Of note, one working group is to focus on food issues in DC. Anticipated topics include: local food production; commercial distribution; access to land and the food grown on it; security and links to social services; composting; and community benefits for health, education, and jobs.

Time: Tues, Nov 29, 2011 from 6:00-8:30 pm
Place: Walter E. Washington Convention Center (Room 202B)
RSVP: If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP here.

Harriet Tregoning (Director, DC Office of Planning) and Christophe A.G. Tulou (Director, DC Department of the Environment) invite you to join Mayor Vincent Gray on November 29^th from 6:00 to 8:30 pm at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center as they present the progress from the “Start in September” outreach, and establish working groups to develop recommendations.

In their own words:

“On behalf of the Mayor, we thank everyone who contributed ideas at sustainable.dc.gov, attended one of over 50 public meetings and events, or tweeted during our #SustainableDC Twitter chat.  Now it’s time to take our initial collection of ideas, existing local efforts, and the best national and global examples of sustainable practices to develop our vision, goals, and priorities.  The plan will also evaluate environmental and health benefits, and take steps to strengthen the city’s economic vitality and build community.

On November 29^th, we will begin the meeting together as a group to hear from Mayor Gray, review input to date, and map out the Sustainable DC planning process.  We will then break out into nine topical working groups:  the built environment, climate, energy, food, nature, transportation, waste, water, and the green economy. We invite you to actively participate in one (or more) of these working groups, which will delve into the details of these topics over the course of four to six meetings from December through February.  At the mid-point and again at the end of the working group process, all participants will come together to share ideas and address the critical connections among these working group topics.

While all meetings will be open to the public, we are asking those who wish to officially participate on a working group to commit to some basic roles and responsibilities.”

For questions, please email sustainable.future@dc.gov or call (202) 442-8809. For more information on the plan and to follow plan updates, please visit http://www.sustainable.dc.gov/ or click here.

We look forward to working with you to make the District the greenest, healthiest, most livable city in the nation!”

Join us for our launch on Saturday July 30th from 11am until 5pm at Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church (3000 Penn. Ave. SE).

Aya’s physical farmers’ markets will be a vibrant gathering places and destination points where consumers will come to not only shop for produce, but will be able to access various vendors for goods and services for mental, spiritual and financial health. This holistic approach will attract customers in search of other health experiences such as yoga, exercise classes, or credit counseling which help to improve the community.

Aya Community Markets will offer fresh, local produce, flowers, prepared foods and handcrafted items directly to Ward 7 residents. In addition Aya will host a wide range of family and nutritional programs, including live entertainment, chef demonstrations and youth activities.

Aya will feature:

• Fresh produce and baked goods;
• Handmade arts and crafts;
• Live musical performances;
• Massage therapy, acupuncture and other holistic health services.

Visit http://dreamingoutloud.org/ayamarkets for more!

To me, the discussions have been exciting and the possibilities seem both endless and achievable. It’s also apparent that the work goes far beyond generating good policy ideas. Speaking with groups who’ve been living and working in the city for a long time, it becomes increasingly clear that as a white, young, relatively new arrival to the district, and someone who came from a pretty comfortable economic background, I need to spend some time reflecting on my identity and role.

It’s no secret that across the country, the impact of a broken food system is disproportionately felt by communities of color. In DC in particular, parts of the city with higher concentration of African Americans often have higher rates of poverty, lower access to healthy and affordable foods, and higher rates of the accompanying diet-related diseases.

Studies and facts are easy to find, yet less often do I find them accompanied by thoughtful analysis of why and of the reality of a racist food system that has been built and perpetuated throughout our nation’s and our city’s history. “Race & the Food System,” a project of WHY Hunger and Growing Food and Justice For All Initiative, explores some of that history and the present reality. From low-cost labor inputs from immigrant workers, to the discriminatory treatment of black farmers by the USDA, to the ongoing unequal wages and employment patterns across all aspects of the food system – it’s clear that race matters.

WHY Hunger and GFJI breaks it down: “The problem is systemic; therefore, the solution must be approached with an eye towards understanding those systems and how to change them.” So what does systemic change in DC look like? And how might something like a food policy council play a role?

As a starting place, it’s clear that white people like me must reflect on our identity (and the privileges that have come with it) and take responsibility for our place in an unjust system. Next, I hope we can prioritize listening and learning – about the history of food and racism in this city, about how ways of working on food politics might perpetuate some of those injustices, about work that’s already being done and ideas that people already have about how to fix it. (I’m excited about this week’s National Black Agricultural Awareness Week as one of those opportunities to reflect and learn. Learn more here )

We can gain strength for the long journey by knowing other cities have made progress – white people and people of color together building the kind of just, transparent, welcoming community needed to do this hard work. Some cities, like Detroit and Oakland, have explicitly built diverse representation and ownership into the mandate and mission of their food policy councils. Others have used participatory action research to engage as broad of a spectrum of impacted groups and individuals as possible in creating and implementing a ‘food systems plan.’ And some, like Toronto’s organized food community, took a few steps back through public conversations and gatherings, with the support of the Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative’s Toronto chapter.

The Community Food Security Coalition summarizes the aim: “In order to dismantle the structural racism within our food system, we must make a determined effort to cultivate and increase the leadership, voice, perspectives and demands of low-income communities of color within the food movement.”  I hope that our work in DC can be shaped by that vision.

Set in a city whose mayor owns chickens and dedicates city hall land to the production of food for local homeless shelters, the conference had no shortage of government-driven food-policy role models. We learned about progressive and impressive urban agriculture policies and programs in Baltimore, healthy food systems resolutions in Cleveland, coordination across Michigan’s cities to identify shared infrastructure needs, and Seattle’s efforts to link local legislation to national Farm Bill policies.

It was also more than just wonks. Something that’s been central to conversations in DC , and at Bread for the City, is that it takes a lot more than policymakers, non-profits, and so-called “professionals” to realize true, lasting change. For that reason, I was glad to see participation by everyone from community organizers to health care workers to rural farmers to homeless advocates. I was also glad that the conference featured presentations from several different groups organizing communities not traditionally thought of as “foodies” or even part of the “food movement.” Here are a few examples:

The SW Organizing Project (SWOP), in Albuquerque, NM, is a people-of-color-led group that sees food-related organizing as one of a number of vehicles for empowering disenfranchised members of their community. One project, Feed the Hood, is a “food literacy and community gardening initiative.” It uses community gardens to create “centers of gravity around which people can gather” to build skills, share knowledge, and organize around efforts to ensure healthy food access in their neighborhoods.

POWER San Francisco is

a community-based organization working to ensure that low-income residents of Bayview benefit from the wealth and amenities generated by economic development in the City. They consider themselves “new” to the “food movement,” organizer Jaron Brown explained. A “Right to Thrive” principle that was central to their welfare worker campaign led to organizing and advocating around these workers’ right to fresh, healthy, and affordable food. So far, they have successfully mobilized around a policy mandating better food in schools, while also holding conversations about access to healthy food in the neighborhoods in which they work.

Finally, Saru Jayaraman from the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC-U) reminded us that less than one tenth of one percent of restaurant workers are unionized, and that overwhelmingly, those who serve us our food can’t afford to eat that same food themselves. She said she’s tired of having to explain to people why restaurant workers are central to the food movement. According to her, “when the largest workforce in the country is the poorest workforce in the country, and can’t afford to eat in the same restaurants in which they work – that’s a food security issue!” (Check out ROC’s DC affiliate and a report recently released about restaurant workers in DC)

The message from these and many others present was clear: to effectively craft, pass, and implement policies to genuinely move us toward a healthier and more just food system, the food movement must be built in a way that gives priority to the people most impacted by an unjust food system, who have traditionally been excluded from policy-making decisions.

Our collective efforts to build something like a food policy council in DC can benefit from these insights and experiences in other cities. Here are some tips and ideas that I heard about how building the food movement can be done creatively and mindfully:

• Food policy councils should cultivate a “democratization of expertise.” Coalitions built around specific kinds of professional expertise can reinforce exclusion from policy-making. Instead, groups need to create space for sharing and valuing different kinds of expertise.
• For most communities, “food access” does not equal “food justice.” Healthy food advocates like myself need to take the time to acknowledge and address race and power dynamics embedded in the food system to truly be able to fix it.
• Groups can employ members of an impacted community to themselves conduct outreach or research on the problems and how to fix them – such as Participatory Action Research, or the community health promoters model. (The Market Ambassador program in Massachusetts is one example

Finally, a number of cities emphasized the importance of food pantries, food banks, and community gardens serving as “community food centers” – hubs for organizing, sharing about food issues, and getting people involved for change. I’m excited to see that Bread for the City’s rooftop gardens, free farmers market, community brainstorms, and other food justice gatherings are laying the groundwork for such a vision. I’m also excited to see our clients continuing to drive some of our food justice work.

If you would like to help continue these conversations — at Bread, or around the city — please contact Joni Podschun at jpodschun@breadforthecity.org.

I came to the Community Food Security Coalition’s local policy conference to find out how we can better serve the homeless community in terms of getting fresh vegetables in shelters. Once there, I met a lot of people who talked about how that’s just one important way among many that we can improve our communities’ food systems, improving our health while also developing economic opportunity.

And I realized that what we all want is healthy affordable food for all – so let’s do it!

How do we make that happen? First, you need to think about who needs to be brought to the table. You need to do the groundwork – going into the communities and asking people how they feel about their food choices and how they feel about not having fresh food in their neighborhood.

You also need to have people who know about things like zoning, people who are affiliated with the Health department (to highlight the importance of sickness & disease happening in the neighborhoods), and folks who have data linking lack of fresh vegetables to sickness and obesity (that’ll help convince City Council how important it is). Then, you start thinking about how to work together to make it happen.

I learned that having something like a food policy council can help make sure the City Council recognizes that people need fresh & healthy food. And I learned that successful food policy councils have participation and leadership from residents who themselves are struggling with these problems and searching for solutions.

But we also learned that you’ve got to be strategic. You have to know how to use the tools that you have with limited resources. Being strategic means being able to clearly define what you’re trying to do, which also makes people more likely to want to sign on.

So let’s get to work! Here are some of my favorite ideas from the conference:

• Gardening in a way that creates jobs, and supporting healthy foods in shelters will also encourage homeless people to participate in becoming healthy themselves, and feeling more empowered over their own lives. The Gateway Greening Project in St. Louis is one example.
• Food trucks is an awesome way to get food across the city while also creating jobs. Green carts in New York are an example of that.
• Transportation matters more for low-income residents. To engage in garden projects, markets, and so on, they may need additional support for travel to and from.
• Everything Cleveland is doing.
• Food justice can and should also mean economic justice. Bringing in healthy retail can support local job creation, for example.

And here’s what I’m going to be doing now that I’m back in DC:

• Check out the websites of all the organizations I learned about, including a business that specifically caters to the homeless community.
• Dig deeper into the mobile market and mobile garden idea and who’s working on it in DC.
• Start doing more outreach and organizing. We know everyone who needs to be at the table – let’s make sure they’re there.

I traveled to Portland last week to attend CFSC’s food policy conference with a couple of goals: namely, to begin crafting language which will enable discussions on food policy to be translated into language, both indigenous communities and people within urban communities can understand. I wanted to be able to show those communities the connection between diet, fitness & health in practical terms, but to also connect those conversations to politically, the importance of being able to eat well.

I learned that all of us working on food justice have got a lot more learning to do, not just how to change policy to make fresh food available to people, but to get more at why it is people don’t have access, and how to better communicate with people who aren’t working in the field.

As someone with a lot of plains Indians blood, it sometimes becomes difficult for me to know how to fit into the food movement, because I know, politically, how much things have become turned around. When CFSC says, “we’ve got to save the farmland for farming” there’s no explanation of “why do you have that land?” and “why can’t I have that land?” – this causes some personal roadblocks at times.

I did see a good example of how tribal people are successfully changing the direction of disease with proper nutrition and exercise. One workshop was led by members Mvskoke Food Sovereignty Initiative, which has had a lot of success in stressing returning to and learning from tribal diets. They have seen big changes, an 80% increase in controlled diabetes, with the installation and implementation of their program.

I have some questions: 1) How do we frame the conversation for Indian people who have had their diets altered & changed by the dominant culture with disastrous effects? 2) How do we bring this conversation to the inner city, where many members tend to be more people of color, many who have eaten badly for generations? 3) How do we do that in keeping in mind that, more often than not, eating well is determined by one’s economical access?

The issue for me is to have these conversations in a good way, a way that does not disrespect anyone’s connection to their food. Then, there’s the sense that being able to eat well is for the privileged – it almost feels sometimes like a glass ceiling.

Takeaways and next steps

Overall, a lot more work to be done to fight the fact that many of the people who feel excluded from society then feel excluded from the movement as well. Prioritizing inclusion was central to this conference, and there was a real attempt to do things differently. They did a good job at bringing all these diverse people to the conference, but there was no clear sense of how the different policies affect different communities of people.

Here are my recommendations for CFSC and others in the food movement going forward:

• This entire conversation needs to be demystified. I think I have a fairly decent command of the English language, and I can only imagine how other people felt, listening to fairly conceptual discussions.
• Climate-food connection: If we do not consider the effect that climate is having upon our food sources, we are only destined to continue the cycle of having our food be a mess, as well as being an unreachable goal for many low income people. Things need to leave the realm of concept and become much more concrete.
• There needs to be space for the spiritual connection we have with the earth, with the food, with the relationship with what the food does to our body.
• There need to have more conversations about the politics of class & race, and the issues that cause food deserts, or poor health, in rural and urban settings.

For that final point, here are some articles I’d recommend to people who want to learn more:

• Divided we eat: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/22/what-food-says-about-class-in-america.html
• Strive to be average: brooklynmovementcenter.org/node/23
• Cultivating Food Justice …for whom?: http://wordsandnosh.wordpress.com/2011/04/18/cultivating-food-justice-2011/

We can all do our part to fight the culture of elitism and parliamentarianism that comes with movements like these. But it will take time to chip away at these issues.

Here’s what I’m going to do: start posting conversations about food justice on facebook. I want to begin asking people, what do they think food justice means, or food sovereignty? I want to make sure other people of color need are included in this conversation, and I want to start doing what I can to make these conversations accessible to people who have never considered food or food justice issues before.

I’d also like hoping to convene a summit or conference this fall, in order to create more of a climate for indigenous and other people of color to have conversations with those who do work in the food justice arena. Let’s have those who are working in food policy translate their work, and let’s have those who are impacted set the terms for the discussion.

If you are interested being involved, please contact me: indigneousfirstpersons@yahoo.com

While many books have given advice to buy local and eat organic. Dr. Hesterman is calling for a complete reform of the U.S. food system, to bring us back to health. The book deals with all aspects of a food system in crisis, including chemicals, shortages, mistreatment of workers, and unsanitary conditions. Hesterman, president and CEO of Fair Food Network, is a former professor of agronomy, and determined to help change how food is produced, packaged, and delivered.

Here in the link to the book’s website, www.fairfoodbook.org

Dr. Hesterman will discuss problems on a national scale as well as inequities in the food system here in DC — and positive steps being taken as well.

A community brainstorm was held this past weekend at the New Community Church Sanctuary for local advocates and members of the Shaw community to share their ideas for a more food-just D.C. Hosted by ONE DC, Bread for the City, and Common Good City Farm, a round-table discussion enabled individuals from a variety of groups and backgrounds to answer the following questions: What does a healthier, more just food system look like? What are examples of programs that are moving the city toward a more food-just system? How could city-wide support and policy change help facilitate a more food-just D.C.? And finally, who and/or what would need to be included to actually establish such a system?

As previously posted in Community Brainstorm: Building a Healthy, Hunger-Free DC, the food system impacts the environment, the economy and people, yet there is no centralized agency responsible for it; in DC, 13 different city agencies play a role in shaping our local food system. What is now being proposed is the formation of a food policy council, which has the potential to improve DC’s fragmented food system. Food policy councils in other cities and states engage with government policy, grassroots projects, businesses and food workers. They serve as forums for the discussion of food issues and coordination between the various sectors of the food system, and can influence government policies.

Visions for the ideal food-just system include expanding supermarkets across the city, specifying food vouchers for fruits and vegetables, and developing urban agriculture, especially in the expansion of community gardens, and to increase the presence of farm animals and fruit trees in the city.

Examples of initiatives that were presented as already working towards a more food-just D.C. included rooftop gardens, such as the newly established one a top Bread for the City, community and school gardens, gleaning programs, the donation of fresh produce to local shelters and food pantries, and “re-skilling” programs, such as the one offered by Ecolocity DC.

Also, specifically present in the Shaw neighborhood are the ONE DC wellness initiative and Common Good City Farm’s Green Tomorrows program, offering low-income adults or families fresh food from the farm and educational programs.

Overall, the community brainstorm confirmed the passion and determination among local advocates and community members alike to support greater organization and collaboration to create a more food-just D.C., one that better serves all D.C. residents. As one local advocate concluded, “We’ve got to get out of this beg mode and move to a power mode,” which I believe embodies the driving force behind the rapidly developing food justice movement here in D.C.

There are many ways to get involved, such as attending or hosting an upcoming discussion. For more information, contact Allison Burket at aburket@breadforthecity.org.

As I recently wrote, Feeding America’s Map the Meal project provides food insecurity data for every state in the U.S. Happily, researchers stretched the category to include the District of Columbia.

So here’s a brief summary of what we learn about hunger in the District. I use the term “hunger” because people are counted as food insecure when they say they didn’t always have the resources to buy the food they and their families needed. Seems to me that, at least some of the time, they were probably hungry — not just insecure about where the next meal would come from.

In 2009:

• 15.8% of District residents — 93,180 — were food insecure. This is slightly below the nationwide 16.6% rate, but about 4% higher than the rates for either Virginia or Maryland and more than twice as high as the rates for nearby Arlington and Montgomery counties.
• Only 63% of food insecure District residents were eligible for food stamps, even under the higher eligibility ceiling authorized in 2009.
• The average per meal cost of the Thrifty Food Plan — the basis for calculating food stamp benefits — was 67 cents higher than the national average.
• So it would have cost somewhat over $53 million to make up the “meal gap,” i.e., the cost of providing all food insecure residents with enough to eat year round.

A couple of thoughts about the fact that we’re looking at 2009 data.

First — and this would be true for most other jurisdictions as well — the unemployment rate was higher then. By the end of the year, it had risen to 11.9%. As of this January, it was down to 9.8%.

For this reason alone, it’s possible that the next round of food insecurity data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will show a somewhat lower rate.

More importantly, the Income Maintenance Administration, which administers the food stamp program in the District, hadn’t implemented the higher income eligibility standard or a related reform that gives some eligible residents larger benefits.

The Food Stamp Expansion Act, which authorizes the changes, was adopted in June 2009. IMA got around to implementing the part that raises the income eligibility ceiling in March 2010.

The part that provides higher benefits for some food stamp recipients may have been implemented now, but only because of a recent legal settlement secured by the Legal Aid Society and pro bono partners.

So the 2009 food insecurity rate for the District may be higher than it would have been if the responsible District agencies had felt as much urgency as hungry residents undoubtedly did.

Or maybe this is an unfair cheap shot. While the DC Council imposed new tasks on IMA, it also agreed to budget cuts that squeezed the agency’s core operations. Perhaps this accounts, at least in part, for the delay.

I remarked awhile ago, that District officials characteristically do a better job at adopting new progressive policies than at providing the resources to make sure that existing policies can achieve what they’re supposed to. The same apparently can be said for follow-through on new policies.

Low-income residents really shouldn’t have to rely on attorneys to get them the benefits they’re legally entitled to. The District may have budget constraints, but what about theirs?