“Food education takes it to another level,” Leary says. “I’ve done robotics, and that draws in a bunch of kids. I’ve done coding. Some kids really love coding. We’ve written science musicals. That gets some kids. But food? Pretty much every single attempt has been a win.”

This school year will be her fifth time using curriculum from food education nonprofit Pilot Light, she says, “and I’m not going to stop.”

Pilot Light is the kind of program that is hard to argue with, bringing food literacy into schools to fire up core lessons for students and helping establish healthy eating skills. It is well-funded through fundraising galas, foundations, and corporate sponsorships, making it a rare bright spot amid dwindling support for programs nationwide working to address childhood obesity—which impacts nearly 20 percent of children and adolescents—and other nutritional challenges.

As the school year ramps up, significant changes are coming to school food literacy.

The largest is to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) program, which has provided nutrition education, cooking demonstrations, and workshops to 90 million low-income Americans, mostly children, for the last 30 years. SNAP-Ed will be terminated on October 1, a casualty of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill.

Research have consistently demonstrated that SNAP-Ed participants improve their diets, consuming more fruits and vegetables and better managing their food resources. On the executive side, the Trump administration has made cuts to other food programs that supported school nutrition and education.

Civil Eats spoke to school food literacy programs that exemplify different levels of impact, to learn how each is faring and how funding cuts are rippling through the food system.

FoodCorps: Decimated but Determined

FoodCorps received most of its grant funding from AmeriCorps, which was decimated in April when the Trump administration ended nearly $400 million in AmeriCorps grants. FoodCorps has had to cut its budget by $13 million—more than 40 percent—according to a statement from Co-founder and CEO Curt Ellis and President Rachel Willis.

The organization has continued its work this school year, though at a smaller scale, partnering with schools in eight states, where 50 FoodCorps members are continuing to give food and garden education to public schoolchildren. That’s down from 162 FoodCorps members last year, working in 220 schools and school districts across 16 states and Washington, D.C.

FoodCorps says it is developing new approaches, including working with people who are “embedded in the systems of food and education we seek to change.” In addition to professional development support to teachers, it will offer a new 20-person annual fellowship. “Our work will look different in the coming school year . . . and we know the transition may be bumpy. But FoodCorps has faced hardships before. We’re committed to seeing this one through for the children at the center of our work.”

The organization’s impact, however, transcends direct work with kids, since many of its passionate garden and nutrition advocates go on to become food system leaders in their communities.

“We often talk about how in order to change the food system, you need to ensure students know how to cook and garden,” says Sunny Baker, senior director of programs and policy at the National Farm to School Network. “Those FoodCorps service members are invaluable. And a lot of times, the [FoodCorps role] turned into paid positions in districts.”

For example, Janelle Manzano, who is now the farm-to-school coordinator at the San Diego Unified School District, was a FoodCorps service member in Oakland in 2017. Ally Mrachek was a service member in Fayetteville, Arkansas, before becoming a child nutrition director at Fayetteville Public Schools. (She’s now a farm-to-school consultant at LunchAssist.) Others have gone on to do important food policy work at the state level, like Kendal Chavez, who is New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s food policy advisor.

“FoodCorps is a funnel of talent for public schools in America,” Baker says. “Their alumni are some powerful, amazing leaders.”

The Charlie Cart Project: Fine—At Least for Now

Roughly half of its funding comes from cart sales; foundations, individual donors, and corporate sponsors provide the rest. But the federal cuts may hurt some districts’ ability to buy Charlie Carts. In recent weeks, the organization has heard from four separate people that they won’t be able to purchase Charlie Carts this fall due to funding cuts, according to founder Carolyn Federman.

Federman launched the Charlie Cart Project in 2016, after working as director of Alice Water’s Edible Schoolyard Project, in Berkeley. She also taught basic culinary education at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, the project’s main location, where her children attended school. She always had to lug food, knives, cutting boards, and other cooking equipment to class, which gave her the idea for the mobile kitchens.

“It seems so silly, but I was like, ‘If we can’t bring the kids to the kitchen, let’s bring the kitchen to the kids,’” she says.

She designed a cart that could be an all-in-one kitchen, complete with the basic appliances needed to lead a cooking lesson: a small induction cooktop, a griddle, a toaster oven, a Vitamix blender, and a gray-water rinse station. A teacher—or librarian, food educator, or parent volunteer—could roll the cart into a room and plug it in. She named it Charlie Cart, after the 1860s Chuck Wagon.

Charlie Carts cost $14,000 with shipping and include access to a K-5 curriculum with 54 lessons that can be adapted for older kids or adults. The seasonal recipes align with Common Core educational standards. Today, there are 625 Charlie Carts at schools, libraries, food banks, and even Veterans Affairs sites in 47 states.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the Lowcountry Food Bank partnered with the local library system to buy five Charlie Carts for area libraries. Dana Mitchel, director of community health and nutrition at the food bank, says SNAP-Ed funding paid for the initial training for librarians. SNAP-Ed is essentially a national obesity intervention program, designed to prevent food-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease by encouraging healthy eating habits.

“Just seeing kids and families feel more confident working with food is really very exciting,” says Mitchel. “The stories we get are, ‘I didn’t know I could have my child work so safely and productively in the kitchen. I’m excited to be with them in the kitchen now.’”

Federman saw a big uptick in libraries buying Charlie Carts during the pandemic. “Libraries have way more flexibility than schools and can stand up programs super fast,” she says.

Pilot Light: Dodging a Bullet

Pilot Light won’t be affected by SNAP-Ed’s elimination. The organization was already wrapping up a USDA Farm to School grant before funding for that program was cancelled, and the bulk of its revenue comes from fundraising galas, corporate sponsorships, foundations, donations, and professional curriculum development for school districts.

Like the Charlie Cart Project, Pilot Light recruits and supports teachers who are already employed by school districts and who want to incorporate food education into their lesson plans. Each year, they offer fellowships to 25 teachers, who receive one-on-one coaching and professional development from Pilot Light staff and learn from experts in food education, health, and agriculture. The teachers also get a $2,000 stipend and some funding for supplies and chef visits.

Pilot Light created its own food education standards with a panel of experts in 2018, with eight focus areas, including the environment and health. The standards were updated in July to reflect teacher feedback and real classroom experiences. They are broad enough that teachers can tailor the standards to their subject area and student body.

“You can teach any subject through food,” says Executive Director Alexandria DeSorbo-Quinn. “I’ve seen students write poems about a dish that’s been passed down in their family for generations. Suddenly, they’re not just learning about metaphor or structure; they’re connecting language to their identity and their history, all through food. That’s when their eyes light up.”

The Pilot Light curriculum requires students to complete a food advocacy project. In recent years, students in a sixth grade science class in Chicago submitted a city ordinance to ban plastic foam at Chicago restaurants, even holding a press conference at City Hall.

Many teachers go on to serve as mentors to new Pilot Light fellows or present at conferences.

“We invest heavily in that first year, and they keep impacting their students year over year,” DeSorbo-Quinn says. “They become our greatest champions and ambassadors.”

Edible Schoolyard: Still Going Strong

The project has been a model for all school food education programs since Alice Waters (also a Civil Eats advisor) launched the organization in 1995. At its height, the program had seven schoolyard projects around the country. Today, it operates a program in Stockton, California, and its original location at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley is still flourishing.

Each year, teachers take over 1,000 middle school students into its 1-acre organic garden to learn about science, math, history, and poetry while also soaking up the importance of nourishment, stewardship, and community. Its Stockton location is a 6-acre working farm that hosts field trips and community events. It has a community garden program, with 40 families cultivating their own plots, and a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program that provides 130 bags of fresh produce for low-income community members every week.

To date, Edible Schoolyard has inspired 6,500 like-minded programs across the globe—in 47 U.S. states and 75 countries.

The nonprofit’s website is a hub of information for global educators, gardeners, and chefs who want to incorporate gardening and cooking into their lesson plans or programming. It runs free online curriculum and virtual learning experiences such as grant-writing tips and how to integrate academic standards. The downloadable lesson plans are aligned with Common Core standards and include worksheets.

‘Radical Collaboration’

“People are going to have to make hard decisions,” says Mitchel, from the LowCountry Food Bank.

Despite the cuts, these nonprofits say they’ll continue the work they are doing in some way, shape, or form. “People who want to do this work find a way,” says Federman of the Charlie Cart Project. “They know it’s really important.”

Many organizations are also finding support with one another. Ashley Rouse, the Edible Schoolyard Project’s executive director, says her organization has been joining a monthly call with peers across the field. One possibility that’s come up is smaller nonprofits with similar missions joining forces and absorbing one another. “How do we shrink and grow?” she asks.

Rouse describes these sessions as “radical collaboration.”

“In moments like this,” she says, “it feels more important than ever to come together, share what we have, and support one another so that the impact and growth we’ve seen in edible education can continue.”

Due to an editing error, Rachel Willis was listed as Food Corps co-founder. This article has been updated to reflect her title as president of Food Corps.

The post What’s at Stake for School Food-Literacy Programs appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2025/08/27/how-libraries-are-creating-community-through-food/ https://civileats.com/2025/08/27/how-libraries-are-creating-community-through-food/#respond Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:01:38 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=68331 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 […]

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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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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/08/27/how-libraries-are-creating-community-through-food/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/08/19/should-regenerative-farmers-pin-hopes-on-rfk-jr-s-maha/ https://civileats.com/2025/08/19/should-regenerative-farmers-pin-hopes-on-rfk-jr-s-maha/#respond Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:01:18 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=68145 This is the second in a series of articles examining the promises and policies of the MAHA movement. Read the first story here. In the process, his operation became a model for treating animals and the land well while building financial, community, and environmental resilience across America’s rural landscape. Along the way, he hasn’t shied […]

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This is the second in a series of articles examining the promises and policies of the MAHA movement. Read the first story here.

In the process, his operation became a model for treating animals and the land well while building financial, community, and environmental resilience across America’s rural landscape. Along the way, he hasn’t shied away from positioning his approach as a means to take back power from global meatpackers and end harms caused by industrial food production.

It’s the kind of farming—and thinking—that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has long celebrated as a health and environmental advocate.

So while Harris, who wears a tan cowboy hat and speaks with a soothing Southern drawl, says he’s generally “apolitical,” lately, he’s been engaging in D.C. discourse. That’s because he is “shocked and pleased at how much attention my kind of farming is getting.”

While Kennedy was still running his own campaign for president last year, his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, visited White Oak Pastures. A year later, with Kennedy a member of President Trump’s cabinet, Harris received an invitation to the White House for the release of the administration’s first Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report.

“I’m not saying I was the only farmer there, but I was the only one there that looked like a farmer,” he said. On Instagram, White Oak Pastures posted a photo of Harris in his cowboy hat with his two daughters at the event, plus a photo of Trump and Kennedy. Comments on the photos were heated.

As everyone awaits the official release of the second MAHA Commission report, expected in early September, those remarks point to a divide that exists among farmers who typically agree on things like increasing organic matter, reducing pesticide use, and diversifying crops.

Like Harris, some farmers are thrilled to hear Kennedy using the word “regenerative” in the halls of power and calling out corporate influence on the food system, and are optimistic that real change is coming. Others question whether Kennedy will walk the walk, given his place in the Trump administration, which has been rolling back environmental protections, supporting increased taxpayer funding for chemical-dependent, commodity agriculture, and cutting support for the small, regenerative farms that the MAHA movement claims to support.

They also say the administration’s aggressive pushback on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives is hurting the young farmers who disproportionately run regenerative farms. The now-delayed (and recently leaked) second report from RFK’s MAHA Commission seems to confirm those concerns.

“We have had a major setback,” said Kate Mendenhall, an Iowa farmer who is also the director of the Organic Farmers Association, describing what organic and regenerative farmers have experienced since the Trump administration took over.

Mendenhall said many farmers fell behind this season because of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) funding freezes and are now reluctant to expand or invest in new practices. Many have also lost technical support due to program cancellations and staff reductions.

“I don’t think we can see the full impact now, but maybe next season we’ll see what comes forward or what we’re lacking this fall and winter,” she said. “I’m really delighted to see more conversation around helping people get access to more healthy food. We need that. And we also need to help farmers with the infrastructure steps they need to make it happen.”

Will Harris of White Oak Pastures.

A Resounding Message from MAHA

“Now all this MAHA talk makes me think that maybe, again, I might be an early innovator,” he said. “And I like that better.”

In other words, Kennedy’s attention feels like overdue recognition for some farmers who have been on the agricultural fringe for a long time.

While the Biden administration made some of the largest investments in history in paying farmers to implement conservation practices, rebuilding regional meat processing infrastructure, and shoring up the local supply chains that small, regenerative farms sell into, it also maintained the overall status quo and didn’t talk about transformation as loudly or as often as Kennedy does.

Harris said he heard talk of those investments but never saw impacts on the ground. What he remembers about the Climate-Smart Commodities Program, a signature initiative of Biden’s USDA, is not that it sent millions of dollars to small, regenerative farms through organizations like Pasa and Working Landscapes North Carolina, but that it directed huge sums of money to Tyson and other commodity ag giants.

Now, the thing that stands out to him about the current USDA is not that its actions seem to place the administration firmly on the side of Big Ag, but that Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has repeatedly showcased her working relationship with Kennedy.

“I haven’t seen many programs implemented so far, but it’s still very early on,” Harris said. “I might get disappointed again, but the promise is better than it’s ever been in my lifetime.”

Steve Groff is similarly optimistic.

“The MAHA movement is a dream come true for me, because before I even heard the term, I was doing it,” said Groff, a third-generation farmer in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where he farms 200 acres with his son. “We need to eat less junk food and more healthy food, and I think every American agrees that there’s just too much chronic disease. Something’s going on here. We have an opportunity here that is just unbelievable.”

Groff plants hemp on most of his land; he used to process the crop into CBD oil but is now getting into fiber production for textiles and building materials. He also grows heirloom tomatoes, squash, and pumpkins that he sells to Whole Foods. His farm is certified regenerative by Regenified, which requires farmers to implement certain soil health practices but is not organic, since it does allow the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.

To that end, his fields have been 100 percent no-till since 1996, and he regularly plants cover crops. Because of his attention to soil health and ecosystems, he said, he’s been able to reduce the amount of chemical herbicides and fertilizers he uses over time.

“It’s mimicking nature as much as we can to grow food,” he said. (No-till farming and using cover crops also often rely heavily on pesticides, especially glyphosate, which many in the MAHA movement are opposed to and Kennedy has been critical of in the past.)

Groff said he’s always been a conservative but that he didn’t always fully trust Trump. When Trump joined forces with Kennedy, however, that started to change.

As an example of how farmers might begin to shift to more regenerative practices, he offers the example of how farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania in the 1980s were initially resistant to no-till farming and planting cover crops, but increasingly adopted both as awareness grew about how the practices could reduce pollution into the Chesapeake Bay.

“In my area right here, 70 percent of the land is no-till and cover crops. Now, they don’t do it for the Chesapeake Bay, they do it because it’s a better way to farm,” he said. “And the same practices that we started to do for the sake of the Bay now are the same practices to grow healthier food.”

USDA Cuts to Funding

At TendWell Farm in western North Carolina, farmer Steven Beltram grows leafy greens, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables across several hundred acres to sell to grocery stores and other commercial distributors.  Not only is the farm certified organic, it’s Real Organic Project certified, adding an extra layer of regenerative cred.

“We really focus on trying to build and restore and make the soil better year over year,” Beltram said.

Hit hard by Hurricane Helene last year, TendWell was grateful to be participating in a USDA initiative called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Program that offered funding to move fresh produce from small farms directly into food banks.

The contract was for about $5,000 a week, a significant amount for a business of their size. It was especially beneficial, he said, because unlike with grocers who demand a certain amount of kale or lettuce regardless of how the crops turn out, TendWell could send the food banks surplus produce, thereby reducing waste.

“That was a good thing for us, and that was a good thing for our neighbors,” he said. “Giving out local produce to the community—I can’t see how anyone could be opposed to that.”

But in March, the USDA canceled $1 billion that had been allocated to the program and another similar program that connected small farms to schools, ending that source of income for TendWell. At the time, Rollins said repeatedly that she was ending it because it was a COVID-era program and states still had plenty of money left to spend.

At the same time, Rollins’ USDA has also cancelled 2025 funding for the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Program, ended the Regional Food Business Centers program, and revised the Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that meant many small, regenerative farms and the organizations that support them have borne the brunt of the impacts.

“It’s interesting to see that the USDA is cutting funding for programs like [Local Food Purchase Assistance] while they’re increasing payments for commodity crop production, and of course all that commodity crop production is based on the use of glyphosate,” Beltram said, referencing the $67 billion bump that commodity growers got in the recent One Big Beautiful Bill. “It really feels like a divided administration. The USDA is for the most part implementing practices that are the exact opposite of the goals of the MAHA movement.”

At the Organic Farmers Association, Mendenhall said she also sees staffing cuts at the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS) as potentially undermining MAHA agricultural goals, since NRCS employees in local offices can act as guides for farmers looking to improve their grazing practices to produce grass-fed beef or to get the help they need to reduce chemical use.

“They’ve lost a lot of local technical expertise at NRCS in particular,” she said.

At the same time, cuts to other programs mean agriculture support organizations that provide similar help have also let staff go. “That type of technical assistance that farmers rely on when they’re scaling up or expanding markets has also been lost,” she said.

What Mendenhall would like to see in the MAHA policy recommendations is a reinvestment in helping farmers scale up organic production and enter new markets like school food, hospitals, and the institutional markets that open new doors to wholesale.

“That is the avenue forward, and that’s a great way to increase consumption of organic food, but farmers can’t just do it,” she said. “They need support in order to scale up, and then they’ll be able to continue to do it, but we have to invest in the supply chain issues that are creating a barrier for them to doing that on their own.”

USDA Ends Support for Young Regenerative Farmers

Customers at the farmers’ market have already reported they were losing benefits that allow them to buy more healthy food from local farms using their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, Nelson said. She’s also seen a lot of her farmer friends lose jobs with support organizations, including at Pasa and at the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC), where she is an associate field director.

“It’s so powerful to know that you can grow food and preserve a future, so that keeps me going all the time, but I do have worries,” she said. “I really want to have hope that the administration will show how they can support smaller farms. It has been interesting to watch freezes happen and unfreezes happen and nothing feels totally certain or set in stone. Every day is wildly different.”

Things have been particularly fraught for young farmers who don’t fit the stereotype of the brawny white male American farmer. In its latest survey, in 2022, NYFC received responses from more than 10,000 young farmers across the country.

“Through that data, we learned that there are way more farmers of color who are young and way more queer farmers that the USDA data doesn’t reflect,” Nelson said. Eighty-six percent of the young farmers surveyed classified their approach as regenerative farming.

Biden’s USDA encouraged organizations and farmers applying for grants to emphasize whether they were a part of or serving underserved groups, such as BIPOC, women, or LGBTQ farmers. Now, as the USDA goes through grant contracts rooting out DEI initiatives, those farmers and organizations are the ones seeing their grant contracts cancelled.

To push back on that issue, NYFC launched a social media campaign last month dubbed #WeAreAmericanFarmers, calling on USDA to honor its contracts, given Rollins’ repeated statements around supporting American farmers.

“This campaign is to underscore farmers who are immigrants, farmers who are not white, farmers who are queer are all American farmers as well,” Nelson said. “It’s a call for representation and to call out that kind of dangerous language around who gets access to USDA resources or not and who feels like they belong.”

Pesticides, Climate Change, and Ecosystems: MAHA vs. EPA and USDA

“We’re definitely experiencing a change in climate here, and it’s making it more challenging to farm, even aside from just a massive disaster that takes out all the infrastructure,” said TendWell Farm’s Beltram, who still hasn’t received disaster assistance after Hurricane Helene destroyed roads, tractors, box trucks, and more at multiple farm locations and left his team to spend the entire winter cleaning debris out of fields.

On the environmental side, the MAHA movement behind Kennedy has been more vocal about its desire to see more regulation of pesticides linked to health and environmental harm, especially glyphosate, atrazine, and neonicotinoids. Prior to his appointment, Kennedy railed against agricultural chemicals.

However, at a press conference during the recent Great American Farmers’ Market, in response to a question about whether the second MAHA report would include recommendations to restrict the use of some chemicals, he deferred to Rollins.

“There is no question that the use of crop protection tools remains one of the most important tools, if not the most important, to our farmers to thrive and to remain prosperous,” Rollins said, adding that Kennedy has met with 130 farmer and rancher groups. “I’ve also heard him say, ‘We can’t compromise our farmers and their ability to feed and fuel and clothe the world.’ I feel very confident that his and our commitment to make sure farmers are at the table remains paramount, and that the report will reflect that.” Asked to weigh in, Kennedy said he had nothing to add.

Recently, a legislative rider has also gained steam among Republicans in Congress that would help shield Bayer and other pesticide companies from lawsuits claiming their products cause health harms.

White Oak Pasture’s Harris has spoken out about this kind of “pesticide immunity” bill, a version of which passed this year in his state of Georgia. While he acknowledges some worry about the impacts of climate change, he’s especially concerned about the ecosystem collapse caused by pesticide use and other factors.

“I think one of the things we got wrong is this thing of killing the pest,” he said. “I believe that every creature—plant, animal, or microbe—that lives in and is indigenous to an ecosystem has a role in that ecosystem,” he said. “I think we’re not smart enough to know what it is [for every creature]. And the fact that we have driven and are driving so many species of plants and animals and microbes into extinction or near extinction is worrying to me.”

Does he think, then, that a successful MAHA policy plan for regenerative agriculture needs to address that fact? “Absolutely,” he said. Like many others, he’s waiting to see what happens next.

Politico just published a draft version of the MAHA Commission’s policy recommendations, which are currently being reviewed by the White House and could change significantly before being finalized.

The last section of the report is titled “Soil Health and Stewardship of the Land.”  But not one of the four bullet points in the section includes concrete policy steps or positions.

For now, it seems as though not even the MAHA Commission will provide clarity any time soon about the administration’s plans for regenerative farming.

“We don’t know what the program is yet,” Harris said. “Powerful people have been instructed to come up with a program, so that’s promising.”

The post Should Regenerative Farmers Pin Hopes on RFK Jr.’s MAHA? appeared first on Civil Eats.

“The health and the vibrancy of American farms is critical to the success of the MAHA movement,” Kennedy said during his opening remarks. “We have the best farmers in the world in our country. We have people who are developing innovative techniques for restoring the soil, for restoring the microbiome, for producing the healthiest food in the world, and one of the purposes of this meeting is to get that message out to the rest of America: that there’s hope.”

Elisa Lane is one of those innovators. Lane owns Two Boots Farm in Northern Maryland, where she tends to a 200-tree pawpaw orchard, grows vegetable seedlings for home gardeners in the spring, and harvests endless varieties of flowers that get arranged into farmers’ market and bridal bouquets. She does it all without pesticides or tilling, while building soil fertility with a variety of cover crops and compost.

But on a sweltering day a week before the roundtable, with a heat advisory in effect, one thing she was thinking about—for the first time—was crop insurance.

Over the last decade, she explained while hanging freshly harvested garlic in her barn, it’s been getting hotter. Her crew starts at 5 a.m. some days to get field work done before the unbearable heat sets in. Summers are drier. The weather varies more wildly. When storms hit, they seem more intense than in the past.

“They come on so fast and so quick. I just remember that happening in the last three years or so,” she said. “That causes power outages, which is something I’m so nervous about. If we have a cooler worth of stuff, it could all spoil.” The thing that scares her the most, though, is the prospect of losing entire crops, which is what happened recently on two nearby farms during hailstorms.

It’s not just hail. In recent years, Hurricane Helene damaged or destroyed crops on close to 5 million acres of North Carolina farmland. Farmers in Vermont lost vegetable crops worth millions of dollars to unprecedented flooding. In the West, some farms couldn’t plant crops due to historic drought conditions; others lost crops and livestock herds to wildfires.

While it’s difficult to attribute any single weather event to climate change, the evidence is clear that more frequent and intense extreme-weather events are making it increasingly challenging for farmers to grow healthy food regardless of their ability to innovate, complicating the MAHA movement’s goals.

The last report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offered two big takeaways, said Rachel Bezner Kerr, the lead author of a chapter about climate impacts on food, fiber, and ecosystems. Overall agricultural productivity has been reduced from what it would have been with less or no global warming, and more robust evidence now shows extreme weather events are diminishing food security and nutrition.

“Going forward, unless we’re able to significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, those impacts are going to be quite severe,” Kerr said.

However, in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration’s actions are likely to increase U.S. emissions. During the first week of his presidency, Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, rolling back electric vehicle subsidies, and directing his agencies to increase the production of fossil fuels.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has since proposed removing all limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and overturning the finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has canceled programs and contracts that pay farmers to use climate-friendly practices and has stripped the word “climate” from its vocabulary. Trump’s sweeping tax legislation, which Republicans in Congress named the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” also dismantles Biden-era climate actions and boosts the fossil-fuel industry.

Trump has promised that the administration is fully invested in Kennedy’s MAHA movement goals to reduce chronic disease by, among other actions, getting Americans to eat more fresh, healthy, whole foods.

But in response to questions from Civil Eats, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said the administration is not concerned by the fact that climate change is compromising the country’s ability to produce that food.

“When nearly 70 percent of American children’s caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods—contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions—the Make America Healthy Again movement has more pressing short term priorities to address than vague climate change concerns about agricultural yields and nutrient density,” he said in an email.

As a result, it’s unlikely that the second MAHA report—which will be submitted to the White House this week and is aimed at helping Americans eat healthier—will include climate policy directives, even if experts say they should undoubtedly be included.

“If you’re thinking about the importance of things like fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds . . . very important foods that prevent diseases in our diet, then you need to think about, ‘How do we address climate change so that food production, both quality and quantity, remains stable?’” said Samuel Myers, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health. “That also will help with prices for Americans and protecting pollinator populations in the U.S. and abroad.”

Quantity and Quality of Food Impacted

At this point, the data from around the world is clear. “We can say decisively that productivity is lower than what it would be if there was no climate change,” said Kerr.

New research published in June identified yet another consequence of those reduced yields. As yields decline, farmers clear more land to grow food. As a result, more than 200 million acres of cropland in use today can be attributed to climate-change-driven yield loss. And as more land is cleared for farming, emissions increase, since forested land sequesters much more carbon.

“With a warming climate, we’re seeing a decrease in the productivity of our croplands around the world, and then as a result of that, in order to have the same amount of production, we are having to clear a lot more land, which then has an impact on the climate,” said Paul West, a senior scientist at Project Drawdown, who was an author on the paper. “So it ends up creating a vicious cycle.”

Myers’ research has also shown that the food that is being grown is not as healthy as it once was: Rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere affect plant growth in a way that reduces the nutrient content of many important crops.

“We’ve found that crops grown at CO2 concentrations we expect to see by the middle of the century have reduced levels of things like iron and zinc and protein, which are super important from a health standpoint,” he said. “And then we find that potentially hundreds of millions of people get pushed into micronutrient deficiencies because of just the CO2 effect alone.”

In the U.S., that’s unlikely to happen, because our diets are more diverse compared to those of low-income countries that rely heavily on staple food crops. But Myers said climate change also threatens a wide range of foods that provide Americans with important nutrients. For example, the size and distribution of fisheries are changing, and it’s getting harder to raise livestock in certain places as heat and drought conditions increase.

Myers also worked on another study that found many scientific and policy reports underestimate how much food security is likely to be threatened in coming years because they often leave out other factors that intersect with climate change.

Over the last 10,000 years, he said, agriculture was optimized to conditions that were almost entirely stable. Now, everything about growing a crop—from temperature and water supply to pollination and pest pressure—is up in the air.

“We’re changing those biophysical conditions at the fastest rate in the history of our species,” he said. “It’s the climate that we’re changing, but it’s also biodiversity loss and pollution and changes in access to water. It’s not just climate change, it’s everything change.”

In addition to backtracking on a transition away from fossil fuels, President Trump’s EPA is rolling back numerous regulations intended to prevent pollution and safeguard biodiversity.

Forced by Climate to Cut Back on Healthy Crops

Ela is a fourth-generation farmer, and his produce, grown in soil that has more than double the organic matter compared to the local average, is sold at seven Colorado farmers’ markets.

Steve Ela packs apples at Ela Family Farms, where he’s recently taken trees out of production due to concerns about water availability. (Photo credit: Regan Choi)

However, his farm’s viability is entirely dependent on the annual snowpack, which melts into reservoirs that feed his irrigation systems. Several studies have documented declining snowpack in Colorado over the past several decades, caused by rising temperatures and declining precipitation.

There have always been drought cycles, Ela said, but in the past several years, there have been more of them. Last year, after not enough snowpack accumulated, the runoff season was short. When rain didn’t come, he had to start using the reservoir water about three months earlier than normal.

“That reservoir only holds so much water, and if you have to use it for a longer period of time, it’s just like a bank account,” he said. “You can stretch it out, but there’s only X amount there.”

This year, after another dry winter, they’ll run out of water for some of his apple trees in mid-August, with the harvest not happening until October. “If you stretch them, you beat them, you malnourish them, they just don’t come back the same,” he said. “There’s a lasting scar. It’s something that causes damage for multiple years.” After a historic fall freeze a few years ago, for example, his apple and pear trees looked okay, he said, but then he didn’t get a good crop on them for three years.

As a result of his water challenges, he’s started taking acres of trees out of production. It’s the only obvious solution he can see at the moment, he said: If there’s going to be less water available, he’s going to grow less fruit.

“The interaction between MAHA and climate change, it’s an awkward dance,” Ela said. As a dedicated environmentalist, he’s worried about the changing climate. But he also sees the value in the MAHA movement’s message, because “I think we could eat a lot healthier,” he said.

Can the Soil Save Us?

In fact, a 2022 survey by the Organic Farming Research Foundation found that 80 percent of farmers transitioning to organic practices cited “greater resilience to climate change” as a motivating factor.

Kennedy is a longtime critic of pesticide use and promoter of organic practices, and his MAHA movement includes many farmers and consumers who are pushing for more support for organic and regenerative agriculture. These two approaches to agriculture, which intersect and overlap in different ways depending on how they’re practiced, can build healthy soil and biodiversity on farms, creating systems that are both better for the climate and improve the nutrition of the food produced.

But so far, the administration’s actions have done more to hurt organic and regenerative farmers than help them. The USDA retooled the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program in a way that led to thousands of farms around the country losing funding allocated to implement regenerative practices. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has also canceled more than a billion dollars in funding for local food programs that primarily benefit regenerative and organic farms.

Instead, Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill will send more dollars to conventional, commodity farms that rely on large-scale, chemical-intensive farming practices.

Some farmers are optimistic that the upcoming MAHA report will include policy recommendations related to soil health and regenerative agriculture. However, powerful agricultural lobby groups have been pushing back on that front, especially on any provisions regulating pesticide use, and ultimately Kennedy is not in charge of farm policy. Still, he hinted at his desire to push things in that direction.

“We need to give off-ramps to farmers so that they can transition to biodynamic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, and do it in a way that is going to maintain the vibrancy of their farms,” he said at the July roundtable. “We have a president now who is not only absolutely committed to the survival and prosperity of American farmers but is also looking around the corners, who is looking to the future.”

The trouble is, even if farm policy bucks the Big Ag headwinds and takes up the IPPC recommendations to shift to more regenerative, diversified systems, it won’t be enough to guarantee a future filled with healthy food if the administration continues to roll the clock back on overall emissions, Kerr said.

“I think it’s very hard to adapt if we are going over 1.5 [degrees Celsius of warming], and if we are ramping up our greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “The adaptation strategies that we’ve identified are not adequate in the face of that kind of global warming.”

Elisa Lane, owner of Two Boots Farm, with the solar array that sits behind her fields on the edge of forested acres. Installation of the system was delayed to the USDA funding freeze. (Photo credit: Lisa Held)

At Two Boots Farm, Lane is doing her part on all fronts. In addition to building healthy soil and keeping a biodiverse forest intact on most of her acreage, she recently installed a solar array to shift the farm to renewable energy. The project was delayed significantly when the grant funding she had received from the USDA through a program that helps farmers install solar was frozen. It has since been unfrozen, and she’s now close to getting it up and running.

The system will save her around $500 per month in energy costs, she estimates, but she’s not sure if tax credits she was hoping for were eliminated in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Next on her list is crop insurance, which is difficult for small, diversified farms like hers to qualify and apply for.

In 2022, crop insurance subsidies cost taxpayers a record $19.3 billion, up from an average that stayed under $4 billion in the early aughts.

“The government will hopefully help in one way or another,” Lane said. “They have the ability to help on the front end with resiliency, or they’re going to be helping us on the back end, when everybody’s screwed financially because we’re losing crops.”

The post The MAHA Movement’s Climate Conundrum appeared first on Civil Eats.

https://civileats.com/2025/07/15/op-ed-the-big-beautiful-bill-wont-make-america-healthy-again66076/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/15/op-ed-the-big-beautiful-bill-wont-make-america-healthy-again66076/#respond Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:01:13 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=66076 The bill includes the most significant cuts ever enacted to federal benefit programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Millions of Americans will be hungrier and sicker as a result of the OBBBA. It’s also an absolute contradiction to the claims and narrative of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again […]

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On July 4, President Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). While the OBBBA may be beautiful for the ultra-rich, for most Americans it will be brutal, especially for the most vulnerable, with experts asserting that this is the most regressive tax and budget bill in modern U.S. history.

The bill includes the most significant cuts ever enacted to federal benefit programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Millions of Americans will be hungrier and sicker as a result of the OBBBA. It’s also an absolute contradiction to the claims and narrative of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) platform, and a betrayal to the voters who feel an affinity to MAHA due to its stated focus on fighting chronic disease.

Given the devastating impacts of the OBBBA, what MAHA will ultimately accomplish under the Trump Administration is questionable.

In May, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA Commission released the Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment. This first “MAHA report” asserted that the health of American children is in crisis, in part due to poor diet, lack of physical activity, and exposure to harmful chemicals.

As public health advocates, we at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) wholeheartedly agree with this diagnosis. This newfound federal focus on nutrition, chemical safety, and chronic disease could be a dream come true for advocates like CSPI, presenting a potential opportunity for tangible policy action that can directly improve Americans’ health and wellbeing.

“This new law absolutely contradicts the claims and narrative of the Trump administration’s MAHA platform.”

But the devil is in the details, as we’ve seen play out with the passage of the OBBBA. While the MAHA Commission is seeking to address a serious problem, whether it can successfully prevent and treat chronic disease depends on which factors the members deem to be driving the problem, what policy solutions they will choose to pursue, and who they will hold accountable.

All these details will likely form the basis of the next MAHA Commission report, which will be released in August and include recommended policy strategies. We will be watching closely.

There are some good ideas in the first MAHA report that we would like to see operationalized. Of concern, however, is that these good ideas are almost always contradicted by what the administration has done since January and is now planning to do through the OBBBA. Here are a few examples of what the first report says and how it contradicts what has actually been set in motion.

Radical Transparency and Gold-Standard Science

What they say: “The U.S. government is committed to fostering radical transparency and gold-standard science.”

What they do: There are no authors listed on the report, the single meeting of the MAHA Commission before the report’s release was conducted behind closed doors, and the report does not have a Methods section to explain how the authors came to their conclusions. There have also been serious concerns raised with the scientific integrity of the entire report due to misinterpretations and misattributions of citations, as well as citations to studies that do not exist—which were likely written by AI.

Furthermore, entire sections of the report regurgitate RFK Jr.’s pre-conceived, unsubstantiated beliefs (e.g., false claims about the harms of seed oils). He recently publicly promoted a restaurant chain that chose to fry its potatoes in beef tallow instead of seed oils—a move restaurants switched away from over 30 years ago due to strong evidence that beef tallow’s high saturated fat content increases the risk of heart disease, the number one killer in America.

Support for Local Foods and Farmers

What they say: “The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of healthcare.”

What they do: The administration terminated over $1 billion in funding for programs aiding schools and food banks in purchasing food from local producers. Farmers are speaking out about the cumulative negative impact of the Administration’s actions on their livelihoods, and school food service providers are advocating for increased funding to support the provision of healthy, locally sourced foods in school meal programs.

Funding High-Quality Research

What they say: “Industry interests dominate and distort scientific literature,” so more independent research funding is needed for the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

What they do: The administration has proposed slashing NIH research funding by 40 percent, unlawfully terminated thousands of grants (which CSPI successfully challenged in court), and censored NIH research with which the administration disagreed ideologically. The administration is also actively attacking academic institutions and casting doubt on the integrity of the world’s leading medical journals, even suggesting government scientists will be barred from publishing in them.

Food Chemical Safety

What they say: “Children are exposed to an increasing number of synthetic chemicals, some of which have been linked to developmental issues and chronic disease. The current regulatory framework should be continually evaluated to ensure that chemicals and other exposures do not interact together to pose a threat to the health of our children.”

What they do: In April, the Administration fired all 200 employees in the Centers for Disease Control’s Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, which is responsible for preventing exposure to environmental hazards, including lead poisoning in children. Then, in early June, agency staff received emails indicating that they should come back to work, but senior officials in the agency itself advised employees that the decision may not be final.

“Given the devastating impacts of the OBBBA, what MAHA will ultimately accomplish under the Trump Administration is questionable.”

This back-and-forth in staffing demonstrates a lack of commitment to protecting children from harmful chemicals and seriously undermines the agency’s morale.

We agree with that there is an urgent need to improve children’s health, but the policies of the administration as demonstrated by the passage of the OBBBA do just the opposite. It remains to be seen whether the policies recommended in their upcoming strategy report will align with that narrative, or whether we will continue to see federal actions that directly contradict the MAHA rhetoric.

To Protect Health, We Urge MAHA to Consider These Policies

In the areas of improving diet and reducing chemical exposures in childhood (two of the four drivers of chronic diseases listed in the MAHA report), we urge the MAHA Commission to consider the following evidence-based policies.

1. Publish Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) that adopt and uphold the science-based recommendations of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC).

Fifty-five public health and medical organizations, including CSPI, support this recommendation, given that the DGAs are required by law to reflect the preponderance of scientific evidence, which the DGAC has summarized in its recent Scientific Report. However, RFK Jr. has publicly stated that the DGAs will be only four pages long, raising questions about their scientific validity.

The DGAs matter not just for public dietary advice. They are also the cornerstone of federal nutrition programs and policies, directly shaping nutrition standards for national school meal programs, for example, and subsequently affecting the health of more than 30 million children who rely on those meals.

2. Address the food and nutrition security needs of vulnerable children and communities who will go hungry due to cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the OBBBA.

Nearly one in four U.S. children receive SNAP benefits, which help reduce poverty, food insecurity, healthcare expenditures, and risk of chronic conditions later in life. But those children—who are part of the 42.1 million people who rely on SNAP to put food on the table—will suffer due to the OBBBA.

To pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the OBBBA includes clauses creating bureaucratic hoops that roughly 8 million people are projected to be unable to jump through, thus putting them at risk of losing their benefits.

“This newfound federal focus on nutrition, chemical safety, and chronic disease could be a dream come true. . . . But the devil is in the details.”

The OBBBA imposed new work requirements on both SNAP and Medicaid beneficiaries; removed the SNAP work requirement exemptions for veterans, former foster youth, and people experiencing homelessness; and blocked immigrants who are lawfully present in the U.S., such as refugees and asylum seekers, from receiving SNAP benefits. Work requirements like these ultimately increase costs to states and taxpayers, harm health, and drive struggling families deeper into poverty.

In addition to dealing with new work requirements, starting in 2027 state governments will need to pay an unprecedented share of the food benefits and administrative costs associated with SNAP. To cover these higher costs, states will scramble and likely resort to cutting benefits, limiting state employees’ salaries, raising state taxes, or eliminating funding for other programs. In the worst-case scenario, states could completely withdraw from the nation’s most important nutrition program entirely—a disaster in the making.

The OBBBA also limits future updates to the Thrifty Food Plan used to set SNAP benefit levels, which means that the government will have no flexibility to adjust SNAP benefits based on rising food prices, consumption patterns, or changes in dietary guidance.

If the MAHA Commission truly aims to improve childhood health, its next report must provide policy solutions to ensure that children in food-insecure households are able to access and afford nutritious food as the OBBBA’s provisions take effect.

3. Reinstate funding for SNAP Education (SNAP-Ed).

The OBBBA defunds SNAP-Ed, a nationwide program helping individuals eligible for SNAP make healthy choices on a limited budget. Evaluations of SNAP-Ed have demonstrated its power to help families across the country. With cuts to SNAP described above, this support is even more critical. HHS’s proposed $20 million “ Take Back Your Health” ad campaign is no substitute for the evidence-based strategies of SNAP-Ed, which was funded at $536 million in FY25.

4. Regulate the food industry to improve both chemical safety and nutrition.

The MAHA report repeatedly bemoans the food industry’s role in harming children’s health but concludes with calls for industry deregulation instead of increased accountability. We have seen this play out in reality, with RFK Jr. announcing plans to “phase out” synthetic food dyes, but leaving it up to the industry to voluntarily remove dyes.

To systematically improve food safety, the administration should take much-needed action on closing the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) loophole, which allows companies to add new ingredients into the food supply without notifying FDA. So far, RFK Jr. has only ordered FDA to “explore” what can be done about the loophole.

And, while food chemical safety reform is important, it isn’t enough—the administration also needs to ensure that we’re getting proper nutrition. It can do this by finalizing front-of-package nutrition labeling on packaged foods and moving forward with added sugar and sodium reduction targets across the food supply.

Suggested Actions for Readers

Implementing these strategies will require the government to allocate the necessary funds (through appropriations) and personnel to agencies (by undoing the mass firings) so that federal workers can do their jobs.

You can act by signing letters and petitions to state and federal representatives around these issues, and by sharing your stories with your legislators and the media. You can also join CSPI’s email list to stay up to date on what the administration is actually doing—not just what they’re saying—and receive action alerts to make your voice heard. Additional resources can be found at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Food Research & Action Center, and No Kid Hungry.

Together, we can hold the MAHA Commission and the administration to their word.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/15/op-ed-the-big-beautiful-bill-wont-make-america-healthy-again66076/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/07/08/from-bees-to-beer-buckwheat-is-a-climate-solution-crop/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/08/from-bees-to-beer-buckwheat-is-a-climate-solution-crop/#comments Tue, 08 Jul 2025 08:00:50 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65717 “Bees love buckwheat,” says Keith Kisler, a farmer who co-owns Chimacum Valley Grainery, a mill, bakery, and brewery on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Kisler and his wife, Crystie, cultivate barley, quinoa, rye, spelt, and wheat on about 70 acres of organic farmland, but buckwheat has become one of his favorite crops. That’s because buckwheat—planted in late […]

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From a distance, fields of buckwheat may seem serene, with petite, fluffy white flowers and heart-shaped green leaves. But if you’re standing in one, you’ll hear the distinct buzzing of bees as they pollinate millions of flowers per acre.

“Bees love buckwheat,” says Keith Kisler, a farmer who co-owns Chimacum Valley Grainery, a mill, bakery, and brewery on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Kisler and his wife, Crystie, cultivate barley, quinoa, rye, spelt, and wheat on about 70 acres of organic farmland, but buckwheat has become one of his favorite crops.

Despite its name, buckwheat is not a type of wheat; it’s a gluten-free seed, rich in vitamins and minerals.

That’s because buckwheat—planted in late May and harvested in early October—is remarkably easy to grow. “In between, there’s really nothing done to that field,” Kisler says. “I don’t do any weed control, and we don’t water. It’s planted, it germinates, it grows, it flowers, it’s harvested.”

Buckwheat is also easy to mill into flour and adds a rich, earthy flavor to some of the Grainery’s products, like bread, beer, and pasta. By managing every step of the process, from cultivation to the finished product, Kisler has overcome buckwheat’s greatest challenge in the U.S.—a solid infrastructure that connects producers with consumers.

Buckwheat flour can be used in a range of recipes, including noodles, pictured here, as well as crêpes, blinis, and cookies. (Photo credit: Crystie Kisler, Chimacum Valley Grainery)

Buckwheat has a long bloom period, can build healthy soil, and is nutrient-dense, making it good not only for bees and farmers, but also planet and people. These multiple benefits are why Kisler and a team of scientists are working together to test new varieties of buckwheat and to build a local market for it.

Led by researchers at Washington State University (WSU) and supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), they hope to increase organic production of this underutilized, low-input crop—one with the potential to address larger challenges like nutrition access and climate change.

A Versatile Seed

Despite its name, buckwheat is not a type of wheat. It is a seed rich in vitamins and minerals, including vitamins A, B, C, and E, as well as potassium and magnesium, which play an important role in a healthy human diet—and it is gluten free. The tough outer hulls are typically removed, and the hulled seeds, called groats, have a nutty taste and the al dente texture of farro. Buckwheat groats can also be milled into a flour for use in sweet and savory recipes, from brownies and cookies to breads and crackers.

Buckwheat originated in southwestern China, featuring in Asian cuisines for thousands of years before spreading to Eastern Europe, likely in the 15th century. Today, China is the world’s second largest producer of buckwheat after Russia. The grain arrived in North America during European colonization and was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, due to its capacity to suppress weeds.

Its culinary uses, however, have yet to be fully explored in the U.S., where it is still typically treated as an export item or cover crop. About 27,000 acres of buckwheat were grown here in 2017, the most recent year that data on buckwheat plantings were available.

Washington is the nation’s second top producer of buckwheat after North Dakota, with approximately 6,000 to 8,000 acres, according to Kevin Murphy, a WSU professor of international seed and cropping systems and the director of Breadlab, WSU’s grain research center. Almost all of the seed grown in the Northwest state is exported to Japan for making soba noodles.

Kisler’s buckwheat, grown on 12 acres that produce 16,000 to 18,000 pounds of seed annually, remains in his regional food system. His brother, on the other hand, grows between 200 and 300 acres of buckwheat in eastern Washington, entirely for export to Japan.

“There’s a need for different scales of operations,” Kisler says. “For somebody like my brother to grow several hundred acres of buckwheat and for small production at a local level.” 

Buckwheat flowers develop abundantly about 30 days after seeding. At right, an aerial view of a buckwheat field trial. (Photo courtesy of WSU)

Kisler has worked with Breadlab since 2008, and the buckwheat in his fields are varieties they developed together. For years before this collaboration, Kisler used buckwheat as a cover crop, and he saw how it enhanced his soil.

“It helps break disease cycles,” Kisler says. “It grows really quickly, so it out-competes the weeds in a field. It sends down a fairly deep tap root, which loosens compacted soils. It does well even in marginal soils. I don’t ever need to water it, even in a dry season. And it’s planted later, so from a production perspective, it spreads out planting and harvesting so all that work doesn’t need to happen all at once.”

Buckwheat’s agricultural benefits extend beyond the lifespan of the plant. “When I follow it with a grain crop, that grain crop does better in that section of the field where there was buckwheat the previous year than next door where there was no buckwheat planted,” Kisler says.  

The Pancake Project

In 2021, WSU researchers began collaborating with local producers to assess the regional market for buckwheat and millet and build consumer demand for these crops, supported by a $350,000 Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Project (SARE) grant, funded by the USDA.

“I don’t do any weed control with buckwheat, and we don’t water. It’s planted, it germinates, it grows, it flowers, it’s harvested.”

They used the most promising buckwheat varieties from nearby farms to develop a pancake mix for Washington’s school lunch programs. Stephen Bramwell, Thurston County Extension director and WSU agriculture specialist, coordinated with nearly 300 school districts for their feedback. A critical factor, they found, was the ratio of buckwheat flour to whole wheat flour.

“After many rounds of taste tests at the Breadlab and schools, we’ve dialed it in to 50 percent buckwheat,” Bramwell says. “We tried to get it close to what people know, what wouldn’t be too different from other pancakes—fairly light, not too grainy, a little bit sweet.”

The pancakes’ appearance was particularly crucial. “The color—that’s a huge one for kids,” says Bramwell, noting that students prefer the lighter hue of pancakes made with refined wheat flour. “Buckwheat pancakes brown faster and can become really dark, so we’ve done trials to moderate the color.”

Buckwheat pancake-mix packets at the Thurston County Fair, created by WSU Extension. At the booth, kids could grind their own buckwheat flour for the packets using a hand-crank mill. The booth was extremely popular, with some kids returning two or three times to grind more buckwheat groats. (Photo credit: Stephen Bramwell)

To familiarize students with buckwheat, the team also organized hands-on lessons, including growing it in school gardens, harvesting and threshing it, using hand-crank mills to pulverize the seeds into flour, making pancakes, and taste testing batches made with different flour ratios.

“The best way to reach kids is not just when it shows up on the plate,” Bramwell says, “but when they’ve had a chance to get exposure to a new product by learning about it, as a plant, as a seed, and then as a food.”

‘More Bang for Your Buckwheat’

After the SARE grant ended in 2024, the WSU team received another USDA grant for a project they call More Bang for Your Buckwheat (MBYB). Their goal is to develop new buckwheat varieties based on traits that both farmers and consumers like and want. With these new varieties, the team plans to develop a diverse selection of “flavorful, affordable, and nutritious” buckwheat products and continue collaborations with 50 school districts in the region. 

“The name is sort of tongue-in-cheek,” explains Micaela Colley, WSU professor of participatory plant breeding. “Many farmers grow buckwheat knowing they won’t make any money off it, and they just till it in. We’re interested in all the values of buckwheat as a cover crop, but the idea is that you’re getting a food crop out of it, too.”

An array of foods made with buckwheat, including cookies and crackers, at the Buckwheat Festival. (Photo courtesy of WSU Breadlab)

Recent federal funding cuts devastated some WSU research programs, such as the Soil to Society grant, which included buckwheat as a key crop to consider for increasing food security. The four-year, $3.3 million MBYB grant is still being funded through USDA, but may be indirectly impacted by a $1 billion federal funding cut to the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which affects 850,000 students in Washington and may limit the ability of some school districts to buy nutritious, locally produced foods—like WSU’s buckwheat pancake mix.

The MBYB team also includes experts from across the country, with several in New York—another top U.S. producer of buckwheat and buckwheat products. Cornell University and the Glynwood Center for Regional Food are key for research and forming relationships with both farmers and food producers to develop products such as BAM, a buckwheat-based milk alternative.

The MBYB grant will also help fund the third annual Buckwheat Festival on August 8 at the Breadlab, in Burlington, Washington. The small event, which attracted about 50 visitors last year, will offer an evening tasting of buckwheat foods and drinks for $25 or a full day of activities for $125, including a field tour with plant breeders and cooking demonstrations with chefs.

Since 2018, the Breadlab has collaborated with chef Bonnie Morales of the Eastern European restaurant Kachka, in Portland, Oregon, to develop recipes for the restaurant and pop-up events, including the Buckwheat Festival.

“She makes my favorite comfort food,” Colley says, referring to Morales’ golubtsi, a Ukrainian dish of cabbage rolls stuffed with buckwheat. The seed is used throughout Kachka’s menu, including for custard and blini.

The Buckwheat Festival offers tastings of buckwheat foods and drinks, field tours with plant breeders, and cooking demonstrations with chefs. (Photo courtesy of WSU Breadlab)

California chef Sonoko Sakai has also participated in the festival and will be there again this year. “She did a demo and made soba noodles by hand,” Colley recalls. “One thing that stuck in my mind that she shared is that in Japan, master soba chefs will include on the menu the date that buckwheat was harvested and what farm it came from.”

Ultimately, the goal is for buckwheat to be enjoyed year-round, not only on the day of the festival. For this to happen, there’s still much work to be done, especially in local and regional infrastructure.

“We’re really good at growing large amounts of grain and putting them in silos and then shipping them off somewhere far away,” Murphy says. “But if we want to eat locally and grow these grains at a smaller scale, there are a lot of gaps between the farmers and food companies and schools. How do we work together to bridge these gaps and make regional grain economies and value chains more efficient?”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/08/from-bees-to-beer-buckwheat-is-a-climate-solution-crop/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/07/01/food-assistance-debate-are-lawmakers-ending-waste-or-dismantling-a-safety-net/ https://civileats.com/2025/07/01/food-assistance-debate-are-lawmakers-ending-waste-or-dismantling-a-safety-net/#respond Tue, 01 Jul 2025 08:00:09 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=65550 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. […]

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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.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/07/01/food-assistance-debate-are-lawmakers-ending-waste-or-dismantling-a-safety-net/feed/ 0 https://civileats.com/2025/06/02/everything-you-know-about-the-dietary-guidelines-is-wrong/ https://civileats.com/2025/06/02/everything-you-know-about-the-dietary-guidelines-is-wrong/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2025 08:00:28 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=64851 “Are we redoing the food pyramid?” Kelly asked, in one exchange. “We’re redoing the food pyramid,” Makary confirmed, with gusto. “Thank God!” Kelly replied. However, the food pyramid—once used as a visual aid to convey the federal government’s dietary guidelines to Americans—was retired in 2011, nearly 15 years ago. In addition, the FDA is not […]

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In April, two weeks after being sworn in as the Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Marty Makary sat down for an interview with conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly. Over the course of an hour, the food pyramid came up several times.

“Are we redoing the food pyramid?” Kelly asked, in one exchange.

“We’re redoing the food pyramid,” Makary confirmed, with gusto.

“Thank God!” Kelly replied.

However, the food pyramid—once used as a visual aid to convey the federal government’s dietary guidelines to Americans—was retired in 2011, nearly 15 years ago. In addition, the FDA is not in charge of developing those guidelines. Every five years, an office within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), called the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to update and release them.

The exchange on the podcast episode is one of many examples of how most Americans might be unfamiliar with the details of the dietary guidelines. And while the Trump administration is promising to completely overhaul them, misinformation about what the guidelines say and the process that creates them is only getting worse.

One thing is clear: Given the high rates of diet-related diseases in the U.S., a lot is at stake in this update of the dietary guidelines.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now in the driver’s seat when it comes to developing the 2025 guidelines, due out later this year. Kennedy is passionate about encouraging Americans to eat healthier and has said he’s expediting the process as a result. In the past, however, he has expressed support for dietary advice that does not align with the current scientific consensus—like cutting out seed oils and subbing in beef tallow—and many are worried the guidelines will be altered to fit those beliefs.

One thing is clear: Given the high rates of diet-related diseases in the U.S., a lot is at stake.

“These science-based recommendations aren’t just the nutrition guidance that doctors are giving patients or that policymakers are using in this way that maybe affects your life every once in a while,” said Grace Chamberlin, a policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) who focuses specifically on the federal dietary guidelines. “They are actually directly impacting the food that is offered in programs that serve 1 in 4 Americans.”

The Broad Reach of the Dietary Guidelines

Chamberlin was referring to food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and school meals.

While altering the dietary guidelines does not trigger immediate changes to those programs, federal employees rely on the guidelines when they update related regulations.

For example, Kennedy and his allies have repeatedly announced their desire to use the guidelines to improve the nutrition of school meals. That’s possible because in 2010 President Barack Obama, with the help of first lady Michelle Obama’s advocacy, signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act into law. The law required school meal standards to reflect the dietary guidelines and led to more than a decade of rulemaking at the USDA to make that happen.

The guidelines also inform the Thrifty Food Plan, which the USDA uses to determine how much money a typical family would need to maintain a healthy diet. The Plan informs SNAP benefit amounts.

Experts said dieticians and other healthcare professionals also use the guidelines when working with patients, and Chamberlin said their influence may be even broader. “They can be a huge leverage point for increasing nutrition and nutrition awareness in the population, but also changing what we grow in this country, how our food system works, and what our food system prioritizes,” she said.

How the Dietary Guidelines Are Created

In May, in two separate appearances in front of Congressional committees, Kennedy said his HHS is rewriting guidelines passed down by the Biden administration. “The dietary guidelines that President Biden gave us are 453 pages long,” he told senators.

In fact, the last edition, the 2020 dietary guidelines, came out during Trump’s first term. Under Biden, employees at HHS and the USDA started the process of developing the 2025 guidelines. They formed the scientific advisory committee, which is tasked with reviewing new evidence and then delivering a scientific report the agencies use to write the guidelines.

The document Kennedy was likely referring to is that report, which was delivered to HHS and the USDA last December. Over the course of two years, 20 experts volunteered their time to review new scientific evidence on specific topics of interest identified by the agencies.

At a food policy event at lobbying firm ArentFox Schiff in April, the staff members overseeing the process at the federal agencies said that the committee completed 28 systematic reviews and reviewed almost 2,000 new scientific articles in addition to analyzing many other sources of data during that time.

Teresa Fung, a professor of nutrition at Simmons University and adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, served on the committee. Fung said that during the busiest time, she was volunteering up to 10 hours a week reviewing data.

After the scientific advisory committee delivers its report, HHS and the USDA begin to write the actual guidelines. The agencies swap leadership of the process each time the guidelines are renewed; this time, HHS—and Kennedy—are in charge.

Typically, staff members write the guidelines and then share them with the secretaries, who have final say. But no HHS Secretary has ever criticized the guidelines or promised to alter the structure in such a significant way, and it’s unclear if the customary protocol is being followed. When asked about the process by an audience member at the ArentFox event, all that HHS staff would say was that they’re “working closely” with the new leadership.

Corporate Influence Over the Dietary Guidelines

During the hearings, Kennedy also told lawmakers that the document he received from the Biden administration—likely the scientific advisory committee report—was “clearly written by industry.” The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission Report released at the end of May says the guidelines have a history “of being unduly influenced by corporate interests,” and cites a 2022 study that found that 95 percent of the 20 advisory committee members in 2020 had ties to the food industry. Most had multiple relationships; only one had none. (Reporting has since found several errors with the MAHA Commission citations.)

Food companies have long attempted to influence the guidelines, and over the past several decades, the number of committee members with food industry ties grew. However, an analysis of the current 2025 committee, done by advocacy organization U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), found that this time around, only nine of 20 members had significant food industry links. USRTK identified no industry ties for seven members, which they described as “signs of progress.”

In response to criticism, the USDA and HHS also made changes to increase transparency, although mandatory disclosure of conflicts of interest is still not required.

Chamberlin said that the committee’s work is now the most transparent part of the process. “If that whole group gets together, it has to be a public meeting. If more than a few of them are talking, it has to be viewed by the public. They have to post their protocols. They have to post their preliminary findings. They have to post their final report publicly,” she said. “What’s not as transparent is the stage we’re in right now, which is where the secretaries are actually writing the guidelines. Historically, that’s when interference has come into play.”

For example, the 2015 committee recommended stronger language on cutting back on red meat and processed meats that was ultimately not included in the guidelines written by the agencies, after significant lobbying by the meat industry and Congressional pushback led by Republicans.

“What’s not as transparent is the stage we’re in right now, which is where the secretaries are actually writing the guidelines. Historically, that’s when interference has come into play.”

This January, with the advisory committee report in hand, HHS and USDA employees held a public meeting to take comments on the report before they began the process of writing the actual guidelines.

Seventy-nine individuals spoke at the meeting, including plenty of concerned private citizens and advocates for healthy eating. But 32 of the speakers, about 40 percent, had obvious, direct links to the food industry. Meat companies sent the most representatives by far: 15 of the speakers represented beef, egg, dairy, and other meat interests.

Representatives of the Beef Checkoff and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), a contractor to the Checkoff, both spoke, and the NCBA also submitted written comments of its own and on behalf of the Beef Checkoff. In its comments, the organization pushed back hard on provisions in the guidelines that might recommend swapping in beans, peas, and lentils for servings of red meat.

“This substitution, and the anti-red meat language scattered throughout the report, is nonsensical given beef’s proven nutritional value and clear place in a healthy diet,” it read.

Similar Nutrition Controversies, New Attention

Meat companies have long held sway in D.C., but they might be sensing that this time around, they’ve got an even bigger chance to log some wins.

One of the longest-running disagreements in nutrition is the role of red meat, and particularly saturated fat, in healthy diets. Trendy high-meat diets are continually rebranded—Atkins became South Beach became Paleo became Keto and Whole 30—but all the while, most nutrition scientists maintain that the body of evidence shows limiting red meat and saturated fat is a healthier dietary pattern for most people.

Harvard professor Fung was part of the chronic disease subcommittee tasked with looking at evidence on this front. Rather than just focusing on reducing red meat, the researchers tackled a specific, more nuanced question. Because every dietary choice involves a swap, cutting a serving of red meat might mean adding a serving of chicken or fish or beans. So, they wanted to know: Does the substitute matter? For instance, is tofu a better choice than beef but not as good as fish?

What they found is that any swap in place of red meat produces a health benefit in terms of reducing heart-disease risk. That led to one of the December report’s most significant recommendations: Change the guidelines to promote more plant protein and less animal protein, especially red meat and processed meats.

“It does not mean that somebody cannot eat red meat at all,” Fung said. “But if you look at the science, the good science especially, what it is pointing towards is plant protein.”

There is an entire world of health-conscious people, however, who believe that conclusion is wrong and point to high-meat diets as the best solution for weight loss and chronic disease prevention. Many of those people are prominent in Kennedy’s MAHA movement: At a MAHA roundtable last fall, podcaster Mikhaila Fuller talked about curing her multiple health issues through an all-red-meat diet, which she now promotes as The Lion Diet.

At the launch of the MAHA Institute in May, Montana rancher Bryan Mussard told attendees he’d been talking to Kennedy since last summer about the topic. “I sent him so many text messages and emails on saturated fat that when I met him for the first time last September, I just introduced myself as ‘saturated fat,’ and he knew who I was,” he said.

There is an entire world of health-conscious people, who believe recommendations to eat more plant-based proteins are wrong; they point to high-meat diets as the best solution for weight loss and chronic disease prevention.

Seed oils present a similar challenge. Many in the MAHA movement, including Kennedy himself, have pointed to seed oils—soybean, corn, safflower, sunflower, cottonseed, and canola—as a likely cause of various health issues. The MAHA Commission Report cites as potentially problematic the change from animal-based sources of fat like butter and lard toward industrially produced seed oils.

“Industrial refining reduces micronutrients, such as vitamin E and phytosterols. Moreover, these oils contribute to an imbalanced omega-6/omega-3 ratio, a topic of ongoing research for its potential role in inflammation,” it reads. Nearly all experts agree that American diets contain too much omega-6 vs. omega-3 oils and that minimal processing of oils is better, but mainstream nutritionists say the science isn’t there to warn against seed oils specifically.

Nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle, who served on the 1995 committee and has been a frequent critic of the guidelines since, wrote recently that while it seems like a given that Americans consume seed oils in excess, in fried and junk foods, “I cannot find convincing data that seed oils are any worse for health than any other high-calorie food, and the evidence for their benefits as compared to animal fats seems strong and consistent.”

Perhaps the most anticipated aspect of the guidelines is what, if anything, they’ll say about ultra-processed foods. Of all the MAHA movement’s goals, Kennedy has pushed hardest, so far, on getting additives out of the food supply and focusing attention on ultra-processed foods as a primary source of Americans’ poor health.

His focus has been so intense that the leading researcher, Kevin Hall, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who was responsible for establishing some of the strongest evidence of ultra-processed foods’ health harms, left the agency because he felt like Kennedy’s HHS wouldn’t allow him to communicate unbiased study results unless they continued to back that conclusion up, regardless of what the research found. (HHS spokespeople have disputed his assertion.)

According to the law, changes to the dietary guidelines must be based on what is called a “preponderance of evidence.” The committee conducted a systematic review of research on the relationship between eating ultra-processed foods and risk of weight gain and obesity. The researchers did conclude that diets high in ultra-processed foods were associated with more body fat, higher body mass indexes, and a higher risk of obesity in adults, with a similar finding for children.

But it rated the evidence as “limited.” Since that didn’t meet the standard of a “preponderance of evidence,” the committee declined to recommend limits on ultra-processed foods in the guidelines.

Fung said that makes sense, since the definition of ultra-processed foods was only developed in 2009. In her mind, it still needs work. And these changes take time: It took ages for nutrition science to evolve to recognize healthy fats instead of cautioning against all fat in the diet, for example.

“It is a hot-button topic, and people want answers,” CSPI’s Chamberlin said. “We want to know what’s going on and what’s making us sick. But honestly, the advisory committee not being able to put forth a strong recommendation is a testament to how scientifically rigorous their process is. Their guidance can only be as strong as the underlying science.”

Not everyone agrees with that. Nestle, for one, who is also a stickler about the science, thinks it’s high time to tell Americans to eat fewer ultra-processed foods.

Either way, members of the Trump administration have mischaracterized how the advisory committee evaluated ultra-professed foods—and how the current guidelines currently handle them. In the Megyn Kelly interview, for example, Makary said, “No longer are we going to say, ‘You have these calories, it doesn’t matter how you get them, it doesn’t matter if it’s all ultra-processed foods.’”

“We do not need the term ultra-processed to help us differentiate between healthy versus unhealthy foods.”

In fact, the 2020 guidelines recommended “nutrient-dense” foods, which means it’s not just calories that matter.

In the end, Fung said the best dietary advice hasn’t changed much over time. Based on the review, she’d give this advice: “Eat more fruits and vegetables, whole grains. Eat a wide variety of foods. Mostly plant-based, especially the proteins, and choose whole foods and minimally processed [foods].”

She—and pretty much any nutrition expert—will recommend sticking most to whole and minimally processed foods. “We do not need the term ultra-processed to help us differentiate between healthy versus unhealthy foods,” she says.

Kennedy and those around him see it differently. They want to emphasize the ultra-processed nature of the foods. “Ultra-processed food is comprised of three ingredients primarily that did not exist 120 years ago,” said Kennedy advisor Calley Means at the MAHA Institute launch, citing refined grains, added sugar, and seed oils.

Some experts, including Nestle, disagree with many of the nitty-gritty details but understand where the arguments and frustration are coming from: She’s been pointing to corporate influence on dietary advice for decades, while others have documented how a food system driven by corporate profit transformed the way Americans eat in less than a century, while chronic disease rates ticked up.

It can start to feel like splitting hairs, but the tension between what conclusions can be drawn from the observable reality at hand, the scientific evidence available, and the desire to make change right away has existed for as long as nutrition has been studied. It’s hard to do controlled trials that isolate what humans eat. It’s hard to boil down complicated studies into simple advice on which foods to eat for optimal health. Kennedy doesn’t seem to agree.

“We are going to have four-page dietary guidelines that tell people, essentially, ‘Eat whole food,’ ” he told members of Congress in May. “ ‘Eat the food that’s good for you.’ ”

The post Everything You Know About the Dietary Guidelines Is Wrong appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/06/02/everything-you-know-about-the-dietary-guidelines-is-wrong/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2025/05/16/maha-supporters-form-new-organization-to-boost-rfks-goals-in-d-c/ Fri, 16 May 2025 19:12:26 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=64552 “There are thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands of people around the country who care deeply about this, who want their children to be healthier, who care about their families, who want to improve the system,” said Mark Gorton, president of the institute. “The MAHA Institute is serving the function of helping to coordinate and channel […]

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Supporters of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement gathered in Washington, D.C. yesterday to launch a new organization, the MAHA Institute, dedicated to changing and championing federal policies that could impact food ingredients, agricultural inputs, and overall health.

“There are thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands of people around the country who care deeply about this, who want their children to be healthier, who care about their families, who want to improve the system,” said Mark Gorton, president of the institute. “The MAHA Institute is serving the function of helping to coordinate and channel the energy of all of these people around the country and connect them with people in the government.”

Many of the people in the room were the same individuals and groups that supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign and then helped propel Donald Trump into office after Kennedy aligned himself with Trump.

Gorton and his partner Tony Lyons, now the MAHA Institute’s chairman, previously co-founded a Super PAC dedicated to supporting Kennedy. Lyons is the founder of Skyhorse Publishing and a close ally of right-wing media personality Steve Bannon. Other speakers included Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, the advocacy organization founded by Kennedy; Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America; and Montana rancher Bryan Mussard. Attendees included regenerative farmers, student activists, and school lunch reformers.

In addition to concerns about vaccine schedules and ingredients, speakers pointed to a wide range of food-related issues they believe are contributing to America’s chronic disease epidemic: genetically modified foods, pesticide exposures, seed oils, sugar, and other ingredients in processed foods. “It’s not about vaccines or drugs or foods, it’s about the toxins that are in them,” Lyons said. Several also described a situation in which the federal government has hidden information on those toxins at the behest of agriculture, pesticide, and food companies—an assertion that mixes the very real influence those companies have in D.C. with overarching conspiracy theory thinking— and said they trusted the Trump administration to turn that ship around.

In an interview with Civil Eats, Gorton said the MAHA Institute will work to connect people working on the same issues and do more traditional lobbying on legislation. And he said they’ll support the work of agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which Kennedy now runs, in achieving MAHA goals. “The number of actual, true MAHA supporters at the top of these agencies is maybe 75 people across an HHS that has 60,000 employees, and their job is unbelievably daunting, because these bureaucracies are highly resistant to change,” he said.

When asked about whether some Trump administration actions, such as the EPA rolling back limits on ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water and the USDA canceling a program that helped local farms get fresh produce into school meals, run counter to the movement’s goals, he dismissed any contradiction and said he was “extremely happy” with the administration so far. “I think there really is a commitment to the larger mission, and changing the government takes time,” he said.

Honeycutt, on the other hand, said she’d been disappointed in some Republican senators’ pushback against pesticide reforms after the MAHA movement supported their campaigns and that restoring regulations on forever chemicals in drinking water is incredibly important to her. “We’re shocked and dismayed that these Republican elected officials and some officials within the EPA are going against Trump’s call to make America healthy again, and we hope that they will see that this is a massive step backwards and that they will listen to the people who are calling for better policies on these toxic chemicals that are clearly harming Americans and making us sick.”

A group of 79 Republicans recently sent a letter urging Kennedy and other agency heads not to recommend restrictions on pesticide use in the MAHA Commission report, expected to be released on May 22.

Calley Means, a MAHA movement fixture who is now a special advisor to Kennedy within HHS, alluded to that tension in his remarks. “As the wins start stacking up—and they will be stacking up at an increasing pace—I can tell you that there’s a thing, an energy around this town, around the country, to divide the MAGA and MAHA movements, but it’s not going to happen,” he said. “This is a powerful revolutionary coalition of people that are going to change American politics.”

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/04/23/banning-ultra-processed-foods-in-school-meals-is-not-as-simple-as-it-may-seem/ https://civileats.com/2025/04/23/banning-ultra-processed-foods-in-school-meals-is-not-as-simple-as-it-may-seem/#comments Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:01 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=63646 September 15, 2025 Update: AB 1254 was passed by both chambers of California’s Legislature, and now heads to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk for his signature. The ban is intended to take full effect by July 2032. June 5, 2025 Update: The California State Assembly voted on Tuesday to pass AB 1264, a bipartisan bill that would begin phasing out “particularly harmful” […]

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]]> September 15, 2025 Update: AB 1254 was passed by both chambers of California’s Legislature, and now heads to Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk for his signature. The ban is intended to take full effect by July 2032.

June 5, 2025 Update: The California State Assembly voted on Tuesday to pass AB 1264, a bipartisan bill that would begin phasing out “particularly harmful” ultra-processed foods (UPF) from meals served in public schools by January 2028. The bill would require the UPF products most harmful to human health to be defined by scientists by July 1, 2026. The bill is now being reviewed by the state Senate.

Last month, California moved to ban “particularly harmful” ultra-processed foods (UPF) from school meals. This initiative is a hot topic in several other states and also has a fair chance of taking hold on a federal level, given that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is clearly very opposed to UPF—and has just taken steps to phase out certain food dyes, commonly used in UPF.

I want to start by saying, I’m all for this. I run a company of chefs trying to help school food programs around the country move away from ultra-processed foods and cook more from scratch. This is my life. I wholeheartedly believe we should be doing everything we can to ensure that the meals we are serving students are as thoughtfully prepared, delicious, and nutritious as possible.

That said, what looks like a positive change is actually quite complicated. There are a lot of rules already in place around school meals—and those rules, even when made with the best of intentions, have not always led to the most positive outcomes. A UPF ban might help students eat better, but only if schools, and school kitchen staff, get the support they need to succeed with the changes.

“Will the list of banned UPF become so exhaustive that school food programs, already dealing with nutritional guidelines, become completely unable to prepare meals that students will want to eat every day?”

Let me give you an example of how hard it is for schools to handle shifts in guidelines—and explain why eliminating UPFs may not be as straightforward as it sounds.

When the National School Lunch Program Guidelines went into effect about a decade ago, it mandated many changes that, on paper, looked much better for kids: more fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less sodium and saturated fat.

While some studies claimed that school diets improved, most people who experienced the change would argue that the meals also became less appetizing as school programs struggled to meet the nutritional guidelines within their allotted budgets. Kitchen workers saw many meals going into the trash (although USDA’s biggest study on the changes found while kids threw out vegetables more than any other foods, the level of waste was generally unchanged after the standards were implemented).

Also, from-scratch cooking became more difficult, because it got too complicated for schools to comply with the new rules. Before the guidelines, many school kitchen staff used to bake and cook proteins themselves. Now they had to follow intimidating guidelines, tracking the nutrition content of every dish and assessing levels of sodium, saturated fats, calories, types of vegetables, and much more. Then schools had to ensure that the rules were being followed, creating an extra administrative burden.

Most schools were already offering some prepackaged ultra-processed foods—a shift that had been happening for decades—but now many switched their operational models to bring in significantly more of those items. It was easier for giant food manufacturers to adapt to the new nutritional guidelines than it was for under-resourced school food programs to do so.

Some schools used the guidelines as a launchpad to move toward more scratch cooking, but many transitioned away from it, selling off their kitchen equipment. When new schools were built, their kitchen spaces were designed for heating up pre-packaged items rather than cooking meals. Slowly but surely, kitchen infrastructure across the country began to disappear. Fewer kitchen staff were needed, and now it is common to see school kitchen labor models that feature only one or two full-time positions, with the rest being parttime staff who work only during meals, to serve food.

Eliminating UPFs from school food would require a massive adjustment within programs as they figure out how to reconfigure menus, and kitchens and staffing too.

The other issue with UPFs is that they are not clearly defined. They’re generally understood as foods (and ingredients) created with industrial processes not found in a home kitchen, but interpretations vary. The proposed bill requires scientists to identify “particularly harmful” UPF based on whether they include banned or restricted additives; whether the food or its ingredients are linked to health harms like cancer, obesity and diabetes, or contribute to “food addiction;” and whether the food is high in fat, sugar, or salt.

Will the list of banned UPF become so exhaustive that school food programs, already dealing with nutritional guidelines, become completely unable to prepare meals that students will want to eat every day?

“Can we really get more schools cooking from scratch? Cooking meals that are nutritious and delicious? Meals that kids enjoy? Absolutely!”

What would happen with school breakfast, for example? Commercially made bread, pre-made baked goods and bars, pre-cooked meats like sausage and bacon, breakfast cereals, and many flavored yogurts could all be considered UP foods. Even school food programs that do a lot of scratch cooking for lunch still rely on these items for their breakfast menus, because typically the entire school needs to be fed in a 20- to 30-minute window, and prepared items fit the breakfast budget, which is roughly half of what schools receive for lunch. Not to mention, breakfast cereals are often the only foods many students will eat in the morning, even if a scratch-made option is available.

My guess is that the definition of “harmful UPF” will most likely mean the elimination of many of the prepackaged, individually wrapped items that a lot of school food programs depend on to build out their menus. School food programs would have to start relying on actual cooking.

Assuming the UPF ban passes in California and begins to take hold in other states, can we really get more schools cooking from scratch? Cooking meals that are nutritious and delicious? Meals that kids enjoy? Absolutely!

A lot of school districts are already doing this or have started to do the work to get there. Brigaid alone is working with 40 school districts, representing over 850 schools, on building their capacity to cook more meals from scratch. Our work is spread across eight states, with most of it happening in California, and each school district is at a different stage of the process—from just starting to move away from serving primarily pre-packaged UP foods to already cooking a good portion of their meals from scratch.

Based on our experience, the work needed to support this type of transition is relatively straightforward, but it will take time and cost money. A lot of time and a lot of money.

Existing kitchen infrastructure (and equipment) in school districts would need to be evaluated to determine their current capabilities and how to improve that infrastructure, both in the short and long term, to make them suitable for onsite cooking. Any new kitchens would need to be built with this vision in mind.

School foodservice staff would need to be trained so they have the ability and confidence to prepare a variety of foods. This training should happen consistently over time, and whenever new operational systems are implemented or new recipes are introduced. Beyond training, as more cooking takes place, daily hours should also increase.

And finally, school food employees should be paid an hourly wage in line with the importance of their work; right now many are paid less than fast-food workers—for preparing food that nourishes kids every day.

Most school food programs aren’t in a position to spend beyond what they need to run the operation day to day. Schools would require additional funding to enact these changes, and for a sustained period of time.

Although the USDA provides funding for school programs, state agencies disperse those funds, and can add on to them in different ways. Some states, like New York and Michigan, have incentivized school food programs to source locally by bumping up the per-meal reimbursement they receive. Similar incentives could work for UPF reduction, too: School food programs that commit to removing UPF from their menus could receive a higher per-meal reimbursement.

Also, schools could receive an up-front lump sum for infrastructure and training, as has been the casen California over the past few years. The state has given every school participating in the National School Lunch Program multiple rounds of Kitchen, Infrastructure, and Training (KIT) funds, based on the size of the district, the need, and the number of meals served. Schools can also opt into a final lump sum if they agree to prepare 40 percent of their meals according to “freshly prepared” guidelines that emphasize whole, minimally processed ingredients.

Over the years, in an effort to make school meals healthier, we have made it harder and harder for school food programs to feed their students well. In fact, we’ve made it so hard that in many cases we’ve given the giant food manufacturers the upper hand, which has led to more UPF in school meals.

The banning of ultra-processed foods in school meals would theoretically reduce the presence of these companies in the school food space, but I’m not counting on it. Kids need to eat. Either school districts are going to cook on their own, with more help, or giant manufacturers are going to figure out how to adapt to new regulations and keep selling processed food to schools. If we don’t get behind school food programs, my money is on the giant food companies.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/04/23/banning-ultra-processed-foods-in-school-meals-is-not-as-simple-as-it-may-seem/feed/ 3 https://civileats.com/2025/04/14/at-these-grocery-stores-no-one-pays/ https://civileats.com/2025/04/14/at-these-grocery-stores-no-one-pays/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2025 08:00:08 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=63403 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 […]

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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.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/04/14/at-these-grocery-stores-no-one-pays/feed/ 4 https://civileats.com/2025/04/01/photo-essay-the-heart-of-chinatown/ Tue, 01 Apr 2025 09:00:26 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=61743 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 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. […]

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]]> 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.

Food Mutual Aid Stories

Illustration by Nhatt Nichols

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

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.”

The post Photo Essay: Connecting Manhattan’s Chinatown Elders Through Food and Culture appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/03/10/bans-on-soda-and-candy-in-snap-are-back-on-the-table-and-theyre-still-controversial/ https://civileats.com/2025/03/10/bans-on-soda-and-candy-in-snap-are-back-on-the-table-and-theyre-still-controversial/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2025 09:00:54 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=62089 This article was produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Take a listen here. May 20, 2025 Update: On May 19, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed a state waiver to restrict SNAP purchases for the first time, allowing Nebraska to ban soda and energy drinks from SNAP. […]

The post Bans on Soda and Candy in SNAP Are Back on the Table, and They’re Still Controversial appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> This article was produced as a radio story by our media partner Public News Service, reaching millions of listeners. Take a listen here.

May 20, 2025 Update: On May 19, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed a state waiver to restrict SNAP purchases for the first time, allowing Nebraska to ban soda and energy drinks from SNAP.

March 28, 2025 Update: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Trump administration will allow states to take soda off the list of grocery items that SNAP benefits cover. Kennedy does not have jurisdiction over SNAP, but said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who does, has agreed to grant the waivers that states need.

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is an economist who has spent her entire career studying policies meant to alleviate hunger and improve the health and nutrition of poor Americans. In the run-up to the 2018 Farm Bill, she was asked to testify in front of the House Agriculture Committee at a hearing on the pros and cons of restricting the purchase of soda and other unhealthy foods within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Based on the body of research she reviewed, which included her own studies, she summed up her thinking at the start. “I believe that SNAP restrictions will be difficult to structure in practice, will be inefficiently targeted, and in many cases—such as a proposed ban of the purchase of soft drinks or sweetened beverages—will be unlikely to change consumption patterns,” she told lawmakers. “There are better policy options for promoting healthy eating patterns, both for SNAP recipients and for all Americans.”

At the time, Schanzenbach said, her aunt was especially proud of her appearance in front of Congress. After, she sent Schanzenbach a note.

“She was like, ‘You were great, darling! But I think you’re completely wrong.’”

Schanzenbach wasn’t surprised. While it is often presented as a common-sense issue, the question of whether to restrict what people can buy with SNAP has inspired decades of circuitous, heated debate and political maneuvering. Some argue that the program should remain a simple source of grocery dollars for Americans struggling to feed their families, while others say food and beverages associated with chronic disease risk should be eliminated from acceptable SNAP purchases.

Want to get a sense of the complications? Into a whirring blender, throw nutrition experts trying to parse limited, inconsistent data on what SNAP participants actually buy and their health outcomes. Mix in some pseudo-experts peddling misinformation and bad data. Add politicians trying to score points. Don’t forget hunger groups that often see any restriction to SNAP benefits as an existential threat to the program or the powerful soda and junk food lobbyists fighting to protect corporate profits.

All of these groups have been crashing into each other for years. Now, in the era of Make America Healthy Again, Republicans are turning the dial up to 10.

In Congress, where getting SNAP restrictions into a farm bill used to be seen as a political impossibility, that thinking is changing; now the idea comes up in hearing after hearing. That means there’s a good chance some language that implements national restrictions or introduces a pilot program could be included, should a farm bill move through Congress later this year.

At the same time, Republican legislators in more than a dozen states have introduced bills to restrict soda and unhealthy foods within SNAP. If those bills succeed, states still need a waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put the restrictions into place, and historically the USDA has rejected waiver requests under both Democrat and Republican administrations.

But Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is taking a different tack: Within her first week in office, she sent a letter to state governments outlining her guiding principles on the nation’s hunger programs. Second on her list was a commitment to “support state innovation through approvals of waivers.” She also told White House reporters she’s looking forward to working with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  to figure out potential restrictions. So, state restrictions could become a reality soon.

All of this is happening at a time when Republicans have proposed rolling back Biden-era updates to SNAP that could result in up to $230 billion cuts to benefits, shrinking how much individuals have to spend at the store while food prices continue to rise. That approach doesn’t sync up with the evidence on how best to improve nutrition, said Schanzenbach, who is now at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research. “In general, when people have more money to spend on food, they buy more food, and healthier food.”

One thing that everyone can agree on is that Americans are not eating well, and that contributes to high rates of chronic disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), about 42 percent of American adults and 20 percent of children have obesity. More than a third of deaths each year are due to heart attack or stroke.

Costly Logistics?

Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently called Kennedy “beyond dangerous,” based on his views on vaccines and spreading of conspiracy theories. But on soda in SNAP, the two have agreed.

Bloomberg—known for his public health initiatives including banning smoking in city parks and getting calorie counts on fast food menus—was central to the most high-profile effort to get soda out of SNAP. Fifteen years ago, New York City applied for a waiver to ban beverages with more than 10 calories per eight ounces (excluding fruit juice and milk) from allowed purchases.

Prominent New York University nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle (who is sits on Civil Eats’ advisory board) had opposed the idea of restrictions in the past, but she got behind the effort as she watched both sugary drink consumption and chronic disease rates rise and saw the role the soda industry played.

In the end, USDA officials rejected the waiver request based on what they said was the logistical difficulty of implementing the plan and how difficult it would be to track whether it reduced obesity.

Logistical challenges are one big reason many experts oppose the restrictions across the board. Broader bans that try to define “unhealthy” or “junk” foods run into complicated questions about how to do so.

“Right now, SNAP is a very efficient program. . . . Only about 6 percent is spent on both federal administrative costs and the federal share of state administrative costs.”

Case in point: Kennedy, now the top government health official in the country, is currently leading an online campaign to get seed oils like canola and sunflower out of fast food, while the vast majority of nutrition professionals say there is no evidence that they are responsible for health harms.

Even soda restrictions could pose a challenge, said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonprofit research and policy institute. One state bill she had reviewed, for example, exempted soft drinks that were 50 percent or more fruit juice, so a fruit-forward beverage with plenty of added sugar might sneak through, but a diet soda would be banned. Either way, she said, working out those kinks, how to make distinctions, and how to roll out new rules to retailers across the country would cost money.

“Right now, SNAP is a very efficient program,” she said. “If you look at what the federal government spends, roughly 94 percent of that amount is on benefits that go directly to families to buy food. Only about 6 percent is spent on both federal administrative costs and the federal share of state administrative costs.”

“I think if the purpose of the program is to improve diet quality, and the evidence shows that it’s not doing that, this needs to be addressed.”

Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the CEO of Nourish Science, who has been involved in SNAP policy for decades, brushed off that concern. He’s excited about Rollins and Kennedy bringing this issue to the forefront, and good policies, he said, could be written to eliminate confusion and minimize costs. For example, he said, since most SNAP purchases are made at major retailers like Walmart, lawmakers could even exempt smaller, neighborhood retailers if the new rules were a burden to them.

“I think if the purpose of the program is to improve diet quality, and the evidence shows that it’s not doing that, this needs to be addressed,” he said.

What We Know About SNAP, Diet Quality, and Health

Last week, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a bill that would take candy and soda out of SNAP. In speaking to his fellow lawmakers about the bill, Representative Jordan Redman, a Republican, referenced Kennedy’s MAHA goals. To bolster his case, he told them that soda is the “number-one commodity” SNAP participants spend money on.

It’s a statistic that gets repeated over and over, including by a conservative think tank pushing for the laws in states across the country—but it’s misleading. Very little data on SNAP purchasing exists, but in 2016, the USDA published a study on purchases using 2011 data from one leading grocer’s stores.

The data set shows a ranked list of “commodities” bought by households using SNAP dollars over the course of a year, with soft drinks totaling $357 million in spending. But soft drinks are only sitting at the top of the list because of how the items are categorized: Individual fruits and vegetables are each listed one at a time, rather than counted as a category. Pork and bacon are separate line items. Fresh chicken and frozen chicken are different.

When the purchases are combined into the categories we normally use to assess dietary patterns, things start to look different: SNAP participants spent about 40 cents of every dollar on basic foods including meat, poultry, fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, and bread. Soft drinks accounted for 5 cents, and candy for 2. Their purchases were very similar to purchases made by families not using SNAP benefits.

“The diets of most Americans across income levels fall short of what nutrition experts recommend.”

In another study using national survey data, the USDA also looked at diet quality using a measure called the Healthy Eating Index (HEI). SNAP participants scored a few points lower than people with similar income levels not using SNAP benefits and higher-income individuals, but researchers cautioned the differences were so small, it was unclear if they were significant. Their main conclusion was that overall, American diets don’t align with the dietary guidelines, regardless of how they’re paying at checkout.

“The data that we do have on what SNAP participants buy shows that there’s really no meaningful difference in the types of food that people are purchasing with SNAP benefits versus other payment methods,” said Bergh at CBPP. “The diets of most Americans across income levels fall short of what nutrition experts recommend.”

Harvard professor Mande disagreed on the first point. Any data point, no matter how small, that suggests the program is failing to improve nutrition is problematic, he felt. “If you’re spending over $100 billion a year, and the purpose of your program is to improve the diet quality of Americans, and when you check how that’s going, you find out it’s actually doing the reverse, that should be a big problem,” he said.

And he pointed to other concerns in the USDA report. For example, analysts found a higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes among SNAP participants and more risk factors for heart disease. A higher percentage of SNAP participants reported drinking soda regularly.

Still, other data points led in a different direction. The USDA found children in households using SNAP had lower rates of obesity and lower prevalence of diabetes compared to families with similar incomes not using benefits. In addition, other research has found that SNAP use is linked to better long-term health outcomes, including fewer sick days and doctor visits and  $1,400 less in annual healthcare costs compared to non-participants with similar incomes.

Part of the issue, Schanzenbach said, is that it’s “devilishly hard” to study SNAP. It’s been around forever and there’s little variation. Comparing those who access benefits to people in similar income brackets who don’t is often the best you can do, but it’s still not a great research practice, she said, because those groups vary in many other ways.

Where the research is even more sparse, she said, is in illuminating whether restrictions will actually improve diets. After all, SNAP has the word “supplemental” in its name for a reason. The vast majority of SNAP recipients have other forms of income and could shift their dollars around to buy soda and candy when they want to.

And that’s their right, say many advocates and experts who feel that the entire discussion around SNAP recipients’ diets is demeaning, especially once it enters the political realm. Most Americans, after all—even those who eat as healthfully as possible—grab something sweet every now and then.

“People can have this conversation, and at the end of the day, those lawmakers will go and have a soda while they’re restricting what other people will have. There’s this idea of American values and about being to choose, but somehow that gets lost in translation if you are low-income. Then, your right to choose, it’s not in play,” said Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP deputy director at the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “Every farm bill we see it, and at its core is, ‘Who is deserving?’”

Similarly, Bergh said restrictions could be burdensome and stigmatizing. “Diet-related chronic disease is a society-wide problem. So, if you’re looking for a solution, it needs to be one that cuts across income levels and that addresses all of society,” she said.

Less Controversial, Better Evidence: Nutrition Incentives

Mande was adamant that anti-hunger groups should stay out of the conversation altogether and dismisses as preposterous the idea of restrictions being demeaning. But he agreed that policies should improve nutrition across the board. SNAP, he said, is one of the few policy “levers that the government has that is powerful enough to change the entire food system.”

A bill that introduced restrictions on using SNAP benefits to pay for soda, he suggested, could include a provision that requires all retailers accepting SNAP to stop promoting soda through the use of aisle “endcaps,” which have been shown to be effective marketing. And that could encourage all shoppers to make healthier choices.

“Diet-related chronic disease is a society-wide problem. So, if you’re looking for a solution, it needs to be one that cuts across income levels and that addresses all of society.”

Nearly across the board, experts who have spent time on the issue—whether they are for or against soda bans in SNAP—support policies that incentivize those using the benefits to buy more fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods.

At about 40 farmers’ markets across Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, for example, Freshfarm offers SNAP participants a dollar-for-dollar match to purchase foods from local farmers. Their accounting shows SNAP participants spend 55 percent of their benefits on fruits and vegetables and the other 45 percent on market foods like bread, meat, eggs, and dairy.

In fact, said, Nick Stavely, the director of incentive programs, the organization has been forced to implement a daily cap because the demand outstrips the funding.

The program is funded through a USDA effort called the Gus Schumaker Nutrition Incentive Program, which has historically been popular on both sides of the aisle and powers similar efforts at farmers’ markets across the country. Last week, a bipartisan group of Senators including Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) and Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico) introduced a bill to expand the program.

“I think, through our nearly 20 years of experience and the hundreds of conversations we’ve had with folks at the markets, incentives work better than restrictions,” Stavely said. Research supports the fact that incentive programs do increase consumption of healthy foods.

But experts like Mande want incentives as well as restrictions—and in this political moment, restrictions are easier to sell. “When you take a lot of smart, thoughtful people who have deep expertise and knowledge of public policy, and you lay out the facts, they say, ‘Of course, SNAP shouldn’t be by spending money on soda,” he said. In fact, many smart, thoughtful people say it’s not that simple.

Still, when asked if her thinking has changed since the issue surfaced in New York City so long ago, Marion Nestle told Civil Eats she thought that, if anything, the arguments now are stronger.

“WIC works fine without sodas. SNAP could too. I hope the USDA finally agrees to a pilot project—health advocates have been arguing for that for ages,” she said. “With that said, the entire system is terrible, and I wish we had universal basic income instead.”

The post Bans on Soda and Candy in SNAP Are Back on the Table, and They’re Still Controversial appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2025/03/10/bans-on-soda-and-candy-in-snap-are-back-on-the-table-and-theyre-still-controversial/feed/ 2 https://civileats.com/2025/03/03/indigenous-food-reciprocity-as-a-model-for-mutual-aid/ https://civileats.com/2025/03/03/indigenous-food-reciprocity-as-a-model-for-mutual-aid/#comments Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:00:40 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=61726 A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning member newsletter. To get the next issue in your inbox, become a member today. Examples of this sharing-focused approach abound. A recent documentary, One With the Whale, follows the hunting practices of an island community in the Bering Sea. In one scene, […]

The post Indigenous Food Reciprocity as a Model for Mutual Aid appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> A version of this article originally appeared in The Deep Dish, our award-winning member newsletter. To get the next issue in your inbox, become a member today.

In the Arctic and Far North, where a successful hunt can mean the difference between feeding the village or scrounging to make ends meet, one might assume a scarcity mindset would take hold. Instead, reciprocity prevails.

Examples of this sharing-focused approach abound. A recent documentary, One With the Whale, follows the hunting practices of an island community in the Bering Sea. In one scene, after a long period without finding game, a hunting crew harpoons a seal, which will allow them to feed some of the community. “It’s always a blessing to receive any animal that you catch,” Siberian Yupik hunter Daniel Apassingok tells the filmmakers. “As small as the game is, the game is dispersed with four or five other boats. We don’t ever say no to anybody.” Later, when the hunters take a whale, his wife, Susan, characterizes this too as a “blessing,” describing it in a way that recognizes it as beyond a commodity.

The notion of “mutual aid” is relatively new in name, but it mirrors a concept that’s been prioritized by Indigenous cultures since time immemorial: a focus on the collective. A foundational value among Native American communities, it stands in stark contrast to America’s modern hyper-fixation on the individual.

Ways to Support Indigenous Food Mutual Aid:

• NĀTIFS: Donate | Shop

• Tocabe: Shop

• Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance: Donate

This idea of reciprocity extends far beyond humans, beginning in the natural world around us. It is a worldview informed by abundance and mutual existence—not scarcity and competition—where gratitude trumps greed. At a time of pervasive extraction and exploitation, we might take a moment to understand the importance of this worldview, still practiced the world over.

“In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: One life is given in support of another,” Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her newest book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. “The focus is on supporting the good of the people, not only an individual. Receiving a gift from the land is coupled to attached responsibilities of sharing, respect, reciprocity, and gratitude.”

Throughout my work covering Indigenous foodways for Civil Eats and beyond, I have witnessed this culture of abundance and generosity time and again. The idea is expansive, beyond human, and happening all around us all the time—even right under our feet in the soil, where carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycle in an interdependent exchange.

“In a traditional Anishinaabe economy, the land is the source of all goods and services, which are distributed in a kind of gift exchange: one life is given in support of another.”

Symbiotic relationships in the natural world are well-documented by Indigenous knowledge-keepers. Centuries ago, tribal communities across Turtle Island, as North America is commonly referred to in Native circles, began growing the three sisters—corn, beans, and squash—maximizing their complementary properties and creating a mini-ecosystem that results in higher yields and improved soil health. Each plant contributes to the well-being of the other, for the well-being of all.

Much in the same way, Indigenous groups had long stewarded the land in a collective, non-extractive manner, until European standards of private land ownership were forced upon them. To reject this extractive, “scarcity” thinking, Kimmerer reminds us, is to make way for another kind of economy: “In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away,” she writes.

In a society driven by scarcity thinking, generosity can seem like a radical concept, but within Indigenous cultures, it’s intuitive. For instance, many tribal nations in the Pacific Northwest regularly host potlatches—the word comes from the Chinook term meaning “to give”—which are festive feasts centered on gift exchanging.

“When one’s heart is glad, he gives away gifts,” the late, visionary ‘Na̱mg̱is filmmaker Barb Cranmer explains in a short documentary series about the potlatch ceremony. “It was given to us by our creator, our way of doing things, of who we are. The potlatch was given to us as a way of expressing joy. Everyone on earth is given something. This was given to us.”

Much like this ceremony dedicated entirely to the dissemination of food and gifts, there are words in many Native languages simply meaning “to share food.” This focus on the greater good isn’t just something that happens in community, in isolation, or in the past. It’s happening today, and Indigenous thought leaders are incorporating this value of reciprocity into their business models as well.

Samuel Gensaw III of the Yurok Nation roasting wild salmon from the Klamath River, as seen in the documentary Gather. (Photo credit: Renan Ozturk)

Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman, for example, imparts this ancestral wisdom with his nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS), which promotes Indigenous foodways access and education. Back in 2020, Sherman delayed the opening of his acclaimed restaurant Owamni in order to distribute free meals after the police killing of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising that transformed entire Minneapolis neighborhoods into food deserts.

Now, Sherman is turning his attention to supplying decolonized food—meaning devoid of Eurocentric ingredients such as beef, pork, chicken, dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, and the like—to institutions such as schools and hospitals. He is getting one step closer to realizing his vision of bringing the myriad benefits of Native foodways to people everywhere.

Then there’s Denver-based restaurant Tocabe, which donates Indigenous ingredients and ready-made meals to tribal communities across the country with every purchase made from its online marketplace. For Osage cook and co-owner Ben Jacobs, this food reciprocity is at the heart of all his work, reminiscent of the feasts his tribal nation has long held to honor elders and other community members.

These cycles of reciprocity aren’t just to show love and respect to one another; they’re also imperative for our collective future.

“In [a] climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver,” writes Kimmerer. “Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans. Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?”

These themes ripple through the 2020 documentary Gather, about the Native movement to reclaim cultural identity through food sovereignty. In one scene, a group of young Yurok men fish for salmon along the Klamath River, but with no luck. Seeing this, a family friend shares his catch, giving them a huge salmon, which they’ll cook over a fire alongside the rocky riverbank later that night. “He’s helping us out because it’s important,” one of the youths says as he carries the massive fish back to camp. “And that’s how we do it.”

Food Mutual Aid Stories

Illustration by Nhatt Nichols

• Indigenous Food Reciprocity as a Model for Mutual Aid
• Photo Essay: Standing in the Gaps With Feed Durham
• In Chicago, an Environmental Organization Feeds Community
• This San Francisco Food Pantry Is a Labor of Love
• Photo Essay: Connecting Manhattan’s Chinatown Elders Through Food and Culture

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/03/03/indigenous-food-reciprocity-as-a-model-for-mutual-aid/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2025/01/22/in-los-angeless-altadena-neighborhood-community-food-solutions-feed-wildfire-recovery/ Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:41 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60747 Pacific Palisades, which has an average home listing price of $4.7 million, has gotten much of the attention in news media because of the many celebrities who own homes there. Altadena, whose average home listing price is just 28 percent that of the Palisades, is less known, yet has a rich history. During the Great […]

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In Los Angeles, the Palisades and Eaton fires that have burned for the past two weeks are among the deadliest and most destructive in California history, exacerbated by climate change. As of publication, the Palisades Fire is 63 percent contained while Eaton, in the suburb of Altadena, is 89 percent contained. Together they’ve burned nearly 40,000 acres of urban Los Angeles.

Pacific Palisades, which has an average home listing price of $4.7 million, has gotten much of the attention in news media because of the many celebrities who own homes there. Altadena, whose average home listing price is just 28 percent that of the Palisades, is less known, yet has a rich history.

During the Great Migration, when 6 million African Americans moved from the South to the North, Midwest, and West, many Black families settled here as nearby neighborhoods like Pasadena practiced redlining. In 2024, 18 percent of Altadena residents were Black; more than half were people of color. And 80 percent of those Black Americans were homeowners.

Though the Eaton fire still smolders, the Altadena community has banded together for relief and recovery. Many have lost so much: family members, friends, homes, valuables, places where memories were made. Through food, residents who have lost everything are finding sustenance for body and soul, and hospitality workers are collaborating to help the best way they know how. Here are 13 initiatives—some within the neighborhood, some from greater Los Angeles—that you can support to keep the victims of the fire in this vibrant community fed in the short and long term.

Altadena Farmers’ Market

In operation since 2012 and held on Wednesday afternoons in Loma Alta Park in west Altadena, the Altadena farmers’ market has sustained a double whammy, with local farms and vendors losing business and residents suffering the tremendous loss of the market, incinerated in the fire. All donations “will be used to purchase local produce from small farmers who are deeply affected by the fires,” says Rafaela Gass, the market manager and owner. “The produce will be given for free to families who lost everything and are now living on cereal bars and fast food. Our community needs and deserves to be nourished with healthy fruits and vegetables, grown with love and care by our farmers.” Farmers’ market food giveaways will take place on Wednesdays starting January 22 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Unincorporated Coffee Roasters, 2160 Colorado Avenue, in Eagle Rock.

Altadena Community Garden

The Altadena Community Garden, which began in the mid-1970s, has also been decimated by the Eaton Fire. Located on the site of a former military academy adjacent to Loma Alta Park, it had 82 plots rented by residents for generations, and a communal area spread over 2.5 acres. Operating as a self-supported nonprofit, it receives no county funding, making the loss of the garden that much more tragic. It is hard to estimate the impact the destruction of the garden will have on the community’s ability to feed itself, as community gardens are instrumental in battling food insecurity. The garden also reduces environmental impacts, since the food doesn’t need to be trucked in. To help the garden rebuild, you can donate to its efforts to rehabilitate the soil, replenish garden tools and structures, and replant foliage—all consumed by the fire.

Altadena Seed Library

Altadena Seed Library is a seed-exchange network, founded to expand access to green spaces and shade while increasing food sovereignty and restoring local ecosystems. Helmed by Nina Raj, the library is accepting native seed and plant donations as well as tools such as shovels, crowbars, gloves, and saws to help sift through the rubble and clear debris. Native plants are especially useful after fire: Because they’re adapted to the dry local environment, they require far less water and are more apt to thrive. To find out which plants are native to the Altadena area, visit Calscape. Seed donations can be mailed to 37 Auburn Ave., No. 8, Sierra Madre, California, 91024, in care of Altadena Seed Library.

New Revelation Missionary Baptist Church, Special Needs Network, and LA Urban League Wildfires Fund

New Revelation Missionary Church, in partnership with Special Needs Network, LA Urban League, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has served as the site of distributing three hot, to-go meals per day prepared by Black-owned restaurants in L.A., among them The Serving Spoon, Dulan’s on Crenshaw, Hotville Chicken, and A Family Affair. It’s an important partnership between Black communities, with these restaurants—based in Inglewood, Crenshaw, Windsor Hills, and South L.A.—feeding Altadena, where 80 percent of New Revelation’s congregation lives.

“Our initiative not only supports local businesses, but also ensures that Altadena’s displaced residents have access to nourishing meals during this crisis,” says Connie Chavarria, senior director of programs and community services at Special Needs Network. “Donations serve as a lifeline for those who have been affected by the wildfires, offering them not just sustenance but also a sense of care and support from their community.” Donate to their LA/Altadena Fire Relief Fund to keep the meals going at 855 N. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena, with distribution times of 9:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m., and 5:30 p.m.

Inclusive Action Cash Assistance for Outdoor Workers 

The fires, and the destruction they’ve left in their path, have created dangerously poor air quality in the Los Angeles area, making conditions extremely hazardous for outdoor workers, including food vendors, many of whom live in Altadena. Inclusive Action for the City—an organization dedicated to supporting the economic needs of underinvested communities—has started a fund to provide cash assistance to those workers.

“Many street vendors, gardeners, and recyclers rely on jobs that are out in the open air, but due to the fires, many have lost their incomes or even their homes,” says Rudy Espinoza, the group’s CEO. The fund is offering $500 to each applicant, to be used however they see fit, and so far has received almost 11,000 applications.

“Thanks to generous donors and over 1,100 individuals on GoFundMe, we’ve raised over $1 million that can help us support 2,000 workers, but we still have a long way to go to care for them. We will continue to raise money to cover as many people as we can,” Espinoza says. To contribute to Inclusive Action’s cash assistance fund for outdoor workers, donate here.

Another Round Another Rally

An  organization started by bartenders Amanda Gunderson and Travis Nass, Another Round Another Rally helps support restaurant workers, many of whom live in Altadena, with education through scholarships and emergency aid. “Right now our Disaster Relief Fund is focused on hospitality workers who were affected by the fires in Los Angeles. You can donate or apply for aid at disasterrelief. anotherroundanotherrally.org, and you can also find tools there to host a fundraiser,” says Gunderson.

LA Community Meals

Countless independent restaurants around Los Angeles have stepped up to help feed first responders and evacuees despite having lower cash flow due to the slow winter season and empty dining rooms in the aftermath of the fires. Many of these establishments have been paying out of pocket to feed their communities. Thanks to a coalition of restaurants banding together to form LA Community Meals, supporters can purchase prepared foods for those in need while patronizing impacted restaurants at the same time.

“The Community Meals initiative is important, because it has found a way for people in Los Angeles to contribute, while recognizing that restaurants can’t undertake the effort without financial support,” says Beth Griffiths, owner of Little Nelly, in Burbank. “We’re cooking meals at cost and with the assistance of generously donated product from our vendors, but being able to pay our staff has been game-changing in terms of how much we can put out each day.” Support one or more restaurants as they cook meals for those affected by the fires here.

World Central Kitchen in Partnership with Kogi, Socalo, Evan Funke, and HomeState

World Central Kitchen (WCK), helmed by chef José Andrés, has been feeding afflicted communities all over the world, and Los Angeles is no exception. Here, they’ve partnered with Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken of Socalo; Roy Choi’s Kogi Trucks; Evan Funke of Mother Wolf, Funke, and Felix; and Briana Valdez of HomeState Pasadena. WCK’s fleet of food trucks have been on the road, feeding first responders and families who have been affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires, thanks to the funding of generous patrons.

“We chefs are built to feed people, and when there’s a disaster like this one in L.A., we swing into fifth gear,” says Milliken. “WCK is the glue between those in need and chefs who want to keep busy doing what they love: cooking. We’ve made over 10,000 meals and counting. My team is so thankful to be useful at a time when we all feel pretty useless in the face of natural disasters.”

Homestate Pasadena is also open and distributing meals. “Despite not having functional utilities, our team has been able to share over 7,000 meals, warm hospitality, and a place to call home for breakfast and dinner,” says Valdez.

You can donate to keep WCK’s trucks feeding those in need in L.A., or even join the WCK volunteer corps. Sign up to volunteer at HomeState Pasadena, or consider donating an order of Homestate’s tacos to those in need. To receive a free meal from WCK, check out its full list of meal distribution sites.

Hollywood Food Coalition

Hollywood Food Coalition has been serving dinners daily, 365 days a year, since 1987. Since the L.A. fires began, they’ve been ramping up food distributions to emergency responders and evacuation centers. They recognize the inadequacy of current response systems, especially for those experiencing homelessness.

“When a crisis strikes—like the current L.A. fires—we mobilize quickly with our partners to provide immediate relief until government assistance arrives,” says Arnali Ray, executive director. “We must keep investing in our food system infrastructure to ensure that, when the next crisis occurs, everyone—especially marginalized communities—has access to the food they need.”

The coalition is currently accepting dropoffs of food and other supplies in moderate quantities; see the list of desired items here. You can also make monetary donations on the same page. Dinners are served Mondays through Fridays from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. at The Salvation Army Campus at 5939 Hollywood Blvd., and on Saturdays and Sundays from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on the street, at the corner of Orange and Romaine.

Friends In Deed

Friends In Deed is a Pasadena-based, interfaith grassroots organization that began in 1894 and was officially established as a nonprofit in 1946. It serves homeless and at-risk communities, and during the fires is providing shelter at Trinity Lutheran Church at 997 E. Walnut Street in Pasadena, two miles south of the Eaton fire line. Though normally only operating at nighttime, their Bad Weather Shelter has kicked into 24/7 mode. The ongoing food pantry has been a staple in the community for over 50 years, and accepted donations can be found here, with the most-needed items being canned tuna and canned chicken, cereal, peanut butter, rice, hearty soups, stew, chili, pasta and pasta sauce, oil, sugar, flour, shelf-stable juices, and plant-based products.

“Our community represents just about every culture and background,” says Merria Velasco, senior director of development. “Single retired adults, families with young children, people who have fallen onto hard times, individuals experiencing homelessness, and most every other household picture you can think of, Friends In Deed serves them all.” The food pantry is open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Voto Latino and National Day Laborer Organizing Network

Voto Latino, a grassroots political organization focused on empowering the new generation of Latino voters, is matching all donations to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network up to $15,000. The funds will support NDLON’s Pasadena Community Job Center, which is serving as a relief hub for Pasadena and Altadena, providing food, temporary shelter, water, and emergency kits for the workers who put food on L.A.’s tables, yet are frequently forgotten. They’re also taking donations of canned goods, Gatorade, water, fresh produce, and more for second responders, who often are undocumented day laborers who step up for disaster recovery.

Heart of Dinner

This New York-based charity, founded by Yin Chang and Moonlynn Tsai, has expanded its operations to Los Angeles to help battle food insecurity experienced by Asian elders. Culturally sensitive foods accompanied by N95 masks and caring notes written in native languages are packaged in artful, hand-decorated bags, then delivered to homes with the aim of bringing hope and nourishment amid the crisis. On January 10, the first emergency drop to Korean elders contained packages of Korean bone broth, fresh produce, rice, buns, fishcakes, beef kimbap, and more. Donate to help Heart of Dinner reach its goal of feeding 1,000 Asian elders. Just $30 funds two to three days of meals and protective supplies.

Project Angel Food

Project Angel Food prepares and delivers medically tailored meals to the critically ill, designed to fit the unique needs of each patient, whether heart healthy, low fat, low protein, diabetic, gastrointestinal friendly, and more. At the moment, donations to the fire relief fund are being doubled, as it’s more crucial than ever that meals reach clients during this crisis. You can also volunteer for a shift to work in Angel Food’s temporary kitchen, located at 230 W Ave. 26 in Lincoln Heights, or to deliver meals.

As Altadena absorbs the shock and grief of loss, its deep community strength and the outpouring of support from the surrounding city  are already helping its citizens recover. It will be a long, slow build, and your support will make a difference.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2025/01/06/wics-recent-gains-likely-to-face-challenges-in-next-administration/ Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:00:39 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60298 The program, which turned 50 last year, serves people who are pregnant, postpartum, breastfeeding, or have infants or children up to age 5. Services include monthly checks or vouchers for healthy foods, as well as personalized education, breastfeeding support, and referrals to other services. These provide crucial support to those struggling with food insecurity, especially […]

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The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) has been undersubscribed since 2016, in many years serving only around half of the mothers and children who are eligible. Even though it reaches 6.7 million low-income people, including 40 percent of the babies born in the U.S., WIC has had wiggle room in its budget, which has helped it deal with partisan funding debates and the vicissitudes of the economy.

The program, which turned 50 last year, serves people who are pregnant, postpartum, breastfeeding, or have infants or children up to age 5. Services include monthly checks or vouchers for healthy foods, as well as personalized education, breastfeeding support, and referrals to other services. These provide crucial support to those struggling with food insecurity, especially with a recent surge in food prices and deepening hunger across the country. And WIC participation has been shown to improve birth outcomes, lower infant mortality, and reduce Medicaid expenses, among other benefits.

Biden’s USDA made increasing participation in WIC a priority. To enroll more people, agency staff fought for increasing the benefit to participants, creating a food package that hewed closer to current nutrition standards and incorporating new technologies to make participation easier. Perhaps as a result, participation has been ticking up over the last two years. With a new administration intent on cost cutting, experts say they’re fearful about undoing what they see as incremental progress made.

Potential Cutbacks in WIC Funding

The program is permanently authorized but its funding is not guaranteed, as opposed to an entitlement like the National School Lunch Program, in which every eligible student is assured the benefit. Each year, Congress provides the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) with a specific amount of funds for state agencies to operate WIC. Increased participation could mean that participants are turned away if allocated funds run out, or in the event of a government shutdown.

If Project 2025 is any predictor of the next administration’s agenda, the program could see significant funding cuts.

After 25 years of bipartisan Congressional support for fully funding the program, WIC funding has become more political during the last few rounds of appropriations. Budget plans by both the House and Senate in 2023 included cuts to the nutrition benefit program for the following year.

That prompted the USDA to warn of a $1 billion shortfall in estimated funding need for WIC—the cost of providing six months of benefits. A shortfall of this magnitude, the USDA said, “presents states with difficult, untenable decisions about how to manage the program.”

WIC ended up getting $7 billion in 2024, $1 billion more than the 2023 enacted level, but talk of cuts worried child nutrition and anti-hunger advocates.

“The biggest concern is that are we going to run into what we did last year with a potential shortfall in funding,” said Meghan Maroney, who leads the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s Federal Child Nutrition Programs initiatives. “We narrowly avoided a crisis and were facing potential waiting lists for WIC. At the eleventh hour we avoided that, but we’re scarred by the idea that this would happen again.”

If Project 2025 is any predictor of the next administration’s agenda, the program could see significant funding cuts. And if tariffs were to raise food prices, that quickly impacts what it costs to administer the program and how many people could be served.

Growth in Participation

Meanwhile, participation in the program grew by 5.3 percent between 2021 and 2023, which heightens concerns that full participation might leave some low-income mothers and young children without assistance. WIC has a triage plan in the event they can’t serve everyone.

The reason for the uptick tracks with higher inflation and food costs, but it is also a response to improvements to the program itself, said Maroney.

“WIC has seen a lot of innovation over the past several years. There were flexibilities that were tried out during the pandemic that people would like to see implemented long term: online shopping benefits, virtual online registration, and enhanced fruit and vegetable benefits all contribute to the long-term success of the program,” she said.

Bottom line, WIC is now easier to use, and the benefits are more desirable.

Mahagani Jenkins lives in Denver and has been participating in WIC with her 1-year-old son for the past year. For her, the program has been invaluable. “I was able to get formula, baby food, and fruits and vegetables for him, even though he wasn’t quite ready for that, so it was a nutrition benefit for myself as well,” she said. “It allowed me to have extra spending money to spend on more diapers and wipes. It has also allowed me to reach out for housing . . . [and] other networks. It’s been very beneficial for us.”

WIC’s Expanded Benefits

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, passed during the pandemic, gave the USDA $490 million to allow states to temporarily offer a boost in the benefits, roughly doubling the benefit to children and nearly tripling the benefit to pregnant people and new mothers.

During the pandemic, a cash-value benefit voucher was added to allow participants to purchase fruits and vegetables as part of their WIC food package, providing up to $35 per child and adult, per month. This aimed to align the WIC food packages with the current Dietary Guidelines for Americans and to reflect recommendations from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine as a means of improving maternal and child nutrition.

In April 2024, the USDA published a final rule revising the WIC food packages, making permanent that cash value benefit for fruits and vegetables, currently $26 for child participants, $47 for pregnant and postpartum participants, and $52 for mostly and fully breastfeeding participants.

“There have been tremendous strides in strengthening WIC with the new food package that came out in April,” said Alexandra Ashbrook, director of special projects and initiatives at Food Research & Action Center, an anti-hunger nonprofit. Although the revision included adding beans and canned fish, and more whole grain options, the fruit and vegetable options are proving the most popular. “More fruit and vegetable benefits are one of the reasons the program is making gains. We know what an important tool it is, and how WIC participation is tied to multiple health benefits.”

Other advocates worry that if Trump in his second administration brings back a version of his “public charge” rule, which would have denied green cards to immigrants who use SNAP and other public benefits, WIC participation could falter. WIC-eligible people might not use the program because they don’t want their names in the system for fear of jeopardizing their legal immigration status.

Ease of Participation

WIC historically required everyone seeking to enroll or re-enroll in the program to do so in person at a WIC office. New applicants had to be screened for iron deficiency anemia through blood work, and babies and toddlers had height/length and weight checks conducted in offices. Participants were also often required to pick up the benefits themselves from WIC offices. It was an attempt to monitor maternal and young children’s health, but schlepping to these office visits could be onerous for mothers with transportation problems or young kids to wrangle.

During the pandemic, USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service allowed WIC agencies to issue benefits remotely, and participants to enroll or re-enroll in the program without visiting a clinic in person and to postpone certain medical tests. It even allowed agencies that didn’t have online benefit services to issue up to four months of benefits on EBT cards at one time so people didn’t have to make frequent office visits.

“More fruit and vegetable benefits are one of the reasons the program is making gains.”

For Jenkins, that benefit has proven extremely helpful. “Once I was certified, I was able to have access to my money immediately via a debit card,” she said. “They had a brochure that broke down the brands I was able to get. . . . Every six months it’s updated. They make it comfortable for you and your child.”

The waiver that allows these remote services expires in September 2026. If it goes away, the requirement of in-person applications, recertification appointments, and benefit receipt comes back. Just about everyone using the program now has never experienced that requirement, says Ali Hard, policy director of the National WIC Association, and a shift could create significant barriers to families staying on the program.

In a satisfaction survey, she says one of the big things participants appreciated was the ease of getting remote services and being able to conduct meetings over the phone or use the web portal for their recertification appointments.

“People appreciate that convenience. It puts WIC on par with other services,” Hard said.

Online Shopping

WIC has been slower than SNAP, the food assistance program formerly known as food stamps, to offer online shopping.

“Lack of modernization is the thing holding the program back,” said Carolyn Vega, associate director of policy analysis at Share Our Strength. “There are younger users of the program, and it has to keep up with the times and be more flexible with job schedules and family schedules.”

Enabling the use of benefits for online shopping was piloted in seven states initially in 2020, according to Hard, with 14 states now doing some kind of pilot program, spearheaded by the Center for Nutrition and Health Impact. Walmart has been a vendor in some of the pilots and Instacart has partnered with WIC to deliver products to program participants. But the future of online shopping now hangs in the balance.

“The agency is putting out a final rule about online shopping, to be published in February. We hope that stays on track and does not get slowed down and that the USDA keeps supporting these pilots,” Hard said. Orchestrating online shopping is complicated by the fact that, while SNAP participants all have the same benefit, WIC-approved foods differ state by state.

“Setting up an approved products list with very specific SKUs is complicated,” Hard said, with 50 states and all the territories expected to maintain complex data systems of their own.

The Future of WIC

Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR) is Congress’s process of updating the permanent statutes that authorize child nutrition programs such as WIC, the National School Lunch Program, and the Summer Food Service Program. Congress reviews the laws governing these programs through the reauthorization process, including things like eligibility criteria, funding levels, and program benefits.

The last reauthorization was the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which expired in September 2015. In 2021, leaders in both the Senate and House expressed interest in advancing CNR, but it got bogged down in political wrangling.

Without CNR, says Whitney Carlson, national recruitment and retention campaign manager for the National WIC Association, “we lose the opportunity to make critical program updates, like what we’re seeing in WIC with the need to authorize modern service models like virtual services.”

She said there were many important proposals in the House CNR bill that would have improved the program.

“These are common-sense improvements like allowing multiple family members to consolidate their certification and recertification appointments so they can get them all done at once,” she said. “It also would have extended WIC eligibility to age 6 so that there is no gap for kids before they start kindergarten.”

There is widespread consensus that the process is unlikely to be taken up by Congress in the next administration, according to Vega.

“The farm bill is thought to be a more pressing bill to be considered and is likely to take up more time and space in the next Congress,” she said. “If there’s never an appetite for a CNR, you lose the opportunity for that comprehensive revisiting of the entire program.”

If WIC loses support in Congress, the new and planned benefits could disappear—and funding reductions might mean waitlists for millions of people like Jenkins and her son. “Waitlists would impact families like mine because I’m a single parent with one sole income that me and my child have to survive off of,” she said.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/12/27/our-best-community-food-solutions-stories-of-2024/ https://civileats.com/2024/12/27/our-best-community-food-solutions-stories-of-2024/#comments Fri, 27 Dec 2024 09:00:56 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=60248 Climate change, environmental health issues, and food access are foremost among those challenges. The people and projects we drew inspiration from this year provided creative, community-appropriate improvements to disaster relief, wildfire prevention, living wages, and food access, among other pressing issues. Here are our best community food solutions stories of 2024. The Farmers Leaning On […]

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Over our nearly 16 years of covering the U.S. food system, we’ve seen firsthand how complex, often sobering stories about challenges in food and farming come to life when they include real people trying to fix problems at the local level.

Climate change, environmental health issues, and food access are foremost among those challenges. The people and projects we drew inspiration from this year provided creative, community-appropriate improvements to disaster relief, wildfire prevention, living wages, and food access, among other pressing issues.

Here are our best community food solutions stories of 2024.

The Farmers Leaning On Each Other’s Tools
The cost of specialized farm equipment is one of the biggest barriers for small-scale and beginning farmers. Cooperatives are springing up around the nation to help bridge the gap.

This Group Has Helped Farmworkers Become Farm Owners for More Than 2 Decades
California’s farmworkers face untold barriers accessing the land, capital, and training needed to strike out on their own. For 20 years, ALBA has been slowly changing the landscape for this important group of aspiring growers.

Can Prescriptions for Produce-Focused Meal Kits Fight Diabetes?
Over half of the population of Stockton, California, is diabetic or pre-diabetic. A prescribed meal kit program helps some residents manage the disease and may provide a model for other communities.

A participant in the Healthy Food Rx program gets ready to prepare a recipe with the fresh produce she received in one of its meal kits. (Photo credit: Abbott Fund)

Micro Solar Leases: A New Income Stream for Black Farmers in the South?
EnerWealth Solutions wants to bring the benefits of renewable energy to Black farmers and landowners in the Carolinas.

Native Youth Learn to Heal Their Communities Through Mycelium
Spirit of the Sun is using traditional ecological knowledge to help address food insecurity and connection to culture.

How a Community Gardener Grew Food for Her Family, Quit Her Job at McDonald’s, and Started a Farm
A Q&A with Maximina Hernández Reyes, who credits her success to a Portland, Oregon, food network called Rockwood Food Systems Collaborative.

A Community of Growers
How East New York Farms builds food security and provides jobs for its neighborhood.

Farm Stops Create New Markets for Small Farms
These brick-and-mortar consignment businesses support farmers and bring fresh, locally grown food to their communities.

Kim Bayer, owner of Slow Farm, in Ann Arbor, MI, with farm managers Zach Goodman and Magda Nawrocka-Weekes. Slow Farm sells its organic produce at Argus, a local farm stop. (Photo credit: Paige Hodder)

How a Vermont Cheesemaker Helps Local Farms Thrive
By paying top dollar for milk and sourcing within 15 miles of its creamery, Jasper Hill supports an entire community.

Good Goats Make Good Neighbors
A California nonprofit builds community through goat grazing to reduce wildfire risk, farm-to-school programs, and more.

After Hurricane Helene, Local Farmers and Chefs Pivot to Disaster Relief
Western North Carolina farms, restaurants, and even a festival quickly switched gears to get fresh food and water to neighbors devastated by the worst storm in more than a century.

Restoring a Cornerstone of the Local Grain Economy
A new community of millers joins the revival of America’s regional grain heritage, connecting farmers with a market eager for fresh, local flour.

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]]> https://civileats.com/2024/12/27/our-best-community-food-solutions-stories-of-2024/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/12/16/an-artisan-bakery-in-buffalo-reimagines-wonder-bread/ Mon, 16 Dec 2024 09:00:32 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=59980 Freshly milled flour is part of Buffalo’s legacy. For a century, the city was a hub of America’s grain trade, as well as its flour milling and bread manufacturing. Horton’s flour comprises the base of his bagels, buns, sweet rolls—and the bakery’s Wonderful Loaf, an homage to Wonder Bread that Horton and his business and […]

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While most Buffalonians are fast asleep, Stephen Horton of Miller’s Thumb Bakery begins milling fresh flour at 3:30 a.m. every morning. For the next two hours, he carefully feeds beadlike kernels of New York State–grown Glenn and Warthog wheat from 50-pound bags into the bakery’s custom-made stone mill as flour sprays in powdery sheets from the opposite side, like a snowblower.

Freshly milled flour is part of Buffalo’s legacy. For a century, the city was a hub of America’s grain trade, as well as its flour milling and bread manufacturing. Horton’s flour comprises the base of his bagels, buns, sweet rolls—and the bakery’s Wonderful Loaf, an homage to Wonder Bread that Horton and his business and life partner, Jill Colella, conceived as a flagship product when they opened Miller’s Thumb in 2022.

Long before Buffalo was celebrated for its eponymous hot wings and roast beef on a kummelweck roll, the city’s food economy centered around grain. But in the latter half of the 20th century, as the city’s once-flourishing shipping industry slowly deteriorated, Buffalo’s legacy as a bread-baking and milling town became a forgotten footnote. Among the remnants of the city’s golden age are the towering rows of abandoned grain elevators whose hollowed-out carcasses still inhabit the shores of the Buffalo River, a haunting reminder of the city’s glorious agrarian past.

Horton’s freshly milled flour comprises the base of the bakery’s Wonderful Loaf, an homage to Wonder Bread.

Colella is a proud Buffalo native and the creative force behind Wonderful Loaf. She moved back home from Minneapolis with Horton in 2019 after the two began devising a plan for a bakery there. “I was always jealous of Wonder Bread when I was kid,” she says. “My mom would buy this other brand, Sunbeam, which was like Hydrox cookies instead of Oreos for me.” Colella saw a need in the community for an affordable everyday sandwich bread, like the recognizable brands of her youth. “When Dad went to the store, he would buy the name brand and we would use the leftover Wonder Bread bags to line our snow boots,” she adds.

Colella and Horton were keenly aware that a scant six miles from their bakery, an abandoned Wonder Bread factory, active from 1925 to 2004, still stood, derelict from two decades of neglect. In its heyday, the facility showcased the innovative automated manufacturing methods of Wonder Bread, one of the first commercial breads to be sold pre-sliced.

With Wonderful Loaf, Colella saw an opportunity to honor Buffalo’s bread-baking legacy while eschewing the highly processed ingredients that strip industrial breads of their nutritional value and flavor. “If Wonder Bread was supposed to be this scientific miracle, then we felt like we could make it even more wonderful by using better flour, better methods, and cleaner ingredients,” Colella says.

An Abandoned Factory With a Glorious Past

From a distance, it’s difficult to make out the two words that once stood atop the roof of the abandoned five-story factory building on Fougeron Street, bounded by Barthel and Urban streets on Buffalo’s industrial east side. Despite the missing characters, if you stare long enough at the signage, you can deduce that it once read “WONDER BREAD” in giant block lettering.

The now-abandoned Wonder Bread factory in Buffalo was built in 1914. (Photo credit: Emily Jarnot)

Aside from the 56-acre Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, originally called The Parade and designed in 1874 by Fredrick Law Olmsted of Central Park fame, there isn’t much within a five-block radius of the moribund factory. Before the plant unceremoniously closed 20 years ago, the yeasty aroma of freshly baked Wonder Bread permeated the neighborhood; in its heyday, the factory could produce 100,000 loaves, 50,000 cakes, and 20,000 rolls every day. Now, the windows along the perimeter of the blond brick building, framed by Roman-inspired arches, are mostly all blown out and boarded up, and the interior of the factory is ransacked and riddled with graffiti.

“The building is a classic example of a scientific and sanitary bakery inspired by the Pure Foods movement in the early 20th century,” says Chris Hawley, a local urbanist and preservationist who authored the application to award the Wonder Bread Factory local landmark status, which was approved in 2018. “These structures were an outgrowth of progressivism and the notion that science can join hands with agriculture to produce healthier foods, before we learned better that some of these foods weren’t so healthy after all.”

Wonder Bread didn’t originate in Buffalo. The product was first manufactured by the Taggart Baking Company in Indianapolis in 1921. It wasn’t until the Buffalo-based Continental Baking Company (formerly Ward & Ward Incorporated), which built the Fougeron Street facility in 1914, acquired Taggart in 1925 that it began baking Wonder Bread in Buffalo. By 1928, after a series of aggressive acquisitions, the Continental Baking Company became the largest commercial baking operation in the United States.

According to The New York Times, Continental Baking Company’s profits in 1950 neared record highs with sales of more than $150 million, primarily fueled by the popularity of Wonder Bread and Hostess baked goods. Wonder Bread has since had multiple owners, and although it’s no longer the household staple it once was, the brand lives on, generating half a billion in sales in 2022 for its current owner, Flowers Foods.

“Wonder Bread is an iconic American product,” says Hawley, stressing the importance of preserving the deteriorating building. “It’s as important as Coca-Cola or M&M’s in American food history. It helps tell the story of America in the 20th century.”

‘Like the Icon but Better’

Before Miller’s Thumb Bakery opened in 2022, Horton spent months researching his recipe for Wonderful Loaf, creating over a dozen failed prototypes before arriving at the finished product. Working with freshly milled flour can create challenges to achieving a consistent bake. “The flavor profiles are more unique and complex than commercially created flour,” says Horton, “but there are also more natural oils present in freshly milled flours that interfere with gluten structure, and using them doesn’t allow for the same volume.” The biggest challenge was replicating Wonder Bread’s signature squishiness.

To increase volume, Horton adds 20 percent King Arthur Sir Galahad flour to the freshly milled flour base as well as a small amount of fava-bean flour from Bob’s Red Mill as an “improver” to get even more lift. Horton explains that natural enzymes in fava-bean flour create peroxide, which reinforces gluten structure and builds volume in the rise. Using commercial yeast further encourages leavening. To this mix, Horton adds naturally fermented levain (sourdough starter), eggs, and a hint of butter to achieve a more tender crumb and more flavorful crust.

Wonder Bread, on the other hand, is enriched with vitamin and mineral additives like iron, niacin, and riboflavin, and contains preservatives like calcium propionate that are used to slow spoilage. Because industrial baked goods like Wonder Bread are made with refined wheat flours that are stripped of their nutrients by commercial milling methods, the dough needs to be enriched before baking. Enriched breads also lack the fiber content of breads made from freshly milled whole-grain flour, which contains more bran—like Wonderful Loaf.

Mass-produced commercial breads also often contain traces of glyphosate, the most widely used synthetic herbicide. Those levels are generally considered safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, although glyphosate is connected to health risks at higher exposure levels experienced by people who spray it regularly. The freshly milled flour at Miller’s Thumb Bakery—made from Farmer Ground USDA-certified organic whole wheat—is glyphosate-free. (According to King Arthur, its Sir Galahad flour is a non-organic product which may contain glyphosate up to the federally mandated limits.)

Among the remnants of Buffalo’s golden age are the towering rows of abandoned grain elevators whose hollowed-out carcasses still inhabit the shores of the Buffalo River.

With Wonderful Loaf, the plan was always to create an affordable and more wholesome workhorse bread that locals could count on, the way they once did with the ubiquitous Wonder Bread. “Accessibility was always key,” Colella says. “We knew that if we could bring people in with certain products, that those could be a Trojan Horse for things that Steve is very passionate about—like true sourdough and 100 percent rye bread.”

To settle on the right price point, the couple canvassed local supermarkets. “We looked at grocery stores in our area, like Wegman’s, and we wanted to keep our breads similarly priced or perhaps even lower,” says Colella. “Wonder Bread here typically costs between $4.50 and $5. We charge $5.95 for ours, and we also sell it by the half loaf. The price hasn’t changed since we opened.” Colella says the bread, sold entirely at the bakery, is most popular among families with young children and local seniors looking for a softer alternative to the bakery’s crustier sourdoughs.

A sign over the Wonderful Loaf reads: “Like the icon but better.” Horton’s version replicates the airiness of the original but with a deeper, wheatier flavor. He purposely bakes the bread in a pan with slightly wider dimensions than Wonder Bread, preferring the broader width to make more substantial sandwiches. In a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Wonderful Loaf is both nostalgia-inducing and delicious—the platonic ideal of Wonder Bread without the baggage.

Restoring the Northeast Grain Shed

Miller’s Thumb’s success with products like Wonderful Loaf benefits the city’s economy, but it also boosts the local grain economy as well. Horton and Colella embrace their responsibility for supporting local farmers. They buy Farmer Ground grains sourced almost exclusively from New York State farms, and over half of their whole grains come from Seneca Grain & Bean in Penn Yan, New York, in the neighboring Finger Lakes region.

Stephen Horton mills fresh flour daily at Miller’s Thumb Bakery & Cafe in Buffalo, NY. (Photo credit: Jill Colella)

“Agriculture is a backward business model where you buy all your inputs retail and sell everything wholesale, which is the exact opposite of what a healthy business should do,” says Thor Oechsner, one of the founding partners of Farmer Ground, whose organic Glenn and Warthog wheats make up 80 percent of the Wonderful Loaf. Seeing the success of artisan bakeries like Miller’s Thumb with his products makes Oechsner more optimistic about the market for responsibly grown wheat.

“When we started in 2009, there was a bias against Northeast grains. It took a while to dispel the myth that we couldn’t grow good bread-quality wheats in the Northeast,” says Oechsner, who also operates a 1,200-acre organic farm outside Ithaca, New York. “But now, volume-wise, the commercial artisan bread trade is the largest sector of our business.”

The market for higher quality wheat also shows signs of expanding nationally. According to a report by analysts at Argus Media Group in May, organic wheat production in the U.S. surged 22 percent in 2023-24 from the previous marketing year, driven primarily by dietary shifts and growing consciousness about health. Production is predicted to increase again in 2024-25 to 26.1 million bushels, a 7 percent increase from the prior year. But these markets tend to fluctuate wildly, in the face of stubborn headwinds like rising inflation and unpredictable weather events.

The protectionist trade policies of the incoming Trump administration won’t likely impede sales growth for domestic producers of organic wheat, according to Ryan Koory, an agriculture researcher at Argus. “The impact of any tariff is weighted by the share of supply impacted by that tariff,” he says. “In the case of organic wheat, imports accounted for about 6 percent of U.S. supply over the prior marketing year, a relatively small share.” If imported wheat prices rise due to tariffs, there could be built-in advantages for small bakeries like Miller’s Thumb that rely on domestic producers for their wheat supply, but Koory says it’s too soon to tell.

A Storied History, A Tenuous Future

Restoring the grain economy to its former glory is a tall order. “In the late 19th century, Buffalo was the largest grain port in the world,” says Bruce Jackson, a professor at State University of New York at Buffalo and author of The Life and Death of Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator.

As the western terminus of the Erie Canal, Buffalo became one of the richest cities in America by the end of the Civil War. The 363-mile manmade canal, which opened in 1825, provided a vital passageway for transporting Midwestern grain, reducing shipping times from Buffalo to New York City from three weeks to just eight days. It was also a boon for factory development along Buffalo’s Belt Line, a 15-mile stretch of commuter and freight rail along which the abandoned Wonder Bread factory still sits.

“One of the key factors in the decline of the grain trade in Buffalo was the development of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959,” says Jackson. “It created a much quicker route to the Atlantic, so Buffalo’s shipping industry essentially starved to death.”

In recent years, many architectural achievements from Buffalo’s industrial era have come under assault by corporate interests. In 2022, Archer Daniels Midland, the multinational food processor and commodities trader, razed the Great Northern Elevator, a grain storage facility built here in 1897, despite fervent protests and legal challenges by local advocacy groups like Preservation Buffalo Niagara (PBN). The Great Northern was once the largest grain elevator in the world and the first to be fully powered by electricity.

Preservation Buffalo Niagara led a tour of the Wonder Bread factory in August 2024. (Photo courtesy of Emily Jarnot)

This summer, Emily Jarnot, a preservation planner for PBN, led a tour through the abandoned Wonder Bread factory for a group of about 30 locals. She has a personal connection to the product because her uncle Frank worked as the head mixer in the factory for over 25 years before it closed unexpectedly in 2004. Convincing the building’s current owner to grant access for the tour wasn’t easy, and what she found inside was disconcerting. “It was a total mess,” Jarnot says. But, like Hawley, she sees enormous potential in the building as a candidate for preservation.

According to The Buffalo News, the building now faces the threat of demolition, although its owner is trying to find a buyer. Hawley insisted that, regardless of whether the sale goes through, it won’t be easy for anyone to raze the Wonder Bread factory because of its landmark status.

Colella is gravely concerned about the steady erosion of Buffalo’s cultural history, including bread-baking. A giant poster inside the bakery displaying a hand-drawn map of the city’s iconic grain elevators hangs on the wall to remind customers about the city’s distinguished past as a custodian of America’s grain economy. She hopes to develop plans for a food museum in Buffalo that celebrates the city’s agrarian, industrial, and culinary history.

“For a long time, I think Buffalo didn’t know how to tell its own story,” says Colella. “It’s been this joke of a city that doesn’t win Super Bowls, and that’s held it back for quite a long time.” But there are indications that Buffalo is poised for a comeback. In the most recent census, the city’s population grew 6.5 percent, the first increase since 1950 and the most of any city in upstate New York.

These days, young moms and dads with school-age children in tow come into Miller’s Thumb weekly to purchase their Wonderful Loaf, Colella says. She’s encouraged that her vision to deliver a wholesome Wonder Bread alternative to her community has come to fruition. She says that sales are gaining momentum, consistently averaging about 20 to 30 loaves per day.

“There’s a loyal following to that bread,” says Colella. “If we stopped selling it, we would definitely hear about it.”

The post An Artisan Bakery in Buffalo Reimagines Wonder Bread appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/11/26/a-memoir-of-communal-living-celebrates-families-relationships-and-food/ https://civileats.com/2024/11/26/a-memoir-of-communal-living-celebrates-families-relationships-and-food/#comments Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:50 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=59430 Then the monks were gone, replaced by a rotating cast of houseguests—relatives, family friends, more than 20 exchange students, and even a group of Indigenous Tairona from Colombia peddling free-trade coffee. Her parents, who lived mostly as roommates, welcomed them all, making “a life together—over days, weeks, months, years.” More guests stopped by for dinner. […]

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In the first chapter of her book Group Living and Other Recipes, author Lola Milholland writes about coming home from elementary school to discover that her parents had given her bedroom to three Tibetan monks from India. They stayed for three months, and left behind a “sensory collage”—especially the scent of butter as they melted it into their tea, sizzled it with handmade wheat noodles, and shaped it into tiny ceremonial butter sculptures.

Then the monks were gone, replaced by a rotating cast of houseguests—relatives, family friends, more than 20 exchange students, and even a group of Indigenous Tairona from Colombia peddling free-trade coffee. Her parents, who lived mostly as roommates, welcomed them all, making “a life together—over days, weeks, months, years.” More guests stopped by for dinner. “There was always room at our table,” she writes.

Milholland, now the founder of Umi Organic, a groundbreaking noodle company in Portland, Oregon, and her brother, Zak, still live together and maintain similar communal living habits at their childhood home, a four-bedroom Craftsman on Holman Street in Portland.  As their own unintentional community came together, including a few roommates and regular extended visits from friends and their mom, Milholland became compelled to write a book about her family’s unconventional approach to housing and their long and varied history of cohabitation.

The result is a warm intellectual journey through meals and relationships that invites readers to reconsider the norm of the romantically coupled household. The “recipe” for how to build a household or family can be a loose one, Milholland argues, emerging from lived experiences—just like the recipes that end each chapter, from familiar granola to cantaloupe-seed horchata.

“We got the opportunity to make noodles for schools in 2019, and that shifted my entire understanding of what the business was and could be.”

Milholland worked at the nonprofit Ecotrust for eight years on regional food and farming issues and was assistant editor of Edible Portland magazine before she started her noodle company in 2016. Umi ramen noodles, made from regionally grown and milled flour, were the first certified organic fresh ramen sold in American grocery stores and received a prestigious Good Food Award in 2021.

As we prepare to gather together during the holidays, Civil Eats spoke to Milholland about the lessons communal living can offer us all, the future of Umi Organic, and how stronger relationships and communities can benefit the broader food system, too.

Can you give a sense of the casual intimacies that develop in a communal living situation?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what really breeds intimacy. I don’t think it’s making a date with your friend once a month and having a beer with them for an hour. I think it’s spending time with people in space together. Experiencing each other. What’s the easiest way to be with each other and have that kind of easy contact? It’s having meals together.

Everyone is going to eat dinner. When you eat, you feel really alive. You’re taking care of yourself. You’re taking care of somebody else. You’re offering something of yourself. It may just feel like food, but it’s always more than that. It has to do with the culture that you come from, the places that you’ve been, your relationship to ingredients and the land. What makes you feel good? What kind of effect do you want to have in that moment? And you’re constantly all participating in that, and you’ve just learned so much about each other.

What are meals like at your house?

Most nights we cook and eat together, and special nights can stretch to as many as 10 people.

How do you divide cooking and after-dinner washing up?

I don’t have a problem asking people to help. I usually will just say, “Hey, will you help us peel garlic or wash lettuce?” When people do have a job, I think they get to feel more at home. And the opportunity to show someone how to do something they didn’t know how to do can be quite sweet.

Everybody cleans. Somebody’s unloading the dishwasher and putting the dishes away. Somebody is doing all the dishes. Somebody’s clearing and wiping down all the counters. Someone is putting any leftovers away and asking, “Who needs lunch tomorrow? Pack yourself a lunch.” Usually there’s three or four of us, so it’s quick, you get it done so fast.

How are food expenses shared?

“When people do have a job, I think they get to feel more at home. And the opportunity to show someone how to do something they didn’t know how to do can be quite sweet.”

We split bulk olive oil, bulk organic sunflower oil, bulk rice, and a CSA share. If we buy anything in a large volume, [we’ll split it]. I’m not a great gardener and I’ll buy a huge amount of tomatoes every year and we’ll can them and split the cost. In the past, we’ve even bought a quarter of a pig. Everything else we just buy for ourselves.

We pay for the meals we make, and if you have less money, you might make rice and lentils. And if you have more money, you might make a roast chicken. None of us are expecting anybody to spend some [particular] amount. So, there is an intrinsic sliding scale to it.

What are the dynamics of sharing household chores on a day-to-day basis?

We’re a household without a chore wheel. I think working without one is more egalitarian. We each take turns doing every role. I don’t mind doing certain things, and I really dislike doing others—that’s true for everyone in our household. I don’t mind cleaning the toilet or refrigerator. I’m not great at caring for house plants. It doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be cool for me to learn, but someone else is going to enjoy it, and it’s going to feel less like a job and more like a form of nurturing or care that they give to the house.

It’s not easy to ask someone to do something. You have to do it from a place of sincere desire, knowing that they can ask the same of you, whatever that is, and realizing the stakes feel kind of high.

Let’s come back to the cooking. A lot of the recipes in the book are Asian influenced. What other foods do you make?

Christopher’s [a roommate] influence has made Thai food sort of the beating heart of the household. I always make sure that we have things for a very simple Japanese meal and that makes me feel really grounded.

My brother loves to cook Mexican food. My mom used to make tortillas from scratch when I was growing up. We still have her big, beautiful wooden tortilla press that she carried back from Mexico on buses and hitchhiking in the ‘70s. She used to always make us fresh tortillas and cheese, and my brother’s become a really adept Mexican cook. My partner, Corey, loves Italian food. I love to cook Indian food because it feels so big and flavorful, and you really can eat just pulses [from the legume family] and vegetables.

How did your time in Japan shape your ideas about food?

I went to a public school with a Japanese immersion program, and I visited [Japan] many times before I lived there for a year in college. During that time, I lived with a family who was devoted to regional food. The mother was a professor of food studies and specialized in heirloom pickles. I gained such a sense of what a balanced meal was there. It was really influential.

How does Umi relate to these food experiences?

I don’t think Umi would ever exist if I hadn’t spent that year in Japan, not just because of my exposure to delicious noodles, but also my interest in regionalism. Ramen is really awesome because you go from one place to another in Japan, and each ramen is an expression of place, history, and personality.

I always felt like Umi is supposed to be an expression of place, in this case, the Pacific Northwest. So, we need to be using regional grains. We need to do something that feels connected with the farming community here. I never imagined this brand being national.

Umi’s yakisoba noodles have been served in more than two dozen school districts. How and why did you bring them to the  local school food system?

Eventually, we got the opportunity to make noodles for schools in 2019, and that shifted my entire understanding of what the business was and could be. I had this commitment to the producers, to organic, to regionality, and it kept resulting in a product that was expensive. It had this really limited audience, and that didn’t feel right.

When we had an opportunity to make noodles for schools, it felt so much more meaningful and inspiring on a business level. It felt like an opportunity to enact the kind of food system that we want, to continue to hold our values and make it available more broadly. The only thing that made that possible is Oregon’s subsidies for local products for school meals. It’s a beautiful thing; we should make investments that benefit groups, including kids, farmers, food producers, families, local economies. Those things reverberate. It gave me a whole different lease on what the business was and could be.

A fire shut down your operation in June. Are you back in business?

The facility is still not operable, and in the meantime, we found another facility. We’re starting—me and another employee part-time—by just making noodles for schools and then step-by-step decide what we want to grow back into. We have to see if it works financially for us to continue to do this.

I’m calling it a year of experiments. I’m trying to see how I can serve food service, customers, restaurants, schools, corporate cafeterias, colleges. Of course national school lunch will be deeply impacted by the new administration [eventually], but this is a state program! The funding will not be impacted.

You’re in a house that questions tradition,  but with the holidays coming, are there any food traditions you’ll be observing?

My mama’s mom always made doughnuts on Christmas morning. I’m not sure if that’s Polish. It’s probably some Polish with Americana combined. It is absolutely crucial to me that fresh, hot doughnuts be made, and these days, with sourdough. With [my grandma], it would have been yeast-raised.

On Christmas Day every year, I always make my grandmother’s doughnuts and invite family, friends, and Christmas stragglers over. We eat doughnuts and drink strong coffee while two of my friends prep their family’s tradition: a full falafel meal.

Because I’ve already got doughnut-frying oil going, it’s no big thing for [my friends] to step in and begin frying falafel. At some point we all sit down—whoever we may be —around our big dining room table covered in pita, hummus, tahini sauce, tzatziki, lettuce, and more, and eat together.

I love, love, love traditions—even if you’re interrogating [some of] them.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Lola Milholland’s Christmas Doughnuts

(Photo credit: Margo True)

Makes 8-10 doughnuts plus doughnut holes

Lola Milholland uses her own sourdough starter for her family’s Christmas doughnuts, which allows for a long, flavor-developing rise. Lola’s grandma made a yeasted version. Depending on whether you choose sourdough or yeast, the timing will be a bit different for the first two steps. In either case, start the recipe early the day before serving.

This recipe can easily be doubled if you have lots of hungry people around your holiday breakfast table.

Ingredients

Sourdough sponge

• ¼ cup or 50 g bubbly sourdough starter
• ½ cup or 113 g water
• ½ cup or 113 g milk
• 1 tablespoon or 14 g butter, melted
• 1 egg, slightly beaten
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 – 1½ tablespoons or 13 – 20 g sugar
• 2 tablespoons or 16 g whole-wheat flour
• 6 tablespoons or 45 g all-purpose white flour

Yeasted sponge

• ½ cup or 113 g warm (100°-110°F) water
• ½ cup or 113 g warm (100°-110°F) milk
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon or 14 g butter
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon instant yeast
• 1 -1½ tablespoons or 13-20 g sugar
• ⅓ cup or 45 g all-purpose flour
• ⅓ cup or 45 g whole wheat flour

For the doughnuts

• Sourdough or yeasted sponge
• 2½ cups (300 g) all-purpose flour
• High-heat oil, like sunflower, for frying
• ½ cup granulated sugar, plus more as needed
• Pinch salt, plus more as needed

The day before serving, make the sponge:

For the sourdough version, combine the sponge ingredients in a large bowl in the morning and let rest at room temperature in a draft-free spot, covered, for 5-6 hours.

For the yeasted version, combine sponge ingredients in a large bowl in the afternoon and let rest at room temperature in a draft-free spot, covered, for 3 hours.

For both types, make the dough the evening before serving. Add 2½ cups all-purpose flour to the sponge and stir or lightly knead in the bowl until smooth.

The dough should be shiny and bouncy and not too tacky. If it seems like you should add more flour, let the dough rest first, then come back, knead some more, and observe; often it achieves a shiny and bouncy consistency just from having taken a break.

(Photo credit: Ellie Markovitch)

Form dough into a ball, set in an oiled bowl covered with a cloth or plastic wrap, and let rest overnight in the refrigerator.

The next day, turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface. Let rest about 15 minutes.

Roll out or pat the dough until it’s about ½ inch thick.

With a floured doughnut cutter or one large and one small biscuit cutter, cut out doughnuts and holes. Shake off excess flour. Place them on a baking sheet, covered with parchment. Let rest for an hour. They should puff up!

When ready to fry the donuts, heat 2 inches of the oil in a small cast iron pan to 350° F over medium-high heat. Oil is ready when simmering bubbles form around a wooden chopstick or wooden spoon handle inserted into the pan.

Fry one or two donuts and holes at a time, making sure not to crowd them. Turn them only once. Cook for 1 minute per side. Remove and drain on a paper bag.

Fill a small paper bag with ½ cup granulated sugar and a big pinch of fine salt. Add a hot donut to the bag, close it, and shake. Remove the coated donut and repeat with the rest. Serve hot.

 

The post A Memoir of Communal Living Celebrates Families, Relationships, and Food appeared first on Civil Eats.

]]> https://civileats.com/2024/11/26/a-memoir-of-communal-living-celebrates-families-relationships-and-food/feed/ 1 https://civileats.com/2024/11/20/the-craft-milling-movement-gears-up/ Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:55 +0000 https://civileats.com/?p=59217 These gristmills use a pair of huge cylindrical stones, each about four feet wide, two feet thick, and weighing close a ton apiece, to pulverize wheat and other grains. With a dull roar, like the sound of heavy rain and hail on a metal roof, they gradually crush the kernels between them into a cascade […]

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Two hefty, 7-foot-tall machines stand in a corner of the airy, white-walled Carolina Ground warehouse in Hendersonville, North Carolina. One framed in light pine wood, the other in gleaming stainless steel, they project an aura of massive force—especially once they start to move.

Where to Get Local Grain

Looking for a supplier of local grain near you? Try the following resources.

• National: Whole Grains Council Local Grains Map
• Craft Millers Guild Member Map
• Northeast – GrowNYC Northeast Grainshed Map
• Mid-Atlantic – Common Grain Alliance Shop Grain Map
• Midwest – Artisan Grain Collaborative Regional Grain Map
• Mountain West – Colorado Grain Chain Grain Exchange Marketplace
• California – Golden State Grains Millers Directory

These gristmills use a pair of huge cylindrical stones, each about four feet wide, two feet thick, and weighing close a ton apiece, to pulverize wheat and other grains. With a dull roar, like the sound of heavy rain and hail on a metal roof, they gradually crush the kernels between them into a cascade of flavorful flour.

Like the thousands of small processors that once dotted the American landscape, Carolina Ground founder Jennifer Lapidus buys her wheat from nearby growers, grinds it whole at low temperatures to preserve the nutrients in the grain’s flavorful, rich germ, and sells the flour to area bakers seeking a delicious, locally sourced foundation for their products. Although September’s Hurricane Helene disrupted operations temporarily, the mill was up and running within a couple of weeks and could get flour to customers quickly, supporting their businesses in turn. That’s how mills once operated: as mainstays of their own small communities.

“Every town in the U.S. probably has a road that has ‘mill’ in it,” says Michelle Ajamian, who owns Shagbark Seed & Mill in Athens, Ohio (and in fact happens to live on a Mill Creek Road). But the era of the neighborhood mill disappeared long ago.

Carolina Ground founder Jennifer Lapidus with her pinewood Osttiroler gristmill. (Photo credit: Rinne Allen)

The Craft Millers Guild is working to change that. Ajamian and others established the guild in 2020 to provide a community for a new generation of millers who draw inspiration from historic practices and try to help restore regional grain economies that have been lost to industrialization. Through networking, education, and advocacy, the group hopes to help small millers get established and grow their share of the market. Their success, says Ajamian, will mean bringing back a grain system that supports local businesses, provides fresher and more nutritious flour, and preserves biodiversity by using a variety of grains.

The Rise of the Roller Mills

“From the beginning, it’s been an open source-group,” Ajamian says of the guild. “We’re not competing with each other. We’re helping each other, because the competition is really with Big Ag.”

Her comment reflects a history going back at least a hundred years. The first formal count of American gristmills, conducted in 1840, found over 28,000 in operation. Back then, the high cost of transporting grain meant all milling was local. Farmers would bring wagonloads of grain to the modest mill in their community, often paying for its services with a portion of the product, and receive flour back to sell themselves. Different areas used unique local varieties of wheat, like White Sonora in the Southwest and California, and Fulcaster in Pennsylvania. In comparison, when Ajamian started her business in 2010, she estimates there were as few as five small-scale mills serving local farmers left in the country. (Carolina Ground launched in 2012.)

Carolina Ground’s Osttiroler (right) and New American Stone Mill gristmills sit in the corner of the mill’s Hendersonville warehouse. (Photo credit: Daniel Walton)

The rise of railroad transport enabled mills to source grain from farther away and bring in more of it, allowing them to expand. These big facilities adopted new steel roller technology that could process wheat more quickly and easily separate the bran and germ, yielding a flour that was much cheaper to produce and kept longer on the shelf, but had far less flavor and nutrition. Wheat breeders focused on yield and ease of processing, pushing local varieties like White Sonora out of favor. By the early 1900s, industrial wheat mills prevailed.

Today, although local mills have been gaining traction as part of the regional grain movement, they are still relatively rare. Just three companies—Ardent Mills, ADM Milling Co., and Grain Craft—own 57 percent of the country’s wheat processing capacity. Of the more than 21.5 million tons of wheat flour milled domestically in 2022, over 96 percent came from the 21 largest millers and entered the commodity market that fills supermarket shelves across the country.

Together in the Grind

The Craft Millers Guild began with a peer-to-peer Zoom learning group that Ajamian helped organize in the early days of the pandemic, responding to the needs of new millers inspired by the surge of demand for flour.

“A lot of what we’re doing isn’t backed by big corporations.”

By 2023, those casual monthly meetings had coalesced into an organization modeled on similar professional groups such as the Bread Bakers Guild of America and Craft Maltsters Guild. The Craft Millers Guild now boasts about 50 members from across the country. Together, they develop best practices for small-scale mills in areas like food safety and regulatory compliance, assist beginning millers as they gain their footing, and champion local grains in the public sphere.

At a recent online meeting, the Guild’s collaborative spirit was on full display. As veteran millwright Tass Jansen shared his tips for maintaining mills in top condition, about 20 millers kept up a lively side discussion in the chat. Members swapped advice about how to keep their grindstones from getting too hot, the advantages of different furrow depths in millstones, and where to buy food-grade mill grease in bulk—the kind of shop talk that would have been commonplace at community mills hundreds of years ago but is hard to come across today.

Miller Aaron Grigsby at Deep Roots Milling, which grinds grain on a historic water-powered mill in Lowesville, Virginia. (Photo credit: Justin Ide)

“A lot of what we’re doing isn’t backed by big corporations,” Jansen says with a laugh. “There’s a lot of collective knowledge in this group, and you can ask them instead.”

Aaron Grigsby finds that sense of community to be the guild’s biggest accomplishment so far. He joined the group in 2020, shortly after helping to set up Deep Roots Milling at a historic water-powered mill in Lowesville, Virginia, and now serves on its steering committee.

“Millers these days, especially craft stone millers, are so few and far between, and so disconnected by geography, that we hardly have anyone to compare notes with,” Grigsby explains. “Just hearing how people were dealing with mundane issues like packaging was really revelatory.”

Beyond connecting millers, the guild also brings in expertise from those serving the industry, like Andrew Heyn and Blair Marvin of New American Stone Mills. Founded in 2015, their Morrisville, Vermont-based business is a leading supplier of gristmills, producing roughly 45 per year with granite quarried nearby.

Lately, Heyn has been fielding inquiries from people looking to start mills with federal Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure grant funding, which supports the middle of the food-supply chain and bolsters markets for small farms and food businesses. He also talks to aspiring, idealistic millers about the day-to-day realities of milling, such as maintaining mill equipment, adjusting stones to process different types of flour, sourcing grain, and finding buyers.

Heyn compares the craft milling movement to his state’s once-burgeoning hemp farming industry, which contracted by more than 90 percent from 2019 to 2022. “We need to make sure people are doing this safely and effectively so that we don’t have another CBD bust,” he says. “Everybody gets excited about it, nobody knows what they’re doing, and then it all falls apart. So, I think broadening the knowledge base is a big part of it.”

The guild also recognizes that millers, although a critical bridge between farmers and end users, are just one part of the local grain economy. The group regularly partners with other nonprofits working on different aspects of the ecosystem, including the Common Grain Alliance, which builds demand for local grains in the Mid-Atlantic through consumer awareness campaigns and training to help veterans and farmers of color participate in their local grain economies. Similar organizations are active throughout the U.S., from GrowNYC Grains in the Northeast to the Colorado Grain Chain and Golden State Grains in California.

Common Grain Alliance members participate in a grain cleaning workshop at Greater Richmond Grains in Virginia. (Photo courtesy of Common Grain Alliance)

Madelyn Smith, executive director of the Common Grain Alliance, points to her group’s grain stand program as a successful step in building consumer awareness. The grain stand program is a partnership between Common Grain Alliance and FRESHFARM, a nonprofit organization that works to build a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient food system in the Mid-Atlantic region. The stands offer grain-based goods including flour from 11 local producers at FRESHFARM farmers’ markets in Washington, D.C. She says people are surprised to learn that flour can be different from “a white powder purchased in a 5-pound bag at the grocery store” and once they try it, they come back for more.

The Common Grain Alliance’s Mid-Atlantic Grain Stand gives local grains a presence at multiple farmers markets in the Washington, D.C. area, educating consumers and helping producers sell more grain. (Photo courtesy of Common Grain Alliance)

Smith is particularly excited about the Alliance’s effort to educate consumers about less familiar grains like buckwheat and millet. Not only can those plants provide delicious flour, she says; they can also be used as cover crops that develop healthy soils.

“By building a market for these small grains, we’re building in economic incentives to have more diversified and sustainable crop rotations,” says Smith. “We’re not just serving the farmers whose products we’re buying and selling; we’re working to raise the profile of the full diversity of local grains that are produced in our agricultural system.”

Seeds and Capital

Demand certainly seems robust at Carolina Ground in Hendersonville. Lapidus, herself a Craft Millers Guild member, moved from a cramped space in nearby Asheville to the roomy warehouse in 2021, bolstered by pandemic-era sales increases. A long storage space next to the milling room is stacked floor to ceiling with shrink-wrapped grain ready for grinding.

But finding local growers who can supply them isn’t easy. The hard wheat preferred for bread flour is a relatively new crop in the Southeast, with regionally adapted varieties only introduced in 2009. Farmers don’t have a lot of information about how best to grow it here, Lapidus says, and those used to focusing on yield alone might not produce grain with the protein levels discerning bakers expect.

Even in places where local grain production is more established, small-scale farmers can find it challenging to get their crop to market. Grain needs to be cleaned and screened before it’s delivered to a miller. It’s expensive to transport. If a small mill can’t take an entire crop at once, the grower must invest in storage facilities, which require refrigeration if winters aren’t cold enough to suppress pests.

Appalachian White Wheat at Brown Family Farms in Warren Co, NC. (Photo courtesy of Carolina Ground)

The infrastructure costs add up and can discourage all but the most dedicated growers from taking a risk on small-scale grains. Danny Cowan, farmer and co-owner of Red Tail Grains in North Carolina, says he and co-owner George Allen have invested roughly $150,000 in equipment to grow and process grains like Turkey Red winter wheat on about 70 acres. The two have built up that infrastructure over the course of a decade, reinvesting their earnings from the farm and working off-farm jobs to raise further capital.

Machines like dryers and seed cleaners, Cowan says, can each range from the low thousands to nearly $100,000. Red Tail Grains has benefited from a few small local government and nonprofit grants—as well as Allen’s mechanical aptitude, which means he can fix older but more affordable equipment—but that support hasn’t come close to covering the full costs of machinery.

Of the more than 21.5 million tons of wheat flour milled domestically in 2022, over 96 percent came from the 21 largest millers and entered the commodity market that fills supermarket shelves across the country.

“It’s more challenging than I ever expected,” says Jordan Shockley about building the local-grain supply chain. An agricultural economist with the University of Kentucky, he helped organize the inaugural Southeastern Grain Gathering in 2019 and has since worked to create grain opportunities for farmers.

The challenges aren’t insurmountable, though, says Shockley. For example, he sees promise in the way Kentucky’s bourbon makers are interacting with small-scale rye growers. They guarantee payments to farmers for producing rye on a certain acreage, reducing the risk of loss from crop failure. (Existing crop insurance programs can be complicated to access for small-grain growers and doesn’t always work for smaller, diversified farms.)

It helps the farmers, and it’s a win for the distilleries, who can emphasize the local provenance of their raw materials and command a premium from avid drinkers. “It’s all about the story when it comes to local grains: knowing where the grain came from, promoting the farm, and marketing that it’s a local product,” says Shockley.

Making Waves for Local Grain

The large-scale grain industry has substantial economies of scale, admits Ajamian of the Craft Millers Guild. That translates to a dramatically cheaper product. Carolina Ground sells a four-pound bag of stone-milled all-purpose flour made from Appalachian White Hard White Wheat and Shirley Soft Red Winter Wheat on its website for $17.75; a five-pound bag of unbleached all-purpose commodity flour at a nearby grocery store costs as little as $2.49.

But by galvanizing the many small players doing their part for local grains, Ajamian believes the movement can build a different kind of strength in numbers.

A bag of all-purpose flour from Carolina Ground. (Photo credit: Taylor Heery)

Organizations like her guild, she says, can advocate for policies that can help local millers gain footing and lower production costs. Several U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs, for example, support regional food system infrastructure—including for local grains—under the umbrella of the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP), and guild members and others could work to ensure that support remains under the Trump administration.

Citing another example of advocacy, Ajamian points to a letter-writing campaign by the Craft Millers Guild asking the USDA to prioritize local sourcing in food assistance programs. The Biden administration subsequently allocated $900 million to create the Local Food Purchase Assistance program to help state, tribal, and territorial governments buy foods produced within 400 miles, including wheat.

That money meant Ohio food banks could afford the premium for locally milled flour, which put fresh, nutritious whole grains in the kitchens of food-insecure people while supporting local farmers. She’s pushing for Congress to make the program permanent as part of negotiations over the upcoming farm bill.

However, a much larger pot of USDA money gets funneled to large-scale wheat growers selling to big grain buyers. In 2021, about 70 million acres of wheat fields were eligible for subsidies through commodity programs. Even if regional grain growers could access those programs, the payments, at about $10 per acre, don’t add up to much unless they’re operating at a massive scale.

The Common Grain Alliance’s Smith adds that expanding crop insurance eligibility and making the program work better for smaller, diversified farms could be a big help for aspiring grain growers.

But for now, she says, education is even more important than policy. “Every community used to have its own grain mill, and it was natural that bakers would bake with the grains that were grown in their local community,” says Smith. “This isn’t a new way of doing things, but so much of that knowledge has been lost. We’re having to work together to rediscover and relearn those systems.”

The post Restoring a Cornerstone of the Local Grain Economy appeared first on Civil Eats.

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