food security

by Leslie Boden, Community Health & Sustainable Food Systems Planner

What lies at the very foundation of food production? Healthy soil. Dirt. Teeming with myriad forms of life, generative and renewable, essential for plant growth and sustainable ecosystems. And yet, all over the world, it is under attack by industrial agriculture’s methods, which deplete fertile topsoil and produce climate change-contributing greenhouse gases. Common Ground Media’s Dirt! The Movie describes the importance and vulnerability of dirt and the devastating global effects on agricultural production and our adaptability to climate change that will result from the continued assault on it.  It also highlights instances of hopeful actions large and small that are being taken to halt the destruction and replenish soil worldwide.  The movie features Vandana Shiva (physicist and environmental activist) and Wangari Maathai (Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement), both of whom addressed the recent NYC Food & Climate Summit. 

by Kristin Pederson, FSNYC VISTA Member

Sunday’s New York Times carried a story stating that food stamp enrollment is at an all time high and increasing, helping to feed 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children.  It is wonderful that food stamps, now actually called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), are having such an important impact in the aggregate.  But I have learned through my own experience that each individual’s journey to receiving assistance is idiosyncratic in spite of the bureaucracy surrounding the process.

Parts of that bureaucracy can be dehumanizing.  Arriving mid-morning at the Williamsburg, Brooklyn Food Stamp Center, I joined an outdoor line reaching down the block.  As the line inside was processed, we moved through the doors in groups of five or so, strictly managed by security guards who stood watch every few feet against line jumping and disorder.  Once indoors, it was possible to hear the shouted announcement, made every few minutes, that the building was literally at its capacity, so anyone without business there had to leave.  This meant no friends to look after babies as mothers filled in forms, and elderly wives unaccompanied by their husbands.

While others ask how to build a more inclusive good food movement, Henry Harris has an answer: beets.

As a primary organizer of the Food Security Roundtable, Henry has recently worked with Mothers on the Move of the South Bronx to bring a ton of fresh organic vegetables, including over three hundred pounds of beets, straight from farmers in Vermont to communities where such quality produce can be difficult to find.

And now he is turning his energy to another innovative collaboration, working with staff and volunteers from Just Food and other organizations to build a diverse delegation from New York to attend the Growing Food and Justice Initiative (GFJI) conference in Milwaukee at the end of October.

The Growing Food and Justice Initiative came about through the work of Growing Power, Will Allen’s national non-profit. As the successes of Allen and his organization are being lauded by everyone from Bill Clinton to the Macarthur Foundation, this year’s conference will focus on building cross-cultural understanding for systems change.

Posted by Mark Foggin

A few weeks ago, on a bike tour of community gardens that are also raising chickens,  the tour guide was asked where the gardeners managed to get chicken feed for their fowl, and riders heard this tantalizing scrap: that many of them get it from New York City’s only animal feed store—in the Bronx.

The Bronx? Surely he was joking.

Nope. Owen Taylor, coordinator of Just Food’s City Chicken project, was referring to Bronx Animal Feeds on Park Avenue and East 162nd Street in the Melrose neighborhood. And, yes, it appears to be one of only two bulk feed stores in New York City (CG Country Seed in Staten Island is the other). Of late, Bronx Animal Feeds has become much more of a place for pet owners to provision dogs and cats than for coop owners (nota bene, all you city-slickers, that’s coop owners and not co-op owners) to buy cracked corn for their Rhode Island Reds.

Business is just fine, says owner Jack Horowitz. His grandfather started the shop about 75 years ago to supply live poultry markets in a time before refrigeration and pre-butchered meats. But in the post-war era, live poultry markets became the exception instead of the rule in New York City.  And those that remained, Horowitz said, got their feed from the farms that supplied their livestock.

“We kept carrying chicken feed because it was in our blood, but we were down to very little. A couple of poultry markets would come by just to fill in.”

But recently, Horowitz says, he’s seen a significant change. “Three years ago, we did about a thousand pounds a month,” he told me one recent Saturday afternoon while walking among shelves piled with 50-pound bags of feed. “Now we’re up to two or three tons a month.” What accounts for the change? City chickens, he says. “It’s all from the laying hen movement.”

Posted by Jonna McKone, City Harvest

Staten Island is New York’s often forgotten borough when it comes to progressive food programs aimed to cut across class and neighborhood lines. Borough representatives and residents are rarely integrated in city-wide conferences, events, and policy development. This exclusion is due in part to Staten Island’s unique geography, low overall population density, limited public transit system, and unfamiliar neighborhood characteristics. Thus programming and initiatives that might apply to other New York City neighborhoods are rarely extended to the borough.

Despite the obstacles, City Harvest is currently supporting the development of community-based food projects in Staten Island’s North Shore, specifically the under-served communities of Stapleton and Park Hill, which may seem surprising in contrast to the stereotypical image of Staten Island as a homogenous, suburban borough. These neighborhoods, however, are served by only a small number of food retailers and supermarkets that are particularly difficult to access on a regular basis1, which negatively influences residents’ food purchasing habits. Citizens rely primarily on public buses with limited routes and schedules that exacerbate what community members term “isolationism” – the reluctance to travel even a short distance. Thirty-three percent of individuals living in zip code 10304, one of the lowest income areas in the borough, do not have a car, and in some census tracts the figure approaches 60 percent. Additionally, there is only one Greenmarket serving these neighborhoods and the entire borough of half a million people. The North Shore also supports only a handful of public community gardens.

Posted by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

The fine folks at Arts Engine, who brought us The Media That Matters: Good Food Festival back in 2006, premiered this year’s Media That Matters Film Festival on May 28th at the Independent Film Center in NYC. The festival featured a dozen films created to engage and inspire us on a wide range of issues, everything from the impact of globalization on Tibetan nomads to the slow rebirth of post-Katrina New Orleans to the empowerment of factory workers in Argentina. What the films all have in common is that they “spark debate and action in 12 minutes or less.”

The one food-related film in this year’s festival is Every Third Bite, a bittersweet documentary about colony collapse disorder, the mysterious malady that’s decimating our honeybees. Our hyper-industrialized system of agriculture depends on these fuzzy little farm workers to pollinate about $15 billion dollars worth of fruit, nut and vegetable crops each season, or roughly one third of our nation’s food supply.

Mary Woltz, one of the small scale beekeepers profiled in Every Third Bite, notes that commercial beekeepers, in order to survive, have to harvest all the honey from their hives, leaving none for the bees, who are fed high fructose corn syrup instead. Woltz, by contrast, sets aside enough of the honey from her hives to feed her bees in the winter and spring.