conventional food system which may do more harm than good. He cites a KPMG 2012 report that says the food industry inflicts $2.24 of environmental damage for every $1.00 of profit – a rate that is four times higher than the industrial average. He traces our “cheap food” tradition to the past centuries of slave labor and its current manifestation in a world-wide agriculture system that employs 170 million child laborers. Even those who earn something from their farm toils are virtual slaves to the industrial model of food production. According to a 2013 report by Oxfam, the 450 million farmers who supply the 10 biggest food companies account for 60 per cent of the world’s poor and 80 per cent of its hungry. And as Roberts points out, cheap and convenient food has been made necessary by the necessity of all adult household members to work at least one full-time job – not enough money to buy good food and not enough time to prepare (and enjoy) food.

While there are good stories and analyses from North America, No-Nonsense is very much a guide to world food. Cuba, Brazil, and Honduras are the settings for inspiring initiatives by both the “grass-tops” and the “grass-roots” who are struggling to overcome food security challenges far more serious than anything we’ll find in the U.S. or Canada. Some of these tales are now quite familiar – Brazil’s Zero Fome (Zero Hunger) movement, the model food strategy work of Belo Horizonte, and Cuba’s organoponicos (urban organic farms which now cover 12 per cent of Havana’s land area).

But what’s different here is Roberts’s willingness to go out and kick the tires, meet the local leaders, and hang out in some tough places until he gets it. What he bring back might be a small boon for those of us who are used to big federal programs like SNAP and multi-million dollar food bank warehouses. Empowerment, food sovereignty, and individual agency are the concepts that drive the struggle of people in developing nations to grow more of their own food, hold their own governments accountable, and experiment constantly in hopes of finding new, viable solutions to hunger and poverty. In the words of Debbie Fields, a fellow Toronto food activist, the leaders of Brazil’s food movements made people proud enough to “do things for themselves, without waiting for government to get its act together, but still seeing the need for government action.”

No-Nonsense Guides (Women’s Rights, World Poverty, and World Health are just a few of the other titles available in this series published by New Internationalist) are designed to give thorough but pithy summaries of their topics along with compelling examples in less than 200 pages. The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food is no exception rewarding both newcomers and experienced hands with tales of the fabulously rich theater of our global food system.

“Non-Nonsense Guide to World Food” Makes Perfect Sense

Before he was a food activist and manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Wayne Roberts was a union leader in Ontario and a Greenpeace organizer in northern Canada. While I can’t imagine what those experiences were like, they sound rough, frigid, and unresponsive to the gentler sensibilities of today’s foodies. It must have been in such places where Dr. Roberts nurtured his feisty nature which is clearly on display in his new edition of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food.

As expected, he takes on the oligopolistic forces of multi-national agribusiness. Roberts maintains, mustering more than enough evidence, that our industrial food system has left us starved for healthy and affordable food, showered our environment with pollutants, and sucked the social marrow from the bones of our communities. Though the radical Canadian populist in him eviscerates, the foodie in him levitates.  No-Nonsense is as much an anthem to class struggle as it a psalm to the delights of good food and vibrant communities.

Roberts’s main line of attack starts with a clear and compelling description of the food system. By thinking about the entire chain of food events from seed to table as a complex and interrelated system, our solutions to today’s food problems (and a host of other associated problems) become richer, more nuanced, and decidedly more creative. Roberts “passes a dessert tray” of examples like the flat city roof “converted to a garden using soil enriched with compost from food scraps…[and] watered by rain that otherwise spills into an [overburdened] city sewage system.”

Likewise, he tells us about unused land turned into community gardens by “at-risk youth hanging out on the vacant lot. The youth gain both general employment-readiness skills, specific gardening skills, and make a fresh start. The neighborhood delights in the garden which generates enough surplus for a donation to a local church which uses its previously unused basement kitchen equipment for a community kitchen that teaches neighbors cooking skills.” And on it goes in a multi-dimensional web that beholds, as Roberts puts it, “food as a many-splendored asset.”

If Roberts makes a joyful noise unto the virtues of a multi-functional and community-based approach to food and farming, he replays the dissonant notes of a conventional food system which may do more harm than good. He cites a KPMG 2012 report that says the food industry inflicts $2.24 of environmental damage for every $1.00 of profit – a rate that is four times higher than the industrial average. He traces our “cheap food” tradition to the past centuries of slave labor and its current manifestation in a world-wide agriculture system that employs 170 million child laborers. Even those who earn something from their farm toils are virtual slaves to the industrial model of food production. According to a 2013 report by Oxfam, the 450 million farmers who supply the 10 biggest food companies account for 60 per cent of the world’s poor and 80 per cent of its hungry. And as Roberts points out, cheap and convenient food has been made necessary by the necessity of all adult household members to work at least one full-time job – not enough money to buy good food and not enough time to prepare (and enjoy) food.

While there are good stories and analyses from North America, No-Nonsense is very much a guide to world food. Cuba, Brazil, and Honduras are the settings for inspiring initiatives by both the “grass-tops” and the “grass-roots” who are struggling to overcome food security challenges far more serious than anything we’ll find in the U.S. or Canada. Some of these tales are now quite familiar – Brazil’s Zero Fome (Zero Hunger) movement, the model food strategy work of Belo Horizonte, and Cuba’s organoponicos (urban organic farms which now cover 12 per cent of Havana’s land area).

But what’s different here is Roberts’s willingness to go out and kick the tires, meet the local leaders, and hang out in some tough places until he gets it. What he bring back might be a small boon for those of us who are used to big federal programs like SNAP and multi-million dollar food bank warehouses. Empowerment, food sovereignty, and individual agency are the concepts that drive the struggle of people in developing nations to grow more of their own food, hold their own governments accountable, and experiment constantly in hopes of finding new, viable solutions to hunger and poverty. In the words of Debbie Fields, a fellow Toronto food activist, the leaders of Brazil’s food movements made people proud enough to “do things for themselves, without waiting for government to get its act together, but still seeing the need for government action.”

No-Nonsense Guides (Women’s Rights, World Poverty, and World Health are just a few of the other titles available in this series published by New Internationalist) are designed to give thorough but pithy summaries of their topics along with compelling examples in less than 200 pages. The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food is no exception rewarding both newcomers and experienced hands with tales of the fabulously rich theater of our global food system.

San Bernardino: A Hub of Food Activity

There’s something humbling about a 100-year old orange tree. Ancient, deeply rooted, with a gnarly trunk as thick as an old washing machine tub, its leafy crown is elegantly coiffed like that that of a manicured dowager. When standing in a large grove of these beauties one can’t help but imagine what they have seen in their lifetime, or what sweet murmurings may have passed from one to the other by way of soft summer breezes. In the midst of this quiet oasis in the otherwise hurly-burly world of San Bernardino County, there must be moments of playful giggling as the trees’ leaves were tickled by the harvesters’ hands. But as sprawl grew closer and the bulldozer’s roar got louder, the conversations must have grown more anxious as the body count of neighboring groves mounted and the subdivisions marched up the nearby hill.

By 4 o’clock on this July day, the temperature is still over 100. I’m standing in an orange grove owned by Bob Knight, fourth generation orchard man and general manager of Old Grove Orange. With us are Rebecca Hoggarth, a staff member of Community Action Partnership, San Bernardino County’s community action agency, and Loma Linda University public health professor, Eddy Jara, both leaders of the new San Bernardino Food Policy Council. Together, this threesome are working to protect these groves from development while promoting healthy eating and food security across the county.

None of those goals will be realized easily. San Bernardino County is big – the largest geographic county in the nation – and poor – it has nearly 400,000 low-income residents, about 20 percent of the population. The county is sliced and diced with freeways and warehouses that stretch as far as the eye can see. As the transportation hub for truck and train traffic that distributes the world’s goods arriving at the Port of Los Angeles, the place gives off a rough, diesel infused vibe. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that the city of San Bernardino is the site of the unofficial McDonalds Restaurant Museum which commemorates the nation’s first McDonalds, opened here in 1940. And as a testament to the chain’s enduring legacy, McDonalds recently tore down an orange grove to build a restaurant In nearby Loma Linda, known, unofficially, as “America’s healthiest city.”

Fortunately, Knight, Hoggarth, and Jara have a vision that builds on a different food history. Before there were freeways, fast-food joints, and obesity, San Bernardino County was home to California’s first commercial fresh-packed orange businesses. The power of this legacy and the promise for the county’s future is partially powered by Bob Knight’s development of the Inland Orange Conservancy, a non-profit, and Old Grove Orange, a for-profit farm enterprise which acts as a food hub for 28 area growers.

After college, Knight joined on with Fortune 500 telecomm giants to wire the world. Though he acquired a great deal of business acumen, he realized that he had become disconnected from any form of community. “I was a cog in a huge corporation,” he told me, “that can be disposed of in a nano second. I also became aware of how unresilient and cold our global system had become.”

With an entrepreneurial zeal that would leave most head’s spinning, Knight returned to the family farm and started the Inland Orange Conservancy soon to be followed by the food hub. The IOC operates a 1200 member community supported agriculture project, a “mini-farmers’ market” program to bring fresh local food and food knowledge to the area’s public schools, and donates tons of surplus produce to Helping Hands, an area food bank.

While Knight’s work was having an impact, it wasn’t enough to keep the bulldozers at bay. It was the food hub that gave area farmers the opportunity get on board the farm-to-school train and ensure the viability of their farms. Interestingly, farm-to-school wasn’t a new idea for Knight whose father started selling into the nearby Fontana school district over 30 years ago. But by aggregating their produce, the Old Grove Orange hub’s growers are now selling up to 5,000 boxes a week to 24 school districts with a combined student population of 1.5 million. According to Knight, “Farm to school was lifesaver and a farm saver.”

There are a number of factors which make the hub a competitive vendor. First, according to Knight, there’s a five-fold markup from grower to schools when one goes through the current citrus distribution chain (“Oranges,” said Knight, “are an egregious example of the commodification of agriculture.”). By “going direct” the hub eliminates much of that markup. Second, by aggregating all these orders into one, each farmer’s transaction costs drop significantly. Third, since they are not in the global citrus distribution chain, they don’t need expensive waxing equipment and post-harvest chemicals. “You just pick ‘em and pack ‘em,” said Knight. And last (you got to love this), as an orange tree gets older, its oranges get smaller thus concentrating their sugars. In other words, a 100-year old matriarchal tree is producing a very sweet orange tailor made for a 10-year old hand.

As much as IOC and the hub are breathing new life into the area’s agriculture, the threats to its long term survival remain real. Developers are bidding up land to as much as $100,000 per acre. For a 37-acre operation like Knight’s, he and his entire family would be set for life if they sold out. This is where Rebecca Hoggarth and Eddy Jara, the movers and shakers behind the San Bernardino Food Policy Council come in.  As Hoggarth says, “The food hub has oranges that taste like oranges, and the food policy council wants to do everything it can to help farmers like Bob.”

One ironic exception to the hub’s list of participating school districts is San Bernardino. For reasons that seem both personal and historical, Old Grove Orange has not been able to sell to the district which has 50,000 students. “I think the food policy council can help with that,” said Hoggarth.

At a recent food policy meeting held at Loma Linda University, it became obvious how the future of the county’s food system was a community responsibility. Not only was Bob Knight among the 40 people in attendance, there was strong participation from many other stakeholder groups including the Latino Health Collaborative, community garden organizations, emergency food providers, Slow Food, and numerous public agencies.  Farmland preservation, obesity reduction, and farm to school were all part of the Council’s discussion, which echoed something that Knight had told me earlier: “Food is a community creator. Whereas the global food system cuts people out, the local food system keeps people in.”

Time to Re-think Food Stamps

At the risk of being labeled a Tea Party toady or right-leaning deviationist, I have to ask if the severing of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) from the Farm Bill by the Republican House Majority isn’t an opportunity worth taking advantage of. And in the same breath, I have to ask if the lockstep resistance to that move and piling on of liberal vituperation isn’t yet more evidence that the left-leaning social policy machine is running on empty.

Federal spending on the food stamp program has been pushing north of $70 billion a year. It has been justifiably credited with keeping many people’s heads above water during the Great Recession while modestly stimulating local economies. Representing some 70 percent of the current Farm Bill – the rest being divvied up between the much reviled agricultural commodity programs and the much beloved conservation and sustainable farming programs – food stamp support has allegedly relied on an unholy alliance of sorts between Big Agriculture and anti-hunger advocates. “I’ll support billions in agricultural subsidies if you support tens of billions in SNAP benefits. That way we can eat our food stamps and high fructose corn syrup too!”

By tearing asunder that which unlikely partners hath joined together, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor put a lot of federal spending in play for the government downsizing Neanderthals. As Emerson once noted, “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatives”, and what can be meaner than taking food away from hungry children? Though doing marginally little to pull the current 50 million food stamp recipients out of poverty, the program is one of the few tools that government has to mitigate it worst effects.

That being said, one can’t help but ask if we didn’t see this dramatic House action coming. After all, food stamps have been under siege for years, even before their association with President Reagan’s nefarious welfare queen remark. Getting their start in a somewhat different form during the Great Depression (not Recession), and codified in its present form as the first executive order of President Kennedy, food stamps and the food benefits they bestow reflect two sides of the American character. Being as compassionate as any people, we simply don’t have the heart to let anyone starve to death. But being up-by-the-bootstraps individualists, Americans generally blame the poor for being poor and don’t trust them to spend the taxpayer’s largesse wisely. Hence food stamps can only be spent on food, and not any other of life’s necessities.

But even then the hapless food stamp user must run a gauntlet of consumer scorn. The smug conservative shopper will ask aloud why “those people” are buying filet mignon with their food stamps, while righteous foodies ask why “they” are allowed to buy Coca-Cola, Twinkies, and host of other highly disparaged processed food products.

Being a food stamp recipient isn’t for sissies. Not only do you wear a bull’s eye on your back for every cost-cutting politician to take aim at, your purchases are relentlessly scrutinized and the subject of a never ending public critique. You endure derision from every quarter all for the princely sum of about $5 a day.

Whether we have more food stamp spending or less begs the question of why such a major act of social policy that nobody, including the recipients, seems to like, continues unreformed and unevaluated.  With a national poverty rate locked at 15 percent and a near-poverty rate bringing the combined numbers to well over 30 percent, food stamps provide some relief but no solutions. With overweight and obesity affecting 65 percent of the population and eclipsing hunger as America’s number one diet-related health problem, food stamps do little to encourage healthy eating and less to discourage unhealthy eating. And with high unemployment, low wage jobs, and few prospects for growth – other than big box stores and casinos – leaving the economy stuck in neutral, food stamps $70 billion in federally generated buying power helps Kraft Foods (food stamps are 1/6 of its sales), but nearly nothing to infuse local economies with new energy.

But the anti-hunger orthodoxy that SNAP is a vital part of the nation’s safety net and must never be altered goes unchallenged. Whenever an innovation is proposed, e.g. Mayor Bloomberg’s request to prohibit the use of food stamps to purchase sugary soft drinks, the program’s pit bull defenders bare their teeth threatening to rip the limbs off heretics who might modify even one of SNAP’s holy sacraments. It may be that they are in bed with Wal-Mart and others who have tragically dumbed-down American wages and whose workers are subsidized by the food stamp program, or it may be that they are riveted to the notion that they are all that stand between a modicum of food sufficiency and mass starvation. Either way, the tenaciousness of their enterprise, which opposes food stamp change at any cost, is only matched by an equally fervent brand of conservatism embodied by the Tea Party. The result: A program now more than 50 years old remains largely unchanged even though the nation that it helps feed has changed in myriad ways.

Imagine a corporation or major private institution that did not conduct research and development, kept the same product line for generations, and never engaged in strategic thinking. That enterprise would be out of business (or subsidized by the federal government). While a nation’s social policy is albeit more complicated and subject to a host of conflicting winds, it cannot go unexamined by those who genuinely care about people and their communities. Anti-hunger advocates will say that any meaningful examination of the food stamp program opens a Pandora’s Box that allows Tea Party-ites to wield their machetes, but that process is underway already; better to get out front with new ideas and positive energy.

Both history and biology amply demonstrate that change is inevitable, and that those who resist the need to adapt and reinvent in the face of new exigencies are eventually subject to denigration, decay, and decomposition. While we cannot realistically count on the Republicans (though I think exceptions do exist) to enthusiastically embrace a food stamp reformation that places poverty reduction, nutritional health, and sustainable agriculture above basic caloric intake, we might expect more from food stamps’ stalwart defenders as well as progressive forces within the food movement.

The time to re-think food stamps is upon us. If the best and most compassionate don’t do it, if we don’t find a way to build a model 21st century social program around the bones of an aging 20th century program, food stamps will become nothing more than carrion for circling vultures.

Food Rebels of Utica

I’ve always wondered what it takes to turn around a really down and out place. By which I mean the type of city where the only visible signs of prosperity are a well-lit McDonalds and half-full car wash. Some will say that the only hope rests with bold, inspired leadership by politicians or captains of industry. Others proclaim that better days will come from that big economic home run, like a sprawling new research park where young tech nerds park their wheels in sculptured bike racks. And then there are the more modest voices who quietly, almost sheepishly subscribe to the notion that ball games are won with a lot of singles.

Utica, New York, nestled in the Mohawk Valley and tucked against the banks of the legendary Erie Canal, is a gritty place with no big hitters to rescue it from the throes of a long, steady economic decline. But a team of hardworking food activists are putting the brakes on its road to perdition by placing food at the center of the city’s revitalization plate.

One part of the Utica’s renewal strategy focuses on the beverage side of the food system, namely beer. As one who misspent a portion of his youth quaffing vast quantities of a very mediocre brew called Utica Club – a period of my life I’d prefer to forget if only I could remember it – I was well aware of the city’s reputation for mass produced suds. But by producing beers more recently that you could actually get your lips around, Utica re-purposed itself in line with 21st century microbrew tastes. When Sam Adams first hit the market in the early 1980s – an event I still regard with great reverence – guess where it was first produced? Utica’s Saranac Brewery which dates back to 1888 and now supports 35 fine styles of its own brand. It also contract brews for a number of other popular microbrews.

But in spite of a success story or two, Utica still has a long row to hoe to find its way forward to the good old days. As a local insurance agent told me over bagels at Café Domenico – the best bagel I’ve eaten north of Yonkers – “Utica is New York’s last rust belt city to bounce back from a decades-long recession.” Indeed, slogans like “Utica, the city that God forgot,” and “Last one out of Utica please turn out the lights” were rampant in the 1980s and 90s.

I can remember driving my daughter to nearby Hamilton College in 1996 by way of Utica – a route the pricey liberal arts college strongly discouraged parents from taking – and wondering where everyone was. The city’s population was crashing at a precipitous rate but plateaued at 60,000 with the help of mini-waves of refugees (now 17 percent of Utica’s population) like Bosnians, Somalis, Burmese, and Indochinese. If it wasn’t for a severely troubled world sending Utica its “hungry, [its] poor, [its] huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” that light switch might very well be in the off position today. Depending on who you talk to, there are now between 36 and 52 languages spoken in Utica’s public schools. Like the Italians in the early 20th century and the Welsh in the 19th, immigrant groups have been the Mohawk Valley’s unsung economic engine.

The short stories shared around the table at the newly formed regional Food Policy Advisory Council made vivid food’s role in breathing new life into the region’s lungs. Led by an indefatigable Cornell Extension agent, Jim Manning, the 25 or so food system stakeholders spoke of gardens, farmers’ markets, food-focused training and education programs, and perhaps most importantly, their emerging collaboration for change.

Russ Stewart, a member of the local school board described plans for new school greenhouses and efforts to bring more locally produced food into the cafeterias. “Veggie scrips,” special health provider vouchers issued to pre-diabetic/diabetic patients to purchase produce at farmers’ markets, had public health worker Anamarie excited. Hamilton College sociology professor, Steve Ellingson, described how students and the administration were getting on board with the national Real Food Challenge campaign to bring more local, sustainable and fair food to their campus. With a sizeable food budget at its disposal, the college can purchase a lot of Mohawk Valley agricultural products. And Marty Broccoli (yes, his real name), a Cornell Extension colleague of Manning’s, shared news of a $280,000 agri-tourism grant that came to the region for economic development purposes.

Perhaps the most enthusiasm was generated by projects designed to bring the city’s new immigrants into Utica’s rejuvenated food system. Beth Irons, who runs the county public farmers’ market, regaled the group with her new “Share a Recipe, Share a Memory” recipe swap which is at the center of her cross-cultural food education program. Building on Utica’s extraordinary diversity, she wants to tease out the food stories held in the hearts and minds of the city’s many new arrivals. Beth was especially pleased with her ability to pare the city’s 40 or so languages down to 8 for her farmers’ market flyer translation. In a similar vein, Cathe Bullwinkle from the county health department waxed ecstatic over the explosive growth in community gardens. She reported that over 100 new garden beds had been built and spoken for, and that a new three-acre site should become available for urban farming.

This is the kind of singles hitting that, when woven together with good teamwork, can win ball games. But it doesn’t hurt to have a long-ball hitter on the squad as well, especially when the bases are loaded and it’s the bottom of the ninth. Debra Richardson doesn’t so much carry a big bat as she does a whisk, welding torch, and smartphone, the latter being necessary to keep track of a dizzying array of activities. As director of the Leaf, Loaf, & Ladle, a social enterprise that uses foodservice-based training to empower and prepare people for employment, she’s at the heart of the region’s food movement.

In an attempt to keep up with her during one 24-hour period, I saw her supervise a young autistic man’s vegetable cutting lesson at Leaf, Loaf, & Ladle. The veggies would go into a dish being prepared for elders attending that day’s congregate lunch. Debra set up the coffee service for the food policy council meeting that was taking place that afternoon in her building (she’s also one of the council’s original organizers). During the entire course of the council’s two hour meeting, she maintained an alert, upright posture never slumping into her chair like we all do when things get a bit tedious. She listened, commented frequently, and played what can only be described as a gentle coaching role in an effort to encourage others and, like a switchboard operator, connect people to one another. Rushing home from the meeting, she began her own food preparation for a local Slow Food supper she was hosting for a dozen friends that evening. The event took place in her rain-soaked backyard and featured homemade pizza topped with local kale, goat cheese, and garlic scapes, and washed down with Saranac beer. How was the pizza cooked? In her outdoor, wood-fired mud oven that she had constructed two years before, of course! Dessert consisted of local strawberries and cream from a nearby dairy. She had to clean up and get to bed early since she had to be at the Utica farmers’ market at 8:00 the following morning to set up the EBT machine so that the farmers could accept SNAP benefits.

As the Slow Food band of 12 noshed their pizza and laughed at each other’s mud-streaked legs, the chatter swung between despair and hope for Utica’s future. One guest noted that the well-kept, three-story house across the street with the “For Sale” sign in front was listed for only $40,000. Someone else chimed in that the city’s largest employer, St. Elizabeth Hospital, was laying people off (the TV news that night was filled with footage of angry fireman protesting recent cutbacks). But then the mood shifted when one pizza muncher mentioned a new farm-based business that was opening up, and another sharing the news that this had been the best year for maple syrup production in New York’s woods in a long time. Good food and good food news seemed to lift the party’s spirits, and that may be the promise that Utica’s faithful are destined to fulfill.

And what about Debra’s welding torch? In a rare moment when she had time on her hands, Debra decided she wanted to learn welding. She did it not so much to have a trade to fall back on, and not, as I wondered, to keep these emerging coalitions “welded” together. I suspect it had something to do with a fire inside that wasn’t going to let Utica’s lights go out.

There’s an eerie parallel with civilization’s original Utica founded by the Phoenicians on the Mediterranean shores of modern day Tunisia. As history tells it that Utica is no more because deforestation created massive soil erosion that wiped out the settlement’s agricultural capacity. Maybe Debra and her food partners know this tale which is why they are eager to pass that fire from one to the next with a real hope that food will become a combustible force for change.

Food Coops: A Faith Renewed

“Faith is a stray pet that will somehow find you again.” David Hernandez, deceased poet.

For the better part of 40 years, my fondest memory of retail food coops was the day they closed. Even though my heart was broken, the handwritten “Out of Bizness” sign hung from the ill-fated venture’s front door signaled the end of my misery and the first day of the rest my life. With a faith born out of an over-heated idealism, I had sacrificed a living, a bit of my health, and no small part of my soul to the notion that funky storefront coops could ride like the cavalry to the rescue of supermarket-abandoned communities. With the store’s end a painful certainty, I could now retreat into rehab to recover my sanity.

That’s why it felt like some form of divine intervention when I received the invitation to speak at this year’s Consumer Cooperative Management Association conference in Austin. While I no longer broke out in hives when someone would ask me about coops, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was being called back to a church I had long since slammed the door on. Either way, I could hardly address 400 retail food coop managers and board members with a bad attitude, or like the angry Presbyterian ministers of my youth, chastise them for failing to solve all of America’s food problems.

As it turned out, and as my research turned up, my path to coop redemption was far easier than I thought. No longer operating out of the back of your neighbor’s garage, coop food stores are full-fledged business enterprises, managed by a professional staff, and generally well capitalized. They are not necessarily single-store operations either. The Puget Consumer Coop in Seattle has ten stores with an eleventh on the way. La Montanita in New Mexico has five stores with a sixth expected within the year. And annual sales are also nothing to sneeze at. The Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn has 16,000 members and $48 million in annual sales. Burlington, Vermont’s City Market-Onion River Coop has 8,000 members and $33 million in sales. Nationwide, combined coop sales are in the billions and official membership exceeds 1.3 million.

But it’s not only their growth and impressive business performance that distinguishes coops; it’s their adherence to a set of inviolate principles that have also made them successful social enterprises.  In the course of my research and interaction with CCMA conference goers, I came across amazing stories of true democracy in the workplace and marketplace, efforts to educate and inform eaters, initiatives to reduce hunger, and strategies to develop regional agriculture and resilient communities.

Like food coops everywhere, the Good Foods Coop in Lexington, Kentucky holds firm to the principles of open membership, democratic control, member ownership and financing, community concern, equality, equity, and solidarity. Growing since 1972, Good Foods now occupies a lovely 12,000 sq. ft. space that I had the privilege to visit a year ago. In addition to selling great food, the coop makes monthly donations to local nonprofits, assists a local food pantry, and participates in nutrition and health programs.

Thanks to a survey of coop activity by Darrow Vanderburg-Wertz, I learned how coops are reaching out to their community’s low-income residents. The City Market-Onion River Coop in Burlington, Vermont accepts SNAP and WIC benefits which represent about $1.3 million of their $33 million in annual sales; has volunteer work options that allow discounts on purchases; makes free deliveries to senior housing complexes, offers free cooking classes to discounted members, and partners with the state WIC program to offer frugal shopping and basic cooking programs, which includes incentive gift cards to encourage WIC participants to shop at the Coop.

The spirit of coops and their promise to rejuvenate economically depressed communities is alive and well in Dorchester, MA where citizens and members recently raised $26,000 toward their new store. They now have almost 300 members and, building off a successful community garden and farmers’ market, have started a $2 million capital campaign to build out a space for a coop food store in an area that can only be called a food desert. And according to Joe Amedeo, board member of the newly founded Bethlehem (Penn.) Food Coop, work is underway to bring a coop to a couple of food deserts communities in that former steel city’s downtown.

My “hometown coop,” La Montanita, is New Mexico’s leader in buying and distributing local food. Through their warehousing, local business investment programs, and extended partnerships, including an innovative mobile grocery program operating in vast and sparsely populated Native American Pueblos, they are sourcing 1100 local products from 400 local producers, which now represent 20% of their coop’s sales.

I learned from the Sacramento and Davis Food Coops that coops aren’t just interested in buying local, they want to ensure that there will be a local to buy from. Through a member supported effort, the two coops are raising funds to purchase an easement on the Central Valley organic farm owned by Jeff and Annie Main.  A documentary film “The Last Crop,” that tells the story of the farm and the coops’ efforts to preserve it, is in the making. Once the funds are raised – not a foregone conclusion but certainly a likely one – the farm will be farmed in perpetuity and the coops will have astutely protected a portion of their food supply.

From a fine paper written by Kelsey Byrd and Celeste Winston that compared food coops to Walmart, I was reminded of the extraordinary history and work of New Hampshire’s Hanover Co-op, started in 1936. The coop recently intervened to take over a failed independent grocer in the lower middle-income town of White River Junction, Vermont. In spite of the high risk associated with re-opening a store in this area, the coop saw an opportunity to sell high quality food at low prices to people who needed both. The coop saved jobs, expanded the market for local food, improved the local economy by keeping more food dollars in the community, and earned an enormous amount of goodwill.

While not every member of the Hanover Coop was excited by this investment, one board member told me that, “yes, we could have used our profits to give our members lower prices, but chose instead to open a store in a community that needed one.” A similar sentiment was echoed by a Puget Consumer Coop board member who said that the coop is solicited all the time by affluent Seattle area neighborhoods that want a PCC store, but their new store will open in a lower income community for three reasons: the success of their earlier stores gave them the necessary resources to assume a modest level of risk, the new store is projected to be financially successful, and their values dictate that a needier neighborhood should come first.

How do coops compare overall to Wal-Mart and other conventional supermarkets? Food coops spend 38% of their revenues locally compared to 24% by conventional grocers; source 20% of their products locally compared to 6%; keep 17% more money in the community; sell 82% of their produce as organic compared to 12%, and create significantly more full-time workers with benefits.

Now, I do find that I spend more money for food at my coop than I do for comparable items at an Albertson’s Supermarket. But I know that every extra dime I spend is being reinvested in the coop, going back to members, paying workers a living wage and decent benefits, buying from local farmers, and strengthening the economic underpinnings of my community. Can Albertson’s or Wal-Mart make those claims?

Given the extraordinary commitment to community development by the retail coop movement over the past decade, you have to wonder why the Obama Administration turned to Walmart to re-store America’s food deserts. It’s highly likely that a modest public investment by the federal government (and states as well) in a coop-oriented food store development strategy would achieve a higher rate of return to community equity, workers, regional agriculture, and healthier food, to say nothing of citizen democracy!

But therein lies the rub, and I think the promise as well, that coops can and should play a much larger role in the rejuvenation of our local and regional food systems. Like a torch under a bushel basket, coops only burn bright for the limited number of eyes that can see them. A bigger noise and a broader beam are called for, ones that could be projected far and wide if the millions of coop members and shoppers rolled up their sleeves and became politically active.

Coops aren’t by any means neophytes in the world of public policy. They’ve been on the frontlines in the state and federal battles to label genetically engineered food, for instance. But imagine one million coop members getting severely agitated about food insecurity, poverty and the nation’s wealth gap, and the growing unsustainability of our food system. Congress would listen, state legislatures would listen, and the general public would not only perk up, it might even buy a coop membership.

Yes, my faith in coops as a force for community-level change has been restored. But the time has come for coops to take what they’ve done so well, albeit on a smaller scale, and go big, get loud, and show the country that cooperative development just might be the ticket to social justice and a democratically controlled food system.

Summer and Fall Appearances – 2013

June 19 – 2:00 to 3:00 eastern time – CSPI Food Day Webinar on Food Policy Councils with Mark Winne. To register go to http://www.foodday.org/webinars

June 25 – Utica, New York – Food Policy Council workshop. For more information contact win5m@aol.com.

June 27 & 28 – Johns Hopkins University. For more information contact win5m@aol.com.

July 9 – San Bernardino, California – Food Policy Council training with Roots of Change from 9 to 1 Pacific time. For more information contact Tiffany Nurrenbern at tiffany@rootsofchange.org.

July 10 – Richmond, California – Food Policy Council training with Roots of Change from 1 to 5 Pacific time. Contact Tiffany at tiffany@rootsofchange.org.

August 14 – Duluth, Minnesota - 8:45 AM Central Time. Food Access Summit keynote address. For more information contact Ryan Johnson at ryan.johnson1@state.mn.us.

September 18 – 20 – Tucson, Arizona – Closing the Hunger Gap: Cultivating Food Security Conference. Keynote presentation. For more information contact Leona Davis at LDavis@communityfoodbank.org.

October 1 – 3 – Red Deer, Alberta (Canada) – Re-Think Red Deer food system planning charrette. Keynote address. For more information contact Rene Michalak at info@rethinkreddeer.ca.

October 17 – Hartford, Connecticut – Conference for Connecticut’s state and local food policy councils. For more information contact Jean King at jeancking@gmail.com.