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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org, nmgreens@yahoogroups.com, community_garden@mallorn.com
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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Breaking Ground: The Community Food Security Movement
  • Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 07:11:14 -0700

Breaking Ground: The Community Food Security Movement
http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/2004/w04v10n1.html
Also available in PDF format (960 kb).
Christine Ahn*

The U.S. is the world's largest producer and exporter of food, yet in 2002,
35 million Americans didn't know where their next meal was coming from. (1)
At the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans were overweight. Although
hunger is still a reality for those living in poverty, our food system has
created a condition where "obesity is now a greater threat to the health and
well-being of America's poor" than hunger. (2)

One reason the food system is so sick is that supermarkets are virtually
nonexistent in poor communities. Wealthier neighborhoods have two to three
times as many supermarkets as lower-income areas, and white neighborhoods
have up to four times more supermarkets than African-American neighborhoods.
(3) Without access to nutritious food, poor communities will have unhealthy
diets. (4)

Access to safe and nutritious food concerns not only America's poor.
Approximately 2,000 Americans die each year from food poisoning caused by
salmonella and E. coli, in part due to large-scale food processing. (5) And
in our industrialized, profit-maximizing agricultural system, mad cow disease
has now become a reality. (6)

Today, just ten companies supply more than half the food and drink sold in
the United States. (7) Corporate consolidation of the food industry has
reduced farmers to less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, (8) and
because production and distribution is so centralized, food now travels on
average 1,500 to 2,500 miles from farm to plate in the U.S. (9)

Recognizing that dramatic changes aren't imminent in the profit-driven food
system, a diverse network of activists across America have begun organizing
for a just food system that benefits consumers and farmers. Family farm
groups, food banks, community gardeners, nutritionists, environmentalists,
and community development organizations are striving to achieve community
food security (10) --a condition wherein everyone has a safe, culturally
acceptable, nutritious diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes
community self-reliance and social justice. (11)

According to Andy Fisher, Executive Director of the Community Food Security
Coalition, this movement, which has flowered in the past seven years, seeks
to democratize food production and distribution by localizing food, using
more sustainable and health-promoting practices, and meeting the needs of
underserved communities. (12)

Dr. Joan Gussow, Professor Emerita of Nutrition at Columbia University and
author of This Organic Life (2002), believes that "the Community Food
Security movement is still small when compared to the power of...Wal-Mart,
but all across the country, our growth can almost match theirs." (13)

Innovative Models of Food Justice

Two trends form important pillars of the community food security movement:
farmers' markets and community supported agriculture programs (CSAs).
Farmers' markets, the most obvious outlets for farmers to earn a decent price
for their produce, have grown from 1,774 to 3,100 in the past decade. (14)
CSAs, also known as subscription farms, allow consumers to buy advance shares
of a farm's harvest. They date back thirty years to Japan, where a group of
women concerned about growing food imports, use of pesticides, and the
corresponding decrease in the farming population organized a direct
relationship with local farms. CSAs have since spread to Europe and to the
U.S., where over 1,200 now flourish. (15)

The following are some snapshots of what community food security looks like
in the United States.

New York's Just Food

In 2003, 1.6 million people in New York state received emergency food,
further stressing the soup kitchens and food pantries that fed 45 percent
more people in 2002 than in 2000.(16) And from 1987 to 1997, the state lost
about a million acres of fertile farmland, displacing family farmers.

In response to these crises, Just Food began connecting farmers with urban
families in the New York City area. Since 1996, Just Food has organized
thirty community gardens and thirty-five CSAs, with each CSA supporting up to
six regional farmers. During the harvest season, the CSA farmers deliver
produce and meat--usually organic and always fresh--to a central distribution
site in the city. According to Dr. Gussow, who chairs the Just Food board,
demand has soared faster than local farmers can supply. (17)

Boston's Food Project

Transforming vacant lots into lush city farms is a crucial way to feed a
rapidly growing urban population, and the Boston-based Food Project has
become a national inspiration to other inner city communities. In 1991, the
first growing season yielded 4,000 pounds of food from 2.5 acres of
detoxified soil. By 2001, the Food Project was growing 209,000 pounds of
organic food on a twenty-oneacre farm and three city lots. The project
donates 55 percent of the food to fifteen homeless shelters and soup
kitchens, sells 5 percent at reasonable prices at inner city farmers'
markets, and distributes the rest to 225 CSA shareholders.

The Food Project also gives youth a chance to learn urban farming, work in
Boston homeless shelters, and run city farmers' markets. As youth coordinator
Anim Steele puts it, "We need to involve young people because they will
inherit our practices, and they need to learn that alternatives exist." (18)

Oakland's Peoples' Grocery

Hamburgers, pizza, Chinese take-out, and donuts are some of the most
accessible foods for West Oakland, California's 30,000 predominantly African
American and Latino residents. This impoverished neighborhood has just one
grocery store, forty liquor stores, and a handful of fast food restaurants.
(19)

In response, community activists started Peoples' Grocery, a community garden
and mobile market in the heart of West Oakland. They transformed a 4,000
square foot vacant lot into a garden that now grows seasonal fruits and
vegetables and educates youth and residents about urban renewal, food
justice, and revitalizing the local economy. They also operate a mobile
market on wheels that runs on bio-diesel fuel and sells fresh produce, staple
goods, and healthy snacks from local farmers and urban farmers' markets.

According to co-founder Brahm Ahmadi, Peoples' Grocery was founded "with the
long-term goal of building community self-reliance in West Oakland. We've
chosen food as an organizing tool for our work because it is personal and
universal to everyone and is fundamental to the inner workings of a
community." (20)

Junk Food or Just Food? Feeding Our Children

As Ahmadi says, the community food security movement is about organizing, and
the community doesn't stop at the school gates.

Nationwide, a coalition of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and
community and health advocates are pressing for farm-to-school programs that
help local farmers supply schools with nutritious food. In 1997, the Santa
Monica-Malibu Unified School District became the first to stock fresh produce
from a farmers' market in the salad bars of all its nine schools. Over 700
school districts across America now participate in farm-to-school programs,
(21) and the trend is spreading to universities and other public
institutions, including the Connecticut Department of Corrections.

Since 1999, the Berkeley Unified School District has purchased from local
farmers to feed its 10,000 students. Berkeley also serves fresh food in its
cafeterias through school gardens, such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle
School's Edible Schoolyard, founded by Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters.

In Los Angeles, the organizing efforts of students, parents, and teachers
resulted in a ban on sales of soda and junk food in cafeterias and student
stores throughout the school district. Other districts are considering such a
ban.

This organizing is in response to an estimate that one-third of our nation's
23,000 public schools sell fast food to students, often because tight food
budgets lead administrators to resort to cheap, highly processed food. (22)
In Los Angeles--which serves fast food to its students--75 percent of
students participate in the USDA's National School Lunch Program, which
reimburses L.A. schools approximately $33 million per year, thereby
subsidizing the sale of fast food to children. Since school breakfast and
lunch are often the only meals low income children get all day, the impact on
the health of poor students is potentially disastrous. As fifteen-year-old
Rosa Villar, a Los Angeles high school student, put it, "If schools are
responsible for teaching kids to say no to drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, then
why don't they tell kids to say no to fast food?" (23)

Clearly, change is needed on a large scale, including at the level of the
National School Lunch Program. Groups within the movement have successfully
pressed for national legislation, such as the Community Food Security Act of
the 1996 Farm Bill, authorizing $16 million in USDA-funded grants over seven
years to support projects that provide fresher, more nutritious food in poor
neighborhoods and help communities meet their own food needs. Advocates
succeeded in doubling this amount in the 2002 Farm Bill. They are now
pressing for federal funds to assist schools with the extra costs of
purchasing directly from local farmers and for transit programs and
distribution centers to improve food access in both urban and rural low
income communities.

The Way Forward

Organizing around food is often a catalyst for addressing broader social and
economic justice issues, such as access to affordable housing and public
transportation. The proliferation of local food projects, farmers' markets,
CSAs, farm-to-school programs, and progressive public policies aimed at both
supplying wholesome food to all and stemming the loss of family farms should
restore hope that, as Andy Fisher says, "another food system is possible."
(24)

These stories do not just describe isolated pockets of change. The fusing of
the community food security and justice movement with the movement
challenging globalization and corporate hegemony could spell the beginning of
the end of the industrial food system.

* Christine Ahn is Program Coordinator for the Economic and Social Human
Rights Program at Food First.







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