You are currently browsing the archives for the Food Security category.
DC Food Not Bombs is an adhocratic group that shares vegan and vegetarian meals to promote healthy eating, peace, non-violence, community, and the reduction of waste in our economies. Barrett Jones made this short video of some of the behind-the-scenes preparation and serving.
[Cross posted to DC Food Not Bombs]
Over the last two years of leading service projects in Washington DC, I have volunteered with several soup kitchens and homeless shelters. I respect and admire the work these organizations do. They help some of our most forgotten citizens.
One thing I love about some of these organizations is that they do great work rescuing unwanted food. For example, last year Bread for the City started its Glean for the City program, which gathers vegetables from local farms — all for free. And one of the better known examples of food-reclamation in the country was founded here in DC in 1989 — the DC Central Kitchen started off making meals for the homeless from the leftovers from the Presidential Inauguration festivals. These days, they rescue more than 600,000 pounds of food a year.
But in some cases at several social service organizations, I see a large amount of food waste ends up in the trash. I often wonder: Can these organizations compost? Is there a way to ‘close the loop’ on this process, to give back to the fields that produce the food? In response to these questions I raised to the DCFoodforAll Google Group, representatives from the Common Good City Farm, located near Howard University, say that the farm will start accepting compost from community members.
This may be just the start of a series of such community composting opportunities. In another response to these questions, the Director of Kitchen Operations at Miriam’s Kitchen, Steven Badt, noted that — even if there were local sites to compost — even a well-run service organization like Miriam’s would be daunted by the volunteer resources that regular composting would require. Also, there’s the question of volume: Badt estimates that the Kitchen ends up with fifty or a hundred or more gallons of food waste every day — “There is no way a community garden could handle/manage the amount.” He did note, however, that Miriam’s Kitchen will switch trash hauling companies in January 2011 to a company that does industrial composting. (This is just one of the green initiatives that they are undertaking there. Also they are looking at hiring a night green cleaning crew for their building. )
There are other opportunities on the horizon. Included in the DC Government’s proposed Healthy Schools Act, introduced by DC Council member Mary Cheh and Chairman Vincent Gray, there will be money set aside for a DC Schools compost pilot project. This could be a way to start a large scale composting program.
DC wouldn’t have the first large scale composting program in the nation. San Francisco implemented a mandatory composting law with fines for residents or businesses that throw anything compostable in the trash. 
(When the law went into effect, most of the city was already in compliance, because many companies and landlords already changed their practices.) Currently the city of Denver has a pilot residential composting program happening. And in Milwaukee, Will Allen of Growing Power says that his organization compost more than twelve million pounds of food waste yearly that came from a variety of different sources, from breweries to private homes.
Can Washington DC become another city to require composting? We are already the first city to install a bag tax. What would intermediary steps look like? A composting law could be years away. Could we start picking up small qualities of compost from social services agencies to take to community gardens? What are other ideas?
One of the first steps we can take is to support the Healthy Schools Act: On March 26 DC Council is holding a hearing on the Healthy Schools Act at 11 am in Room 500 of the John A. Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
What if the DC government created something like Baltimore Public Schools’ Great Kids Farm, a 33 acre educational farm in Catonsville, Maryland in response to this act? 
Let’s show support for the DC Schools Compost Pilot Program. This could be the first step towards closing the loop in getting food waste back to the land instead of the landfill.
Here are more details about the March 26 hearing:
Anyone wishing to testify at the hearing should contact Ms. Aukima Benjamin, staff assistant to the Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, at 724-8062, or via e-mail at abenjamin@dccouncil.us. Witnesses should bring 15 copies of their written testimony to the hearing. If possible, witnesses should submit a copy of their testimony in advance of the hearing to abenjamin@dccouncil.us. Witnesses will be allowed a maximum of three (3) minutes for oral presentation.
If you are unable to testify at the hearing, written statements are encouraged and will be made a part of the official record. Copies of written statements should be submitted either to the Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, or to Ms. Cynthia Brock-Smith, Secretary to the Council, Room 5 of the John A. Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20004. The record will close at the end of the business day on April 2, 2010.
Thanks to Steven Badt, Greg Boom, Rebecca Kantar, Greg Plotkin, Jenn Roccanti, and Carl Rollins for their assistance on researching this topic on the DCFoodforAll Google Group.
Food and Health: the two go hand in hand. In many areas of the country, food insecurity, poverty and obesity are also terms that go hand in hand. Safeway is in the neighborhood one day and gone the next. This is the reality of urban communities where fast food restaurants dominate the food landscape. Corner grocery stores fill in the gaps for full stop supermarkets, but the pickings are slim to none when it comes to local and organic produce — and the fruits and vegetables are expensive and not exactly fresh. In these neighborhoods, hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease are pervasive and increasing.
Where is the food justice? One place to look is in Beltsville, Md.
The District of Columbia owns over 50 acres of land in Beltsville, which is managed by the University of the District of Columbia(UDC). There, UDC houses an agriculture experiment station used for research, investigation and experiments. Dr. James Allen, a UDC professor, was profiled in a recent Washington Post article on the benefits of pigweed, a leafy vegetable high in Vitamin A.
UDC, a land grant institution, stood to gain almost $10 million dollars from the recent farm bill for use with community outreach and research. While I truly appreciate and understand the need for research and experimentation, I also understand that 12% of households in DC suffer from food insecurity. And yet the majority of the land that DC owns is unused and unproductive.
This relatively unknown and underutilized gem in the coffers of the D.C. government can help decrease the incidence and prevalence of food insecurity in D.C.
Take, for instance, the Food Project in Boston and Ma’o Organic Farms in Hawaii which offer examples of the economic and health benefits of sustainable agriculture. Ma’o Organic Farms grows certified organic produce on 25 acres of land in a community plagued by food insecurity, teen pregnancy, juvenile arrests, cancer and heart disease; a community similar to some of D.C’s wards. The young participants in this program are involved in educational and youth leadership programs in addition to social enterprise. The Food Project engages teens in programs which encourage leadership as well as providing vocational skills through their CSA, farmers’ market and work with hunger relief organizations.
A similar program on D.C. owned farm in Beltsville has to be included in the war on hunger.
We live in an area filled with contradictions and uncertainty. The food secure and the food insecure intersect at hunger relief organizations which provide needed services. Most families, however, would prefer to feed themselves. Living with the uncertainty that food insecurity brings can trigger mental instability. Providing food directly to DC citizens from D.C. land could potentially provide the economic, social and health benefits needed to stem the tide of illness, unemployment, hunger and poverty. The time is now to use this land for food and families.
Fenty Farms anyone?
Vicki Reese is a healthcare professional and the owner of 5 A DAY CSA a company dedicated to providing fresh organic/ locally grown food and supporting farmers. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Yesterday, we posted Stacy Braverman’s testimony before DC City Council’s oversight hearings of the Department of Human Services. The following is the testimony of Bread for the City attorney Allison Miles-Lee, who represents Bread for the City in the Language Access Coalition. Allison speaks to the challenge that non-English speakers face when trying to obtain public assistance — food stamps in particular.
Good morning. My name is Allison Miles-Lee. I am a bilingual family law and public benefits staff attorney at Bread for the City.
Others have given testimony today and in the past about ways that DHS can improve its customers’ access to services. However, these improvements will be meaningless for a large portion of DC residents unless DHS also provides services in a language that its customers can understand.
Under federal and DC laws, including the 2004 DC Language Access Act, DHS is required to provide meaningful access to services for limited and non-English speaking customers. This includes oral interpretation and written translation of vital documents. But we have frequently seen and heard from non-English speaking customers who were turned away by security guards or front desk staff at service centers because they were not able to communicate in English. We have seen frontline staff at one service center attempting to communicate with a Spanish speaking customer by Googling phrases in Spanish, and IMA (Income Maintenance Administration) eligibility workers frequently rely on customers’ children, other family members or advocates to provide oral interpretation for customers. In more alarming cases, customers have reported being shouted at and belittled in English, castigated for not speaking the language.
In our experience, even if customers do receive language interpretation at IMA service centers during their initial interview, information about their language preference is somehow not captured by IMA’s computer system. This happens even though the capture of such information is required by the Language Access Act. As a result, we have seen that important follow-up notices are often sent to these limited or non-English speaking customers in English.
I recently helped two clients, Ms. C and Ms. D, with very similar problems. Both are Spanish-speaking single mothers, who had applied for food stamps for their children multiple times at the Taylor street service center. Both failed to receive adequate Spanish interpretation at the service center, and left believing they had been denied benefits each time. They finally sought the assistance of an attorney since they did not understand why their applications continued to be denied.
I quickly learned that in both cases, my clients had actually been approved for food stamps and food stamps cases had been opened more than eight months earlier. In both cases, an EBT card had been issued to each woman and benefits were loaded onto the card every month.
Luckily, the EBT cards were still available to be picked up, and the benefits on the cards had not yet expired. Ms. D’s card had over $2,700 of food stamps loaded onto it when she picked it up. Neither of these women was told in Spanish at the service center that their food stamps case had even been opened. In addition, because neither of these women ever received notices of approval for food stamps in Spanish, or notices explaining where to pick up their EBT cards in Spanish, they had no idea these cards were waiting for them. Our understanding, after speaking with senior DHS staff, is that if these cards had not been picked up, the money loaded onto the cards would not be refunded to DHS, even after it expired. The failure to send notices in a comprehensible language to these clients was almost a lose-lose situation, for the clients and for the agency.
In these cases, since the women also did not receive notice of the need to recertify for food stamps benefits in Spanish, their cases had been closed after 6 months for failure to recertify. Working with IMA appeals officers and other senior DHS staff, I was able to secure retroactive benefits for both women. Ms. D received over $2,500 in retroactive benefits. While she was happy to finally get the benefits that her three children were entitled to, much had happened during the months she believed she had been denied benefits. Unable to purchase food for her children and pay rent, Ms. D was forced to move out of the apartment she had rented and into the basement of a family friend with her children.
For both of these women, as well as other Bread for the City clients, senior IMA staff quickly remedied problems and restored or provided benefits once we brought a language access concern to their attention. However, we are concerned about the doubtless many other customers who have encountered language access barriers and do not seek the help of advocates like those at Bread for the City.
Unless IMA comes into compliance with DC and federal laws regarding language access, any of its other service improvements will still leave a large portion of its customers in the dark.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
Taped testimony of all the witnesses is available on the D.C. Council website
While food stamp participation has skyrocketed in D.C., there are still many people that are eligible for the program but not receiving it. One reason why they are missing out: They simply don’t know they are eligible.
The Food Stamp Benefit Estimator – a new tool created by D.C. Hunger Solutions, Bread for the City, and D.C. Legal Aid – can help advocates and providers determine whether someone is likely to be eligible for food stamps and what their possible food stamp monthly allotment may be. The benefit estimator provides an estimate of eligibility and benefits (not an official determination of eligibility or benefit). It comes as an Excel spread sheet and can be used in as little as five minutes.
On February 25th from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., D.C. Hunger Solutions and Bread for the City are hosting a phone tutorial on the estimator. The phone tutorial will include essential information about the food stamp program and eligibility guidelines, a how-to on the estimator, and information on upcoming modifications to the estimator.
To RSVP, contact Katie Vinopal at kvinopal@dchunger.org by Tuesday, February 23rd.
Last week, Bread for the City attorney Stacy Braverman testified before the D.C. Council at its oversight hearing on the Department of Human Services (DHS). DHS provides many services to the District’s homeless population and also oversees public benefits programs including food stamps, TANF, Interim Disability Assistance, and medical insurance. Stacy spoke about the need for better training of DHS frontline staff, and about the importance of finally expanding the amount of DC families who are eligible for food stamps.
The executive director of DHS, Clarence Carter, was on hand at the hearing to address some of the concerns of the councilmembers and the many witnesses who provided testimony. Mr. Carter’s testimony included some potentially good news for benefits recipients–including the news that DHS is hiring 20 more eligibility workers to cope with the long wait times at service centers, and a promise that the Food Stamp Expansion Act will be fully implemented by the end of March. It’s a promise, however, that we’ve heard before.
Taped testimony of all the witnesses is available on the D.C. Council website. Abbreviated verbal remarks follow:
Good afternoon. My name is Stacy Braverman and I am a public benefits lawyer at Bread for the City. Today, I’d like to focus on the need for better training and organization at Income Maintenance Administration service centers in general, and the need for DHS to implement changes to the food stamp program as directed by the Food Stamp Expansion Act of 2009.
As Mr. Carter noted, there are more applicants and fewer IMA service center and staff. I visit the service centers often and rarely see the express lines or “all hands on deck” mentality he mentioned, but I look forward to those initiatives. Service centers need to be better organized and staff needs more training to cope, because right now files and paperwork are often lost and decisions are delayed beyond the requirements of DHS policy and federal law.
For example, my client Mr. F had trouble requesting benefits at the Taylor Street service center. I accompanied him on a return visit and we waited for six hours before he could apply. Mr. F forgot to bring his pay stubs to the service center, so he waited for several more hours the following week to drop them off. When over a month passed and Mr. F hadn’t heard from IMA, I called the service center. A supervisor said she could tell from the computer that he had brought in his pay stubs, but said that his income was not entered into the system and the documents had been lost. Her only suggestion was to have Mr. F return to the service center another time, missing work, and wait again.
Part of the reason crowds at service centers are so large is because it is nearly impossible to reach staff by phone. Phone numbers printed on notices sent to customers often direct to other employees, or to full voicemail boxes. The voicemail system at the Taylor Street Service Center was broken for approximately a month this winter, and I haven’t been able to reach anyone at the Ft. Davis Service Center for weeks. When you do leave a message, it is rarely returned in the promised 24 hours—or at all.
Even when customers do get to speak with an eligibility worker, they often receive incorrect information. For example, my client Ms. T went to the Ft. Davis service center and was told she couldn’t receive TANF because one of her children got SSI. Another client, Mr. Q, was denied medical assistance because he couldn’t get a termination letter from his former employer. And Ms. B was told that her young grandchildren were ineligible for food stamps because of their legal immigration status. Eligibility rules for IMA benefits can be complicated, and these customers all actually qualified for benefits and got them with the help of attorneys. However, countless low-income District residents leave service centers without crucial safety-net benefits, and may never learn they were wrongly deprived. IMA staff need more training in program rules, they should be encouraged to look to the policy manual or to supervisors when they have questions, and they need to promptly and willingly remedy problems when they occur.
Of course, many people who apply for benefits are given the correct information about their eligibility, and some of them are denied food stamps because they do not qualify under the current rules. However, more of them will be able to receive this crucial safety-net benefit once DHS implements the Food Stamp Expansion Act of 2009. This law expanded categorical eligibility for food stamps to households earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level, so they could receive benefits without having to pass certain income and asset tests. It also created a Heat and Eat initiative that leverages federal energy assistance funds to increase the food stamp benefits many households would receive. The Council passed this bill last summer, and we originally heard that DHS would modify its computer system and enact the changes on October 1, 2009. When that date passed, we heard the changes would come in January, then March 15th—and today Mr. Carter has promised “the end of March.”
I have spoken with many people who will be eligible for food stamps as soon as these changes are implemented, like Mr. Q, whose employer went bankrupt and laid off all its workers. Like Ms. N, who struggles to make ends meet with Social Security Disability Insurance as her only income. And Ms. C, who spends nearly half her unemployment benefits on COBRA so she can continue to get medical treatment for her Multiple Sclerosis; after that and her rent, she struggles to buy food.
Implementing the Council’s changes will bring more federal funds to the District, which supports local grocery stores and farmers’ markets. It would reduce the burden on food pantries and other service providers, who are facing increasing demands. It would simplify the food stamp application process, leading to greater efficiency at the service centers. And for the people who are most affected by DHS’ delay in implementing these changes—people who worked and then became unemployed or disabled; people working part-time or minimum wage jobs; and those with severe housing, utility, medical, or child care expenses—it could help avert catastrophe.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
BIG thanks go out to Nathan Bynum for capturing the energy of Rooting DC 2010 on video. You can check out more of his work here.
With shovels a
nd forks, local food justice advocates will descend on the Historical Society of Washington tomorrow for Rooting DC, the District’s own urban agriculture forum. Workshops are organized around four themes–production, distribution, preparation and preservation–in order to explore how food finds its way from the field to our forks.
For the first time in it’s 3-year history, Rooting DC will feature cooking demonstrations. Steve Seuser, who planned and coordinated the demonstrations, says that presenters will share how to prepare cooked, raw, and fermented foods, as well as canning basics. In particular, the demonstrations will feature recipes that are fast and affordable for families, as well as processes for gardeners who grow a lot and aren’t sure what to do with the overabundance.
Tracye McQuirter, a nutritionist with the UDC Center for Nutrition, Diet, and Health, will present during Workshop Session 2. We talked with Tracye about the importance of eating healthy and also got a sneak peak of her cooking demonstration. Read on:
Can you give us a sneak peek into your workshop at Rooting DC? What will you be cooking? What messages will you be focusing on?
I’ll be preparing Spicy Kale Salad, which is usually a big hit wherever I go. My goal is to show people how easy it is to prepare fresh greens in really satisfying ways that keep the nutrients and flavor alive and dazzling.
Why do you think it’s important to eat local, organic food or grow your own?
Growing and eating your own food gives you a sense of satisfaction in your soul that few things can so easily match. It’s also cheaper, more convenient, and more sustainable to grow your own food or eat the food grown by your neighbor, community, or local farmer.
It seems like empowerment is an important part of your work. In your classes, how do you use food to empower people?
Most folks in this country are masters at eating unhealthy food. I empower people by showing them how and why to become masters at eating healthy food. We look at who profits from our unhealthy eating habits and why what we eat is directly tied to whether or not we will have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, overweight, diabetes, heart disease, and a host of other killer diseases. Then we look at how to take matters into our own hands by learning to read food labels, choose healthier ingredients, and prepare lots of healthy and delicious dishes.
When teaching people about food and nutrition, what strategies or techniques do you find most effective?
In the course of my work, I teach people who are ages 3 to 83, so the tools that I use vary. For example, when I do food demos for little ones, I make sure to engage each of the five senses, so that might include singing a healthy food song and identifying the colors of each ingredient in our recipe.
You’ve been working on these issues for years. Do you sense a shift in people’s attitudes toward healthy eating and fresh produce? If so, how?
I’ve noticed that people are more comfortable saying that they want to eat healthier foods and are less likely to feel defensive about it. That is a paradigm shift. I’m hopeful that this shift will continue to grow and evolve into a desire to eat more fresh, plant-based foods and fewer animal foods for the health of ourselves and our planet.
Tracye McQuirter’s new book By Any Greens Necessary will be published on May 1, 2010. Contact her at www.byanygreensnecessary.com.
Rooting DC 2010 will be held tomorrow, February 20th, at the Historical Society in downtown DC.
[Cross posted to Field to Fork Network]
At the Rooting DC conference this Saturday, activist, scholar, and consultant Joe Nasr will speak about how North American cities have been organizing for urban agriculture, and what the DC region can learn from that. Joe, who is based in Toronto, has worked on urban agriculture and food issues globally since the early 1990s. He has had longstanding ties to the DC region, discovering the subject by working with Jac Smit, “the father of urban agriculture.”
He is the co-ordinator for MetroAg – Alliance for Urban Agriculture, co-founded The Urban Agriculture Network and maintains several worldwide affiliations, including the Centre for Studies in Food Security at Ryerson University in Toronto . He received a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
Joe brings hands on experience to his perspective at the conference. He has mentored a number of students interested in urban agriculture worldwide, including architecture students working with food- and agriculture-related design. Joe also co-curated the traveling exhibition: Carrot City – Designing for Urban Agriculture, which showed how the design of buildings and cities can enable the production of food in the city, and is now being turned into a book. Hopefully we’ll see the Carrot City exhibit in DC in the near future!
In 1996 he co-authored a book, entitled, “Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities,” which has now become a standard textbook on the subject. Long out of print, this book might become available online very soon. Joe is also spearheading the creation of a digital clearinghouse on urban agriculture that MetroAg is setting up currently – keep an eye for an announcement on the launch of that website really soon.
We are excited to have Joe in DC, and look forward to gleaning some green nuggets of wisdom from his knowledge and experience! Joe will joined in his session by Kim Hodgson, who has been spearheading initiatives related to urban agriculture at the American Planning Association, who will be sharing with us some exciting stories from across North America on how planners have been recently supporting urban agriculture.
I met Ibti at Rooting DC 2009. Last February, this plucky foodie had quit her job as an English teacher and was learning to ride a bike for the first time. A year later, she’s biked her way from DC to Vermont to Milwaukee to Seattle visiting sustainable farms and urban agriculture projects along the way. I’ve been following her on her blog, A Bikeable Feast, and as she heads towards Phoenix, I asked her to reflect on her experiences one year later and what she might bring back home with her. Here’s what she said:
I’ve been on the road for nearly 10 months now and seen quite a bit of the country’s diverse food systems. I do plan to make my way back to DC this summer and share what I’ve learned with those who might be interested in models for community-based food systems. As a sneak preview, Liz has asked me to offer a few thoughts on exceptional models that I have encountered thus far and how we might learn from them as we move forward with plans to make DC a thriving, community-based, food secure city.
The first example I would offer is The Intervale — the wildly successful farm community and farmer incubation project in Burlington, VT. During the growing season, community members gather at the farms each weekend to pick up their boxes of fresh, organic produce; Friday evenings offer live music, local brews, and flatbread pizzas; young farmers apprentice with experienced ones to learn the trade, share the cost of equipment, and develop plans for their own operation.
The site of the Intervale was actually a former floodplain and later a trash dump. It was cleaned out and cleaned up and now is in many ways the heart of Burlington’s burgeoning food system. Might we not develop a similar grouping of urban farms along the waterfront in, say, Southeast DC? I wonder. It could potentially turn this quadrant of the city from a food desert to a food haven. Just a thought.
The second model that comes to mind is the community food system in Madison, WI — another city of comparable size to DC (I think). There is a thriving local food culture in Madison, with many small farms and CSAs. And yet, instead of being in competition — as a traditional market might dictate — the producers support each other, sharing the idea that the more the collective farms succeed, the more able they are to feed everyone.
Farmers are notoriously independent and isolated. Not so with the young (and not so young) farmers around Madison. There are a few things that might explain this anomaly, but I think it comes down to community support. First, there is MACSAC (Madison Area Community Supported Agriculture Coalition), a group that works on everything from building farmer customer bases to subsidizing low-income CSA shares to facilitating internships at CSA farms. There are also groups like REAP (Research, Education, Action, and Policy) Food Group — a coalition that works to build a stronger regional food system and better-educated eaters through programs like Homegrown Lunch and publications such as the Farm Fresh Atlas. And, finally, there are educated consumers — CSA shareholders, restauranteurs, farmers’ market shoppers, co-op members — who support these devoted farmers.
A similar group could evolve in DC, I believe, with the development of an active, supportive food policy council. (And I understand from my ears on the ground in the District that there’s been some discussion recently of forming just such a group. Hey, I may be on the road, but DC is always close to my heart and I’m trying to keep up with the exciting new developments.)
The third notable example of a community truly coming together to improve food security in their area is the Noyo Food Forest, based in the tiny coastal town of Fort Bragg, CA. The NFF has partnered with a growing number of diverse, local programs and businesses to beautify the landscape, educate, and grow fresh fruits and vegetables.
There’s a Head Start garden, where lunch and snacks are grown for the low-income-based preschool education program and an NFF staffmember runs weekly activities for youngsters and their parents. (Unfortunately, the timing of my visit didn’t coincide with a lesson, but it sounds like a great program from what I can tell. Incidentally, improving child nutrition continues to be one of the strongest elements of Head Start programs across the country. It seems fitting that the tots and their parents learn how to grow and eat fresh, healthy veggies here.)
Something that really impressed me during my time learning about the Noyo Food Forest was its amazing success with partnerships. This is partly because the need for pooled resources (money and land) brings NFF to the table with local groups but it is also because there are natural connections between gardening and so many aspects of community development. The Noyo Food Forest is working to empower folks to feed themselves, but the gardens are, in the process, fostering healthy communities as well. It’s the kind of program that could be replicated in many other places, adapted for different communities while maintaining its core philosophy of building healthier communities.
Awareness about food and nutrition is on the rise in our fair city, thanks in part to the unflagging efforts of the First Lady. (Love her! And I’m dying to visit the White House garden!) DC has the potential to really be a model for local food security and community that the rest of the country can look to. Let’s get to it!
Want to talk more about how to make DC a model of community food security? Come to Rooting DC 2010, DC’s very own, still free urban agriculture conference this Saturday at the Historical Society of Washington, 801 K Street NW.
Liz Whitehurst also works on the brand new Field to Fork website.