6 FOOD DAY PRINCIPLES
Expand access to food and end hunger
Some 50 million Americans are "food insecure," or near hunger. Deep-seated social problems, such as poverty, unemployment, and crime, contribute to that problem, and solving the problem will require a variety of approaches. Education, community-engagement, jobs programs, and increasing the availability of healthier foods would all help. For starters, it is critically important to help eligible people take full advantage of food stamps, school meals, and other federal anti-hunger programs.
It's going to take political will, money, and time to ensure that every American has reasonable and affordable access to healthful, fresh, and culturally appropriate foods. Government programs, along with efforts by individuals and citizens groups, can play important roles in tackling the problem. Food stamps (now called SNAP), school meals, and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) have done much to diminish hunger. But it's still tough for many families to get the makings for healthy meals.
About 11 percent of the poorest Americans without cars live in "food deserts"—where people are beyond walking distance to the nearest grocery store. The term "food swamp" also describes some of these areas, because the community is filled with fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, or liquor stores, all of which sell junk foods, but precious little nourishing food. When obtaining good, real food requires taking a bus or a cab, it's no surprise that people guzzle soft-drinks and chow down on cheeseburgers, pizzas, and salty snacks that promote obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer.
First Lady Michelle Obama said, "Our goal is ambitious, it is to eliminate food deserts in America completely in seven years." Government funding could plant oases by encouraging private investment and by providing incentives for grocery stores to locate in food deserts. Similarly, loans and grants can be used to help convenience stores offer healthier foods. In 2011 President Obama to provide more than $400 million in such funding, but Congress did not approve that budget. Fortunately, smaller amounts of other federal funding and state funding have helped communities, such as Seattle's High Point neighborhood, make fresh produce more accessible.
The following are just a few examples of the great things that citizens and the government working together can do to improve health and food security:
- USDA's Community Food Project (CFP) is a federal grant program designed to meet the needs of low-income people by increasing access to fresher, more nutritious food supplies. Nuestras Raices, one of the first CFP grantees, transformed a blighted block in Holyoke, Massachusetts, into a vibrant community center with a greenhouse and a kitchen. The kitchen fosters the growth of food-based micro-enterprises, including a now-thriving bakery.
- New York City's Healthy Bodega Initiative has recruited 1,000 small, inner-city convenience stores to offer more low-fat milk, fruits, and vegetables, sometimes from local farms. With foundation support, the city is licensing 1,000 mobile green carts that sell only raw fruits and vegetables in low-income communities.
- The Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative provides grants of up to $250,000 or loans of up to $2.5 million per store to bring supermarkets or grocery stores to underserved communities. The state's $30 million worth of grants has leveraged $120 million in additional investment and helped almost 100 stores across Pennsylvania. This is creating thousands of new jobs in job-hungry communities.
- Fair Food Network's Double Up Food Bucks is being used to reward SNAP recipients for purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers markets throughout Michigan, and Wholesome Wave's Double Value Coupon Program similarly operates in 20 states around the country. And New York City's Health Bucks incentive program has doubled the amount of spending by SNAP recipients at farmers markets. Such programs are designed to benefit farmers as well as low-income consumers.
- The California FreshWorks Fund is a public-private partnership loan fund created to help finance grocery stores and other means of getting healthy foods into communities (with roughly one million people) that lack them. Retailers that make fresh produce and other healthful foods more accessible both improve the public's health and spur economic development.
Resources:
Policy Link and The Food Trust. The Grocery Gap.
Why Hunger's Food Security Learning Center
