Food Access | Civil Eats

After the Eaton Fire, a Los Angeles Community Garden Rebuilds

Jennifer Oldham — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 08:01:31 +0000

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Five months after the second-most destructive fire in California’s history, gardeners in the hillside town of Altadena were hard at work remediating what had once been a community paradise.

An acrid smell floated on the breeze amid the calls and caws of mockingbirds, finches, and crows at the two-and-a-half-acre Altadena Community Garden, now an expanse of mostly empty soil.

Joe Nagy, a white baseball cap pulled low over his sunglasses, explained how gardeners hope oyster mushrooms will help bring the 52-year-old landmark back to life: by absorbing and clearing potential toxins from the soil.

“Some people might argue we didn’t really need to do all this, but the big picture is, we are right next to really toxic burn zones,” said Nagy, who is president of the nonprofit that operates the popular 120-member institution.

The Altadena Community Garden is now undergoing remediation. (Photo credit: Jennifer Oldham)

In January, the Eaton Fire burned through this northern Los Angeles suburb, destroying nearly 10,000 homes, businesses, and landmarks. The fire didn’t char the garden, but members worried that lead and other airborne pollutants had settled in the soil.

In the aftermath, Nagy and the community garden members were left with a quandary: How would they remediate after such an unprecedented disaster? The decision was made more difficult by the fact that many of the garden’s 82 plots, and a trellis-shaded common area, remained unscathed; one even had cabbage ready for harvest.

In April, Nagy said, gardeners donned protective equipment and removed tools and other personal items from their plots. Workers hauled away raised beds, then scraped off more than 3 inches of topsoil. Next, trucks dumped 141 tons of compost on top. The nonprofit’s members added teas, fertilizer, and worms. Finally, in June, they amended the mixture with oyster mushroom mycelium and covered it with straw. The fragile compound required constant watering to keep it alive in the hot summer sun.

Altadena gardeners (from left): Mary McGilvray, vice president of the nonprofit that operates the garden; Ardra Grubbs, a garden member for 50 years; Maria Zendejas, who makes soap from wild calendula flowers bordering the garden; Joe Nagy, president of the garden’s nonprofit; and Kurt Zubriskie, a member for nearly three years. (Photo credit: Jennifer Oldham)

It was a lot of work, requiring scores of hours of labor, a demonstration of the strong bonds among gardeners who find solace in this place. Many have tended this ground for decades, growing vegetables, herbs, and fruit year-round. They’ve shared recipes, seeds, and laughs here. One community gardener makes wine from Concord grapes that still crown a chain-link fence surrounding the garden. Another crafts soap out of calendula, a perennial daisy that blooms along the perimeter.

The gardeners include African Americans, Cameroonians, Gabonese, El Salvadorans, Eastern Europeans, and Filipinos, among others. The city itself, established at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, is home to generations of Black families, who comprise nearly two-thirds of the households within the Eaton Fire perimeter. More than half of the Altadena Community Garden’s members lost homes to the blaze.

For Mary McGilvray, vice president of the nonprofit that operates Altadena Community Garden, the remediation of the soil has given her a renewed sense of purpose upon her retirement.

“This is one of the most beautiful places in the late afternoons when the sun hits those mountains,” she said. “One of the first times I was here by myself, the mountains were purple, and these Latino men were riding their horses in their full silver regalia down the street and into the park here—and there was a guy sitting here playing the banjo, and it was absolutely magical.”

‘One of the Hardest Things Human Beings Have to Do’

African Americans established the garden in the early 1970s when local homeowners, equestrians, tennis enthusiasts, and politicians agreed to convert the site of a former military academy into a leafy haven. With tennis courts and a horse arena nearby, Black residents cultivated a few small plots, and Los Angeles County installed water lines for their use.

The space, which is both gender and politically diverse, became so coveted that some members would drive for miles to weed and water their patch of ground. In July, even with remediation underway, the waiting list held 133 names. It can take as many as three years to receive a plot.

Many plots belong to two or more gardeners, who often step in to nurture each other’s fruits and vegetables when a partner goes on vacation, gets knee surgery, or is buried in work.

“Gardeners are doing one of the hardest things that human beings have to do: share land,” said Omar Brownson, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Garden Council, which counts about a third of the region’s 150 gardens as members. “Think about all the conflict around the world. Most of it is around sharing land.”

At the Altadena garden’s 2023 summer picnic. (Photo courtesy of Altadena Community Garden)

In Altadena, even residents who aren’t members of the community garden eagerly await its reopening, particularly its famed summer picnic. “I had a wonderful experience during the last picnic when we had the public in here,” recounted Kurt Zubriskie, who is considered a “new member,” having belonged for a mere three years. “I had a fair field of strawberries, there were some kids over there stealing strawberries, and it was just wonderful—they were so happy and joyous.”

The event won’t happen this year, as gardeners patiently remediate the soil. If it tests negative for toxins later this year, the nonprofit will install a sprinkler system and, if all goes well, reopen by early next year. The group is still raising some of the money they estimate they will need to finish remediation, as well as building an office on site.

“As soon as money comes in, it goes out,” said Silvera Grant, a past president of the garden, whom members credit with helping to transform the institution from “one of privilege” to one where access is equal for all.

The Jamaican-born grandfather shares his space with several others, including Alan Freeman, a retired theater teacher and playwright. Grant invited Freeman, who belongs to his church, to join the garden about a dozen years ago.

“I brought flowers to his garden. He doesn’t really like flowers because he can’t eat them—but I like a little bit of color,” Freeman said as he sat next to Grant and other gardeners around a concrete picnic table, as purple blooms drifted down from a jacaranda tree.

Both men are taking advantage of this downtime to help other members expand a fruit orchard outside the garden’s fence, where the public will be able to pick plums, apricots, avocados, and more, for free. An education program is also in the works, as is a community crop swap and food share.

For now, gardeners are working to bring back what was lost. When the soil is ready, Freeman will plant flowers, and Grant will sow pepper seeds among them, an embodiment of the longstanding communal ethos of the garden. “When I first came to the garden,” Grant recalled, “a gardener said to me, ‘Silvera, when you plant, you plant for yourself, and you plant for everyone else.’”

The post After the Eaton Fire, a Los Angeles Community Garden Rebuilds appeared first on Civil Eats.

Farmers of Color Offer Community Wellness at ‘Healing Farms’

Nicole J. Caruth — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:01:13 +0000

On a drizzly spring morning in North Carolina, the land at Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens is alive with activity. Bees hum inside wooden hives while chickens forage, exposing the rich black soil. Vegetables and herbs fill the air with the aromas of mint and rosemary.

At the center of it all are farmers Hector Lopez and Phoebe Gooding, who say growing food is but one part of their mission on this urban permaculture farm. “We’re here to heal our bodies, the land, and our communities,” Lopez said, gently chewing a mint leaf he had just picked.

Set on 1.3 acres outside the couple’s split-level brick home in Durham, Hawk’s Nest welcomes community members for regular events rooted in spirituality. At the back of their property, between a towering teepee and piles of compost, is a dome-like structure made from bent branches. Here the couple regularly offer a temazcal, an ancient sweat lodge ceremony for physical and spiritual purification that Lopez has facilitated for decades.

“We’re producing this food for healing our bodies, but it’s not just that,” Gooding said. “This is about a whole ecosystem of healing.”

Rosemary, mint, and other herbs flourish in garden beds near a mobile chicken coop at Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens. (Photo credit: Nicole J. Caruth)

Across the country, farmers of color like Lopez and Gooding are using their farms as centers for community wellness and collective healing. Through workshops, retreats, and immersive experiences, they’re making space for their neighbors and broader community to address everything from racial trauma to burnout to traumatic brain injuries.

In communities of color, where generations of environmental racism and inadequate resources have led to issues like high food insecurity and chronic illnesses, healing-centered farms are more than just nice to have—they’re deeply needed.

“We’re producing food for healing our bodies, but it’s not just that. This is about a whole ecosystem of healing.”

A number of authors have written about land-based healing recently, with notable titles from botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, herbalist Michele E. Lee, and farmer Leah Penniman. What they all point out is that land has been more than just a resource across cultures and time; it’s also been a healing force for bodies, minds, and spirits. But as colonization and urban industrialization disconnect people from the land, they’re also distanced from their ancestral traditions.

Now, farmers and land stewards of color are reclaiming Indigenous knowledge, taking control over their health through holistic remedies, and building spaces for rest and creative expression. By helping others heal, these farmers say they’re also healing themselves.

Coping with Tragedy

Many such farms trace their beginning back to the COVID-19 pandemic. Witnessing widespread suffering and the higher death toll among people of color was a catalyst for action, as social systems failed to provide the care and resources communities needed.

“So much was lost,” said Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, a Filipina American farmer, activist, and former Asian American studies professor at the University of California, Davis. “All of our people were dying as a consequence of the pandemic, but [also] all the failures of the system.”

For Rodriguez, the pandemic hit particularly hard. Two months after the police murder of George Floyd, amid global protests and a rising death toll, Rodriguez experienced a personal tragedy: her 22-year-old son, Amado Khaya, died from septic shock that may have been exacerbated by COVID-19.

She took up farming to process her grief and honor her son—an activist who was living and working alongside Indigenous land defenders and farmers in the Philippines. “I needed to touch life,” Rodriguez said. “I needed to be in a space where I could see life proliferate despite it all.”

Rodriguez eventually left her full-time job at the university and, along with her husband, Joshua Vang, a second-generation Hmong refugee and naturalist, founded Remagination Farm in Northern California. On the 8.5 acres they now steward, they raise goats and cultivate crops using regenerative practices.

“It’s not just a farm where you go to learn about planting seeds,” said Stephanie Garma Balon, a Filipina American arts therapist, just days after participating in a weekend retreat for mothers at Remagination Farm. “Being there is a return to self, to ancestors, and right relationship to the land.”

The retreat was organized by Raising Ancestors, a group of parents, caregivers, and activists dedicated to breaking cycles of oppression, Balon said.

Remagination Farm’s website describes it as not only a farm but also “a learning center, healing and arts space” aimed at reconnecting people of color with the land. Educational workshops offer lessons on, among other things, the principles of healing justice. Harvest festivals, film screenings, and fishing lessons invite people to visit for a few hours.

Those looking for a longer stay can book the Amado Khaya Healing House, a two-story home near the farm that was established for activists and organizers to rest and rejuvenate.

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Joshua Vang at Remagination Farm. (Photo courtesy of Remagination Farm)

“I feel so empowered by being in this space,” said Balon, who is the founder of Kapwa Kultural Center, a mental health and wellness space for Filipino youth in Daly City. “The pandemic taught me that we can reclaim the way that our ancestors lived—and we’re able to embody that at Remagination Farm.”

Rodriguez has found the pace of farming healing, too. “There is really something to be said about being present with the life cycle as a farmer that can be deeply healing,” she said. “Planting and harvesting and starting again really gets you to a different place.”

Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous peoples around the world have coexisted with nature for millennia, seeing their care for the land as central to their well-being. But according to Lopez of Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens, initiatives like the Green Revolution—a mid-20th-century movement that promoted chemical-intensive agriculture, beginning in Mexico—contributed to generations of disconnection from these ways of living and knowing.

Born in Mexico City, Lopez grew up unaware of his Indigenous heritage. “When they moved into the city, they abandoned their communities, their languages, and their traditions,” Lopez said, referring in part to his family, some of whom had farmed in mountainous regions.

Now, more than two decades later, he walks the damp earth at Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens in knee-high rubber boots, explaining how Indigenous agroecology—or what’s widely known as regenerative farming—influences every aspect of his and Gooding’s urban farm.

“We are taking back all this knowledge,” Lopez says. “All these things that we always did.”

At Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens, chickens live in a mobile coop that the farmers rotate across the property, enhancing soil health. (Photo credit: Nicole J. Caruth)

On the western side of their farm, medicinal herbs grow alongside blueberries and beehives. On the other side, leafy greens, corn, cucumbers, hibiscus, and loofah grow in a high tunnel alongside a bounty of herbs, including arnica, basil, lemongrass, and lemon balm. An outdoor compost toilet and a rainwater catchment system work together to cycle nutrients back into the earth.

Just as important to this system are the community events that bring neighbors onto the land.

Recently, Lopez and Gooding have offered seed blessing ceremonies and Día de los Muertos altar workshops. This year, Lopez is hosting a new healing series specifically for men, pairing talking circles with sweat lodge ceremonies over five months. According to the website, this is meant to help men unburden themselves of a toxic masculinity that “distances them from their full humanity” and allows them to shift from “conquerors” to “caretakers.”

Gooding said their sweat lodges tend to attract those already on a healing journey—people who tell her, “I needed this,” or “I’ve been wanting something like this.”

The dome at Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens, constructed from bent branches, will be covered with cloth for sweat lodge ceremonies. (Photo credit: Nicole J. Caruth)

Ina Maka, a third-generation farmer and wellness practitioner with African American, Choctaw, and Caribbean ancestry, participates in sweat lodge ceremonies at Hawk’s Nest almost monthly and recognizes a difference in herself since starting the practice.

“The sweat lodge allows me to release things at a quicker rate,” she said, naming anxiousness, overwhelm, and generational pain and trauma among the burdens that come up during the ceremonies. “I’ve seen a lot of change in my life.”

Maka drives 1.5 hours to get to Hawk’s Nest from her home in Tarborough, North Carolina, and despite the distance, has built a “sisterhood” with women she’s met there “because they’ve been vulnerable with each other,” she said. “Sitting in a circle with other people and not being afraid to sweat or cry or scream has been healing.”

Bringing Herbal Remedies to Modern Medicine

Americans are increasingly seeking alternatives to modern medicine for physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. According to a 2022 survey by the National Institutes of Health, traditional healing methods, including yoga, acupuncture, and naturopathy, are gaining popularity, especially among people in search of pain relief. In the last 20 years, the number of people using complementary health approaches for pain grew by about 7 percent, the study stated.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Bernadette Lim, a trained physician, has observed this trend firsthand. “People don’t want to constantly be dependent on another person to save their health,” she said. “People want to learn how to become their own healers.”

“People don’t want to constantly be dependent on another person to save their health. People want to learn how to become their own healers.”

Amid growing interest in holistic healing methods, there’s been a renewed focus on herbalism, with many seeking care that reflects their cultural roots and ancestral wisdom. Ostensibly, it’s also easier access. Herbal medicine is typically more affordable than pharmaceuticals and doesn’t require health insurance, both of which can be major barriers for people of color.

Lim is the founder of Freedom Community Clinic (FCC), a nonprofit that bridges ancestral practices with modern approaches to health, particularly for Black, Brown, Native, and immigrant communities. Last January, FCC announced the opening of Ancestral Healing Farm Sanctuary, an acre of land in Orinda, about ten minutes outside Oakland, where they cultivate ancestral medicinal plants from around the world, such as those used for traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicines.

The farm isn’t designed for distribution, but rather as a holistic wellness space for experiencing land-based practices rooted in various healing traditions. June featured a workshop on vinegar extractions for healthy plants and soil.

A month before that, FCC invited its followers to gather for a workshop on bee stewardship. Plants harvested at the farm supply the organization’s apothecary in Oakland, where people can access herbs—and the expertise of local herbalists—at no charge.

FCC’s efforts appear to be having a positive impact. Lim says demand for their services has consistently exceeded their capacity. Meanwhile, Marakee Tilahun, FCC’s director of land and community stewardship, said many express to her that the farm has given them a place to feel balanced and more at ease.

“A lot of people who come to me feel so joyous for the opportunity to be on the land and for free,” Tilahun said. “They don’t need to buy anything to be here; they can just exist.”

Women making medicine bags filled with herbs and stones on Native Women’s Wellness Day at Remagination Farm, June 2025. (Photo courtesy of Remagination Farm)

Healers Need Healing, Too

Back at Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens, Lopez and Gooding reflected on a central paradox for farmers who care for others: They both need care themselves.

On the one hand, farming and making space for others to experience land-based healing is a therapeutic experience. “We heal ourselves by helping others,” Lopez said. On the other hand, the labor of growing and selling food, stewarding land, fundraising to sustain it, and holding emotional space for others can be exhausting.

To support their efforts, the couple relies on the community they’ve cultivated to pour into them as they have poured into their community.

For Gooding, this reciprocity is embodied in their sweat lodge, built with the help of friends. Its heavy stones and bent-branch structure represent both the labor of creating a sacred space and the collective energy it takes to heal.

Surrounded by rows of vegetables and fresh herbs, the couple expressed gratitude for community and reverence for Mother Earth, especially during this time of environmental and political upheaval.

“She’s the boss here,” Lopez said, gesturing to the ground and the sky. Gooding nodded in agreement, adding, “And I think she’s telling us we have a lot of healing to do.”

The post Farmers of Color Offer Community Wellness at ‘Healing Farms’ appeared first on Civil Eats.

How Libraries Are Creating Community Through Food

Liz Susman Karp — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:01:38 +0000

For the last five years, Michelle Coleman has attended cooking and culinary education classes in a light-filled teaching kitchen at her local library in Boston. The kitchen, designed for hands-on cooking and demonstrations with four gas cooktops and a 17-foot-long counter, was included in the building’s redesign in 2020 in response to community feedback.

Here Coleman learned how to compost and repurpose leftovers, thereby reducing her food waste, a bonus to learning about new foods and flavor profiles.

“Cooking in public spaces is really fun,” says Coleman, a retired academic medicine administrator who owns over 300 cookbooks. She enjoys combining her love of cooking with being social. “The library has become this much broader social space for people to feel supported and in community.”

The Schuylerville Library in Schuylerville, New York, features a community fridge. (Photo courtesy of Farm-2-Library)

Across the country, libraries are using culinary programs to evolve beyond traditional book-lending, adapt to users’ needs, and reshape themselves into contemporary centers of community. Events have generally centered on cookbook or food memoir discussions, perhaps sharing dishes connected to the title, but libraries are increasingly expanding this concept.

For example, some libraries in New York’s Hudson Valley are hosting cider and cheese tastings in a nod to the area’s prolific agricultural scene and experimenting with family-friendly supper clubs. Many are offering programs that help people fight food insecurity and learn wellness and life skills.

Others may give out seeds and spices, lend out kitchen equipment, or host free pantries or grocery stores.

These efforts come amid the declining use of libraries, which are also facing attacks from conservative groups seeking to ban books and even defund libraries. Regular library visits nationwide decreased by 46.5 percent between 2019 and 2022, according to the 2022 Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Public Library Survey. However, recent data shows an upswing as branches reconsider their roles and communities’ needs.

“The reason that people come into their libraries changes, and it’s different and unique to the community that’s being served,” says American Library Association President Sam Helmick. “We should always be asking who’s not at the table and inviting them [in].”

Models for Food Literacy at Libraries

Elizabeth Marshak is the assistant head of the Free Library of Philadelphia Culinary Literacy Center, which in 2014 pioneered the idea of using cooking in a library to develop knowledge and competencies within the Philadelphia community.

You need literacy to cook, she says. “You’re reading the recipe or following directions, gathering your ingredients. There’s organization, a lot of different skills that get improved by cooking,” she notes.

The Culinary Literacy Center features a well-stocked commercial kitchen with seating for 35, a demonstration kitchen, classroom space, prep space, a walk-in refrigerator, and a dishwashing room. It has three Charlie Carts, mobile electric kitchens inspired by the iconic cowboy chuckwagon. The center also has three toolboxes with electric skillets, cutting boards, and other small kitchen tools that are deployed to library branches for simple cooking programs.

Every month, the center offers more than 30 programs for adults and children, from nutrition education to cooking with a local chef, funded by the library, grants, and the center’s rental revenue. Since 2015, the center has also offered Edible Alphabet, a free eight-week, English-language learning program that began as a way to help refugee women in Philadelphia find community. The program is now available to anyone who wants to learn English.

The Pember Library in Granville, New York, offers a variety of cooking workshops, including this one on canning. (Photo courtesy of Farm-2-Library)

The center has become a model for libraries around the nation, including for the Boston Public Library’s Nutrition Literacy program, where Coleman takes classes. Stephanie Chace, who runs the Boston program, says its events reflect a belief that nutritional literacy should include a cultural understanding of food. The lab hosts ayurvedic wellness cooking workshops for new mothers and multi-series offerings like “Navigating Diabetes Through Food and Community.”

The latter, a one-time only course, combined medical professionals, nutritionists, movement specialists, and discussions about African diaspora and African food with renowned culinary historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris.

“I think people feel understood by the library when these programs are offered,” Chace says, adding that this encourages them to return.

The Nutrition Literacy program also features a chef in residence, who researches food topics and creates recipes and classes around them. The current resident is Kayla Tabb, a pastry chef and recipe developer who is studying Indigenous shoreline foods of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Through an anonymous $500,000 grant, the program is growing, with additional staffing and a pilot program of five mobile kitchen kits. They consist of easily transportable equipment like induction cooktops and blenders and can be requested by a branch librarian.

Catering to Each Community’s Needs

Across the country, libraries have long been trusted, accessible, and free repositories of resources and information, a democratized space for all. Library administrators look to see what a community needs or lacks “and how we can solve these problems,” says Jack Scott, outreach consultant for the Southern Adirondack Library System in New York.

He oversees Farm-2-Library, which delivers rescued food to 13 libraries for locals to pick up, helping solve problems with food distribution in this rural region.

At the Terrytown Library outside New Orleans, culinary education has blossomed into two weekly children’s cooking classes serving 48 kids, adult culinary and nutrition classes, and a community teaching garden that produces vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers.

In the four years since the library began offering culinary education, branch visitation has increased, and physical circulation of materials such as books, DVDs, magazines, and the Library of Things collection has jumped 9.5 percent, says Bethany Lopreste, the library’s manager. The Library of Things allows patrons to sign out items used in daily living, such as kitchen equipment or home improvement tools.

Programs like these help people make proactive choices in their own lives, she added.

“Teaching someone how to cook, how to garden, and how to encourage and include their families to participate is really impactful.”

“Teaching someone how to cook, how to garden, and how to encourage and include their families to participate is really impactful,” Lopreste says.

Learning cooking and self-expression in a safe space are “life skills they can take forward with them,” says Athena Riesenberg, who runs a popular teen cooking program at the Des Moines Public Library’s Franklin branch. During National Poetry Month, for example, attendees baked fortune cookies and wrote their own fortunes. Riesenberg saw how the program fostered camaraderie among participants, one of whom is heading to culinary school after high school.

The Central Arkansas Library System, whose motto is “The Library, Rewritten,” views the library’s role as a community wellness and information hub. Librarians there are information specialists for the community’s day-to-day needs, explains Jessica Frazier-Emerson, coordinator of Be Mighty, an anti-hunger program serving 14 libraries in Little Rock.

According to the Public Library Association’s 2022 services survey, 31.6 percent of libraries say food insecurity is a need they currently address.

“Libraries are accessible, which makes them ideal for food and resource distribution,” Frazier-Emerson says. “They are also bound to only offer no cost and identification-free programming, which also lends to equitable food distribution.”

What Happens When Federal Funding Stops?

The Be Mighty program provides after-school and summer meals for children through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, application and interview assistance for public benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), community refrigerators, little free pantries, nutrition and trauma-informed cooking classes, and free monthly bus passes.

With the recent federal cuts to SNAP benefits, however, Frazier-Emerson worries that she may have to reduce the number of branches that Be Mighty serves.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill didn’t cut funding to the Child and Adult Care Food Program or the SUN Meals, which supply meals to the Be Mighty sites, but Frazier-Emerson is unsure the programs will remain unscathed.

SNAP-Ed, a federal grant program that teaches SNAP recipients how to stretch their SNAP dollars and cook healthy meals, has had its funding eliminated. SNAP-Ed supported some Be Mighty partners, including Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, so Be Mighty now offers fewer offsite cooking and nutrition classes.

There are no provisions in the federal bill that directly affect library funding nationally, but the burden it adds on state and local governments imperils support for libraries and other essential infrastructure. Separately, though, the federal government withheld funding earlier this year from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which funnels money to state libraries to use and distribute. And the greater concern is for 2026—when IMLS may be eliminated.

The Schuylerville Library in Schuylerville, New York, regularly distributes fresh fruit and cookbooks. (Photo courtesy of Farm-2-Library)

As a result, the New York State Library anticipates losing $8.1 million. At the Southern Adirondack Library System, operations could be crippled, since the funding supports 55 of 80 jobs, including those responsible for processing construction grants, Scott says. Many projects could remain incomplete.

In Arkansas, smaller libraries will feel the greatest impact because they won’t be able to purchase their own databases or digital platforms without the funding, says Tameka Lee, communications director at the Central Arkansas Library System. “Cuts could mean fewer materials and less access for communities that rely on libraries,” she says.

Be Mighty is mainly funded by the city, and to date Frazier-Emerson has not received any indication that it won’t continue to receive support.

“It’s especially important in communities that don’t have a lot of third spaces that already exist,” Frazier-Emerson says. “Access to healthy food, nutrition, and food science, [and] knowing how food works in our bodies—what we need to get through the day, ratios, protein, all that fun stuff—should be free and accessible to the public.”

The Des Moines Public Library’s Franklin branch offers the Teen Chef program, which teaches young people how to make a variety of foods, including twists on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with different nut butters and jams, gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches, and different types of smoothies. (Photo courtesy of the Des Moines Public Library)

Using Food to Gather Together

In the Hudson Valley, resident Lenny Sutton has seen how food can help build community and relationships. He created cookbook and supper clubs at three local libraries, which he runs each month as a volunteer, drawing from his experiences of cooking in restaurants and boarding schools for nearly 35 years.

“I’ve always enjoyed interacting with people about food,” Sutton says. “It’s a very easy way into a conversation.”

The supper clubs are freeform and encourage participants to be creative in their cooking, with monthly themes like beans, fermented foods, and cheese. He’s watched family bonding as a mother and daughter tried different recipes and learned to cook together. The club inspired one cooking aficionado to get a library card and attend other library programs.

“I’ve seen her grow with the library in a way that I’m hoping we helped facilitate,” Sutton says.

The cookbook club focuses on a single cookbook, with members preparing recipes for a group tasting and a “nitty gritty” discussion about the ingredients, recipes, and photos. Sutton relishes connecting with home cooks who want to expand their knowledge.

“I love using cookbooks as a way to peek into other chefs and their skills and where they come from.”

“I love using cookbooks as a way to peek into other chefs and their skills and where they come from,” he says.

These meaningful experiences prompted him to launch a monthly newsletter, and he maintains cookbookclubs.org, which includes meeting dates for six area groups, information about how to start a club, and suggestions for themes and events.

He sees the clubs as filling a need in a society that is less religious today. “The church potluck has been around for years and years,” he says, and adds, “Folks are looking for a way to have pieces of that [church] lifestyle that they miss or built up.”

Lopreste, in New Orleans, notes how the classes and the teaching garden—the building of a shared place together—planted real roots at the library for participants.

“When people take that amount of pride in a community space,” she says, “it truly becomes a hub of community activity amongst people, who are maybe more disparate than you would expect, to come together almost like a little library family.”

An earlier version of this story stated that in 2026, the Institute of Museum and Library Services would be eliminated. Although that is a possibility, its future has not yet been determined.

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Disasters Block Local Food Access. One Groundbreaking Group Has a Solution.

Elizabeth Doerr — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:01:11 +0000

In October 2017, the Tubbs Fire in Northern California burned more than 36,000 acres and a large part of suburban Santa Rosa, forcing around 100,000 people to evacuate their homes. Grocery stores, restaurants, and farmers’ markets had to close, and because farmers were unable to get their crops to these vendors, the produce languished on their farms. Meanwhile, displaced residents who had lost their homes and jobs suddenly found themselves struggling to find food.

The local food system was not set up for emergencies. This realization was catalyzing for Julia Van Soelen Kim, a social scientist and food systems advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Napa County, who saw the great abundance available yet no systems to get it to people in need.

“The event magnified and intensified the inequalities in food access and the abundance that our local food system could provide in emergencies,” Van Soelen Kim says.

In typical emergency response larger relief organizations—such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Red Cross, Salvation Army, and state entities—take charge of large-scale feeding. They will use food that might be locally or regionally available from larger chains, but not food sourced directly from area farmers—and there’s no set way for these farmers to get their food to people in their communities.

What’s more, when outside organizations without the proper connections try to start moving food from farms to food banks, it often doesn’t work, Van Soelen Kim says. “They’re just picking up the food and don’t know how the farmer is going to get paid,” she says. While there is a role for these large-scale feeding organizations, she says, “we just want to make sure that they have access to local foods.”

To try to improve the system, Van Soelen Kim created the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership to connect emergency management and local food-system professionals. The goal of the partnership is to enable the distribution of locally produced food in the wake of disaster. For both fields, this represents a novel collaboration.

Julia Van Soelen Kim, founder of the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership, leads a workshop for food system and emergency response workers at the Partnership’s May 2025 convening. (Photo courtesy of The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership)

A Landscape Vulnerable to Climate Change

Just north of the San Francisco Bay area, the landscape consists of small fishing towns set amid a dramatic coastline, where waves crash against craggy cliffs. Here, the vineyards and orchards of Marin, Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino counties transition into the forests and tribal lands of Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

While the region is popular with tourists thanks to its coastal location, wineries, and redwoods, the North Coast is very rural. Aside from the communities just outside the Bay Area, the median household income is well below the state average.

Alongside the ever-present threat of earthquakes, the region is especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Fires are a worry not just during the hot, dry summers, but year-round, and the coastal landscape is prone to landslides during heavy rains.

Nationwide, climate disasters are increasingly forcing communities to deal with large-scale emergencies, like the floods of Hurricane Helene, the wildfires that ripped through Los Angeles, and the floods in Central Texas after intense rainfall from Tropical Storm Barry. In such emergencies, food distribution is a major concern, and the model that the partnership is developing could serve as a solution across the country.

Suzanne Grady, program director at Petaluma Bounty, a food aid program and emergency food hub, says developing a resilient local food system prior to emergencies helps local food find its way to people after disaster.

“It just seems that we have been set up to rely too heavily upon groups and agencies that come in, potentially flood the area with resources that may or may not be needed, and then leave sometimes just as quickly,” Grady says. “It actually interferes with the local recovery efforts.”

While these relief organizations are necessary for disaster response writ large, she says, if there’s a resilient food system in place, the incoming groups could tap into that local system already in operation.

Boxes of shiitake mushrooms that Mycality Mushrooms donated to survivors of the 2022 earthquakes in Humboldt, CA. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)

Transforming Regional Food Systems to Prepare for Disaster

Typically, those who work in food systems—farmers, food policy council members, food hub coordinators, farmers’ market managers, and food pantry managers—rarely, if ever, cross professional paths with emergency management workers. The North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership is meant to change that, creating a way for these different regional entities to meet, connect, and strategize.

The majority of the $1.5 million in funding for the project comes from the USDA’s Regional Food Systems Partnership Program, and the rest consists of local grants and matching funds from regional organizations and community foundations. As of this writing, the USDA funding has remained intact, despite the administration’s shift in priorities.

In mid-August, in fact, Van Soelen Kim received news that the program received a no-cost extension from the USDA, meaning that instead of having to scale back or end their activities, they have one more year to carry out their work using what’s remaining of their existing funding.

“We have been set up to rely too heavily upon groups and agencies that come in, potentially flood the area with resources that may or may not be needed, and then leave, sometimes just as quickly. It actually interferes with the local recovery efforts.”

Van Soelen Kim and her colleagues are taking full advantage if the extension by focusing on three goals: building a “community of practice” among emergency management and daily food-operations professionals to collaborate on emergency feeding plans; establishing the technical assistance needed for food distribution systems to pivot after disaster; and shifting local government policy to incorporate local food distribution as central to emergency plans.

Van Soelen Kim has seen almost immediate results from the community of practice goal in particular. Partnership members meet by virtual calls quarterly and in person annually. While 250 people are on the member list, typically around 75 people participate in each meeting. Together, they discuss topics around local food systems and disaster response and build relationships with each other.

“This North Coast Regional Partnership has opened the doors for a lot of relationships and networking that is invaluable to the development of this local group,” says Robert Sataua, the emergency food response coordinator for Food for People, Humboldt County’s food bank. “It’s not something that’s a metric that you can put on paper, but I think the momentum is there.”

Emergency food boxes outside the Family Resource Center of the Redwoods food bank during California’s Smith Complex Fire in 2023. The white board shows the number of emergency food boxes distributed to rural communities in Del Norte County. (Photo credit: Iya Mahan)

Most of Humbolt County, which is rural and rugged outside the port city of Eureka, is susceptible to disasters like fires and winter storms. Local producers raise and harvest livestock, dairy, a diverse array of crops, and oysters, yet a 2019 U.C. Davis report shows that one in five Humboldt County residents lives in a low-income area with limited access to food, especially fresh food. During emergencies, disparate relief organizations worked in a vacuum and most food came from outside Humboldt County.

Sataua, networking with colleagues in other organizations through the partnership, helped develop a multi-agency feeding plan to supplement regional and community disaster response. In Humboldt County, the new plan lays out strategies and guidance that will minimize duplication, coordinate resources, and deliver food and water efficiently.

With this plan, food systems and emergency management folks get on the same page before disaster strikes. Coordinated preparation helps farmers sell their food in a disaster and residents to more easily find out where and how to access it.

‘When Something Happens, We Know Who to Call’

Iya Mahan is the program director for the Del Norte and Tribal Lands Community Food Council (DNATL Food Council), an organization that strategizes to make the food system more local and equitable in her community. Her work with the Partnership inspired the creation of an emergency feeding task force for Del Norte County, another rural, rugged area, on the Oregon border.

The task force—which involved multiple parties including the Office of Emergency Services, the Department of Health and Human Services, two county food banks, and tribal communities—created a Multi-Agency Disaster Feeding Plan (MADFP), and now meets monthly to coordinate and discuss emergency feeding efforts and ways to strengthen resilience.

The plan is more than a document, Mahan says. “It’s a community-built roadmap for action. Developed by local organizations and government partners working side by side, it has strengthened relationships, clarified roles, and prepared us to respond quickly in a crisis.”

The relationships that members are developing are key, she says. “When something happens, we know who to call, and we know how to communicate with them—we’ve already built the relationship. So, we’re seeing a lot of strength in that soft infrastructure of relationship building.”

One example is the relationship between the DNATL Food Council and the school district’s nutrition services director, Julie Bjorkstrand.

“When something happens, we know who to call, and we know how to communicate with them—we’ve already built the relationship. We’re seeing a lot of strength in that soft infrastructure of relationship building.”

That relationship showed its strength during the Smith River Complex Fire in August 2023, when the food bank, along with many homes in the area, lost power. The fairgrounds that was serving as a shelter had a hard time to keeping up with the demand.

“[Bjorkstrand] really stepped up,” says Mahan, refrigerating all the food from the food bank at the school district kitchen—and then going beyond. “She actually created a team that cooked and fed everybody at the shelter—[using] the school kitchens that she uses to serve 1,800 students breakfast and lunch every day.”

Bjorkstrand’s nimble response shows there’s room in a local food system to respond to disaster. The school district’s nutrition services team, which is actively involved in the task force, has now integrated lessons from the Smith River Fire Complex into the plan and laid out how the school district can help after another disaster.

Establishing Food Hubs and Bottom-Up Infrastructure

The partnership is helping organizations work through the more difficult aspects of creating localized food systems, which can serve communities on a regular basis—and activate in new ways after disaster.

Humboldt County volunteer Jennifer Bell helps pack Harvest Boxes in 2020 for distribution during the pandemic. The boxes are a creation of the North Coast Growers’ Association food hub. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)

Many Humboldt County business leaders revealed in surveys that they found building local and regional food systems to be a clunky process even in blue-sky times, says Megan Kenney, director of cooperative distribution for the county’s North Coast Growers’ Association (NCGA). In surveys distributed to local businesses, including local restaurants, food trucks, and food vendors, “everyone really wanted more local food,” Kenney says. “There just wasn’t an easy way to get it.”

The 100-member growers’ association supported the county’s farmers by coordinating farmers’ markets—but it didn’t distribute food. Now, thanks to participation in the North Coast Emergency Partnership, the group offers a food hub and a multi-farm CSA, too.

Kenney credits the connections and ideas she developed in the partnership for the development of the Harvest Hub in 2020. To make it easy for food buyers like restaurants and grocery stores to buy local food, the hub created an online marketplace that mimics a traditional distribution system.

Farmers drop off their local harvests at the cold storage facility in the NCGA warehouse, a key component of the food hub. From there, hub vehicles deliver the food to customers.

Currently, the hub provides food for 34 school sites, 11 restaurants, and nine community organizations that include two food banks, four tribes, and two community centers.

“What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish?”

Though the hub serves the county year round, it has already proven essential after disasters. During the 2021 Monument Fire, NCGA put together no-cook boxes with produce and locally made soap for evacuees and people without power. Following a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in December 2022 and during subsequent winter storms, the hub collected donations from farmers for bulk food distributions.

And during the Smith River Complex fires in August 2023, its members sent food to Crescent City in Del Norte County, proving that the Partnership not only fosters cross-sectoral collaboration, but cross-county support as well. On-site at the hub’s warehouse, they’ve helped to coordinate emergency supply storage.

Additionally, to get around blocked roads after disaster, NCGA—with help from a USDA Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RFSI) grant and California Jobs First grants—is planning to establish “cooler nodes,” food drop-off sites with solar-powered coolers, in isolated communities.

During regular times, the nodes can keep food at safe temperatures until hub employees make the rounds for pickup and redistribution. After a disaster, they can serve as lifelines, providing a place for farmers to drop food to be integrated into an emergency feeding operation.

Farmers would still get paid through the same networks, but the recipients of the food would be food pantries or emergency providers like the Red Cross. They could use the same system and codes for the coolers to access food without having to have extra staff on hand.

Daniel Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program and co-director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University, has found time and again in his research that connections among local people are important to building resilient communities.

“These bottom-up social infrastructure spaces [such as a food hub or community garden] give us the space where we can have agency,” Aldrich says. “The social connection, social capital, always tries to build these ideas of knowledge, of collective action.”

In Humboldt County, volunteers prepare Harvest Boxes for distribution during the 2023 holidays. (Photo credit: Megan Kenney)

Bringing Local, State, and National Efforts Together

Another important aspect to resilience-building: translating the bottom-up social infrastructure made possible by the North Coast Emergency Food System Partnership to the larger feeding entities. Van Soelen Kim saw this in action at the group’s most recent annual convening on May 13.

The event brought in 75 attendees from all the counties in the partnership, representing organizations including the Redwood Empire Food Bank, the Salvation Army, the American Red Cross, and the California Department of Social Services Disaster Services. It even brought in state and national representatives from large-scale food distribution and disaster response groups. The important factor wasn’t just that these organizations attended; it’s that their participation allowed for personal introductions.

“All the representatives from these large feeding entities . . . expressed, ‘If you need us, pick up the phone and call us,’” says Van Soelen Kim. “That kind of open-door approach was great to see because before, no one knew even where the front door was, and now they have an actual person to call.”

These connections matter, says Aldrich, of the Global Resilience Institute. “What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish? If you’re alone, if you’re isolated, if you’re not engaged with other people, it’s much harder.”

Resilience, he emphasizes, is about human-to-human interaction, which the Partnership provides.

While the group has not replicated its work in other communities quite yet, organizers have started to disseminate information about the project at scholarly conferences and hope to begin training practitioners in other regions, Van Soelen Kim says.

With an upheaval in federal emergency assistance funding, Aldrich believes that communities need to step up for themselves. Traditionally, he says, we think about disaster response as having two pillars: government assistance provided by FEMA and the state, and insurance provided by the market.

“But the reality is what we see right now—both in California and with the ongoing mess in D.C.—is, it is really a triangle, not two pillars. The third part is community. What it often comes down to, in the network that you formed, is how much information and collective action can you accomplish?”

As the North Coast heads into the driest parts of the season and the Tubbs Fire’s eighth anniversary, Van Soelen Kim says the members of the North Coast Emergency Food System are increasingly appreciative of their group’s innovative approach.

“With time, we’ve found what we’re doing here on the North Coast is really special,” she says. “New people keep showing up to the conversation [and] we continue learning together about how layered and complex the emergency food system is. By collaborating in this way, we’re creating something unique that isn’t being done elsewhere.”

The post Disasters Block Local Food Access. One Groundbreaking Group Has a Solution. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Op-ed: Public Grocery Stores Already Exist and Work Well. We Need More.

Raj Patel — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:01:40 +0000

New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to open five city-run grocery stores has grocery industry executives—and other political foes—clutching their pearls. Critics call it a socialist fantasy. But publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30 percent lower than conventional retail. We need more public grocery stores, not fewer.

The affordability crisis is crushing American families. Grocery prices have spiked 32 percent since 2019, with even sharper increases in meat, frozen foods, and snacks—categories that make up over 50 percent of Americans’ calories and are dominated by a handful of conglomerates. Market concentration has enabled food giants to raise prices, while actual consumption has flatlined since 2019.

The numbers are starker in New York, where 85 percent of New Yorkers are paying more for groceries than they did last year and 91 percent are concerned about inflation’s impact on their food bills.

Supermarket closures are another major issue. While several grocery chains have expanded, these openings are unevenly distributed, often bypassing the very neighborhoods that have lost supermarkets. In many working-class areas, closures have left residents relying on discount chains and liquor outlets instead. The lack of grocery stores isn’t something that can be fixed by the Robinson-Patman Act, enacted during the New Deal to prevent price discrimination by large retail buyers at the expense of smaller competitors. New York already has one of the least concentrated grocery markets in the country, and trust-busting won’t make new grocery stores open in low-income neighborhoods.

In New York, as nationally, the crisis of affordability is real and food apartheid is, too. Food consumption is deeply divided by race, class, and geography. This is a structural problem, and there’s a long history of ideas for structural solutions.

Some of the best visions for the future come from outside the United States. Bulgaria announced plans to roll out 1,500 rural grocery stores, buying local produce and reselling at cost to support both farmers and underserved rural consumers. From South Korea to the European Union, governments are strengthening public and local supply chains.

But we can look even closer to home to find a public grocery success story: the U.S. military.

The Pentagon’s Grocery

Every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA). With 236 stores worldwide, DeCA is a retail behemoth, generating over $4.6 billion in annual revenue. If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation. In 2023 alone, U.S. military families, veterans, and other eligible shoppers saved an estimated $1.6 billion on their grocery bills.

“We can look close to home to find a public grocery success story: the U.S. military. If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”

The model is simple and effective. Commissaries are not profit centers; they are cost centers. By law, they operate on a cost-plus model, selling goods at what they pay for them, plus a 5 percent surcharge that covers the cost of store construction and modernization. DeCA leverages the immense, centralized buying power of the entire Department of Defense to negotiate rock-bottom prices from suppliers.

Furthermore, commissary workers are federal employees, often unionized, with stable pay and benefits. This removes labor costs from the individual stores’ balance sheets and ensures that the mission of providing affordable food isn’t compromised by the downward pressure on wages that defines the private retail industry. The result is a system that delivers low prices and high-quality service and is immensely popular with service members, demonstrating that a government-run, nonprofit grocery model can thrive at scale.

Scale for Victory

Skeptics will say it won’t work outside the military, pointing to small attempts like one in Baldwin, Florida, where a municipal grocery closed last year, or Chicago’s stalled plans, or other failed public-private partnerships. The scorn these failures attract is both wrong and right.

Wrong because the status quo is demonstrably bad. Where are these critics when Aldi or Lidl gain market share with cookie-cutter, vertically integrated discount models that displace diverse, unionized operators, or when dollar stores swamp neighborhoods with misleading prices and low-quality, ultra-processed foods?

Public grocery stores add to food security, offering something that food banks can’t: dignity, choice, and control over food supply chains. They can anchor broader food justice efforts, creating demand for values-based purchasing that prioritizes worker dignity, environmental sustainability, and racial equity. (Mamdani’s commitment to minimum wage increases and safety nets are of a piece with public grocery policy.)

Critics are right, however, to note that grocery is a business of scale. Public groceries can succeed, but only with the scale and operational sophistication of proven models. Half-measures will inevitably fail.

Existing—and Successful—Models

There are clear models for operating a public grocery store: Combine the military commissary’s cost-plus pricing (and free delivery) with Costco’s warehouse efficiency and Aldi’s limited assortment strategy.

Stock no more than 1,500 carefully selected products instead of 30,000. Buy in massive volumes. Employ union workers as municipal employees, removing labor costs from individual store budgets.

And make it joyful and dignified to work and shop there.

“Public grocery stores add to food security, offering something that food banks can’t: dignity, choice, and control over food supply chains.”

There are already foundations on which to build. New York City’s Good Food Purchasing Program, for example, requires school food vendors to meet standards for nutrition, environmental impact, and fair labor. Such values-based procurement was inspired by private sector supply chain standards, which brought premium quality products to consumers. The Good Food Purchasing Program shows we can do this without the steep prices.

Why stop at lunch trays? Public grocery stores could bring high standards full circle, creating demand for ethical producers who are locked out of centralized supermarket, dollar store, or discounter supply chains, while offering best-in-market prices to consumers.

Public grocery stores could be the first step to scaling up and anchoring vertically integrated public food systems. Municipal processing and manufacturing could aggregate demand for local, sustainably grown products as the basis for shelf-stable goods—soups, frozen meals, snacks—normally dominated by a handful of conglomerates. This would lower the risk for values-based farmers while making good food the most affordable option, not the most expensive.

Starting up such an operation won’t be cheap, but doing it successfully will save New Yorkers hundreds of millions of dollars off their grocery bills every year. Our calculations, exclusive to Civil Eats and unpublished elsewhere, show that operating five full-service stores across all New York’s boroughs would require at least $20 million per year each, assuming good union labor rates and free rent.

Those costs can drop a little if a Costco-like warehouse model is adopted; however, the expense of running 20 such stores (and keeping them medium size) is north of $400 million per year.

That’s a small investment in addressing hunger in a city as big as New York, which already purchases more than $300 million worth of food for vital city programs. Other public services that New Yorkers benefit from require even higher funding.

For example, the New York City police department budget is over $10 billion a year. Our public grocery estimate is less than 4 percent of that. The fire department budget is over $2.6 billion and the department of sanitation’s is $2 billion. The city’s budget adds up to more than $112 billion a year. So, while $400 million is a substantial sum, it would be a rounding error, 0.36 percent of the annual budget.

“There are clear models for operating a public grocery store: Combine the military commissary’s cost-plus pricing (and free delivery) with Costco’s warehouse efficiency and Aldi’s limited assortment strategy.”

Much of this budget would cover the overhead expenses and profit margins that customers typically pay for in the form of high retail prices, but New Yorkers will keep this money in their pockets. The budget also leaves plenty of room for growth if the concept is embraced by New Yorkers. There’s reason to think that stores with low prices and high ethics would work in the Big Apple. And if they can make it there, they can make it anywhere.

Food inflation is rife and set to get worse. As Trump’s tariffs, immigration crackdowns, federal nutrition program and local food supply chain cuts, defunding of food banks, and SNAP cuts worsen food apartheid, public groceries offer a proven, pragmatic policy solution.

The idea is certainly being taken seriously by grocery sector labor unions. Faye Guenther, president of United Food and Commercial Workers 3000, argues that giant companies like Krogers and Albertsons are closing stores and “transforming themselves into companies that are more focused on collecting and selling customer data than they are on selling food.”

In the face of this, she told us by email, “We need a public option in the supermarket industry—stores that are focused on providing healthy food in our communities while providing jobs with good wages and benefits. The public sector already has large, efficient food supply chains through municipal education departments and through the U.S. military commissary system, so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Publicly owned supermarkets should find the right way to piggyback on those systems.”

Beyond a Broken Model

The grocery industry will claim that public groceries hurt small businesses, ignoring the fact that the greatest threat to those businesses is the unchecked proliferation of chains like Dollar General and the predatory pricing power of giants like Walmart and Aldi. They will call it an inefficient government boondoggle, hoping no one notices the efficiency of the military commissary system.

The truth is that the ground has already shifted. Two-thirds of New York City voters now support the creation of public grocery stores, because anything that helps meet the crisis of affordability is going to be welcome.

They’re not alone. Thirteen states have begun to explore public grocery stores. Communities across the nation are tired of corporate price gouging, empty shelves, and a food system designed to extract maximum wealth rather than nourish them.

The solution lies in thinking upstream, in building public alternatives that operationalize the Right to Food, a concept supported by over 80 percent of Americans, adopted by Maine in 2021, and being explored by a range of other states, too.

The blueprint is clear. With the commissary as a template, take a page from Costco: pile the produce high, staff the floor with union labor, stock the shelves with good food, offer home delivery, and make it as beautiful as the New York Public Library, because the working class deserve nothing but the best.

If the private market cannot or will not deliver affordable, nutritious food to all its citizens—and it has proven that it won’t—then the public sector must.

The post Op-ed: Public Grocery Stores Already Exist and Work Well. We Need More. appeared first on Civil Eats.

Could Child Care Centers Strengthen Local Food Systems?

Tilde Herrera — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 08:00:20 +0000

Ever since the pandemic, the child care sector has grappled with tight budgets, staffing shortages, and low wages. Dara Bloom, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, has watched over the years as many of these centers have struggled to serve fresh fruits and vegetables to kids, especially when inflation and food prices soared.

Last year, federal stabilization grants provided to the child care sector during the pandemic ended, leaving many centers in “survival mode,” says Bloom, a local foods extension specialist who is diligently working to build relationships between child care facilities and small farmers. Through her research, Bloom, herself a mom, hopes to improve food access for underserved communities and economic opportunities for small farmers. She says the child care sector can play a key role—if given the chance.

“Those early [childhood] stages are so important, especially in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.”

Child care centers were set to receive a helping hand this year, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) expanded the Local Food for Schools (LFS) program last October to include child care sites. Under the Biden administration, the program earmarked $188.6 million for fresh, local produce for child care facilities already participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program, which reimburses the centers for providing healthful meals and snacks.

Participating sites range from home-based ones serving up to 15 kids to large private daycare providers and programs connected to public school systems, such as Head Start and Early Head Start.

The additional LFS funding would have been a game-changer for the child care industry, Bloom says. But five months after the USDA expanded the LFS program to child care, the Trump administration terminated the program. The decision sparked extensive media coverage of the impact on schools and food banks, but child care didn’t receive much attention—because it had yet to receive any funding.

However, child care, an often-overlooked sector, could become a larger part of local food systems, Bloom says. Through a farm to early care and education (ECE) program at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, where Bloom also serves as assistant director, she tests and evaluates local food supply chains for child care that help create better markets for farmers.

The center then creates resources to help others replicate these systems in their own communities—for example, a step-by-step local food-buying guide for child care that offers guidance on understanding ingredient seasonality, where to find farmers, and how to order and incorporate local farm food on menus.

Civil Eats recently spoke to Bloom about her research, healthy eating habits for children, and how the child care sector can support small and midsize farms.

Dara Bloom visits Locklear Farms in Pembroke, North Carolina, which sells produce to a group of child care facilities as part of a farm-to-ECE program. (Photo credit: Bhavisha Gulabrai)

What are some of the ingredients of a resilient local food system?

In North Carolina, one of the things that has helped our local food system and issues of accessibility is a strong food hub network. If you look at our food system over the years, as things got bigger, we lost some local and regional food system infrastructure.

Food hubs are produce distributors, and a lot of them, especially in North Carolina, are nonprofits, and so they have a social mission. This includes working with small-to-midsize farmers who often need training to produce for a wholesale market, in terms of scale and [compliance with] food safety requirements. Many of our food hubs are selling to schools, and we’ve worked with them to increase purchasing for child care centers. That middle infrastructure along the supply chain really helps.

What role can child care sites play in our food system?

We know from the research how important early childhood is developmentally, in terms of education and emotional, social, behavioral learning. Those early stages are also important in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.

Research shows it can take anywhere from eight to 15 exposures to new types of fruits and vegetables for kids to develop those preferences. And if you are a low-income family, it’s hard to put food on the plate that you know your kid isn’t going to eat, eight to 15 times.

You want to give your kid something they’re going to eat, that is going to fill them up, and that they’ll love, especially if you’re on a tight budget and maybe have to say no to a lot of things. So, there is this opportunity in child care to do what maybe some low-income families wouldn’t be able to do, which is to increase that exposure.

Children learn about fresh fruit and vegetables with hands-on activities like making spinach smoothies and art projects. (Photo credit: Marcello Cappellazzi)

What challenges do child care providers face in buying and serving local food?

Over the years, there has been a shift to purchasing more processed foods or relying on canned or frozen foods, especially produce. There can be a lot of work to help those [child care] buyers look at their menus, understand seasonality, and find recipes to try new local products. They also need to figure out how to have the staff time, the skill set, and the equipment that’s needed to process local food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables.

Post-COVID, they’re struggling with staffing. We’ve heard stories about child care programs that will lose their cook and so they’ve got teachers or the director coming in to cook meals. I’ve seen reports that staff wages are so low that they’re often on public assistance themselves.

Finding local farmers and knowing how to approach them or work with them is also a challenge, since that takes extra time, which centers often just don’t have. Space and storage are another piece. I’ve visited some child care centers with kitchens that are smaller than my home kitchen, and they might be preparing a breakfast, snack, lunch, and maybe even an afternoon snack for 150 kids. In that situation, it helps to have pre-chopped fruits and vegetables.

Much of your work is focused on farm-to-ECE programs. What are they and how would the Local Food for Schools funding have impacted farm-to-ECE initiatives?

We see farm-to-ECE programs as having three components. One is local food procurement: sourcing from farmers and getting local food on the plate for meals and snacks. Two is experiential learning in the garden. And three is food-based learning, exposing kids to cooking in the classroom. There’s something about that experiential piece of being in the garden and experiencing the food in the classroom setting and learning about it. Then it’s on the plate, they’ve had those repeated exposures and are more likely to eat it.

When we started doing this work, we heard from a teacher at a child care center who said that parents would ask, “What’s going on? I didn’t think my kid would eat this [vegetable].” They’re so surprised when those behaviors carry over at home. We had a parent who said they went to the supermarket, and their kid was yelling, “I want broccoli!”

Our hope with the funding was to reach new child care programs and expand farm-to-ECE programming to reach more children and families.

Obviously, the funding never began, but farmers could have benefited, too. What can you say about the loss of that money for farmers?

This was an opportunity to introduce farmers to a new market, create interest, and train technical assistance providers at the county level. This assistance could help farmers with barriers to selling to the school system, such as the Good Agricultural Products certification, which can be hard for smaller-scale farmers because of the cost and paperwork.

“The child care market can be a great starting point for farmers who are interested in shifting toward wholesale.”

Also, the school system can be so large that farmers don’t have enough volume for it. Child care is not the largest market, but it can be a great outlet for a smaller scale farm that’s not going to be able to meet the demands of a larger market like the school system.

Child care can also be a great starting point, almost like a steppingstone, for farmers who are interested in shifting toward wholesale. The child care market gives them the chance to work with an institutional buyer while they build their own infrastructure, with the hope that maybe they’ll be able to scale up someday to serve that larger market.

How were you and other food-system players preparing for the funding?

The funding could only be spent on local food, so it had to go directly to farmers—which was a great benefit for farmers, but it didn’t cover any overhead, like administrative fees, for non-farmers. It was hard to find an organization with the capacity to handle that much funding without being able to hire someone or pay for someone’s time to manage the funds, distribution, and record-keeping that would come with it.

We worked with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to do outreach to partners we thought could distribute the funds. We worked closely with Working Landscapes, which is a food hub that was taking a leadership role in organizing other food hubs around the state. They felt strongly enough that it fit their mission and would be such a benefit to themselves and other food hubs that they were willing to be the fiscal sponsor.

Where will you go from here?

Moving forward, we’ll continue supporting our partners with the resources we have, and then in the future we’re trying to have a plan so that if there is ever funding available, we will know how to best implement it in a way that supports all stakeholders.

We’re trying to continue supporting child care centers, farmers, and food hubs, and we’re hoping to organize regional meetups over the summer. We’re still trying to bring those partners—food hubs and child care centers—to the table. We are creating resource documents from our research, like a local food buying guide for child care centers.

The possibility to work on the program is still there. But sometimes it feels like a lot to ask of child care providers. If they’re struggling to get by, it can be hard to take this extra time and energy and find the funds to do this. But we also know that child care programs are dedicated to the health of the children they serve.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Could Child Care Centers Strengthen Local Food Systems? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Op-ed: Through Acts of Solidarity, We Can Support Immigrants in the Food Chain and Beyond

Alba Velasquez — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:00:06 +0000

As a kid, I used to cringe when my mom would pull the car over on the side of the freeway. She’d spot something growing wild in the hills around Los Angeles and jump out of the car, searching for flor de izote, a white flower that’s part of everyday cooking in El Salvador, our home country. When she found some, my mom would take it home and cook it with huevos estrellados con tomate (fried eggs with tomatoes) or stir it into a cheese filling for pupusa.

As I grew older, I came to realize that this was my mother’s ingenious way of connecting to home, even as we were putting down roots in a new land. In this way, we built a life here, away from a dangerous civil war in our home country.

I grew up cooking alongside my family, and I saw firsthand how assimilation was wrecking our health. Not only were we lacking access to our customary nutritious foods, but everyone was working hard, too, up to 16 hours a day, which left little time for meals beyond fast food.

I went away from home for college, and one day, I got a terrible call: My dad had suffered a heart attack. I knew that stress and poor eating habits had finally taken a toll. I decided then to work to change the broken food system that had failed my family.

As executive director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, an anti-hunger advocacy organization, I am heartbroken to see the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy this kind of work, uprooting people and food systems along the way. Our food system should nourish people, with dignity, care, and justice. That means everyone. Immigrant families, food workers, and small vendors are not threats; they are essential to our communities.

Immigrants comprise two-thirds of Los Angeles’s food service workers, and nearly 80 percent of the industry’s workers are Latino. (Photo credit: LA Food Policy Council)

Empty Markets, Corner Stores, and Farm Fields

Immigrants play a vital role across the entire food system—from agriculture, food processing plants, distribution, and the service industries. They make up the labor force that produces, sells, delivers, and prepares our food.

In Ventura County, a major agricultural area north of Los Angeles, about 60 percent of the 255,000 agricultural workers are undocumented immigrants, underscoring how vital their labor is to local farming. As a result of the recent immigration raids there, the city of Oxnard reported worker absenteeism as high as 70 percent, resulting in unharvested strawberry crops and projected losses exceeding $100,000 per week per farm.

“These days, I find myself trying to explain to my little ones why families like ours are being torn apart. Why innocent, hard-working people are being pulled into vans by masked men without explanation or due process.”

The historic L.A. 7th Street produce market, which supplies the region’s restaurants and small grocers with fresh fruits and vegetables, has seen empty stalls and slow business, because workers and buyers aren’t coming.

Corner stores in South Central LA are quietly losing their regulars, too; people are afraid to shop, work, or even be seen.

I recently visited a small market in the Pico Union neighborhood, where a vendor I’ve known for years stood behind a table full of produce that would likely go unsold.

“No viene nadie,” she said—no one is coming—as she described what this major setback would mean for the financial wellbeing of her family business. They’ve since pivoted to offer delivery service for their regular customers.

In Los Angeles County, immigrants make up 66 percent of food service workers, and 79 percent are Latino. Without them, many restaurants, catering businesses, and institutions would struggle to function.

In neighborhoods where immigrant-run food enterprises thrive—like MacArthur Park, Boyle Heights, and South L.A.—recent ICE raids devastated business: at a central fresh-produce market, daily sales plunged from $2,000 to $300, an 85 percent drop in revenue as vendors and customers stayed away in fear.

Safety Nets Disappearing

All of this is happening while our safety nets are being stripped away. SNAP, called CalFresh here in California, has long been a lifeline for families trying to get by. Last year, nearly 5 million Californians relied on it to put food on the table. The average benefit was just $189 a month, while the cost of groceries for a family with children is often over $1,200.

This budget was a struggle for many households, even before prices started rising. Now, under the Trump administration’s latest policies, fewer people will qualify for CalFresh, and many immigrants are too afraid to even apply. I’ve heard from families who’ve stopped showing up to the food pantry because they’re worried their names will end up on a list. The people who grow and cook our food are quietly skipping meals so their children can eat.

It’s a painful irony: Immigrant workers who fuel this economy, who bring in billions of dollars through farming, restaurants, and food businesses, are going hungry. But these policies don’t just punish individuals; they also weaken the entire structure of our food system, from labor to access to dignity. When we push people deeper into fear and poverty, we all feel the ripple effects.

These days, I find myself trying to explain to my little ones why families like ours are being torn apart. Why innocent, hard-working people are being pulled into vans by masked men without explanation or due process. Why people are afraid to shop for groceries. Why they’re afraid to walk to school or go to work.

In South Central, where my tía lives, her neighbor, Rosa, works as a cook for a taco street vendor in the Piñata District. A single mother of a 1-year-old boy, she usually brings him to work. Her boss recently told her it’s too risky for her to come in. Rosa’s $110 daily income vanished, but rent didn’t, and her food needs didn’t.

The Republicans’ “Big, Beautiful Bill,” passed earlier this month by the slimmest of margins, will only make things worse. We’ll see more of Trump’s agents of chaos on our streets, tearing families apart, driving workers into hiding, and dismantling the systems that keep people fed.

How Citizens Can Help

These systems, built up over decades, are falling apart when they are needed most. The cost of living continues to rise, but under the current administration, programs like SNAP are under threat, along with funding for programs that help keep nutritious food on people’s plates.

In our organization, we’ve pivoted our Farm Fresh LA program, and we are quietly working with trusted community groups to deliver locally grown produce to families who are too afraid to show up in public.

It’s a daunting task, sneaking food to people in this powerful country of plenty.

But we are undeterred. And we are not alone. In fact, there is much that can be done. Citizens can help by buying from farmers’ markets that source locally and equitably; supporting CSAs (community supported agriculture programs) run by worker-led farms; purchasing from local small markets and family-owned restaurants; and choosing produce from farms that treat their workers with dignity.

These are not just economic choices. These are small acts of solidarity, and they add up.

Beyond that, we all need to create coalitions and movements with long-lasting impact. In 2017, for example, our organization led a successful campaign to mandate that all farmers’ markets accept EBT (the debit cards for CalFresh benefits). It was a big step toward making fresh, local food more accessible to low-income families, and it’s the kind of work that we need even more of now.

We need to strengthen networks, too, tying together community-based organizations with deep, trusted relationships in immigrant communities. Trusted organizations have been on the ground every day, providing food delivery, wage recovery support, legal navigation, and culturally rooted care to families who have been abandoned by the system. We must support and connect the work of organizations who offer legal, housing, and food help—including food delivery.

I now look back on my mother’s search for the flor de izote not with embarrassment, but with pride. As a mother myself and a citizen of this country, I recognize the hard work she put in as we built a new life. Immigrant communities in Los Angeles have always made a way out of no way. We root ourselves in the cracks—and we bloom.

But we shouldn’t have to do it alone, and we shouldn’t have to do it in fear. With care, collaboration, and compassion—even now, against these powerful forces—we can create a food system and a community that helps everyone thrive.

The post Op-ed: Through Acts of Solidarity, We Can Support Immigrants in the Food Chain and Beyond appeared first on Civil Eats.

Amid SNAP Debate, Are Lawmakers Ending Waste and Abuse—or Dismantling a Safety Net?

Lisa Held — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 08:00:09 +0000

In Washington, D.C., a few miles north of Capitol Hill, where members of Congress are battling over federal food assistance, workers driving forklifts lean on their horns and whip around corners at the Capital Area Food Bank’s 100,000-square-foot warehouse.

Near the loading dock, a shipment of kale awaits transport to refrigerated storage, the curly green leaves poking out of boxes from a nearby farm. More boxes of food, including brown rice, coconut milk, and Corn Flakes, are stacked on towering shelves.

Some shelves, however, are notably empty.

Due to funding cuts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) over the last several months, the food bank lost more than 25 tractor-trailer loads of food between April and June and an expected $2 million that would have been used to purchase local produce next year. As other food banks across the country have reported, Capital Area’s President and CEO Radha Muthiah said that demand here is way up. Now, her team is preparing for another rush.

“We know that with any reduction in SNAP [the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], people are going to look to try and make that [food] up in other ways, and certainly looking to us and our network will be one of those ways,” she said.

More than 40 million Americans rely on SNAP for food aid. But Republicans are counting on major changes to the program to help fund tax cuts in their “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which they hope to have to President Donald Trump by July 4. In 2023, SNAP cost $113 billion.

Their plans would fundamentally alter how SNAP works, decreasing federal spending on the program by about $200 billion over 10 years. The bill is not yet final, but the Senate is poised to soon pass it, sending it back to the House (where it could face other obstacles) before it heads toward Trump’s desk later this week. If the plans remain intact and the bill becomes law, many fewer Americans—possibly millions fewer—will receive benefits.

An employee of the Capital Area Food Bank takes part in a “family market” at a nearby school. (Photo credit: Maansi Srivastava for the Capital Area Food Bank)

House and Senate Agriculture leaders G.T. Thompson (R-Pennsylvania) and John Boozman (R-Arkansas), who worked on the plans, have both said they support SNAP and are committed to ensuring that hungry people can access food. But Republican leaders also claim the program is rife with waste, fraud, and abuse.

They want to shift the cost to states, with the amount based on how many errors the states are making in administering the program. They say this will incentivize states to make fewer mistakes with taxpayer funds. They also say the Republican plan to subject more SNAP recipients to work requirements will move them off benefits faster.

But many experts and those who work within the program say the changes will do the opposite, adding to state agency workloads and creating more opportunities for the wasteful inefficiencies and errors Republicans say they want to reduce.

Opponents of the Republican plan cite evidence showing that work requirements don’t encourage more work. Instead, they can make it harder for those who need help to get it, pushing them further into a hole and increasing their dependence on food aid.

At a Capitol Hill forum hosted by Senate Democrats in June, Barbara Guinn, the commissioner of the New York State office that administers SNAP, said the plans would not reduce waste, fraud, or abuse. “Instead,” she said, “these proposals threaten an effective and efficient program which research consistently and clearly shows has very low rates of recipient fraud, reduces hunger, supports work, and stimulates the economy.”

Fraud vs. Error Rates

The Republican proposal to shift costs to states relies heavily on one metric: SNAP error rates, which are a measure of under- or overpayments made to people receiving benefits.

According to the plan, states with higher error rates—as determined by USDA oversight—would have to take on the responsibility of paying a larger proportion of SNAP benefits, which historically have been paid by the federal government.

Last year, when the USDA’s annual report showed error rates were higher than typical, Boozman signaled the Agriculture Committees in Congress were paying attention. “While SNAP is a critical nutrition program for households in need, any level of erroneous payments is a misuse of taxpayer dollars,” he said in a statement. “House and Senate Republicans stand ready to . . . hold states accountable for exploiting the generosity of the American taxpayer.”

But Republicans have also spread misinformation: At a House hearing in early June, for example, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins appeared to conflate error rates with fraud.

In response to a question about error rates, she said she thought they were likely even higher than the data showed. “That is why these efforts are so important. We just have had, I think, three stings in just the last couple of weeks.”

Rollins was likely referring to recent law enforcement actions where the USDA targeted individuals stealing benefits from SNAP participants and, in one case, installing fraudulent benefit terminals.

But these stings target fraud, something entirely separate from error rates.

Fraud in the program is typically the result of “skimming,” when criminals steal benefits from the debit-like cards participants receive. In the 2024 fiscal year, states reported about $190 million in stolen benefits. None of the changes Republicans have proposed target this kind of fraud (although the USDA is cracking down on it).

Error rates, on the other hand, measure what are essentially clerical and reporting errors.

“Error rates are reflective of a very, very rigorous quality control process that is one of the most—if not the most—robust of any federal program,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst working on food assistance at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

Most errors are made by employees in state agencies. Others may reflect an individual who didn’t realize they had to report a change in a work situation. Historically, error rates have been low, because states have multiple incentives to keep them that way.

If their rate is over 6 percent, Bergh explained, states have to create a “corrective action plan” with the USDA. If that doesn’t fix the situation after two years, they get fined, and the funds go back to the feds. In 2023, for example, Pennsylvania had to pay almost $40 million. “If a state’s error rate creeps up, what we see is they typically are successful in bringing it back down within a few years,” she said.

That shifted during the pandemic, as a spike in people needing food assistance flooded agencies that had lost employees and struggled to set up remote work systems.

As a result, the USDA allowed states some flexibility in issuing benefits. When the agency measured error rates in 2022 and 2023, they had increased significantly. As Senators pushed toward the final bill passage, the USDA released the 2024 numbers, showing error rates are still elevated but have decreased compared to the previous two years.

In 2022, meanwhile, the USDA made a change to how it counts errors, creating more potential confusion. In the past, when its reviewers found an error on a required form, such as a missing signature, they would follow up with a family to determine if they were in fact eligible before counting it as an error. Now, without followup, they count it as an overpayment, skewing the data.

“Oftentimes, people will imply that the entire error rate represents taxpayer dollars that are going to people who are ineligible, and that’s incorrect,” Bergh said. “It includes both over and underpayments, and most overpayments go to people who actually are eligible. They’re just receiving the wrong amount.”

Finally, the error rate does not take into account state efforts to recoup overpayments, which they are required to do by reducing a participant’s future payments. In the 2023 fiscal year, the last year data was available, states were able to collect about $389 million in overpayments, although that number was tiny compared to the estimated $10.5 billion in overpayments.

“If you look at what the Department of Agriculture recommends for improving program integrity and reducing error rates—those are all things that federal resources would be cut for in both the House and the Senate bill.”

The Republican plan would penalize states with the highest error rates by forcing them to take on a significant portion of the costs of benefits. But at a press conference last week, governors of four states, all Democrats, said their states won’t be able to afford it and will be forced to either cut food aid or cut other services.

“The fact is, in our state government, we simply cannot shoulder the extra $50 to $80 million burden over the next decade without sacrificing serious investments in education, in healthcare, and public safety,” said Delaware Governor Matt Meyer. “That’s the harsh reality.”

In all states, the bill would also cut in half the administrative costs the federal government pays for, shifting another $25 billion onto states. That move would cost Massachusetts an estimated $15 million per year, Governor Laura Kelley said.

Bergh said cutting administrative funding could potentially lead to even more errors.

“The things that states fund using those administrative resources are all of the things that they do to reduce errors,” Bergh said. “If you look at what the Department of Agriculture recommends for improving program integrity and reducing error rates, it’s things like making sure you have enough staff so that workers have manageable workloads, staff training, investing in technology upgrades, investing in data analysis, so you can identify the root causes of your most common errors. Those are all things that federal resources would be cut for in both the House and the Senate bill.”

At the Capital Area Food Bank, staff worry that supplies of canned goods will not meet an influx of need over the summer. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)

Impacts of Expanding Work Requirements

States will also be burdened with a heavier workload from the other piece of the Republican plan: extending work requirements for additional groups of people, such as parents with children between 14 and 18 years old. (Currently, parents with children under 18 are exempt.)

Under the House version of the bill, for example, CBPP estimated that about 6 million more people in a typical month would be subject to work requirements. (That number will be lower in the current Senate version.) “That means that states would need to be screening those 6 million more people for exemptions,” Bergh said. “It means tracking compliance: Making sure people are working enough hours and cutting them off if they have reached their three months and are not complying with the work requirement. So that’s a ton of additional work.”

In her opening testimony during a House Agriculture Committee hearing in April, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a Northwestern University economist who has been studying SNAP for decades, included a table of new studies and survey data on the impacts of work requirements.

“These new studies have found that SNAP work requirements have no positive impact on work-related outcomes, as measured by employment, earnings, or hours worked,” she said. “On the other hand, they substantially reduce the likelihood that an individual receives SNAP.”

Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, presented the opposite argument, calling stronger or expanded work requirements a key means to improving SNAP. However, in her testimony, she said that when it comes to the requirements, “some studies find positive effects on employment while others find negative or null effects.”

“These new studies have found that SNAP work requirements have no positive impact on work-related outcomes. On the other hand, they substantially reduce the likelihood that an individual receives SNAP.”

At the Senate forum in June, witness Jade Johnson described a situation in which SNAP benefits supported her path toward more secure employment. Johnson said she works two jobs—at a church and as a home health aide—while attending college classes part-time to become a dialysis technician.

Her hours, especially as a home health aide, are often unpredictable, she said, and the fluctuations could mean she wouldn’t meet new work requirements in a given week. For her, SNAP benefits were a source of stability as she focused on finishing school, after which she’d have access to higher wages.

“If my SNAP benefits were cut, I wouldn’t be able to get ahead or even maintain,” she said. “It would keep me stuck in a cycle where I’m always scrambling to make ends meet and never able to focus on building a better future. SNAP is one of the only things keeping me from falling behind.”

The Capital Area Food Bank’s supplies include healthy staples like brown rice (left) and leafy greens (right). Over the past two years, the food bank purchased more of the greens directly from local farms thanks to expanded federal grant funding that has now ended. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)

‘We Cannot Fill That Gap’

At the Capital Area Food Bank, Muthiah estimates about half of the region’s SNAP recipients also access food bank resources. And the food bank’s annual surveys consistently find that most people looking for help are working. “In fact, they’re working more than one job,” she said. “It’s just that those jobs are at a minimum-wage level, so it’s not enough to be able to cover the cost of living in our area.”

Muthiah worries that kicking new groups of people off the rolls through work requirements will make them more reliant on aid in the future.

“You’re having them slide back, as opposed to really moving forward,” she said, because if the benefits are gone, their attention will shift to finding the next meal.

As the bill moves forward, Muthiah said one analysis estimates that the new work requirements could push 74,000 people off SNAP in the area the Capital Area Food Bank covers—and that many of those people would then turn to the Food Bank, some for the first time.

At the same time, their region has been hit hard by the downsizing of the federal government; this spring, the food bank launched pop-up food distributions to serve former federal workers and others who Muthiah describes as “downstream” of the impacts.

For example, at the pop-up the weekend before, she met a nanny whose hours had been cut because her employer lost her government job. She met a senior citizen who relied on her son for extra income but felt like she didn’t want to burden him now that he had lost his job at the Internal Revenue Service.

With all of these things happening at once, she says, Capital Area Food Bank’s current supply of canned tomatoes and fresh pineapples won’t be enough to meet the increased need, no matter how quickly their staff drive the forklifts.

If millions of people lose SNAP benefits, Muthiah said, “One thing that we have to be really clear about is that we cannot fill that gap. We just can’t do it.”

The post Amid SNAP Debate, Are Lawmakers Ending Waste and Abuse—or Dismantling a Safety Net? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Can This Baltimore Academy Continue to Train Urban Farmers?

Sam Delgado — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:03 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

In southern Baltimore, not far from the sewage treatment plant of Wagner’s Point and massive coal mounds of Curtis Bay, lies a small farm of green grass, rustling trees, and rows of radishes, arugula, peppers, and more. On a cool afternoon in late May, groups of children and their parents pass by, cutting through a dirt path on their way to some other part of this historically industrial city. As they come and go, a small crew of farmers diligently tends to the crops and land.

This is the Black Butterfly Teaching Farm, run by the Farm Alliance of Baltimore (FAB), a membership organization of urban farmers, neighborhood growers, and those interested in learning more about both. The farm was designed to turn food-curious people into urban farmers, especially those who live or work in the “Black Butterfly”—the regions of the city to the east and west of the center, shaped like a pair of butterfly wings, where the city’s majority Black population lives.

“The folks that tore it apart have no intention of fixing it.”

These neighborhoods continue to grapple with a legacy of redlining, with impacts that persist today—from a scarcity of grocery stores to a lack of tree cover (and resulting “heat island” effect) to lower life expectancy in general, often due to environmental pollutants.

Urban farms, though, represent a tangible way for people to have “a sense of control and autonomy” over their health and environment, says Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). By enriching the environment and helping build a climate-resilient food system with economic potential, urban agriculture can unlock a form of empowerment for disadvantaged communities.

“It has real big community effects,” Quigley adds. “It’s not just helping one household in a lot of these settings. It’s helping hundreds of individuals in these neighborhood settings.”

Since 2021, the FAB has operated the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy, which launched the teaching farm later that year and has graduated two groups of trainees. But this year, the program won’t be offered, as it takes a step back to finish several construction projects on the farm and to adjust to funding cuts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

(Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

“I’m really looking forward to the full vision coming to fruition,” says Denzel Mitchell, FAB’s executive director and a former urban farmer himself, about the construction. He says they’re aiming to set up fencing, a greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen, a storage barn, and additional amenities for the community by the end of the year.

The Trump administration has cut many farming initiatives, including those addressing climate change and environmental injustice. That leaves programs like Black Butterfly—which aim to instill sustainable agriculture knowledge in residents who have long been blocked from land access—in limbo. Mitchell is skeptical that the funding challenges will be fixed any time soon.

“The folks that tore it apart,” he says, “have no intention of fixing it.”

Sustainable Farming in a Polluted Community

For years, the FAB had been having conversations about the need to offer people pathways to becoming urban farmers, says Mitchell, who drives an electric Ford truck to and from the farm. In 2017, the organization ran a feasibility study to understand exactly what the membership wanted. The response was “an opportunity to train,” Mitchell says. “That was the seed, if you will—no pun intended—of the training academy.”

There are other programs around Maryland that offer farm training. Mitchell himself trained with Future Harvest, which runs a year-long program for beginner farmers in the Chesapeake Bay region. But the city of Baltimore lacked an accessible, urban-scale training program.

People here needed something that was “a little bit beyond backyard growing,” and geared toward residents who wanted to develop a business, Mitchell says. “One of the things that we certainly understand as Black and Brown working-class folks is that you got to hustle. You got to have some little side gig.”

That entrepreneurial-environmental mindset has been a key part of the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy’s framework. Its training is intended to help people feed their communities and grow potential businesses, while also learning how to sustainably steward the land.

Done properly, urban agriculture can reduce the carbon footprint of food and can help lower the heat island effect that many major cities face (while also benefiting the social, mental, and physical well-being of urban farmers and gardeners).

“The customers are really excited that we grow food in Baltimore City. They’re excited that these farms are right in their neighborhoods.”

Baltimore is no stranger to climate and environmental hazards, and this is especially true for communities living in the Black Butterfly. The teaching farm, whose nearly 7 acres of land were provided by the city’s Department of Planning, sits just a mile away from Curtis Bay, a neighborhood that has been plagued by pollution from coal dust. Black Baltimorians are also overwhelmingly worried about climate change and its harms, too.

As someone with decades of food and farming experience, Mitchell is well aware of how the changing climate has affected farming. At the same time, he expressed frustration that well-known “climate-smart” techniques, such as cover crops, are sometimes incentivized for industrial farms while smaller farms receive less support. These practices, Mitchell says, should be expected, rather than accepted.

Growing Urban Farmers

Past training programs of the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy ran for nine months and began with in-person classes on foundational topics for a beginner farmer. Mitchell and other teachers guided participants through the basics, like crop selection, pest management, post-harvest handling, safety, marketing, and more.

After 12 weeks of classes, participants attended FAB’s field days, which connected them with local farms and food organizations to gain practical experience. Past field days included instruction on subjects like composting, beekeeping, and growing herbs. Students also gained hands-on experience from shifts at the teaching farm and other local farms.

Mitchell in the fields at Black Butterfly Teaching Farm. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

Past trainees were also each awarded a $2,000 stipend and equipped with books to further add to their understanding of the food system and farming strategies, including Farming While Black by Leah Penniman, The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier, and The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook by Richard Wiswall.

Aria Eghbal was looking for a career change when she discovered the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy. She was working as a medical assistant during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and was feeling burnt out and frustrated by the healthcare system. She applied to the program and became one of 10 people accepted into the first training program—many of whom were also at a career crossroads, she says.

The training program marked the beginning of Eghbal’s career in the food system: as a farmer, as a cook, and, since last December, as FAB’s lead staffer at farmers’ markets. “The customers are really excited that we grow food in Baltimore City,” she says. “They’re excited that these farms are right in their neighborhoods.”

Becoming part of Baltimore’s urban farming community was one of the greatest benefits of the academy, she adds. “We really do care about each other and want to see each other thrive and succeed, through this process of growing food and flowers and processing honey and all the different things that we do.”

The Challenge Ahead

The Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy has seen nearly 20 people graduate from its program. But the USDA funding cuts, particularly to initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion, have also eliminated funding prospects. To operate services like the academy and an upcoming incubator program that Mitchell calls “the launching pad for the next generation of diversified family farmers,” he projects it will cost roughly $300,000. “Fundraising has been incredibly difficult this year,” he says.

Crops in the ground at the teaching farm. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

Added to the difficulty is a political environment where some organizations are hiding their missions. One funder recently asked Mitchell if he was “woke but cloaked”—whether, in other words, the FAB would be hiding language around equity from its website and other materials, to avoid targeting from the Trump administration. “How am I supposed to do that?” Mitchell asked, annoyed, recalling the conversation. “I’m a Black man. My politics are literally on my face.”

Despite all this, Mitchell still has plans for the land where the teaching farm is located, including a pavilion, a playground, and community and commercial orchards. “This was just us growing food and then trying to teach people how to do it,” Mitchell says. “And doing it in a way that is environmentally beneficial. So now, we got to figure out just how to do that on our own.”

The post Can This Baltimore Academy Continue to Train Urban Farmers? appeared first on Civil Eats.

This Man Is Feeding California’s Incarcerated Firefighters

Nadra Nittle — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:44 +0000

In January, as hurricane-force winds caused wildfires to raze entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, more than 7,500 firefighters risked their lives to save people, pets, homes, and communities. Among them were an estimated 1,100 inmates from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This month, as California’s traditional fire season commences with the dry, hot summer, many of those individuals will be back.

Incarcerated individuals have been on the fire lines in the Golden State since 1915, but their numbers have increased in recent years as wildfires have intensified. The Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), a Los Angeles-based organization working toward criminal justice reform, supports those firefighters with quality food unavailable in prison, serving more than 800 during the recent wildfires.

“The goal was to give them different meals based on what they would ask for but also give them the opportunity to experience different kinds of cooking.”

ARC’s executive director, Sam Lewis, himself formerly incarcerated, worked as a butcher in the prison kitchen while serving a 24-year sentence. Now, he and formerly incarcerated prison chefs active in ARC are advocating for incarcerated firefighters—also known as hand crews—and sharing with them a wide range of foods at the fire camps.

Thanks to donations from the public, local restaurants, and food companies, the firefighters battling the L.A. fires were provided pulled pork sandwiches, brisket sandwiches, cheeseburgers, and vegetables. This is a noted departure from the substandard meals people in prison typically receive, meals that often lead to chronic health problems.

ARC will be supporting incarcerated firefighters again this fire season, throughout the state, and Lewis will be there alongside, cooking and putting donations to good use. ARC would also like to see incarcerated firefighters receive significantly higher wages, supporting pending legislation that would allow them to earn a starting hourly pay of $7.25 during active fires and built-in annual wage increases.

These firefighters work long hours, comparable to conventional firefighters, and are vulnerable to suffering serious injuries. Yet most earn meager wages, starting as low as $5.80 per day. The least skilled of the incarcerated firefighters earn about $30 a day for completing 24-hour shifts during active emergencies, a sum critics say is far too little for the risks they take.

Sam Lewis, ARC’s executive director. (Photo courtesy of ARC)

Lewis spoke to Civil Eats about why his organization makes food a priority for these firefighters, and how improving their pay could transform their lives.

Why was it important to ensure that the hand crews had a wide range of foods during the fires earlier this year?

The public wanted to know how they could say thank you to these incarcerated individuals that were putting their lives on the line to save people’s property. So we came up with the idea, with the permission of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, that we could provide them with different meals across the board. The goal was to give them different meals based on what they would ask for but also give them the opportunity to experience different kinds of cooking.

One chef who prepared meals for the firefighters, Jeff Henderson, has an interesting backstory, one that gives him a personal connection to them. Can you say more about him?

Yes, Chef Jeff was the only formerly incarcerated chef that I knew of who came and cooked. He purchases the food, cooks it, and then after the meal is cooked, we reimburse him for the cost. He cooked what he calls “correctional chicken” [the fried chicken he learned to make in prison with all-purpose flour and seasonings] and hot link sandwiches with cheese, and then they had a dessert. The dessert was sent by the cookie company Crumbl.

Chef Jeff is self-taught. Cooking was his dream. He came home a long time ago and started his program [Chef Jeff Project]. He’s written a number of books. His food is incredible. He trains a lot of the kids who work in some of the hotels in Las Vegas, where he’s based. So, if you go to those hotels and you have amazing food there, a lot of times that’s the touch of Chef Jeff.

Although you’re not a chef, food service was one of your responsibilities when you were incarcerated. What was it like to be a butcher in prison?

When I was at Soledad [State Prison], I was the lead butcher for about two years. We prepped meals for about 6,000 people, so anything that had to do with meats, any dairy products, like cheese, was our responsibility. We prepped everything—roast beef, spaghetti and meatballs, hamburgers, chicken. It was our job to make sure that it was prepped, properly stored, and then sent out to the main line for people to eat.

Do you feel like food has improved in prisons or do you think there’s still a long way to go?

So, here’s the thing: It depends on the cook. We had a guy over the entire kitchen who was incredible. This guy would go out and sample food and bring it back. He was from Louisiana, so he was serious about what he would purchase. Each institution gets a budget, so his job was to find the food and spend his budget wisely. He really worked hard to make sure that we had great fresh fruit, and he wouldn’t get the processed turkey because his attitude was like, “If I’m not going to eat it, I’m not going to serve it to the people I’m feeding.” He would also make sure you had enough vegetables on your tray.

There has been some serious effort by the Department of Corrections to move to a healthier diet, because on the back end of having people incarcerated, the cost goes up as their health goes down. But if you feed people properly, their health can be maintained at a higher level, which causes the cost on the back end of incarceration to go down.

ARC supported incarcerated firefighters in January by making sure they had access to foods they wouldn’t normally eat and that they were properly hydrated while risking their lives. And you were inundated with donations of sports drinks for the firefighters?

There were just pallet loads of those coming in. We even had some of our ARC members transport some of those drinks to different base camps. There was so much that sometimes, it was like, “Could you stop donating?” [Laughter] It was a beautiful thing because it just shows the unity of Los Angeles.

“We should always believe in the human spirit and resiliency and understand that our job as a society is to help people become the best version of themselves, even when they’ve made bad choices and possibly have hurt people.”

Beyond food, ARC is seeking donations to help improve the lives of incarcerated firefighters overall once they leave prison. Can you describe the needs these funds will meet?

The donations are for scholarships for [incarcerated] firefighters coming home who want to continue to be firefighters. When a person comes home from incarceration and they go into a training center and become a certified firefighter, then they’re deployed. They can be deployed anywhere in the state, and they have to cover the cost of living, of moving. They have to get an apartment, first and last month’s rent, so that’s one thing that the scholarships will cover.

ARC is also advocating for recently introduced legislation to give incarcerated firefighters higher wages. If this bill passes, how might it change their lives?

The legislation, Assembly Bill 247, was introduced by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan. The money would go on the [prisoners’] books, so they could do what they would like to with it. In some instances, [prisoners] may have restitution to pay, so the state would take 55 percent of that. If they don’t have restitution, or if the restitution has been paid, then they can use it for the commissary. They could just save the money until they’re released also. Walking out of prison, normally, you have $200 in gate money. Ask yourself, how far does that take you, especially in today’s economy?

What is your response to members of the public who are concerned that incarcerated firefighters are being exploited?

The firefighter program is a voluntary program. You have to apply to go to the fire camps, and there’s a whole process that you have to go through, including medical clearance, in order to be accepted. The CDCR health care staff have to clear you—physically and mentally. Because if you think about it, it’s hard work.

Incarcerated firefighters also have to be what you call minimum custody status, which is the lowest classification of security. They have to have eight years or less on their sentence. Disqualifying things that can stop them from going to fire camp are convictions like sex offenses, arson, or [prison] escapes. Other things that are disqualifying are active warrants, medical issues, or high-notoriety cases.

If a person goes to a fire camp, it’s voluntary. If they get there and don’t want to continue, they don’t have to. They can go back without being written up. One of my young people that I mentored decided it wasn’t something that he wanted to do, and so he returned to the facility.

How long have you all been supporting incarcerated firefighters?

We helped establish the Ventura Training Center (VTC) in 2018. That’s the program where people come out of incarceration, go through the training, and become certified firefighters. With the passage of additional legislation after the implementation of VTC, people who are coming home now [after having trained to fight fires] can also get their record expunged so they can get their EMT license, which allows them to become municipal firefighters if they can find a job. We have three or four [ARC alums] who are working [as EMTs] in Orange County, and the rest work for CAL FIRE [wilderness fire protection].

Are you hopeful that public perception of the incarcerated community will change in the wake of the wildfires?

I would hope that this tragic event and the attention that’s being given to our incarcerated hand crews that support firefighters help the entire public understand that people change, that redemption is possible. We should always believe in the human spirit and resiliency and understand that our job as a society is to help people become the best version of themselves, even when they’ve made bad choices and possibly have hurt people. That does not necessarily make them bad people. That makes them people that have done bad things that can be corrected.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

The post This Man Is Feeding California’s Incarcerated Firefighters appeared first on Civil Eats.

Heart of Dinner Delivers Hope to Asian Seniors, and a Boost to Asian Businesses, Too

Adam Reiner — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 08:00:05 +0000

Ten years ago, Yin Chang and Moonlynn Tsai hosted a supper club in their modest Los Angeles apartment. A dozen or so people—mostly friends of friends in the Asian community—would crowd around a custom-built 7-foot-long communal table and feast on dishes like char siu ribs marinated with whiskey or share elaborate hot-pot meals with greenmarket vegetables.

Tsai, who grew up in a restaurant family and is herself a restaurateur and entrepreneur, handled most of the kitchen duties, while Chang, an actor best known for her portrayal of Nelly Yuki on the hit show Gossip Girl, would entertain guests in the dining room.

As a young couple, the two found comfort in bringing together strangers over a home-cooked meal—a communal experience they felt was lacking in their lives at the time.

“Elders like us, if we have any pain or don’t feel very well that day, we cannot go out to get anything.”

“Dinners can bring together people of all cultures and also [present] an opportunity to talk about who we are as people, our heritage, and our love stories,” Chang says. “When we were deciding on a name for our supper club, we were trying to figure out what was at the heart of dinner, and the name ‘Heart of Dinner’ became so fitting.”

Admission to these dinners was free, but guests were invited to leave donations in a large urn on the table, with proceeds going to No Kid Hungry, a child hunger campaign that supports school and community meal programs.

Heart of Dinner’s core mission took a dramatic turn during the pandemic. Chang and Tsai, who moved to New York City in 2018 to pursue career opportunities, were deeply troubled by the wave of Asian hate crimes and xenophobia that swept across the city in March 2020. After a period of feeling helpless, they sprang into action to mobilize support for the elderly Asian community. They partnered with local senior centers to hand-deliver bags of culturally appropriate groceries and ready-to-eat meals, prepared in their tiny home kitchen, to Asian elders isolated by the mandated quarantines. Within months, the couple were regularly delivering over 1,200 meals per week across New York City.

As threats to the Asian community lingered, Chang and Tsai formally established Heart of Dinner as a nonprofit in late 2020, garnering support from private donors; local, mostly Asian-owned businesses; corporate sponsorships; and foundation grants. Today, the organization continues to deliver over 700 care packages every week filled with fresh produce and hot meals to Asian seniors across four of New York City’s five boroughs. Later this year they plan to expand to Staten Island, with fundraising efforts already underway.

In April, Heart of Dinner celebrated its five-year anniversary. While volunteers from across New York City celebrated the milestone, Chang and Tsai were in Los Angeles, where they’ve lived intermittently since January, coordinating relief efforts for Asian seniors displaced by the catastrophic wildfires there (see sidebar below). They believe their experience in New York over the past five years helped them more quickly mobilize recovery efforts there.

Heart of Dinner volunteers at the Lower East Side site organize deliveries for the day. (Photo credit: Adam Reiner)

“We did not see this coming,” Chang says, “but if anything, it was kismet, and poetic in [the] way that it reminded us of the heart of the mission and how necessary this work is, anywhere in the country.”

Delivering Hope to Harlem

On a frigid Wednesday afternoon in February, about a dozen volunteers met at La Marqueta, a Latin food hall in East Harlem, to pack 75 gift bags with groceries like firm tofu, Japanese sweet potatoes, bok choy, and bananas, along with plastic to-go containers filled with stir-fried pork, purple eggplant, and white rice prepared by a partner restaurant in Chinatown. All meals included in Heart of Dinner care packages come from local Asian-owned restaurants.

Each bag, destined for Asian seniors living in nearby public housing, was festooned with colorful, uplifting artwork by volunteers from across the city: drawings and paintings of birds, lanterns, fruit, flowers, and other Asian-themed imagery. “Heart of Dinner” was written in Mandarin characters on the bags, with a personalized note stapled beneath the handle.

The notes included simple wishes for health and prosperity written in each recipient’s native language—in many cases, messages one would expect a grandparent to give, not receive: “Make sure you drink water” or “Please eat well today.” Two of the bags had notes written in Thai; other Heart of Dinner sites also prepare notes in Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog.

The volunteers at the East Harlem site came from all walks of life: college students, bartenders, musicians, physician assistants, and retirees. After loading the care packages into large stroller wagons, the team divided into small groups, traversing the neighborhood’s intricate web of public housing developments by foot.

The volunteers warmly greeted each elder at the door, wearing masks as a precautionary measure, and presented the bags respectfully with two hands. They inquired with genuine concern about each person’s health, as a grandchild would. Most conversations were brief but cordial and ended with gentle bows and exchanges of “xiè xie” (“thank you” in Mandarin) with the many Chinese recipients who live in the area.

East Harlem, which spans from 103rd to 125th street on the east side of northern Manhattan, is a predominantly Latinx neighborhood. But according to the most recent Census Bureau data, Asians now comprise about 9.6 percent of its population, up from only 5.5 percent in 2010.

Due to gentrification, many Asian seniors in New York City are being displaced from Chinatown, forcing them to relocate to neighborhoods like Harlem in search of more affordable housing. The Heart of Dinner founders stressed that this can be particularly isolating for many elders, because these neighborhoods often don’t have familiar Asian businesses that cater to their needs.

An elder in Brooklyn receives her weekly Heart of Dinner delivery. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)

In one of the high-rise public housing developments along the end of the route, a soft-spoken 73-year-old woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Xie extolled the virtues of Heart of Dinner through a translator. “I feel so thankful from the bottom of my heart,” she said of the weekly deliveries she’d been receiving for months. “Elders like us, if we have any pain or don’t feel very well that day, we cannot go out to get anything.”

Another elderly woman, whose husband is in his 90s, joked, “even our children don’t go above and beyond like Heart of Dinner does for us every week.”

Creating a Virtuous Circle

Although Heart of Dinner’s primary mission is to advocate for the Asian elder community, it also provides vital support for many Asian-owned businesses by partnering with local restaurants, wholesale grocers, and organic farmers. “We intentionally purchase from Asian-owned businesses wherever possible, which also helps to build economic resilience in the communities we serve,” Chang says.

In 2023, they began partnering with Choy Commons, an organic farm collective in the Catskills, to supply their East Harlem site with Asian heritage crops such as baby Shanghai bok choy and hakurei turnips.

“The reality of many Asian seniors living in food insecurity is painful,” says Nicole Yeo-Solano, co-founder of Choy Commons, “especially because so many of us were raised by our grandparents, and we know that many of their journeys have not been easy.”

Heart of Dinner also works with Asian-owned restaurants and bakeries across New York City like Saigon Social and Partybus Bakeshop on the Lower East Side, which provide hearty soups and scallion buns, respectively, for their weekly deliveries. They also purchase freshly made soy milk from Fong On, New York City’s oldest tofu shop, which opened in Chinatown in 1933.

Pei Wei, the co-owner of Zaab Zaab, a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg, has supported Heart of Dinner since the pandemic, and her kitchen staff continues to supply over 100 hot meals every week for the Brooklyn delivery site.

“I tell the chef to cook the vegetables a little longer so it’s softer for people who have sensitive teeth,” Wei says, “or to chop the meat into smaller pieces so it’s easier to digest.” Her restaurant also frequently hosts bag decorating sessions, where young children like Wei’s 10-year-old daughter are invited to participate.

“We’re very proud that every single meal we serve with our partners is paid for by Heart of Dinner, at least what the restaurant would be charging,” Tsai says. “So, they’re able to partake in community giving while also doing something that helps sustain their business.”

Finding Connection Through Community

For many volunteers, working with Heart of Dinner has helped foster a deeper connection to the Asian community and their own Asian identities. Professional illustrator Nancy Pappas began volunteering and helping decorate bags and notecards in 2020, after feeling horrified by violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in New York City during the pandemic.

Brightly decorated Heart of Dinner bags are filled with fresh produce and prepared meals. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)

Pappas is an adoptee who was born in Korea and raised by a white family in Kansas City, Missouri. Having struggled with her own Asian identity growing up, she credits Heart of Dinner with helping further her journey of self-discovery. Her experiences with the nonprofit even encouraged her to seek out her Korean birth mother, whom she met in person in 2019, and spend extended time living in Asia.

“To be able to give back to the community—even though as an adoptee I don’t always feel like I belong at times—gives me a place and a purpose,” Pappas says. She attends at least three bag decorating sessions per month at Heart of Dinner’s Lower East Side volunteer site.

Hong Kong native Zoe Lau, who works part-time with Heart of Dinner as a volunteer communications coordinator, speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandarin and spends several hours every week calling elder beneficiaries to confirm their weekly deliveries in their native languages. She began attending weekly bag decorating sessions in New York City during the pandemic to feel closer to her grandmother in Hong Kong, who she was unable to visit due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.

“Since I couldn’t fly back to see her, I went in every Wednesday as much as I could, keeping in mind that if my grandma didn’t have anyone around to look after her, I would be very upset,” Lau says. “I hoped we could be those other grandchildren for these seniors.”

To see Heart of Dinner in action, check out this video on their Instagram.

Founders Moonlynn Tsai (left) and Yin Chang (bottom right) with volunteers in Los Angeles, where Heart of Dinner has delivered more than 300 care packages to Asian elders after the devastating wildfires. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)

In January, Chang and Tsai were on their way to the San Diego airport to return to New York City after visiting family for the holidays. Then the news spread about the catastrophic wildfires unfolding across Los Angeles.

“It was like this déjà vu moment,” Chang says. “It brought us right back to [the pandemic in] 2020. We had the same thought: ‘Who is taking care of folks like our grandparents and aging parents who can’t always speak the language to ask for help or to get the resources they need?’”

They canceled their flights and drove two hours north to L.A., taking up temporary residence to mobilize recovery efforts. Without knowing who the recipients would be, they began decorating as many gift bags as possible, even pulling all-nighters to make sure they had sufficient supply.

As they did during the pandemic, Chang and Tsai canvassed local shelters and senior centers and scoured social media to find elderly Asian victims in need. Through a GoFund Me page, they learned of an elderly couple whose house burned down in the Altadena fires and contacted Allyson Eng, their granddaughter, who organized the fundraiser. After’s Eng’s grandparents lost their two-story, three-bedroom home near Eaton Canyon, where they lived since the 1980s, she raised almost $15,000 to help them rebuild.

Without a place to live, the grandparents were forced to crowd into Eng’s parents’ modest bungalow in nearby Duarte, along with her uncle and his family, who also lost their apartment in the wildfires. “Our house gets pretty crowded when there’s six or seven of us staying there at one time,” Eng says.

Allyson Eng with her grandmother Joan after she received a Heart of Dinner delivery in L.A. this month. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)

Her 82-year-old grandmother Joan used to spend most of her time in the kitchen of the home she lost in the fire, warming its white-tiled walls with the steam of her cooking. When the Heart of Dinner deliveries began arriving, she was delighted to find her bags filled with so many familiar Asian ingredients like bok choy and Chinese noodles, which she used to make chow mein with shrimp, eggs, and scallions for the grandchildren. Even Eng’s 88-year-old grandfather Joseph, who rarely cooks anymore, used the ingredients to prepare fried rice with greens, topped with ha mai (dried shrimp) and lap cheong (Chinese sausage).

Long after the wildfires were contained, Chang and Tsai continued to gather local friends to decorate bags and load produce and dry goods from Asian grocery stores like H Mart and Mitsuwa into the trunk of their hatchback. Leaning on their years of New York City experience, they phoned elderly recipients to coordinate delivery routes, sometimes as often as three times a week, eventually staging their operations at a friend’s art studio in the heart of the city. They sourced culturally appropriate prepared meals such as Cantonese-style roast duck and jajangmyeon, Korean noodles with fermented black bean sauce, from purveyors in the Los Angeles area like 99 Ranch Market and Paik’s Noodle.

Within months, the small team of 10 friends and volunteers delivered over 350 personalized gift bags to displaced elders from the South Bay to San Gabriel Valley.

But the work is far from finished. The couple has returned to California this month to resume deliveries, with the goal of reaching 1,000 total care packages for displaced seniors by the summer’s end.

“As we’re talking to more elders, they need long-term support, so it’s important for us to remain committed,” Tsai says. “For elders who have lost everything and are completely displaced, we want to make sure to provide them hope so they don’t feel alone or like they’ve lost community or love around them.”

The post Heart of Dinner Delivers Hope to Asian Seniors, and a Boost to Asian Businesses, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.

Sean Sherman Expands His Vision for Decolonizing the US Food System

Kate Nelson — Tue, 20 May 2025 08:00:46 +0000

Sean Sherman walks through an expansive commissary kitchen in South Minneapolis, his eyes lighting up with excitement. He isn’t taking in the kitchen as it is—dormant but well-equipped with an industrial smoker, a walk-in sausage-making area, and plentiful storage space. Instead, he’s seeing the future of his Meals for Native Institutions initiative, when the space is up, running, and realizing a long-term vision to introduce more Indigenous foods into the American food system.

Sherman, an Oglala Lakota tribal member with an unassuming demeanor, a soft smile, and a signature long braid hanging down his back, has endeavored to revitalize Native American food traditions since 2014, when he founded The Sioux Chef, a catering and educational enterprise. His focus is on “decolonized” food—made without Eurocentric ingredients such as beef, pork, chicken, dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar—most notably at his acclaimed Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni.

“We’re scaling up our efforts almost simultaneously in Minnesota and Montana, and the goal is that we’re developing a model that works anywhere.”

There he’s become known for cedar-braising bison (flavoring meat with sprigs of the coniferous tree), chopping up plant medicines like ramps, morels, and sweet potatoes, and finishing off dishes with seasonings like sumac and sage. His Indigenous Food Lab (IFL), also in Minneapolis, is an incubator and training kitchen where Native chefs and entrepreneurs can access equipment and information from Sherman and other knowledge keepers.

Sherman still cooks at his restaurant, but these days, he has his sights set on a triad of initiatives that bring him closer to the goal of making the U.S. food system more inclusive and indeed more Indigenous. The opening later this year of an Indigenous Food Lab satellite in Bozeman, Montana, is part of that vision. So too is his cookbook Turtle Island (Clarkson Potter), which I coauthored, covering Native foodways across North America.

But in this moment, Sherman is most excited about Meals for Native Institutions, which will provide schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and community centers with large-format Indigenous foods.

“This model has such immense potential to have a huge impact on the way we eat, especially for kids and elders—and really everyone,” he says about the larger efforts to decolonize institutional food.

Realizing a Vision

This year feels like a full-circle moment for Sherman, who grew up eating government commodity foods—think canned beef and neon-orange blocks of cheese—on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. That tribal community has endured some of the most devastating impacts of European colonization and U.S. policies on Indigenous cultures, practices, and foodways, including the government-sanctioned slaughter of the all-important bison.

Sherman cooking at the Indigenous Food Lab incubator and training kitchen in Minneapolis. (Photo credit: Bill Phelps Studio)

Today, Pine Ridge has some of the highest poverty rates in the nation and lowest life expectancies in the world. For Sherman, a TIME 100 honoree and three-time James Beard Award winner, a return to Indigenous foods can address some of those marked inequities.

“Maybe down the road we’ll even be able to get some of these Native food products into the commodity food program, which so many rural Indigenous communities like the Navajo Nation and Pine Ridge still utilize today,” he added.

His mission to revitalize Indigenous foodways began with a yearning to learn more about his people’s food while also curtailing the marked health inequities tribal communities experience, including disproportionate rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. He’s done this through his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), and through Owamni, and now he’ll have additional ways to move toward these goals.

Meals for Native Institutions will be housed in a newly acquired space that Sherman has named Wóyute Thipi (meaning “food building” in Dakota), situated along what’s known as the American Indian Cultural Corridor on Minneapolis’ Franklin Avenue, a cultural district home to several Indigenous-owned businesses, including a coffee shop and an art gallery.

The building will serve as NATIFS’ headquarters and feature a counter-service Indigenous BBQ restaurant dubbed ŠHOTÁ—the Dakota word for smoke—that’s expected to open later this year. Like Owamni, that public-facing eatery is meant to bring more meaningful attention to his big-picture goal.

“There is a huge need for culturally appropriate foods, especially in schools and programs serving Native people.”

Although the institutional foods initiative is still in the early stages, with Sherman actively fundraising to get it off the ground this summer, he foresees the well-equipped 4,000-square-foot commissary kitchen churning out a plethora of simply prepared, nutritious Indigenous foods. Early recipes include wild rice pilaf with dried berries; baked tepary beans lightly sweetened with maple syrup; and a three sisters soup that brings together nixtamalized pima corn, tepary beans, and delicata squash.

Much like the fare served at Owamni and planned for ŠHOTÁ, the meals created for schools and hospitals will be devoid of ingredients introduced by Europeans during colonization. Sherman’s team is working closely with a nutritionist to ensure recipes will meet established USDA nutritional standards for those settings.

“We know that the menus designed for the American school system aren’t great,” he said. “For example, pizza is somehow considered a perfect food because it covers the meat, grain, dairy, and fruit and vegetable requirements all in one swoop, but we know that pizza isn’t a perfect food for schoolkids. We’re not trying to replace the entire lunch program; we’re trying to create culturally specific components so there are options to build out menus using these recipes with at least one ingredient coming from an Indigenous producer.”

Local Indigenous advocates are cheering Sherman on as he expands his purview to better serve the robust Native community in the Twin Cities, estimated at more than 35,000 individuals. “There is a huge need for culturally appropriate foods, especially in schools and programs serving Native people, and I’m grateful Sean is supporting this with his new business,” said Indigenous Food Network Program Coordinator Kateri Tuttle. “There will always be a need to continue to expand services that provide our families and community with these important foods.”

Sherman wants to introduce more Indigenous foods into the American food system. (Photo credit: Bill Phelps Studio)

As much as this is about feeding people, it’s also about uplifting Native entrepreneurs and businesses. To that end, Sherman estimates that NATIFS currently funnels some $700,000 a year to Indigenous producers and farmers. He only see that growing from here.

“We want to ensure there’s always money going toward Indigenous food production,” he said. “I think we could probably double or triple our current purchasing power with this move into institutional food, where we’ll eventually be creating thousands of servings a day. So we’re not only addressing a need, but we’re also helping create a more sustainable system.”

Muckleshoot nutrition educator and food sovereignty advocate Val Segrest, who has collaborated with Sherman on past initiatives, emphasized the importance of initiatives like this.

“Efforts like this are a powerful reclaiming of space [and] story, and strengthen food sovereignty,” she said in an email. “By establishing Indigenous-owned food hubs in the heart of our communities, we restore pathways for cultural knowledge, health, and economic vitality to thrive. This is more than a building or initiative—it’s a beacon for Indigenous food futures, rooted in our values and nourished by our ancestors’ vision.”

Sherman is also eager to launch the satellite IFL in Bozeman, developed in partnership with Montana State University’s Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative, the Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative, and the Human Resource Development Council of Southwest Montana.

Set to open this fall, it will be located in the Human Resources Development Council of Southwest Montana building and feature an incubator kitchen, a classroom, and a large warehouse designed to replicate the model he has developed in Minneapolis. Similar satellite IFLs are in the works in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Anchorage, Alaska—all intended to empower regional Indigenous chefs, entrepreneurs, community members, and organizations with professional equipment, culinary knowledge, and other support as needed.

For Sherman’s collaborators in Montana, it’s a welcome development. “First and foremost, the Indigenous Foods Lab is about revitalizing the kinship economy for the well-being of the people and the land; in the current climate, this work is more important than ever,” said Jill Falcon Ramaker, PhD (Bishkane Mishtadim Ikwe), director of the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative.

“In the past, our [Native] food system was sustainable for more than 13,000 years because of the networked work of Native people and reliance on the gifts of the land or our older-than-human relatives,” she said. “As we return to the land in a place-based food system, we must rebuild our community amongst Native nations in the region.”

But the impact of the forthcoming IFL goes beyond just the area’s tribal communities, explained KayAnn Miller, co-executive director of the Montana Partnership to End Childhood Hunger. She pointed to alarming state statistics that she hoped the IFL could help curtail: that about two in five Montana residents have two or more chronic diseases, and that about a third of Montana children have at least one chronic disease.

An entree from Owamni, Sean Sherman’s award-winning restaurant, featuring elk. (Photo credit: Scott Streble).

“As we know, chronic diseases often have a dietary component, which means we need to eat a whole lot better in Montana,” said Miller. “Indigenous foods—which tend to be whole and healthy with an emphasis on lean proteins and fruits and vegetables—are right in line with what we all need to eat to reduce health challenges like heart disease and diabetes, which are two of the top 10 causes of death in our state. I see the Indigenous Food Lab as a way for all of us to learn more about these good foods, how to prepare and cook them, and how to grow and eat more of them.”

For Sherman, it’s an opportunity to address the inequities he grew up with back on the Pine Ridge Reservation while also uplifting local Native communities.

“We’re scaling up our efforts almost simultaneously in Minnesota and Montana, and the goal is that we’re developing a model that works anywhere—the Dakotas, Alaska, Hawaii,” he said. “Not only does this give Indigenous communities a platform to talk about the true histories of their cultures and these lands, but it’s also building skills and creating jobs within our communities. This is the kind of food sovereignty we’ve always been working toward.”

The post Sean Sherman Expands His Vision for Decolonizing the US Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.

How One Milwaukee Food Bank Is Handling the Drop in USDA Funding

Brian Calvert — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:00:51 +0000

For months, Matt King kept an eye on federal food aid policies. He also stayed in constant contact with Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, which, among other things, manages food disbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). King is the chief executive officer of Hunger Task Force, which operates a food bank, a 280-acre farm, and other aid programs in Milwaukee, providing nutritious food to more than 50,000 people every month in Wisconsin’s most populous city.

In particular, he was tracking available food distributions from the Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP. TEFAP is a federal program that provides food assistance to people with low incomes, often by supplementing food banks. An affable, soft-spoken advocate for nutrition, King was planning on the TEFAP distributions to stockpile food supplies heading into summer.

“Over the past year, we have experienced a 35 percent increase in visits to local food pantries.”

Suddenly, in late March, those TEFAP distributions were canceled. There was no formal communication around the cancelled disbursements, amounting to $2.2 million in Wisconsin, he says. They were just no longer available. Hunger Task Force lost five full truckloads of food, including canned chicken, cheese, milk, and eggs, along with other deliveries of turkey breast, chicken legs, pulled pork, and pork chops. More than 300,000 pounds of food, worth $615,000, was gone. Nationwide, a total $500 million allocated for TEFAP had been cut, leaving many food banks scrambling.

It was the second blow in March to the nation’s food safety net, as the Trump administration continued sweeping cuts to federal programs and funding. Hunger Task Force and other food banks were already coping with the loss of $500 million from the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation. The CCC oversees the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which provided funds that allowed King to purchase fresh food, especially produce, from local farmers.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has said that the USDA is cutting funding allocated during the Biden administration that is excessive or unnecessary. In an April 3 letter to Senator Amy Klobucher (D-Minnesota), the ranking member of the Senate’s Committee on Agriculture, Rollins said the Biden administration had “inflated statutory programs with Commodity Credit Corporation dollars without any plans for long-term solutions, and even in 2024, used the pandemic as a reason to make funding announcements.”

Matt King, CEO of Hunger Task Force, on a 208-acre Hunger Task Force Farm in Franklin, Wisconsin, which offers a unique source of fresh produce for the community. (Photo courtesy of Hunger Task Force)

During trips to Pennsylvania and Arkansas last week, Rollins said that states currently have more than enough funding for programs like TEFAP and that the cancelled funds were extra distributions that should have ended with the pandemic. “The money is there,” she said, and going forward the programs will be “more effective, more intentional.”

In fact, food banks are facing major shortfalls from USDA cuts, with a combined loss of $1 billion from cuts to LFPA and TEFAP.

Far from Washington, D.C., King’s Hunger Task Force, along with food banks across the country, faces drastic cuts to programs and funding, even as the cost of living, including food, continues to climb.

Civil Eats recently spoke with King to learn the extent of the cuts—and how his organization plans to move forward.

How will you close the gap in food deliveries created by the cuts in federal funding?

It’s been a challenge, and especially given the short notice. One of the real problematic aspects of the cut to the LFPA program, specifically, was that there didn’t seem to be much of a consideration for the impact on the small businesses and the impact on the farmers who were operating under the pretense that the program was continuing for the upcoming growing season.

Hunger Task Force lost five full truckloads of food, including canned chicken, cheese, milk, and eggs.

Many of them had already gone out and purchased the supplies and essentially made financial commitments, only to have the rug kind of pulled out from underneath them. Many of them had already planted their seeds and had started their seedlings for the upcoming growing season. So, for us, it was talking to some of our trusted, long-time donors and explaining the situation.

Our community of donors is also very much committed to local agriculture and supporting growers and producers, so they were able to help us to fill that gap.

What will the TEFAP interruption mean for the people of Milwaukee who have been counting on food banks?

Well, over the past year, we have experienced a 35 percent increase in visits to local food pantries. Right now, across all of our programs, we’re serving over 50,000 people every month, and over the last five years, just here in Milwaukee, the effects of housing and rent increases have been really acute.

We’ve experienced an over 30 percent increase over five years in average rent. When you add all these things together—a dramatic increase in average rent, the increase costs of living, particularly around groceries, as well as then the end of many of the pandemic-era benefits—all these things have contributed to a pretty stark increase in need. So, these cuts come at a really challenging time.

We currently have strong community support and enough inventory to make sure that our network of food pantries stays stocked.

But if the need continues to increase at the rate that it has been, there does become a tipping point. We’re about a year out from a point at which a continued increase in need would need to be accompanied with an increased level of food inventories to be able to keep up.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has said these cuts were made because the additional funding to these programs was “unnecessary.” How do you respond to that?

These particular shipments that were canceled were authorized because of the dramatic increase in need that food banks around the country have experienced. A lot of that is due to the increased cost of living that people around the country are experiencing, in particular housing, but also groceries. These shipments were a necessary part of supporting the food banks’ capacity to meet that growing need.

During the first Trump administration, when similar tariffs were enacted, the USDA purchased a lot of food to stabilize commodities and to stabilize food markets and food pricing. Right now, we’re taking a measured approach and purchasing some items, but also monitoring, to see whether or not similar investment from the USDA will be made to support producers who might be affected by the current tariff situation.

Can you describe the relationships that you’ve built with local farmers due to some of the increases in this support and funding? How do you think that those relationships are going to be impacted by these cuts?

These programs have been vital for our ability to provide access to healthy food, but they’ve also been vital for the farmers that we partner with, and we’ve been able to forge some really meaningful connections and relationships with producers here in our state. And those relationships will continue, because those weren’t contingent on a funding source for many of the farmers. They not only have appreciated the market for their products, but also the ability to see their products going to help people in need. So they don’t want to see that go away.

Fresh produce at emergency food network partner South Milwaukee Human Concerns. (Photo courtesy of Hunger Task Force)

As we all know, there’s a lot of risk that exists within farming from one year to the next, and having the security of some of these contracts has really benefited American agriculture and a lot of American small businesses. So, from our perspective, these programs are not only vital for the access to healthy food for people in need, but also really vital to our economy.

Because our commitment and partnership and friendship with our local producers here in Wisconsin runs so deep, it was no question about whether we were going to continue that programming, so we have honored those commitments, essentially with our own version of the LFPA program.

What are the ways that farmers or members of the public can help their local food banks?

Well, food banks around the country are reliant upon the generosity and compassion of their community, and that includes people giving of their time to volunteer, people giving of their funds to help the organization run and to make food purchases where needed, but then also donations of food. So we would encourage people to find a way that makes sense for them to get involved with their local food bank.

For farmers, whether it’s the possible upcoming farm bill process or whether it’s the current federal budget negotiation and reconciliation that’s happening at the Ag Committee level right now, farmers have an opportunity to reach out to their federal legislators to let them know that as constituents, they support these [LPFA and TEFAP] programs being prioritized and invested into.

I think that that’s the most impactful way they can get involved. We’ve done visits with our legislators, and it’s been our food bank and the farmers together really demonstrating our mutual support for programs like this.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post How One Milwaukee Food Bank Is Handling the Drop in USDA Funding appeared first on Civil Eats.

At These Grocery Stores, No One Pays

Sam Delgado — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 08:00:08 +0000

More than 50 people stood outside the Enoch Pratt Library’s Southeast Anchor branch on a recent spring morning in Baltimore. Parents with small children, teenagers, and senior citizens clustered outside the door and waited to hear their ticket numbers called.

They weren’t there for books—at least, not at that moment. They came to shop for groceries.

Connected to the library, the brightly painted market space is small but doesn’t feel cramped. Massive windows drench it in sunshine. In a previous life, it was a café. Now, shelves, tables, counters, and a refrigerator are spread out across the room, holding a mix of produce and shelf-stable goods.

Every fourth Friday, Pratt Free Market turns into “Pantry on the Go!”, a farmers’ market-style setup outside the library that offers fruits and vegetables.

That day, as staff and volunteers took their stations, shoppers walked in and filled their bags with what was in stock. On any given day, there’s a range of produce, like collard greens, apples, onions, radishes, potatoes, and cherry tomatoes, plus eggs, orange juice, rice, bread, and treats like cookies and peanut butter crackers. As they exited, shoppers did not need to pull out their wallets: No one pays at Pratt Free Market.

Launched in the fall of 2024, Pratt Free Market opens its doors every Wednesday and Friday and serves around 200 people per day. Anyone can pick up food at the store without providing identification or meeting income requirements. The library-based free grocery store was pitched by M’balu “Lu” Bangura when she started her role as Enoch Pratt Library’s chief of equity and fair practices. The idea stemmed from the food insecurity she saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Seeing people hungry just never sat right with me,” said Bangura. “People shouldn’t have to stress about this.”

The Trump administration’s rampant cuts across government agencies have heightened concerns about the future of food security in the U.S. In March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) cancelled two local food programs that connected small farms to food banks and schools.

Republican lawmakers have also proposed significant cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a critical resource that helps low-income consumers purchase food. Economists also say that President Trump’s recent tariff policy on major agricultural trade partners will only cause the cost of food to rise—during a time when food prices were already projected to increase.

The combination of slapping tariffs on food trade partners and cutting aid programs seems like a perfect way to exacerbate an ongoing hunger problem in the U.S. In 2023, one in seven households faced food insecurity at some point in the year. For Baltimore residents, 28 percent reported experiencing food insecurity last year—twice the national average. Bangura described a time when a group of nurses came to Pratt Free Market on their lunch break, looking to pick up some food. She says that other working people have done the same.

On a recent Friday, the Pratt Free Market was stocked with radishes, apples, onions, eggs, salad mix, and other grocery items. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

Free grocery stores, like food pantries and community fridges, offer food at no cost to community members. But unlike other food charity models, free grocery stores often put more emphasis on the physical environment and service.

Just like regular markets, these dedicated spaces are bright, open, and filled with shelves and fridges holding a mix of food and household items, and customers choose what they want. A traditional food pantry may not have an appealing atmosphere, and community refrigerators have limited space and choices. By simulating the grocery store shopping experience, the free stores offer more than just food; they create space for dignity, too.

Pratt Free Market isn’t alone in this model. While some free grocery stores—like Unity Shoppe in Santa Barbara and World Harvest in Los Angeles—have been around for a while, others have popped up in recent years, including The Store in Nashville, Today’s Harvest just outside Minneapolis, the UMMA Center’s Harvest Market in Chicago, and San Francisco’s District 10 Community Market and Friday Farm Fresh Market.

The Pratt Model

The groceries that line the shelves and refrigerators inside Pratt Free Market vary from week to week, depending on who drops off food. Bangura says the vast majority of their food is purchased from a variety of sources, including the Maryland Food Bank and Plantation Park Heights, a local urban farm. The market sources its non-perishables and household or personal items, like deodorant, from Blessings of Hope, a Pennsylvania-based food redistribution organization.

Raquel Cureton, a program assistant at Pratt Library, stocked the shelves at Pratt Free Market before doors opened to the public. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

The funding for these purchases comes entirely from donations to Pratt Library, which are then split amongst the library’s different programs and initiatives, including Pratt Free Market. The library also receives donated food from Leftover Love, a Baltimore nonprofit that rescues food from local businesses that would otherwise go to waste.

On really good days, Bangura says, the market offers a mix of everything—from healthy, fresh produce to sweets like donuts. And every fourth Friday, the marker turns into “Pantry on the Go!”, a farmers’ market-style setup outside the library that offers fruits and vegetables. Last month, Bangura said they handed out onions, sweet potatoes, watermelons, celery, and apples.

As with most philanthropic efforts, volunteers are at the heart of Pratt Free Market’s operations. Gwendolyn Myers, a retiree who lives in the neighborhood, has volunteered with the free grocery store since they opened. She sees her work as a way to give back to her community, and she even brings extra bags of food to her elderly neighbors who aren’t able to leave their homes.

“A little bit of food, it helps,” Myers said. “Times are hard, and they’re going to get harder.”

Meanwhile, In Nashville

About 700 miles from Baltimore, in Nashville, Tennessee, The Store has the look and feel of a grocery store—it’s well-lit, spacious, and stocked with an even mix of fresh foods like fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy, alongside shelf-stable items like oatmeal and rice. It even offers items like flowers and greeting cards. And just like at Pratt Free Market, its shoppers pay nothing.

Inside The Store in Nashville, which looks and feels like a regular grocery store. (Photo courtesy of The Store)

With funding coming from grants, corporate sponsorships, fundraising events, and individual donors, The Store also purchases most of its food, with a small portion donated. Sarah Goodrich, The Store’s operations director, says they source their food and ingredients from partners like Second Harvest Food Bank, the national produce distributor FreshPoint, and various local farms.

The Store opened in March 2020, during a distinctly difficult time for Tennessee and the country at large. Days before their launch, a deadly set of tornadoes devastated parts of Nashville and Middle Tennessee. Then, the staff received more difficult news: a nationwide lockdown was in place as the pandemic upended everything.

But the back-to-back adversities didn’t stop The Store from helping people access food. “We very quickly had to pivot our model,” said Mari Clare Derrick, The Store’s volunteer director. They switched to delivering food, and in that first year, served over a million meals.

Five years later and in spite of a tumultuous start, The Store’s doors are still open. People with incomes up to twice the federal poverty level can enroll to shop there. Participants are then split into a bi-weekly schedule, and each group alternates every other week. Over email, Goodrich added that more than 870 households are currently enrolled, and while the program is full, they’re working to expand their capacity by establishing another location.

Goodrich says that the “secret recipe” for solving social problems, like hunger, is collaboration and partnerships. The Store has dozens of “referral partners,” or organizations that work closely with vulnerable populations, like families transitioning into housing, formerly incarcerated individuals, and victims of domestic violence. These partner groups can refer their clients and patients to The Store, which can guide their shoppers to these organizations for help as needed.

Community Connection

Having the institutional backing of a Baltimore public library made it possible to launch the Pratt Free Market. “Because this is under [Enoch Pratt Library], I’m able to build partnerships with community organizations who want to come in,” says Bangura. “They want to work with us, and they want to bring their volunteers.”

Taking advantage of its affiliation with the library, the Pratt Free Market aims to connect shoppers to other library-run social initiatives, like Project ENCORE, which helps formerly incarcerated individuals re-enter society, and additional wrap-around services, including in-library social workers, lawyers, and housing navigators.

Unlike other food charity models, free grocery stores put a little more emphasis on the physical environment and service.

Using the library’s resources means access to a large and consistently available space, and the ability to offer more food and serve more people than a smaller intervention like a community refrigerator could. Having a market also allows the community to give feedback about what’s offered, unlike with a community fridge. (The library does have a community refrigerator at three other branches, all stocked with produce from Maryland-based Moon Valley Farm.)

Shopper input is a key part of the free grocery store model. When stocking the store, Bangura considers what products seem to be popular, including non-food items. “My dream and vision was always that this would look like a mini grocery store,” said Bangura. “Many grocery stores have things like deodorant, dish detergent, and soap.” She added that Pratt Free Market has a feminine hygiene dispenser, supplied by organic menstrual product company Femly.

Having a welcoming, communal, in-person space has also allowed for relationships to be built between free grocery store staffers, volunteers, and the communities they serve. Goodrich says that store organizers listen to their shoppers and conduct surveys to learn what foods and items to purchase.

A Disconcerting Future for Food Security

As the Trump administration dismantles federal food and hunger assistance initiatives, advocates see the impacts, and they’re troubling.

The “Everybody Eats” sign at Pratt Free Market. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)

“There are millions of children living in food-insecure households,” said Alexis Bylander, interim child nutrition programs and policy director at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). “This is just a really terrible time to end those kinds of programs.”

On top of cuts to the programs, the consumer choices of SNAP recipients have also been a topic of discussion among policymakers. Representative Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) posted on X that it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to “pay for someone else’s soda.”

“You want a soda? Get a job and go buy it yourself,” Mace wrote.

Though Mace alludes to SNAP recipients choosing “unhealthy” foods, restricting options for beneficiaries does nothing to address affordability or accessibility, says Salaam Bhatti, SNAP director at FRAC. “If your goal is for people to eat healthier, you have to understand that the healthier food is the most expensive food in a grocery store,” he said. “If you really want people to buy better food, then increase the SNAP benefit, because right now, it’s only an average of $6 per person per day.”

“I don’t think that I’m going to cure world hunger. But I could help one person eat their next meal. And that’s enough for me.”

The Trump administration’s ongoing and looming funding slashes haven’t affected The Store and Pratt Free Market directly because neither receive federal dollars. But cuts to critical food assistance and welfare programs could force more families to seek aid at philanthropic food initiatives like free grocery stores—and stretch resources thinner than they already are.

It’s particularly concerning in the context of rising grocery prices, which has been an ongoing problem since the pandemic began in 2020. Not all the increases stemmed from higher demand; some resulted from the intentional decision of major food manufacturers, retailers, and commodity growers to raise prices higher than the rate of inflation, says Errol Schweizer, a grocery store industry expert.

This price inflation is “not just a profiteering issue, it’s a food apartheid issue . . . and that it’s made people so much more food insecure,” he added.

Free grocery stores won’t solve hunger or its various root causes, and the people who lead these initiatives know that. But these spaces can play a crucial role in responding to local needs and gaps in real time, while offering a safe, dignified space.

As a dozen shoppers at a time perused the offerings at Pratt Free Market, they filled their bags with snacks and food and made pleasant conversation with staff and volunteers.

Sylvester Foster just started coming to market in the last couple weeks after some friends mentioned it to him. On his third visit, he noticed volunteers struggling to bring a new refrigerator into the store. So, he ended up helping them, and then started to help with other tasks, like breaking down boxes. In exchange for his spur-of-the-moment volunteer work, he got to shop at the market early.

“I gave [the volunteers] a hand, and I ended up getting myself early. So it was a 2-for-1,” Foster joked. “It’s very useful,” he added about the market. “My thing is, you got to utilize whatever you get.”

The store is modest, and still has challenges, like accessing more food to offer, says Bangura. But even so, for hundreds of Baltimore households a week, Pratt Free Market plays an active role in easing the financial pressure of affording groceries.

“I don’t think that I’m going to cure world hunger,” said Bangura. “But I could help one person eat their next meal. And that’s enough for me.”

The post At These Grocery Stores, No One Pays appeared first on Civil Eats.

Hawaiian Taro Takes Root in Oregon

Libby Leonard — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 09:00:37 +0000

This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

In the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation story, the goddess Ho‘ohōkūkalani gives birth to a stillborn son, who is buried in the fertile soil. In her grief, she waters the soil with her tears, and a sprout emerges, becoming the first kalo plant. This plant nourishes her second-born son, Hāloa, the first Native Hawaiian.

For Native Hawaiians, kalo, also known as taro—a tropical plant prized for its starchy, nutritious, rootlike corm as well as its leaves—is not just a traditional food source but an ancestor, symbolizing a lasting and reciprocal connection to land. As a staple crop, kalo has sustained Pacific Islander cultures for generations.

Especially for those who had left the island many decades earlier, it was monumental to see kalo being planted in Oregon.

Now kalo has sprouted thousands of miles from its ancestral home in the Portland metropolitan area, where a growing Native Hawaiian population resides. The land for the garden—or māla, in Hawaiian—started with just six square feet but has expanded exponentially, with multiple locations. What these gardens produce is more than just food and a bond with Indigenous culture; it is a thriving community.

“We give a safe space for our Hawaiian families,” said Leialoha Ka‘ula, one of the garden project’s founders, describing its greater purpose. “It [is] also food sovereignty, that relationship to ʻāina, or land. It’s a place of healing.”

Ka‘ula, like many Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI), left the islands due to the high cost of living there, combined with low wages and lack of jobs and housing. It’s part of a pattern that followed the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and declaration of statehood by the U.S. in 1959. Then as now, emigration is fueled by unaffordable living costs, low-wage jobs, and a housing crisis driven by tourism, luxury development, and an influx of mainlanders.

In 2020, the U.S. Census reported that, for the first time, more Native Hawaiians live in the continental U.S. than they do in Hawaiʻi, with Oregon having nearly 40,000 NHPI residents. Many in the diaspora long for stronger ties to their home and cultural identity.

According to Kaʻula and others, the relationship with kalo is binding, and without it, Native Hawaiians lose vital connections to their culture and mana, a Hawaiian term for spiritual and healing power. But growing kalo is not as easy as just planting it in the ground. Cultivation took years of effort and help from multiple hands.

Land Access and Indigenous Blessings

Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC) Executive Director Leialoha Kaʻula demonstrates the art of making laulau with fresh kalo leaves from the club’s māla, or garden. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)

Born on Oʻahu and raised on Hawaiʻi Island, Kaʻula was steeped in Hawaiian culture through her family. Her grandmother introduced her to the Hawaiian language when she was little. Wanting to continue those studies, she attended a Hawaiian immersion charter school, where she also learned cultural practices like hula, chanting, and the traditional farming methods of her ancestors, including how to grow kalo.

Kaʻula came to the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s to study psychology at Washington State University and eventually settled in Beaverton, Oregon. From her first days in Washington, Kaʻula dreamed of growing kalo there, but accessing land was a challenge.

Meanwhile, she started a hula academy in Beaverton to help carry on the traditions of her elders. She also helped found Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC), one of several such clubs across Hawaiʻi and the continental U.S. promoting Native Hawaiian culture, advocacy, and community welfare after the dissolution of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Kaʻula envisioned growing kalo through the Civic Club as a part of a new youth program, but it wasn’t until she met Donna Ching, an elder at the hula academy, that plans began to take shape. Ching, also Native Hawaiian, served on the board of the Oregon Food Bank (OFB), which has gardens where immigrant communities can grow culturally important foods. Ching helped secure a modest plot for the youth program in the Eastside Learning Garden, in Portland—and the kalo project was born.

The next step was to ensure a blessing for the māla. KALO HCC invited Portland-area Indigenous community organizations like the Portland All Nations Canoe Family and Confluence Project to request permission to grow native Hawaiian plants on local land.

The ceremony and the planting took place in August of 2021. After chanting and prayers, NHPI youth from the club tossed in handfuls of rich, black soil and planted dozens of baby kalo, already sporting several tender, heart-shaped leaves. The elders in the community watered the bed. Especially for those who had left the island many decades earlier, it was monumental to see kalo being planted in Oregon.

The First Harvest

In the first season, KALO HCC harvested 25 pounds of kalo leaves, called lau, which are used for food, medicinal purposes, and ceremonies.

For her role in procuring the land, Ching was given the first harvest to make lau lau—a traditional Hawaiian dish of fatty pork or butterfish along with vegetables, all wrapped in kalo leaves and steamed. The kalo leaf softens in the process, adding an earthy flavor. The leaves are also an ingredient in other dishes like squid lūʻau. The roots, technically called corms, were left to keep growing beneath the soil; they are used to make poi, a nutritious mash that has been a dietary staple for centuries.

Siblings bond while caring for the land, or ʻāina, during a spring “Community Māla Day” on April 22, 2024. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)

“I haven’t made lau lau since I left home, because [lau is] really hard to find here,” Ching said. “When you think about how more of us now live on the big continent than in Hawaiʻi, if we move and we don’t take some of that ‘ike—that knowledge—with us, or find a way to grow [it], we’re going to lose it.”

Due to the garden’s success, Oregon Food Bank allotted an additional 75-square-foot space to plant the following year. KALO HCC harvested 500 pounds of leaves, most of which were distributed to community members for free. They were also able to hire one paid staff member to help take care of the māla, thanks to a partnership with Pacific Climate Warriors, an international youth-led grassroots network led by Pacific Islanders to address climate change.

Now the garden produces other crops, too, including carrots, mānoa lettuce (a variety developed in Hawaiʻi), bok choy, and kale, all of which are eventually given to community members. The garden holds weekly work parties, and some 160 volunteers from diverse backgrounds help out over the course of the year, raking mulch, weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting.

One volunteer drives monthly from her home in Olympia, Washington, nearly two hours away.

“It’s worth every mile,” said Nicole Lee Kamakahiolani Ellison, who also serves on the board of KALO HCC. Ellison left the islands when she was 8 years old and grew up in Las Vegas. She is is a project manager with IREACH at Washington State University, a research institute that promotes health and healthcare equity within Indigenous and rural populations.

Ellison got involved with the garden a year ago while working on a project with Ka‘ula about Native heart health. She said she didn’t believe kalo could be grown in Oregon’s climate.

A KALO HCC member harvests garlic from the garden in July. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)

“You go down [to the garden] and you’re not in Portland anymore,” Ellison said. “It’s like you’re somehow transported back home on some weird magic carpet ride.” She added that a bonus of volunteering is connecting with the kūpuna (elders) who also volunteer, as well as hearing the sound of pidgin, Hawai‘i Creole.

Caring for Kalo

On the islands, kalo, a canoe crop —one of the plants carried to Hawai‘i by the first Polynesian voyagers—is grown in both dryland (or upland) and wetland environments, the legacy of sophisticated traditional irrigation systems that ran from the mountains to the sea in land divisions called ahupua‘a. (Those traditional systems for kalo, once central to Hawaiʻi’s agriculture, were displaced by private land ownership, the sugar industry, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom.) Wetland taro is routinely flooded; dryland kalo doesn’t require that, but needs regular rain and humidity. Optimal temperatures for kalo are in the 70 to 90 degree range.

Planting in the Portland dryland garden typically starts in the spring, with the kalo leaves and corm maturing in about nine months. The garden uses primarily an Asian strain of kalo, but also includes descendants of cuttings from Oʻahu, Mauʻi, and Hawai‘i Island. The kalo in the Oregon dryland garden is adapting well to its new location and growing strong.

Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC) members transplanted baby kalo plants at Pacific University’s garden, preparing the garden for winter, last October. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)

Kaʻula said the club members have learned they can grow garlic to keep the soil warm, which accelerates the kalo’s growth in the spring. They also leave the kalo corm, the starchy root of the plant, in the ground during the winter, where it multiplies. One root can quickly turn into 10, she said. For now, the group is electing not to harvest the corms so that they continue to grow.

This winter, they put a dome over the kalo plants to see if they would last through the freeze—which they did. Now the KALO HCC can have kalo year-round, just like in Hawaii.

Native Hawaiian Foods and Health

The success of the māla comes at a time when it may be needed most. Recent data shows that nearly 60 percent of the NHPI in Oregon lives below the poverty line. The food bank has taken hits from the recent federal funding cuts, losing 30 truckloads of food due to the USDA’s food-delivery cancellations across the U.S., and said they have already seen a 31 percent increase in visits to their locations compared with the previous year.

“Our [cultural] diets are healthy, but food is expensive, and when it’s expensive, many move away from that diet to something more affordable—and a lot of that affordable food is not healthy for us,” Ching said.

“Everything that our lāhui (community), our aliʻi (royalty), and our kūpuna (elders) did was never about one person. It was about, how does it trickle down? How does it create a unified community?”

In October 2023, KALO HCC published an academic paper about their Portland kalo project, describing how establishing the māla in the continental U.S. connected people to the land, improved their mental health, and created a sense of place for Native Hawaiian community members. The paper also suggests that the garden, through cultural foods and practices, might improve health outcomes overall.

“Culture is health, is what we’re trying to argue,” Kaʻula said. “Sometimes people say that traditional healthcare aligns with the Western models, but we’re trying to say no, we want Indigenous healthcare. Can we get the FDA to approve poi as medical support? Can we get the FDA to approve kalo as a supplement, and how can we ensure better access to all of that?”

KALO HCC is currently conducting another study, this time through clinical trials, in hopes of finding the connection between traditional foods, physical health, and emotional wellbeing. For this study, they are working with Oregon Food Bank and Oregon’s Pacific University to collect and analyze data. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders living in the U.S. have some of the highest rates of heart disease, hypertension, asthma, cancer, obesity, and diabetes in comparison with all other ethnicities. Research ties these poor health outcomes to colonization and historic inequities, multigenerational trauma, and discrimination, as well as poverty, lack of housing, education, and environment.

“[From] what we see in other Native communities, their views of food and how it relates to health is huge,” said Sheri Daniels, the CEO of Papa Ola Lōkahi, a Native Hawaiian health organization that advocates for the well-being of Native Hawaiians through policy, research, and community initiatives. Daniels said that providing data can be challenging, but offering resources and opportunities for people to improve self-esteem and strengthen cultural identity are always possible, and can yield insights, too.

“The cool thing about kalo is that you get to build community, you get to meet and see others who might be in the same [emotional] space as you, trying to establish that bond of what it means to be Hawaiian,” she added.

As of this March, new kalo plants had already started sprouting through the soil. They will triple in size in a month, providing more nourishment to the local community in the upcoming year. KALO HCC has also created additional māla at Pacific University, where 25 percent of the student body is Native Hawaiian, and at schools in Tacoma, Washington and within the Beaverton School District.

“Everything that our lāhui (community), our aliʻi (royalty), and our kūpuna (elders) did was never about one person,” Kaʻula said. “It was about, how does it trickle down? How does it create a unified community?”

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10 Ways to Get Involved With Food Mutual Aid

Robin Greenfield — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 09:00:34 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Environmental activist and author Robin Greenfield is known for his fully committed experiments in ecological living. His most recent book, Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food, covers his efforts to live entirely independently from the industrial food system. Greenfield succeeded only by relying on others who guided him in his gardening, fishing, and foraging, and came to understand the profound power of community and how naturally that flows through food.

Robin Greenfield and friends, tending a community fruit tree. (Illustration by Nhatt Nichols)

Here are Greenfield’s suggestions for strengthening your own food community:

1. Live communally! Thousands of intentional communities and ecovillages are waiting for you to join them. Check out the Foundation for Intentional Community, the Global Ecovillage Network, and the Cohousing Association of the United States to find a community near you. Or use their resources to start a co-living space or community of your own.

2. Plant public trees in your community in collaboration with others. Community Fruit Trees can support you on this path.

3. Source your seeds and plants from small-scale community seed growers, seed libraries, and seed banks that are breeding diversity and resilience. Seed Savers Exchange, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Ujamaa Seeds, and Truelove Seeds are a few high-integrity organizations that distribute nationwide.

4. Start a seed library or a community seed network yourself. Community Seed Network and Seed Library Network are excellent resources to help you get started.

5. Join a community compost initiative or start one if there’s a need. Cycle the compost back into small-scale ecological gardening and farming. Find an initiative or learn how to start your own through the Community Compost Program.

6. Harvest food that’s already growing, but not getting utilized, and get this nourishing, local produce to the people who need it the most. Concrete Jungle and ProduceGood are beautiful examples to follow.

7. Join or start a community garden or school garden in your community. Community Gardens of America and Edible Schoolyard Project can help with this.

8. Seek out or start a Food is Free chapter and share your garden bounties freely with your community members.

9. Join a community-led ecological food initiative. A few that have inspired me include Soul Fire Farm, The BIPOC Community Garden, Bartlett Park Community Garden, and the Fonticello Food Forest. Support the initiatives that are already taking place. They are doing the work and they need our support to continue.

10. Take part in land reparations for Indigenous and Black communities, so that they can achieve food sovereignty. Find communities to support via the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. Learn about and take part in the LANDBACK movement to return land to Indigenous people so they can build food sovereignty while stewarding our global resources.

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Photo Essay: Connecting Manhattan’s Chinatown Elders Through Food and Culture

Jake Price — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:00:26 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

All photos by Jake Price

When thinking of Manhattan’s Chinatown, many vibrant places and events come to mind—New Year celebrations, bustling restaurants, and lively shops lining the streets. One place that probably doesn’t, but should: the Open Door Senior Center, where there’s hardly a dull moment. The cafeteria, hung with red lanterns, swells with the conversations of regulars and the aroma of Chinese favorites like beef with black bean sauce, pork spare ribs, and stir-fried bok choi.

When they’re not eating or talking, the seniors take painting classes—or play mahjong, Ping-Pong, and bingo. They sing Peking opera and dance Broadway musical numbers. Holidays are celebrated with joyful group fanfare.

The director of the center, Po-Ling Ng, founded the organization in 1972, with funding from the city’s Chinese American Planning Council and, later, the state of New York as well. Now in her mid-70s, she is not without humor—or youthful vigor: She says she still feels like the 23-year-old she was when she arrived in Manhattan from Hong Kong.

Food, she says, plays a key role in drawing people to the center. “A lot of [them] say, ‘I like to go to Open Door because I love the taste of Chinese food.’”

Ng personally helps deliver Chinese meals, which she coordinates through Citymeals on Wheels, to isolated seniors in the community. “Because they live alone, they feel like they have a very boring life,” she says. “Staying home creates mental problems—they’re constantly thinking about bad things. On top of that, they struggle with medical costs, living expenses, and housing issues.”

Using food as a pretext, she checks in on people to see how they are doing, which allows her to assess their psychological state, help connect them with home healthcare aides, and, if they’re not too infirm, invite them to Open Door.

Many elders describe certain foods they miss, so Ng works with Citymeals on Wheels to provide them. (Chicken with oyster sauce, baked pork, and Chinese-style bok choy are favorites.) Here one of Ng’s volunteers brings food to You Hai Chen.

Choo Tung in her home, with a fresh delivery from Citymeals. Some seniors Ng visits have lost spouses and say they want to remarry or find new partners, and ask her for help in meeting people. Ng encourages them to come to the center so that they might make new friends.

Siu Kuen Tam, 86, leads the daily bingo game.

When seniors arrive at the center, Ng ensures that their meals are both culturally and age appropriate. For instance, while the menu has a brown rice option that’s popular in the West, she insists that white rice also be available. She says, “They like the white—I mean, it just smells really good!” In her conversations, she has learned that what suits one generation isn’t necessarily right for another: People aged 60 to 75 generally prefer harder rice, while older patrons favor it softer. As they sit around the tables, those who came for the food begin to form new relationships and integrate into the community of elders.

Chong Liang Zhao (left), 79, the Peking opera instructor at Open Door, rehearses with a student.

Each year during Valentine’s Day celebrations, Ng invites a couple on stage to commemorate their marriage. Here Qi Xiong He, 78, has just lifted the veil of his wife, Ju Ying Zhou, 66. Traditionally the veil is lifted when the couple are alone in their bridal chamber after the wedding ceremony.

A photo on the wall in the table tennis room at Open Door, taken several years ago. After a championship match, someone donated a whole roast pig to the players (and friends) to enjoy.

Ng celebrates Lunar New Year 2025 at Open Door with police officers from the local precinct, as well as the center’s supporters and regular visitors.

A couple years ago, the surgeon general identified loneliness as a major public health concern, an epidemic, in fact, making Open Door’s welcoming role more critical. Yet the center struggles with funding—none at all last year, so even small things like repairing the front door become hard to afford. And expenses could rise if federal cuts to social services increase the need within the community.

But for Ng, it’s never been about the money. “If you don’t love your job, it doesn’t matter how high you’re paid—you’ll suffer. But I don’t care. I lead a simple life. After 56 years of working in the community, God has given me good health, and I don’t want to retire.”

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‘Dignified Food’ Eases Food Insecurity in Philadelphia

Ben Seal — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:00:53 +0000

Inside the commissary kitchen in West Philadelphia’s Dorrance Hamilton Center, a warming whiff of cinnamon, clove, and cumin fills the air, mingling with the comforting scent of beef simmered slowly with tomatoes. The kitchen is narrow, and the half-dozen chefs cooking on this Friday night in late February weave around its tight corners with a sense of purpose.

The steady thump of techno music spills from a portable speaker as they wind their way toward service. They’ll turn out 300 plates tonight, each one featuring a bed of couscous piled high with harissa-roasted carrots and a hearty Moroccan beef stew with chickpeas and spinach. A sprinkling of cilantro brightens every serving.

This is the home of the Double Trellis Food Initiative, where a group of chefs trained in the world of fine dining are cooking to feed those in need. They once served the city’s upper crust, but tonight their food will be heading to community fridges, mutual aid efforts, and youth programs, where it will feed those facing food and housing insecurity in America’s poorest large city.

With an estimated 15 percent of the population navigating food insecurity, Double Trellis aims to improve the quality of meals these residents receive from a vast network of food banks, soup kitchens, organizations, and agencies.

Over time, Double Trellis became a refuge for chefs turned off by the oppressive, abusive environment found in many white-coat kitchens.

Since its start during the pandemic, Double Trellis has developed from a fledgling operation into an established nonprofit with two full-time and five part-time employees, workforce development for juvenile offenders trying to straighten out their lives, and waste-reduction programs.

The organization receives roughly $400,000 in annual funding from donations, philanthropies, and government agencies, helping its chefs serve more than 55,000 meals last year. As the Trump administration seeks to shrink the public safety net, Double Trellis is deepening its commitment to communities facing increased need.

“Everyone deserves dignified food made from real ingredients by people who care,” says Adrien Carnecchia, a history teacher turned pastry chef who started volunteering with Double Trellis three years ago when it was still a ragtag operation turning out one offering each week.

Today, he and his colleagues send, to two dozen partner organizations across the city, four different meals each week—an evolving menu that recently featured chicken adobo, veggie fajitas, frittatas with potato-and-pepper hash, and butternut squash curry. The cuisine changes, but the food is always nutritious, filling, and flavorful.

The Origins of Double Trellis

Matthew Stebbins, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, has felt the same hunger experienced by many of the community members Double Trellis feeds, lending extra weight to the standard that guides his kitchen: “If this is the only thing you ate today, would that be OK?” he says.

Executive director Matthew Stebbins updates a recipe board that breaks down the cooking tasks for that day’s meal and the plans for the next day. (Photo credit: Kat Arazawa)

Stebbins has been a chef most of his life, training under James Beard nominee Townsend Wentz and then manning the sauté station at Laurel, once named a top 10 restaurant in the country and the best in Philadelphia. But as his career progressed, so did his drug and alcohol addictions. At his professional peak, he was unhoused and struggled to reliably access food—let alone treatment. He spent five years on and off the streets, he says, before leaving the city to get sober.

When he returned to Philadelphia, Stebbins worked at a catering company whose business cratered at the start of the pandemic. When protests erupted a few months later after the murder of George Floyd, he had time and wanted to help. He rallied some friends to cook and feed the protesters, but quickly realized he should instead be serving the unhoused people he was marching past. Their grateful response to being offered a hot meal as simple as a breakfast burrito showed him the void he’s sought to fill ever since.

“It’s about investing directly into young people so they can have opportunities and things they haven’t had access to before—so they can get the life they deserve and want.”

“There’s a difference between skipping lunch and not eating for three days,” Stebbins says, recalling a moment in 2015 when he was at his lowest. “That sort of debilitating pain isn’t just in your body; it’s in your heart and soul. I think about that often when I get tired. There’s absolutely no reason in the richest nation in the world why that should be happening to anyone.”

When it launched in 2020, Double Trellis—its name drawn from the system Stebbins’ grandfather used as a grape farmer in New York decades ago—hand-delivered meals to unhoused people and soon began placing a portion of their food in a community fridge accessible to all for free. In March 2021, the organization began operating a fridge of its own in Kensington, a neighborhood that has long been the epicenter of the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.

In that first full year, Double Trellis served around 10,000 meals, split between direct service and community fridges, which surged in popularity and prominence when the pandemic pushed food insecurity into the spotlight. Philadelphia was home to more than 30 community fridges at one point, most of which still exist.

The one Stebbins helped establish has since moved to the LAVA Center in West Philadelphia, closer to Double Trellis’ base of operations, and still receives some of the organization’s meals. Two others—The People’s Fridge, just a few blocks away, and the South Philadelphia Community Fridge—are the main recipients of meals made during this Friday night service.

For Staff, a Refuge and Source of Strength

Over time, Double Trellis became a refuge for chefs turned off by the oppressive, abusive environment found in many white-coat kitchens. Most of the staff is queer and gender-nonconforming, and they collaborate rather than compete. Stebbins is focused on “recreating kitchen culture from a fear-based system to a support-based system,” he says.

The Double Trellis team after wrapping up in the kitchen. Left to right: Adrien Carnecchia, Sarah Grisham, Mads Pryor, Dani Chaquea, Eli Rojas, and Matthew Stebbins. (Photo credit: Kat Arazawa)

The effort seems to be working. By last year, Double Trellis’ service had expanded nearly sixfold, even as it sought to broaden its impact by introducing a workforce development program for juvenile offenders. Through a partnership with YEAH Philly, which offers support for teens and young adults impacted by violence, Stebbins and his team spent four months teaching their first two young trainees the skills necessary to get a job in the food industry.

The trainees were paid $17 an hour and had externships at candymaker Shane Confectionery and Honeysuckle Provisions, an acclaimed Afrocentric restaurant. Both are now ServSafe certified in food safety and handling practices, which will make them more employable in the food industry. More importantly, both have had their juvenile court cases dismissed with support from YEAH’s legal team, according to co-CEO Kendra Van de Water.

Shamp Johnson, now 18, came to Double Trellis wanting to learn how to cook for himself and his mother. During the training program, he sharpened his knife skills, learned to navigate a professional kitchen, and fell in love with cooking. The relationships he built will stay with him, he says.

“Matt came from a similar lifestyle as me,” Johnson says. “He really showed me that whatever you put your mind to you can do. You really can achieve [it]. That really opened my eyes up, his whole story and what he’d been through. Now all I want is a job cooking.”

The organization’s second group of trainees is set to start this spring, remaining small so its members receive undivided attention, Stebbins says.

“Meals are just a stopgap, not a solution.”

The project is in good company in Philadelphia, where other initiatives share a similar goal. The Monkey and the Elephant, a café in the Brewerytown neighborhood, trains and employs former foster youth as they transition into adulthood, while Down North Pizza in Strawberry Mansion exclusively employs the formerly incarcerated. Philabundance, the largest food bank in the region, offers a 16-week culinary vocational training program for those with low or no income.

For Van de Water, who met Stebbins when Double Trellis began contributing meals to the free, youth-staffed grocery store YEAH operates, the program is helping to change how the Philadelphia community views teens affected by poverty, racism, and violence.

“It’s about investing directly into young people so they can have opportunities and things they haven’t had access to before—so they can get the life they deserve and want,” Van de Water says.

Carnecchia developed the curriculum, which includes one hour each day of classroom education—such as math skills for kitchen measurements and recipe building—and five hours in the kitchen. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve done here, by far,” he says, but also the most rewarding.

Stebbins hopes to expand the program if funding allows; last year, he says, Double Trellis’ revenue was around $400,000, including personal donations, support from private philanthropies like the Claneil Foundation, and backing from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. This year, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health began contributing funds.

Forecasting an Increased Need

Double Trellis’ work has only become more urgent as inflation continues to put healthy food out of reach for more people and the Trump administration threatens the social safety net by vowing to “correct Biden’s financial mismanagement” of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Economists also warn that tariffs will increase food prices. Following the election, volunteer signups at Double Trellis filled up for months in advance, with people recognizing the need that would likely ensue.

The organization hasn’t been directly affected by the attempt to slash federal government spending that has frozen funding for farmers, Stebbins says, but he anticipates a trickle-down effect. The kitchen sources most of its produce and meat from Sharing Excess, a food rescue nonprofit, and the Carversville Farm Foundation. Now, Stebbins is worried about food donations declining or drying up if his partners’ work is hampered. “Anyone [working to address] food insecurity is pretty nervous right now,” he says.

“We have to care for our community. We have to care for our neighbors.”

For Mads Pryor, a Double Trellis cook who has worked in kitchens for 15 years, most recently as private chef for a wealthy family in Philadelphia’s ritzy Main Line suburbs, working to address food insecurity is more important than ever. “We see the cost of groceries rising, an uptick in health issues, and not enough structural support for the citizens of Philadelphia and this country,” Pryor says.

These challenges underscore the need for Double Trellis’ workforce development program. As Stebbins points out, food and housing insecurity are deeply rooted, tangled up with poverty and the systemic failures that allow it to persist.

“Meals are just a stopgap,” he says, “not a solution.”

In the long term, Stebbins hopes Double Trellis can do more to make a difference. The kitchen’s emphasis on reducing food waste is part of that equation. Last year, it used 40,000 pounds of excess food rescued by Sharing Excess and composted 10,000 more. Meanwhile, Double Trellis makes the most of its ingredients. Lemon peels, for example, are preserved in salt and used in vinaigrettes and slaws.

To further expand its impact, Double Trellis hopes to find a kitchen of its own, which would make it possible to prepare breakfasts and lunches and triple its output to 1,000 meals a day, Stebbins says. His long-term vision includes nutrition workshops and cooking classes for the community, and more culinary training for young people.

For now, though, he and his colleagues are simply responding to the need they see as best they can.

“We have to care for our community,” Carnecchia says. “We have to care for our neighbors.”

The post ‘Dignified Food’ Eases Food Insecurity in Philadelphia appeared first on Civil Eats.

This San Francisco Food Pantry Is a Labor of Love

Tilde Herrera — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:00:24 +0000

A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our members-only newsletter. Become a member today and get the next issue directly in your inbox.

Priscilla “Cilla” Lee gave away nearly 50,000 pounds of food last year to her neighbors in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district.

She has hosted a weekly food pantry from her garage since 2021, stocking it with donations from local food banks, grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, and anywhere else she can get free food for her community. Every Friday and two Saturdays a month, she hands out food boxes filled with fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy products, and dried goods like beans or rice. She still serves between 40 and 50 families per week, and 25 families come on Wednesdays, when she gives away baked goods donated by a local bakery.

In a recent week, she shared four boxes of bread and pastries and 20 pizzas. She also gave away 120 boxes of mangoes donated by a food bank and trays of papaya salad and spring rolls provided by a caterer.

Since 2022, Lee has doubled her volunteer team to 40 or 45 people and added more structure. Last year, they gave away nearly 50,000 pounds of food to neighbors in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district. (Photo credit: Tilde Herrera)

Lee, 54, began hosting the food pantry out of her garage in 2021, alarmed by the level of food insecurity in her neighborhood during the pandemic. She was inspired to help others by her late mother, who had always tried to give her family, friends, and acquaintances a hand, even during her cancer treatment. Also, Lee was on leave from her airline job, giving her a bit of extra time—and was volunteering with local food banks, which had surplus food. Starting a neighborhood food project just made sense.

Civil Eats first covered Lee’s food pantry in 2022, when she was inviting free pickups through two local branches of Buy Nothing, an online network of neighborhood groups that share everything from extra food to old clothes and used appliances as part of a gift economy model.

Lee is an administrator for the official Outer Richmond Buy Nothing group, which has 1,100 members, and the Richmond-Sunset Buy Nothing group, which has 2,200 members. Now she limits slots for food pickup to ensure enough food for the core set of regulars who have relied on the pantry for all these years.

These regulars include Yulia Koudriashova, a single mom and teacher who saves nearly $300 a month by getting most of her family’s food through Lee’s pantry. She lives with her two daughters and her parents, who moved in three years ago after fleeing Ukraine when Russia invaded. “My parents’ income is zero in the United States,” Koudriashova says. “For them, it’s very important support because mentally, it’s very important that they know they can get food.”

Koudriashova’s mother spends her days cooking everything they receive from the pantry, and her father volunteers at the pantry a few days a week, unloading boxes or sorting food, despite not speaking any English. He worked as an engineer in Ukraine but is unable to work in the U.S., so he is happy to have a “job” and help others as he often did for his neighbors back home, Koudriashova says. Everyone calls him “Papa.”

“When he began to do it, he became alive, because it’s a very important role, mission,” Koudriashova says. “He tells us, ‘I’m working today,’ so we know he needs to go and help. He loves it a lot.”

Serving the Community

Since 2022, Lee has doubled her volunteer team to 40 or 45 people and added more structure. She has two volunteer administrators who create pantry schedules and sign-up sheets, as well as a third administrator who sends weekly reminders for volunteers to sign up for picking up donations or setting up the pantry. At each pantry, one or two hosts oversee the food pickups and support the pantry assistants, who receive the food donations and get food ready to be given out. About 75 percent of her volunteers are pantry recipients themselves.

Lee asks for a three-month commitment when recruiting volunteers, who donate their time and gas. “I’m donating my sanity and my family’s time—my partner also helps,” Lee says. “No one’s getting paid from this pantry.”

Annelissa Reynoso, a part-time restaurant manager and student, has been volunteering at the pantry for the past year. She met Lee through the Buy Nothing Facebook group when she was giving away a fruit platter. Lee claimed it and asked Reynoso if she was interested in volunteering.

“My parents’ income is zero in the United States. For them, it’s very important support because mentally, they know they can get food.”

Reynoso, 25, saw it as a sign to take action at a time when life felt overwhelming. The Israel-Hamas war was raging, and Reynoso felt helpless, hopeless, and disconnected. She began volunteering with Lee, working her way up from pantry assistant to host. She also drives to pick up donations and gives rides to neighbors who want to visit the pantry.

“I feel like I’m finally part of a community,” Reynoso says. “I’ve wanted to feel this way for a long time.”

Reynoso had already considered herself to be a human rights activist but says Lee has influenced her to consider a career helping unhoused, immigrant, or low-income communities.

“That’s awesome,” Lee says, of her friend’s new direction. “I love it.”

Growth of the Buy Nothing Model

The Buy Nothing Project continues to resonate with people a dozen years after its launch, says founder Liesl Clark, a documentary filmmaker who was fascinated by the cashless gift economies she saw in communities throughout the Himalayas. There are now more than 8,000 Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, representing 12.5 million people, and another 1.4 million people using the Buy Nothing app.

The app has added a global feed for users who are interested in a broader circular economy, Clark says. Rather than buying a product on Amazon, users can now search for it in Buy Nothing’s global feed or post an item they haven’t had success gifting locally. If they find the product, or a taker, they can use Buy Nothing shipping to receive or send the item through UPS.

“We still aim to provide every community that wants one, a gift economy, so community members can get to know each other and connect through our stuff and services offered,” Clark said in an email. “We know this builds connected neighborhoods, which is a building block toward resiliency, mutual aid, and healthy, human-centered cities and towns.”

A Labor of Love

Food donations have been unpredictable for the last 18 months, Lee says. With fewer donations, Lee must give less food to each family. She consistently receives high-quality donations from the Second Harvest food bank every week, but she says other food banks are giving her less food now compared to during the pandemic. That contribution could further decline in the wake of unsteady federal funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, designed to move local farm harvests into food banks.

“We still aim to provide every community that wants one, a gift economy, so community members can get to know each other and connect through our stuff and services offered.”

Lee estimates that she spends 32 to 40 hours a week working on the pantry. It’s more manageable since she retired in October from her airline job; when she was working, she often spent time on pantry-related tasks before and after work and during her lunch breaks.

In addition to the day-to-day logistics, Lee also keeps tabs on everyone’s food preferences. For example, she makes sure Koudriashova’s family gets plenty of their beloved potatoes and sets aside extra beans for a Hispanic family who visits the pantry. This ensures people get food they like to eat, and that food is not wasted.

It’s a lot of work to run the pantry, and the food-supply situation can be unnerving, but hearing about how the project has impacted people’s lives drives Lee to keep going.

For example, Koudriashova uses the money she saves on groceries to pay for gymnastics lessons for one of her daughters. She says she wouldn’t be able to afford those lessons without the pantry. “When I go to the shop, I buy only some food for the kids to make sandwiches for the school lunch,” Koudriashova says. “Otherwise, we use all the products that we have from this pantry. I don’t know how we would survive without Cilla.”

Lee says she had no idea she would still be running this pantry, years after it began.

“I will try my best to keep the pantry going until either I am no longer receiving food donations or community [volunteers], and as long as I am healthy, my family is healthy, and I am not neglecting my own family.”

She says none of her volunteers want to take over the pantry. For now, seeing how it has alleviated financial stress for her neighbors motivates her to continue.

Although Lee didn’t start the pantry to inspire others or seek recognition, she says she has often been told by her community, volunteers, and peers that she motivates them to help others. Which, in fact, they do.

“It is a very powerful feeling, and I feel overwhelmed by the positive feedback,” Lee says. “It reminds me of how my mother would be so proud of the person she raised.”

The post This San Francisco Food Pantry Is a Labor of Love appeared first on Civil Eats.

Op-ed: Food and Moral Courage Are Needed to End Childhood Hunger

Billy Shore — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 09:00:06 +0000

Of all the reckless ways for the federal government to save money, taking breakfast and lunch away from 12 million kids in 24,000 schools across the country has to be the most reckless. We could save even more by taking away books, pencils, and computers, but then kids wouldn’t learn much, would they? The same goes for taking away their school meals.

But this is what Congress is considering, through changes to an innovation known as the “Community Eligibility Provision” (CEP) which, ironically, was designed to achieve the very efficiency for which the Department of Government Efficiency is allegedly searching. CEP says that if 25 percent of a community’s kids are pre-identified as eligible for free school meals, then those meals ought to be available to all the kids rather than go through the bureaucratic expense and time-consuming paperwork of individual applications.

“I’ve seen first-hand how kids tune in once they’ve had their cereal, yogurt, or egg sandwich. . . . how their hands begin to shoot up to answer questions.”

The House-passed budget resolution directs the Education and Workforce Committee to cut $330 billion over the next decade, which is why Congress is contemplating saving money by raising the CEP eligibility threshold from 25 percent to 60 percent. That would reverse decades of steady progress since the admirals and generals who returned from World War II first recommended feeding kids at school so America would have stronger, healthier soldiers.

Since then, countless studies and statistics have documented the advantages to kids, schools, and the economy when students receive nutritious school meals. Attendance and test scores improve. Tardiness and disciplinary infractions decline. Even if there wasn’t such evidence, would there be any rational argument for not feeding kids? For almost 20 years now, Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign has worked with thousands of school districts and nonprofit partners to increase participation in school meals.

One signature strategy of moving breakfast from the cafeteria before school, to after the bell—either in the classroom or grab-and-go between classes—increased participation by more than 3 million kids. Schools represent a built-in infrastructure for reaching most of America’s children. And as former First Lady of Virginia Dorothy McAuliffe says, “Kids can’t be hungry for knowledge if they are just plain hungry.”

I’ve spent more mornings in cafeterias and classrooms than I can count. From Mrs. Diaz’s homeroom period on New York City’s Upper West Side to the sixth-graders in El Monte, CA and dozens of communities in between, I’ve seen first-hand how kids tune in once they’ve had their cereal, yogurt, or egg sandwich. Any classroom teacher will affirm what I’ve witnessed: how kids settle and focus, how their hands begin to shoot up to answer questions, how they start to work in small groups more cooperatively and effectively. There’s no fraud, no corruption, only kids being kids, and being our future.

I heard from one such teacher recently: “As a public-school teacher in South Carolina with a daughter teaching at a Title 1 high school in Boston, we see firsthand every day what a nutritious meal means to a child’s ability to grow and learn. This proposal is cruel and ultimately, quite foolish.”

Students reach out as well: “I was one of those kids that received free breakfast/lunch because our family was dirt poor, and I can personally attest to the complete inability to focus and learn when your stomach is growling so hard it’s cramping. Few things will better enable our children to be engaged and have a can-do attitude than a full belly.”

It’s telling that even proponents of the change have not put forth compelling arguments that school meals or the Community Eligibility Provision don’t work. Only that the funds are needed for more tax cuts.

It’s a shame to see national politicians injecting partisanship into food assistance issues that have historically had bipartisan support. At the state and local level, they still do. For example, just last month Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that passed the state legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support, providing students with free breakfast. “Free school breakfast will help ease the burden on families just trying to put food on their tables and make sure kids are fueled and ready to learn,” said Governor Sanders.

“Proponents of the change have not put forth compelling arguments that school meals or the Community Eligibility Provision don’t work. Only that the funds are needed for more tax cuts.”

Additionally, 112 mayors—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—have signed a letter to Congressional leaders urging them not to cut the food assistance for kids provided by SNAP. One in five kids in America receives SNAP, which provides the nutritious food needed to stay healthy and do well in school. Mayors understand this, given their close proximity to Americans affected by indiscriminate budget cuts.

There’s a role for everyone in reaching out to Congress to urge that they protect food assistance for kids. Seek permission to visit your local school’s breakfast or lunch program and share what you observe. Dare your elected officials to join you, and then see if they are in favor of cutting it.

Members of Congress who have never before supported cuts to food assistance programs seem to be doing so now, not because they believe the cuts are right or fair, but because they are fearful of political consequences. Too many leaders in business, finance, education, the media, and elsewhere remain silent.

Bobby Kennedy was right in 1966 when he said, “Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change.”

Childhood hunger in the U.S. is solvable. There is no shortage of food, only of moral courage. But it shouldn’t require much courage to speak up on behalf of kids.

The post Op-ed: Food and Moral Courage Are Needed to End Childhood Hunger appeared first on Civil Eats.