Green Carts in New York City. Photograph courtesy of Karp Resources.
My book, Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All (PublicAffairs), examines our current food system in the United States and how it has failed to provide enough quality food, particularly for low-income, urban communities. This has in turn contributed to the increase in diet-related health problems such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. I wrote the book to help people who care about our food shift from concerned consumers to engaged citizens.
While many of us have become more conscious about the impacts of our food choices, we can’t fix the broken food system simply by changing what’s on our plate. The answer lies beyond the kitchen; it relies in our willingness to be fair food “solutionaries” in our communities, in the institutions where we work, and with policy makers. The book provides examples of new models and success stories of how solutionaries are finding ways to provide access to healthy food for our most vulnerable citizens. Two such examples are the Green Carts project in New York City and Fair Food Network’s Double Up Food Bucks program in Michigan.
In 2008, the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund provided a $1.5 million grant to help entrepreneurs go into business selling fresh produce in underserved New York City neighborhoods. The project’s goals are to provide microloans and business development assistance for 1,000 NYC Green Cart vendors, as well as communications and outreach campaigns to encourage residents to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from the cart.
Approved by the New York City Council, the Green Carts program is part of a public-private effort to make healthier food more accessible, provide new jobs and is an exciting model that seems to be working and can be replicated elsewhere.
Fair Food Network’s Double Up Food Bucks program, partly funded by a $3 million grant from Open Society Foundations, has proved a model program that provides monetary incentives to low-income shoppers, encouraging them to spend their federal food assistance dollars (also known as food stamps, now known as SNAP benefits) at farmer’s markets. When customers use their SNAP benefits at participating farmers’ markets, they receive an equal amount of tokens that can be used at the markets to purchase any fresh Michigan-grown fruit or vegetable. The program makes healthy food more accessible to low-income urban families while creating new sales opportunities for farmers, thereby supporting the local economy.
Since the program started as a pilot in the summer of 2009, at five markets in Detroit, it has grown to over 40 sites around the state. Open Society is the lead philanthropy that has made this program possible with their generous matching grant that spurred the outpouring of support from about 25 local, state, and national foundations. Augmented by an effective media campaign, Double Up Food Bucks implementation has already proved highly successful: from August to October, 2010 low-income families used SNAP dollars and matching Double Up tokens to purchase $203,451 worth of locally grown produce from 15 participating farmers’ markets, and those dollars flowed directly to small farmers and their rural communities.
You can read more about these and other programs that are making a difference in communities, institutions, and the policy arena in Fair Food. It offers a practical guide to how you can participate in collective action to precipitate big changes in our food system, from your kitchen to your community to your state house and the White House.
Stay Informed
