Share with Charlottesville

I hope National Farmers Market Week was productive in your area. I hope your market received great support both from your community’s producers and its shoppers. I hope the media covered whatever event you hosted at your market. Good job everyone on spreading the news of our continued and expanding impacts.

Unfortunately, this was not the case for at least one market last weekend: the Charlottesville City Market, which was open for business on Saturday during the tragic events that happened two blocks away. Vendors and shoppers had courageously decided to show up, knowing the tense build-up over the past few days to the scheduled rally that afternoon. The market was attempting to do once again what it has done for many years: connect and comfort its citizens through the shared love of regional food and the championing of local creative output.

Instead, the name of its town is currently synonymous with riots and murder and the safety of its downtown with its lovely parks and pedestrian mall will be questioned, as it is likely to be threatened by more events like the ones that the world watched with horror last weekend.

I know this market. I have shopped there, gathered data there and discussed the hopes and dreams of its organizers and its vendors when there. It is like a great many of our markets across the country, located on underused weekend space, open to anyone and everyone, full of gorgeous produce and hand-crafted items proudly displayed by its makers. It is managed by the city and has been operating since the early 1970s, making it a “first wave” markets in my timeline of market eras.

This is what one regular market goer, William J. Antholis, Director and CEO of the Miller Center at UVA wrote about the market on this day:

My wife and I took our daughters for a walk around the protests, four blocks south (of their home), to the farmer’s market on the other side of the historic, pedestrian-only Downtown Mall. Immediately, we felt the sense of danger as fully armed white supremacist protestors walked dangerously close to counter-protestors. Taunts were already being hurled in both directions.

When we arrived at the market, we were surprised to find it eerily quiet. The market is usually packed on a Saturday morning. Row after row of beautiful heirloom tomatoes sat undisturbed, in a rainbow array of colors. Bread stands and coffee stands and local artisans had plenty of product, and not enough customers.

Stacy Miller, Farmers Market Coalition’s former Executive Director, has lived in Charlottesville for six years and is among the vendors at Charlottesville
City Market. Nervous about the potential for violence (and anticipating a slow
sales day, she said), she withdrew her participation several days before.

Several other vendors shared messages of solidarity and commitment to be there ‘come hell or high water’ on our public Facebook group. One said, specifically, “We won’t stand down for these terrorists! They come to our town uninvited and unwanted!… We will stand our grounds, with our fellow vendors and friends, against fascism, against xenophobia, against oppression!” While I certainly shared the sentiment, and I made sure to visit the market early to do my own shopping and wish good luck to those still setting up, I was eager to get back home, readying for other plans later that day. A helicopter (which may have been the same one crashing later that day) was already circling loudly overhead and would become my background noise nearly all day, as we barricaded into our little apartment. Thankfully, my husband was not working at the hospital that day, and we updated each other from various media sources, texts, and Twitter as things escalated, with photos of Nazis “indiscriminately” beating black youths in a parking garage. As my son napped (and, presumably, dreamed) 20 feet away, we quietly watched jerky, just-taken videos and photos of the black Charger with Ohio plates plowing through people on the downtown mall four blocks away, at an intersection I walked almost daily.”

When I read those quotes, I have to confess I had a little PTSD from my days of organizing New Orleans’ markets during hurricane seasons. As a matter of fact, on the Saturday before the landfall of Katrina our market manager, Tatum Evans was off so I was in charge of the day. The newscasters had told us on Thursday that the storm was to veer to Florida and any impact in the city would be negligible, so at that point, most locals stopped watching hour by hour updates.
Of course, since I was managing a market, I continued to monitor the weather and noticed the size of the storm and the lack of major movement eastward. I called vendors on Friday and told them they had the option of staying home, with no rent penalties for missing the day. Still, most showed up and as the day wore on, the tension in and around the market was palpable and the small number of shoppers also obvious. Stories of lines forming for gas and of panic rising around the city began to weigh on me and on our Executive Director Richard McCarthy who was calling me every half hour. Finally at 10:30, I closed the market.

I tell you that because as a result of that and other tense mornings in New Orleans, I felt the market’s anxiety in Charlottesville all the way down here in Louisiana, and I am sure many of you did too.

The use of public space for a public market is a heavy responsibility. Not only does one have to manage tender young businesses and seasoned ones side by side, but also shoulder the responsbility of managing risks of slip and falls, theft, disagreements, weather, dog bites and more crop up constantly.
And this last weekend, we saw once again that even when all of that is managed well, the danger around a market can still overwhelm its good intentions and positive vibe. (Update from C-ville market folks: The market was finally forced to close early because of the nearing clashes and the helicopters circling right overhead, making it impossible to communicate.)

I don’t really have a lesson to impart here. I just wanted to send my admiration to the Charlottesville City Market, to its manager Justin and to the entire team at the market, to its hard working vendors and its loyal shoppers and tell them that to me, YOU are Charlottesville. You are what I think about even as your city’s name is plastered across every news site and linked forever to a very, very bad day in American history.
I know that your market will once again become the center of health, wealth and good civic engagement. As a matter of fact, you will become that as early as next Saturday.
People will gather and hug and probably shed some tears in your lot. They will ask vendors how they are and vendors will ask that of their shoppers. Shoppers will tell vendors they hope they remain committed to coming to their downtown market and vendors will ask the same of their shoppers. The very best of what we do with farmers markets will become evident to everyone in Charlottesville over the next few weeks and months. Media will come to show “normal” activity returning and the market will know to embrace that opportunity and use it to encourage people to leave their homes and connect once again on Saturday mornings.
I know this because it is what happened to us during those months of darkness in 2005-2010.
And I know I was changed because of the love and care that the market community showed everyone here. I believe that markets do something that few other entities or ideas do in modern America: they build and keep community across age, background, political divides and socioeconomic status. I am proud to be part of that.
So let’s send out some good community energy to our friends in Charlottesville; I guarantee they’ll appreciate it.

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Social isolation, loneliness could be greater threat to public health than obesity

I encourage you to cite this report and the ‘loneliness epidemic’ when preparing proposals to city or county entities or public health advocates. Framing the market as a connector and place of civic engagement will allow your market to write a proposal to fund children’s activities like POP, and to offer more seating and events in order to bridge to more people and to allow more bonding.

There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators,” said Holt-Lunstad. With an increasingly aging population, the effect on public health is only anticipated to increase. Indeed, many nations around the world now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.’
….adding that community planners should make sure to include shared social spaces that encourage gathering and interaction, such as recreation centers and community gardens.

Source: Social isolation, loneliness could be greater threat to public health than obesity –

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After gastric bypass surgery, many experience eating difficulties

About 71 percent of the gastric bypass group, compared with 17 percent of the others, could not tolerate certain items, including red meat and foods high in fat or sugar. Water was not tolerated by about 7 percent of those who had had gastric bypass, vs. none of the others. The researchers found no link between the amount of weight people had lost and the digestive problems. Link to story

Markets could put small lists of available products together for different users of their market, including those who have digestive problems. It’s important to remember that many of these folks are just beginning to understand their problems, learning what works and doesn’t. I remember how, after my gallbladder surgery in 2007, I had to figure out what needed to come off my shopping list. It was through trial and error and asking a lot of questions and reading a lot of information that I was able to understand what worked best for me, but in the meantime, I had to give away or throw away some items I bought at first which used to be fine for me but were no longer. Another reason why vendors offering small “sample” amounts of different items can be a great way to invite new visitors (or newly fragile shoppers) to become regular, return shoppers.

I know of at least one market outreach program that focused on these patients – the wonderful North Union Farmers Markets in my original hometown of Cleveland Oh.

Their frittata project is one of my favorite programs to pull out of my sleeve when markets ask me about ideas for working with obese or recently obese populations. (These programs make me seem smart even though what I really am is well-traveled.) Their project is shared with many other types of healthy food clients too, but I was really taken by the idea they had of working with bariatric patients through the Cleveland Clinic system.

FINI report, Year 1

In Year one, FINI supported incentive programs at almost 1,000 farmers markets, representing 4,000 direct marketing farmers in 27 states. These farmers market programs alone generated almost $8 million in SNAP and incentive sales spent on produce. Program evaluation conducted by grantees indicated uniformly high redemption rates, strong support for the program among stakeholders, and a great deal of collaboration from both public agencies and private program partners. These collaborations were particularly important in conducting outreach to SNAP recipients.

FINI_FarmersMarkets_Year1_FMC_170413

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Structural racism and farmers markets, Part 2

Recently, I wrote the first post about where markets began and some of the barriers we have encountered along the way to healthy food for all. I hope that those who read it understood the distinction I was making between individual, institutional and structural racism. The point was and is that any organizing done at the grassroots level can address individual and some institutional examples of racism, but that partnerships across sectors and systemic strategies are necessary to address those structural examples that reduce the effectiveness of these interventions. Markets are just being allowed into those conversations in the last decade and so have much work to do to achieve their goals.

In Part 1, I gave my version of the chronological history of markets in order to show the intentional and thoughtful work done by leaders so far. One of those milestones was the work with public health advocates, starting in the early 2000s and one of the examples I use of that is Kaiser Permanente’s creation of farmers markets. This began around 2003 when ob/gyn Dr. Preston Manning had an idea to put a farmers market on the Oakland KP campus and begat a movement of “market champions”around the U.S. during their shift to wellness rather than crisis care. This report on their markets came out a few years ago and has some very interesting analysis of market interventions. The evolution of the “campus” market type in the emerging market typology spectrum is illustrated in there as is some data on the marked increase in the consumption of fruits and vegetables among surveyed marketgoers, and (what I remember as the surprising outcome to the KP folks) of the increase in social capital for their staff.

The KP markets marked one of the first long-term partnerships with a health care provider interested in them as interventions for their target audience. In other words, it seems to be the beginning of the era of partners realizing markets were more nimble than they had previously seemed and so could be added into new communities for multiple reasons, including those with complex public health goals. The KP/market relationship seemed strained at times -(full disclosure: back then, my organization was in discussion to help KP with their market strategy, but the New Orleans levee breaks of 2005 took precedence for our time. We did continue to discuss markets with them and even included their staff in some of Market Umbrella’s trans•act research into market evaluation)- even with the tension between market leaders and their team, KP remained thoughtful about how they supported markets and constantly offered some good critical thinking about the capacity of markets and what success measures that they thought were appropriate.

I became fond of saying that the relationship between markets and public health was a match made in heaven as markets had been all energy with little discipline and public health discipline with little energy. These health partnerships have led to many things, like the incentive strategy and the expansion of the voucher programs. There is no doubt that markets have adopted a wider view of good food and done an amazing job at encouraging those with benefit program dollars to come to their markets.
Most importantly, markets gained a better understanding of the social determinants of health paradigm.

Social determinants
The CDC definition:

“the conditions in the environments in which people live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Conditions (e.g., social, economic, and physical) in these various environments and settings (e.g., school, church, workplace, and neighborhood) have been referred to as “place.” In addition to the more material attributes of “place,” the patterns of social engagement and sense of security and well-being are also affected by where people live.

http://www.cdc.gov/socialdeterminants/data/index.htm

It is important to address the safety, transportation needs, housing etc of a person who is at-risk in order to offer solutions to repair their health, but without also addressing how that environment ended as less safe or without decent places to live, that individual will remain at risk. What is also important to note about these indicators is that they rely on community wealth being available. Before we tied our market balloon to these pillars of health, many of our initiatives were seen as elitist and obsessed with a construct of local that had no relevance to the larger world. Now, of course, it is clear to markets and their partners that addressing inequities cannot be completed by outside funders swooping in, and that entrepreneurial activity is a necessary aspect for empowerment; efforts across the globe in micro-investing or Slow Money here in the U.S. have shown the trend is appealing even to big-time money folks. So economic power at the local level is key to this shift and in food systems, and currently, no one does that better than farmers markets.

Kellogg Foundation’s shift about the same time to a continuum of health for families encapsulated beautifully at one of their conferences as”first food, early food, school food, community food,” allowed them to lead the discussion on this overarching strategy. The foundation focuses on “three key factors of success and their intersections: education and learning; food, health and well-being; and family economic security. Lots of good language to seek out as well viewing some of the work from Kellogg and its partners. Check out their resources.

—————————————

So place and civic engagement could be the two buckets to consider. How do markets address either of these? Place is pretty simple, isn’t it? Let’s say that your market is working to add at-risk shoppers using an incentive and EBT program and finds that one chief barrier is the lack of public transportation options around your location. It may help to advocate for a bus to alter its route for the market day. Or to add more bike parking to encourage non-drivers or to set aside a few parking spaces close to the entrance for drop-offs, shuttles, jitneys or uber. One great way to look at the place around you is to use PPS’ Placemaking audits and tools and see how inviting your area is.

Clearly, civic engagement is another area that markets are using to do amazing work. The Power of Produce (POP) program offered by FMC is a lovely way to offer this. Some success has been noted by markets work with newly arrived citizens through expanding language choices or adding more culturally significant products. Shady seating for visiting and constant community information is also good. But how about market leaders showing up to a housing meeting in their city? Or working on a micro-investment strategy with shoppers and local banks to encourage new producers or other community solutions?

So, the work to include all of the social determinants into our food work is not fully realized. That issue of where we are currently in health and wealth work at the local level is at the heart of these 2 posts and why (I think) the divide between whites and people of color seems wider and deeper than ever. It is commendable for us to rid our language and actions from individual racist attitudes, and to add institutional partners and programs that add access, but we must go beyond that. If we use our power and privilege to explore and address inequities within the larger physical and political environment, we will start to see better outcomes, and the social determinants framework is as good of a way as any to do that in organizing terms.

Star assessment of community health

Related statement from National Young Farmers Coalition.

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System thinking among market leaders: advocacy, mobilization and organizing.

As leaders, you should be cognizant of 3 levels of activism: advocacy, mobilization and organizing. Knowing the difference between those is often the key to avoiding burnout and engaging people successfully: actively educating others about ideas and needs around your market and its producers (advocacy), encouraging others to be active about those ideas and needs (mobilization), teaching others to lead, defining tactics and building campaign strategies to push those ideas forward or to address a looming legislative crisis(organizing). There are wonderful resources like this one from NYFC to get up to speed on the skills and tactics necessary for different types of work. It is also vital that this work is visible at the local, state and at regional and/or national level.

as markets

advocacy: Don’t Hide the Hard Work: Get ready folks, as this is my new mantra. It is wonderful that markets work hard to put on lovely, comforting markets that celebrate all that is good in community food and hide the duct tape that keeps it all together, but sometimes I think we leave the market organization’s own story behind. In order for it to be seen as a community asset, it is important that those who use it understand that money must be raised, partnerships have to be managed, and logistical issues are constant. So tell the story of the market and producers in words and pictures to audiences that are interested in expanding its impacts to others nearby. Don’t just tell the same “product available” version week after week, month after month; mix it up and instead use your email newsletter to advocate for a single policy change or to explain the FMPP proposal process or to highlight an evolution that one of your vendors has achieved or is working on. For example, it may be a story about one of your vendors getting their products on grocery store shelves and share some of the steps in terms of policy changes or product development that it took to get that done.

mobilization: • Ask your community to send out emails and tweets when legislators or other audiences need to understand how to make community food better. • Post your municipality’s public meetings and your state’s legislative schedule and invite members of your market community to attend as a group, dropping off some of FMC advocacy materials with your market information. That way, some of you might become information providers on food and farming issues for your legislators when necessary. • Don’t rely entirely on social media to mobilize everyone: Create a phone tree among your producers and affiliated stakeholders for when you want them to call about an issue concerning the market or production. • Offer bulleted points for people to write their own emails or letters. Don’t spend time creating online petitions; legislators rarely take those seriously. They are fine to raise awareness among a group of voters but do little beyond that when it comes to policy changes.

organizing: • Build an advisory team made up of vendors, shoppers, and neighbors. If possible, include younger people like vendors’ teenage children or employees, using the time to talk about policy issues affecting your market and its producers. Ask them to write short pieces for the market’s newsletter or tag along when you do an interview about the market. You’d be surprised how quickly members of your market community will get comfortable in talking about and even for the market if you bring them along carefully and with sensitivity to their fears about public speaking. • Invite state leaders to open the season (even for year-round markets) at the market with a ribbon-cutting ceremony or a bell-ringing. Ask a vendor board member or longtime shopper to spend a few minutes showing the leaders around. • Use Dot Surveys to regularly ask visitors and vendors questions about local issues and not always about food or farming. Post the responses and share them with the municipality.

as coalition members

advocacy: Don’t Hide the Hard Work. • Team up with the area’s intermediate buyers like restaurants to build support for farmers using multiple sales outlets. Ask those chefs and store buyers to use their social media sites to talk about the daily work of the market and your farmers.

mobilization: • Share data on your market impacts with your fellow markets and other food and farming advocates. • Organize a “rapid response team”for misleading stories about markets or farmers to give some context or analysis for the media or the market community. • Create a shared google calendar for writing letters to editors, to legislators and to your state’s policymakers on food and farming.

organizing: • Become members of an active market coalition and of at least one coalition where good food is not the primary goal; make sure any coalition you join is actively working on solutions for markets, producers or shoppers, and inclusive and transparent in its process. In those cases where it is less useful to meet regularly with nearby markets, focus on joining larger coalitions- like FMC of course!- but also try to find markets across the US that are similar to yours in terms of size, age or intent and organize yourself into an issue group. • Encourage your active community members to add a food and farming approach to their work if they are part of other groups, like anti-fracking, safe streets, immigration or in networking events for different professions (i.e. architects specializing in green building or recreational fishers) • Organize an event to show what a local food system looks and acts using as a toy village set up at your town hall or at the community center. Show some of the many, many films on food and farming now available.

This is only the beginning of the conversation. Be prepared to hear more from me and others about the need for our market leaders to engage on many issues outside market day. Remember too that markets are already “ahead” of many other organizers in that our work is all about being bridge-builders and working with people with a wide range of goals and perspectives. Let’s use our place in the public arena to connect more people and to build support for food sovereignty and active citizenship. And remind each other to not to allow “naive cynicism” to cloud our future or to limit the possibilities for action.

P.S. Hopefully most of you saw this on various listserves from Debbie Hillman but I think it bears reposting as often as possible:

Post election, this seems a good moment for U.S. food-and-farm activists to compare how federal resources are used on a regional (or state) level, especially whether these resources are

— truly accessible to anyone and everyone

— truly responsive to food-and-farm activists and practitioners.

In this email, I am focusing on the seven regional offices of USDA’s Food & Nutrition Service (FNS), which is the primary federal division that focuses on food access — the food side of the food-and-farm dyad.

1. USDA FNS REGIONAL OFFICEsHere is a list of the seven USDA FNA Regional Offices:

Mid-Atlantic (Robbinsville, NJ), Midwest (Chicago, IL), Mountain Plains (Denver, CO), Northeast (Boston, MA), Southeast (Atlanta, GA), Southwest (Dallas, TX), Western (San Francisco, CA)See https://www.fns.usda.gov/fns-regional-offices for a list of the states served by each.

2. QUESTIONS to spark reflection and sharing

What do USDA FNS Regional offices do for food-and-farm activists?

How do activists in each region engage with the regional offices?

What can we learn from each other, region to region?

In 2017, what do we want to maintain in our regional offices?

In 2017, what do we want to put in place in our regional offices?

3. MIDWEST OFFICE EXAMPLE: GoodGreens (OH, IN, MI, IL, WI, MN)

To kickstart the conversation, here is a description of GoodGreens, a monthly networking event (plus monthly newsletters), hosted by the Midwest Office of USDA FNS. I have written about GoodGreens before, but have never asked about other regional offices. In my opinion, GoodGreens is a win-win model of government staff engaging with residents.

Official description: GoodGreens – Supporting local food systems in the Midwest RegionGoodGreens is a collaboration facilitated by the USDA Food and Nutrition Service Midwest Region to share resources and best practices that support sustainable local foods production and increase consumption of healthy, locally grown foods. GoodGreens meetings are held monthly in person at the USDA Midwest Regional Office in downtown Chicago and via conference call.

WHAT

— Monthly networking meetings open to anyone (every month except December)

— Monthly newsletters (usually 2 per month)

— Occasional special notices (new USDA grant cycle, events)

WHO

Public Affairs Office (Alan Shannon, Public Affairs Director)

USDA FNS Midwest Office

PRACTICAL BENEFITS TO REGIONAL ACTIVISTS

— Regular and easy-to-ready information (including meeting agendas and minutes)

— Meet or learn about other activists (people, organizations, businesses, projects)

— Connect niche areas (farm-to-school, urban agriculture, food hubs, etc.)

— Connect geographically (find potential partners in same state, county, municipality, etc.)

— Share details of your work (presentation at meetings, announcement through newsletter, etc.)

— Access to information about current resources (jobs, grants, events, etc.)

— Food justice activists learn about farm justice

— Farm justice activists learn about food justice

— Mutual learning among rural, urban, suburban communities

— Meetings are well organized but informal, held in a circle (conference call capability for people who can’t come to the office)

— Easy coalition building – no one is excluded

PRACTICAL BENEFITS TO USDA FNS REGIONAL OFFICE

— Easy way for regional office to learn about new food-and-farm initiatives

— Creates database and regional and state-by-state snapshot of food-and-farm issues

— Professional development for government staff: observe and learn the interconnection of everything and everyone in the food system

— Non-partisan (office is a facilitator, not a promoter of any agenda)

COST

— Free to activists

— Little additional cost (if any) to USDA FNS regional office

HISTORY

GoodGreens began in 2007 as a collaboration between the USDA FNS Regional Office and a Chicago Congressman (Bobby Rush, 1st Cong. District – IL). I believe that Cong. Rush was getting a lot of requests from constituents about food-and-farm issues. Like most urban people in the U.S. (who are trained to be ignorant of the food-and-farm system), no one really knew what to do. So a senior staff member in Cong. Rush’s office (Anton Seals) suggested monthly networking meetings. These meetings were originally held in Cong. Rush’s office. After a couple of years, they were moved permanently to the USDA FNS Midwest Regional Office in downtown Chicago.

REPLICATION IN OTHER REGIONAL OFFICES?

I think that this model is easily replicable in other regional offices — and would even be a good model for civic engagement in most (if not all) areas of government. Getting a local Congressional representative on board might be one of the best ways to start the conversation.

Key to replicating this model is having a Public Affairs Director who is really interested in people and mutual sharing, in addition to being concerned about food access. In my opinion, we would not have GoodGreens without Alan Shannon, who set the tone for GoodGreens from the very beginning. (I sure hope we can keep him, but I’d be willing to share if he can help other government offices learn how easy it is to engage with the people they’re supposed to serve.)

SAMPLE NEWSLETTER: Jan. 26, 2017 meeting

Here is a link to the most recent GoodGreens newsletter (now on Constant Contact):

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/GoodGreens–New-Grants–Opportunities–News–January-26th-Meeting-Info—More.html?soid=1123821222616&aid=Y1jEVdlwkIs

Contains:

— Agenda for Jan. 26, 2017 meeting

— News, Resources, Grants, and More….

— Sign-up to receive future newsletters

4. OTHER USDA FNS REGIONAL OFFICES?

I’d be interested to hear about what’s going on in the other six USDA FNS Regional Offices. Maybe activists in the Midwest Region would want to borrow from the other offices. I’m pretty sure that others on COMFOOD, FNS, and NAFSN would be interested, too. — Debbie

P.S.S. Check out Mark Bittman’s post in Civil Eats too. This is from that piece:

You can’t fix agriculture without addressing immigration and labor or without rethinking energy policies; you can’t improve diets without reducing income inequality, which in turn requires unqualified equal rights for women and minorities; you can’t encourage people to cook more at home without questioning gender roles or the double or triple shifts that poor parents often must accept to make ends meet; you can’t fully change the role of women without tackling the future of work, childcare, and education; you can’t address climate change without challenging the power of corporations and their control over the state—and, not so incidentally, without challenging Big Food. The fight for healthy diets is part and parcel of these other struggles, and it will be won or lost alongside them.

It’s all connected; the common threads are justice, fairness, and respect. “Sustainable” is a word that we must now apply to democracy itself: a nation built on perpetuating injustice and the exploitation of people and nature doesn’t qualify. And a “sustainable food system” cannot exist inside an unsustainable political and economic system.

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Health issues topped the list of scientific studies reaching wide audiences in 2016

In general, health-related studies… had more reach on social media and other online platforms than other scientific studies. Seven of the top 11 most-discussed scientific studies for the year focused on health, as did fully 59 of the top 100. Together, these studies covered a wide spectrum of health-related subjects.

The second-most-discussed health article after the one by Obama was about the prevalence of hospital medical errors, a problem the authors determined was the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

The fifth ranked article was a historical analysis claiming the sugar industry had sponsored research dating back to the 1950s aimed at downplaying the possible links between sucrose and coronary heart disease.

ft_most-read-journal

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The Farm-To-Table Movement and Rural Gentrification

Nice article on food-based communities cropping up in rural areas, although I am bit puzzled by the choice of title.
In many ways, rural places are in a better position to build an entire system that supports the farmer than the urban garden movement has been able to do. There, one can start with the farm and the farmer and build out in an expanding set of connected circles.
Of course, we need all types of food production in our regions; urban, suburban and rural and building prototypes of each is the first step to that.The next step will be to then connect these local food systems into a regional system which has been done in very few instances.
I know the Saxapahaw model and even wrote about the store and farm in an
https://darlenewolnik.com/?s=saxapahaw on here. I have also written about the tension that arises when a rural farm community adds these innovative entrepreneurial outlets; in a book that Ben Hewitt wrote about Hardwick VT.

Source: The Farm-To-Table Movement and Rural Gentrification – CityLab

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Catalyzing Health Care Investment in Healthier Food Systems

Health Care Without Harm is undertaking a national study of non-profit hospitals’ community benefit practices to improve healthy food access and reduce risk of diet-related disease.

In this three-year project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Health Care Without Harm is conducting a national study of non-profit hospitals’ community benefit practices targeted to strengthening food system resilience and sustainability, improving physical and economic access to healthy foods, and promoting healthier dietary patterns and healthy body weight. Through a national survey, in-depth interviews, and case studies, the study will identify best hospital community benefit practices as well as model programs promoting sustainable and healthy food systems.

Survey invitations will be sent to a random sample of tax-exempt hospitals to learn about how hospitals include food insecurity, healthy food access, and diet-related health conditions in their community health needs assessments and implementation plans. Findings will be made available through various learning networks, including Community Commons.

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Farmer gives away harvest to feed hungry in his town

Now he’s on a mission to feed the hungry in Central Indiana. Lawler has revamped his 36-acre farm into a nonprofit operation called Brandywine Creek Farms. His goal for the first year is to donate 500,000 pounds of food, which he said is realistic based on the farm’s capacity and the addition of an army of volunteers to help through the season.

On top of that, Lawler has joined forces with Gleaners, Midwest Food Bank, Kenneth Butler Soup Kitchen and other area food banks as distribution partners.

Farmer gives away harvest to feed hungry in his town

An example of social (bridging) and human (knowledge shared) capital impacts, designed and led by a farmer.

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Food companies distort nutrition science says Nestle

…So Nestle decided to document the problem: On her blog, Food Politics, she began tracking all the industry-funded food and nutrition research she came across, paying particular attention to the number of studies that had positive results (i.e., favoring the funder).

Her findings so far are remarkable. Of the 152 industry-funded studies she has examined, 140 boast results that favor the funder. That’s more than 90 percent.

Source: Food companies distort nutrition science. Here’s how to stop them. – Vox

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What Data Can Do to Fight Poverty – The New York Times

I wonder if this research can is useful for food assistance incentive strategies: If allowing shoppers to use their incentive for any item at a market (rather than a hard commitment to just F&V) would ultimately create a more active (regular) marketgoer? And what about the search for food system leaders?

IF social scientists and policy makers have learned anything about how to help the world’s poorest people, it’s not to trust our intuitions or anecdotal evidence about what kinds of antipoverty programs are effective. Rigorous randomized evaluations of policies, however, can show us what works and what doesn’t.

Public primary school students were given the chance to deposit money weekly into a lockbox, and they were informed that their accumulated savings would be returned to them at a school-supplies fair at the beginning of the next trimester. Schools were randomly assigned to one of three groups. In the first group, students were offered a “hard” commitment: Their accumulated savings would be returned in the form of a voucher that had to be spent on school supplies. In the second group, students got a “soft” commitment: Their savings would be returned in cash, and could be spent as they wished. The third group of schools continued as normal, serving as a comparison group whose savings and spending money were also observed…. Students who got their savings back in cash saved more, and when the program was combined with parental involvement (which was also randomized), the students also bought more school supplies and achieved higher test scores.

The researchers randomly assigned some rural communities to receive advertisements for the jobs that announced opportunities for career advancement, whereas in other areas, the advertisements were silent on this issue. Contrary to expectation, the researchers reported in a working paper released last year, those recruited with “career” advertisements were more qualified and scored higher on exams during training, and also exhibited the same degree of emphasis on community service. The “go-getters” also outperformed the “do-gooders” on the job, seeing the same number of patients in their health clinics while conducting 29 percent more home visits and twice as many community health meetings.

These two insights — committing to cash savings, recruiting “go-getters” for community service jobs — are just the tip of the iceberg. We have found that pairing experts in behavioral science with “on the ground” teams of researchers and field workers has yielded many good ideas about how to address the problems of poverty. Hope and rhetoric are great for motivation, but not for figuring out what to do. There you need data.

Source: What Data Can Do to Fight Poverty – The New York Times

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as markets

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