The panel was convened by Tambra Stevenson, Chair of the MWPHA’s Food & the Environment Committee (and DC Food For All contributor). Also on hand were Carl Rollins of Common Good City Farm (another DC Food For All contributor), Aileen Orlino, a GWU graduate student studying public health, and myself, also a public health graduate student. The topic was “What’s on your plate? Are today’s food policies making you sick?”

While non-organic healthy foods sat in the background, a yummy dynamic organic dialogue took place between the panel and audience—both of which were very diverse. Questions ranged from “Do I have to eat organic…I hear it is healthier, but I cannot afford it?” to “What are hoop houses” and “So are there PCBs in fish?”

In a wide-ranging, informative free for all the many aspects of our broken factory farm-focused food system were explored. Tambra outlined many of the problems: the tragedy that even though the system has successfully created a supply of low-cost food much of it is high in sugar, salt and lacks nutritional value.

We have traded health for an abundant supply. She also noted that we as a society can “Pay now, or pay later.” Healthy food can be more expensive but poorer health outcomes and decreased longevity are an overlooked societal cost. Moreover, “We need to stop our addiction with foods high in sugar that are like a new crack,” Tambra said.

I urged a paradigm shift in our culture where people spend a little bit greater proportion of their incomes on food (of higher quality) and become less accustomed to cheap food (and its allure, e.g. convenience).

Carl Rollins described the conditions that chickens and cattle are raised in, the overuse of antibiotics and hormones with their potential impact on public health, and the effects of all of this on the environment. He supported the use of school garden programs and eventually large-scale urban agriculture as part of a multi-pronged solution to these health and food problems.

There are ways to check our addiction to sugar and unhealthy foods. Once we have information, we can start small and begin to make incremental changes in our diets.

We can think about why we are eating what we are eating. We can think about where our food came from—did it come from a large factory livestock or fish farm, where animals may be eating their own feces? Heck, maybe it came from our own backyard. Or maybe some day, while reading a menu in a restaurant, we will think about our food choice based on its number of calories; something people un-consciously or consciously do in places today, such as New York City, the state of California, and Philadelphia.

This last measure was highlighted by Orlino who spearheads the “DC Voices for Healthy MEAL Choices” effort. This is a MWPHA initiative. “MEAL” stands for the DC Menu Education and Labeling Act. Although, introduced in 2007 it has languished in the DC Council because Councilmember David Catania (Independent, at large), Chairman of the Committee on Health has prevented a hearing on the matter. In DC, if the chair of the council committee that has jurisdiction of a particular bill refuses to call a hearing the legislation cannot move forward as a practical matter.

We all have a right to know what is in our food. And we can check ourselves by checking both our trash and recycling bins. Are your bins constantly full (in relation to your household size)? Do you see mostly cans, styrofoam, Chinese take-out containers? Chances are we are eating too many pre-prepared foods that often are high in trans fat, unidentifiable chemical preservatives, sodium, and high fructose corn syrup. Precisely the foods that are the worst for us.

It is time to cook a little more. Think a little more. You don’t need to live close to Whole Paycheck (as Carl and others call it) to have a more healthy diet. Learn what’s good for you, take the time to search for healthier foods that you can afford, eat less, and advocate for changes to our local food system. Get out and get involved!

Check the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood WATCH guides. Eat vegetables and fruits as much as possible. Make water your primary beverage. And don’t be afraid to make small changes over time. As one audience member pointed out, if you are accustomed to eating Ramen noodles, decide to add vegetables and throw out the salt packet. By doing these things you have made a significant step towards eating healthier within your own beautiful life.

Another audience member recalled that a horse and buggy carrying produce used to supply her Baltimore inner-city neighborhood when she was a child. Perhaps we need to reintroduce vegetable carts. Her story may be a nostalgic symbol of the past, but it is time to think about what you eat in the present and its affect on both your future health and that of the earth.

It’s almost spring time – and we are so ready to get gardening! Fortunately, City Blossoms has an exciting new project in the works.

There’s a plot of vacant land on Marion Street, NW — located just behind Bread for the City, between P and Q and 6th and 7th streets, less than a block away from the Kennedy Recreation Center — that will soon be transformed into an intergenerational community garden with educational opportunities for children, youth and adults. (See the beautiful artists’ rendering below.)

And City Blossoms needs our help to make that transformation happen! So on Saturday March 20th at 11AM, the DC Food For All will host a volunteer Garden Gang day. As inspired by the recent NYT profile of “crop mobs,” we’re looking for 15-20 volunteers to help prepare the site for construction and the growing season ahead. We’ll spend a few hours working together on things like:

• sheet mulching!
• leveling!
• pulling out very very stubborn old weeds!
• setting up a fence!
• picking up trash!!
• and some planting!

So we need you — as well as any tools (large shovels, rakes, pick axes, large forks) that you may be able to provide for the afternoon.

RSVP to DCFoodForAll@gmail.com. Let’s get gardening!

[Cross posted to DC Food Not Bombs]

In the traditional models, non-profits provided services to the community while businesses focused solely on maximizing profit — and then donated a percentage back to non-profit organizations of their choice. As a new generation of entrepreneurs emerge, social enterprise blurs the line between profit and social mission. For-profits are becoming more socially and environmentally conscious and non-profits are becoming less dependent on grants by generating revenue to support their social mission.

I walk in both the for-profit and non-profit worlds and see the benefits that each sector brings to social enterprise. In this social enterprise blog series, I’ll share examples of those who are reinventing business and social mission into this third sector. My first example describes how a non-profit organization and a for-profit business collaborate to leverage their strengths and financial sustainability.

Let’s Eat Pie!

Pie Ranch and Mission Pie share several commonalities: a devotion to pie, a founding member, a mission that includes youth education, and sustainable food production. Yet they were individually conceived and launched, and they succeed with different legal structures. Their autonomy and clarity of purpose is a critical element in framing their collaboration, and their differences yield some unique synergy where their missions overlap.

Pie Ranch is a non-profit farm that sits on two 14-acre triangular pieces of land along the central California coast. It offers a sustainable working farm and a food system education to urban and rural high school students and community members, mentors young adult farmers and marketing apprentices, and catalyzes strategic land use collaboration to maintain a healthy and vibrant agriculture in the region.

Mission Pie is a for-profit pie shop located in the Mission District of San Francisco. This women-owned business is committed to local sourcing, at-risk youth training for work readiness, and eco-consciousness in their café and operations.

Karen Heisler was one of the founders of Pie Ranch with Jered Lawson and Nancy Vail. Karen now co-owns Mission Pie with Kystin Rubin. One of Mission Pie’s core business practices is to cultivate collaborations with local farms for mutual benefit. For example, Mission Pie wanted to source locally-grown wheat flour, a rare commodity in California. In support of its educational mission, Pie Ranch recovered a heritage wheat variety called Sonora, originally grown on the California missions. The farm produced it on a demonstration scale in its historic production zone. Mission Pie provided some investment support for equipment to scale up grain production and now Pie Ranch is able to supply Mission Pie and other commercial and individual customers with Sonora wheat. This enhances the non-profit farm’s visibility and its earned income from farm products.

In another example, Mission Pie mentors and employs at-risk high school students so that they can learn work preparation skills. The business provides staffing and mentorship for the youth vocational training program, while other non-profit partners whose missions support youth work readiness provide compensation to the youth subsidized by various funding sources.

Social enterprise thrives here in the District as well. For example, the DC Central Kitchen has a twin mission of providing job training and addressing hunger. In addition to its public and private funders, DCCK generates earned income through its catering services and DC government-contracted meals. (Read DC Food For All’s profile here.)

Social enterprises, whether for-profit or non-profit, are finding creative ways to serve community—addressing food security by serving people, planet, and profit simultaneously. This third sector might just be the most sustainable business model of all.

Stay tuned for more social enterprise stories from the field to inspire new business opportunities right here in our Nation’s Capital.

WIC Sign at Ward 8 Farmers Market

In a previous post, we explored  a new Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program that helps low-income mothers buy more fresh produce at farmers markets. The new coupons are known as WIC Fruit and Vegetable Cash Value Vouchers, or FVC. This second post in the series looks at benefits of a similar nutrition assistance program already in place–the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP)–and yet more stumbling blocks in implementation of such programs.

First, the good news.

According to a report by the Community Food Security Coalition based on USDA numbers, 2.3 million WIC participants received farmers market benefits in 2008, spending about $20 million. During that year, 16,016 farmers and 3,367 farmers markets were authorized to accept FMNP coupons. The USDA awarded grants to each state, amounting to $301,302 for D.C. in 2009, while Maryland received $341,338 (Virginia received $291,212 in 2008, but declined to participate last year).

Also according to the report, evaluation of the program in Washington state showed that WIC recipients who used vouchers  increased their knowledge and consumption of fruits and vegetables, and planned to keep coming to farmers markets in the future. Several D.C.-area markets–including the Crossroads market in Takoma Park and three of the markets run by FRESHFARM Markets–established very popular grant-funded “double dollar” programs, which matched the value of vouchers, increasing shoppers’ buying power and farmers’ income.

This works out for everyone–at least until bureaucracy or lack of participation get in the way.

Liz Falk, the former manager of WIC and food stamp programs for FRESHFARM Markets, says she saw very little in the way of advertising for the WIC FMNP. D.C.’s WIC administrators and the Department of Health could not — or would not — devote much funding to develop and distribute marketing materials, and different agencies were reluctant even to add each others’ information to existing materials. The situation will likely hold true for the FVC program.

More worrisome still: Falk says that “red tape is covering so much of what’s possible with these programs.”

The program’s certification process itself is problematic. As our first post mentioned, D.C. offers just one training for farmers who want to participate in the WIC FMNP, Senior FMNP, and FVC programs. (It’s set for this Wednesday, March 10 in Greenbelt, MD, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.)

By contrast Maryland offers multiple trainings on 13 different dates in Greenbelt, Annapolis, Hagerstown, Baltimore, and Denton. Each lasts an hour–from 10 to 11 a.m. or 1 to 2 p.m.

This is not to say that Maryland gets it all right: it has separate trainings for the FMNP and FVC programs, and each is administered by a different department – FMNP by the Department of Agriculture; FVC by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

All of this is enough to make a farmer’s head spin, and tempt her to drop participating all together.

“[Farmers] want to come, they want to sell produce, and they want to make a living,” says Falk. “Willingness to participate in a WIC program is primarily determined by perceived man-hours needed on the bureaucratic back-end to get enrolled and stay enrolled,” wrote Dan White, DC Food For All contributor, on our listserv recently. Raise the hurdles too high, and farmers will decide the program isn’t worth the earnings.

Crossroads Farmers Market staff have also seen a problem with reimbursement. This market, located just outside the District line in Takoma Park, MD, sees the majority of its customers come in with some form of nutrition assistance. In the three years that Crossroads has been in existence and accepting programs like the WIC FMNP, staff have heard numerous complaints from farmers who say that the reimbursement procedure is complex and the timeline is short. Unlike cash or bank checks, the WIC checks have expiration dates. Once the farmers and customers do successfully exchange a payment, the sellers often have to wait weeks or months to see it turn into cash. Similar problems loom for the new FVC program.

As the last post mentioned, DC Food for All members are asking whether this system can be improved. To learn more and become part of the conversation, join the D.C. Food for All discussion group.

The next workshop is tomorrow at 6pm! Bread for the City is located at 1525 7th St NW, right by the Shaw metro. Email us to RSVP, or join the Google Group to stay posted in the meantime.

That’s where our local artists come in! We need a logo for the market that will be printed on sandwich boards, lamp post signs, canvas bags, t-shirts, and market stall banners. If you’re an artist, know an artist, or just want to give it a shot, please submit a logo design! The logo should have the text “Columbia Heights Community Marketplace,” but the rest is up to you. Keep in mind that the market will be a diverse community event that will incorporate not only fresh, local food, but also music, dance, youth outreach programs, and community services.

Please send your logo design to CHCommunityMarketplace@gmail.com as soon as possible. Submissions will be accepted through Tuesday, March 16th. HOWEVER, we are on a tight time schedule, so please send them in as soon as you can! We look forward to seeing all your ideas.

In the past few years, as part of our mission to serve and care for people in an atmosphere of dignity and respect, we’ve overhauled our pantry menu to feature an array of more nutritious items. The results of that Nutrition Initiative were really positive: healthier diets and higher client satisfaction.

Now we are experimenting with pantry innovation once again: exploring opportunities to enable client choice in our pantry menu. We envision a food pantry in which people can select which food they bring home, just like they would at a grocery store.

To be sure, this would be a logistical challenge. But there’s quite a few reasons why client choice would be an effective process. For one, Bread for the City is not the only source of food for our clients; many clients may already have sufficient amounts of certain kinds of food, but may be in greater need of others. Some of our clients have special dietary needs that make certain foods especially important, and others not helpful at all. And most of all, as our nutrition consultant Sharon Gruber says: “one of the most debilitating things about living with a low income is a lack of control — and food is one of the most basic things that we can or cannot control in our lives.”

Louise Thundercloud, a longtime Bread for the City client and community activist, wrote about that very point on this blog, explaining that a lack of control over food “is related to the problem of very low self esteem: feeling as though you deserve only what is given to you, because you feel so terrible about yourself.”

So on January 28th, we transformed our Southeast Center food pantry into a makeshift grocery store. Armed with a reusable bag, clients selected every component of their groceries. Bread for the City staff engaged directly with clients to help put together food bags. Clients pondered their choices, happily snatching favorites while politely declining other items they might not want or need. Staff laughed with clients and chatted about the choice experiment.

“Choice is much better! I get to pick what I want. This month I have enough cans and dry goods, I just needed meat and fresh veggies.”

Indeed we noticed that, when given options, clients displayed a clear preference to avoid waste, and many even took pride in leaving food behind for others.

We asked each client survey questions after shopping, and 97% of participants rated the experience a 5 out of 5. I asked one beaming client what she thought, and she replied, “I love this because I get to pick out the best options for me. Please keep it going!”

Stay tuned for more results of this exciting new experiment…

[Cross-posted from Beyond Bread.]

One thing I love about some of these organizations is that they do great work rescuing unwanted food. For example, last year Bread for the City started its Glean for the City program, which gathers vegetables from local farms — all for free. And one of the better known examples of food-reclamation in the country was founded here in DC in 1989 — the DC Central Kitchen started off making meals for the homeless from the leftovers from the Presidential Inauguration festivals. These days, they rescue more than 600,000 pounds of food a year.

But in some cases at several social service organizations, I see a large amount of food waste ends up in the trash. I often wonder: Can these organizations compost? Is there a way to ‘close the loop’ on this process, to give back to the fields that produce the food? In response to these questions I raised to the DCFoodforAll Google Group, representatives from the Common Good City Farm, located near Howard University, say that the farm will start accepting compost from community members.

This may be just the start of a series of such community composting opportunities. In another response to these questions, the Director of Kitchen Operations at Miriam’s Kitchen, Steven Badt, noted that — even if there were local sites to compost — even a well-run service organization like Miriam’s would be daunted by the volunteer resources that regular composting would require. Also, there’s the question of volume: Badt estimates that the Kitchen ends up with fifty or a hundred or more gallons of food waste every day — “There is no way a community garden could handle/manage the amount.” He did note, however, that Miriam’s Kitchen will switch trash hauling companies in January 2011 to a company that does industrial composting. (This is just one of the green initiatives that they are undertaking there. Also they are looking at hiring a night green cleaning crew for their building. )

There are other opportunities on the horizon. Included in the DC Government’s proposed Healthy Schools Act, introduced by DC Council member Mary Cheh and Chairman Vincent Gray, there will be money set aside for a DC Schools compost pilot project. This could be a way to start a large scale composting program.

DC wouldn’t have the first large scale composting program in the nation. San Francisco implemented a mandatory composting law with fines for residents or businesses that throw anything compostable in the trash. (When the law went into effect, most of the city was already in compliance, because many companies and landlords already changed their practices.) Currently the city of Denver has a pilot residential composting program happening. And in Milwaukee, Will Allen of Growing Power  says that his organization compost more than twelve million pounds of food waste yearly that came from a variety of different sources, from breweries to private homes.

Can Washington DC become another city to require composting? We are already the first city to install a bag tax. What would intermediary steps look like? A composting law could be years away. Could we start picking up small qualities of compost from social services agencies to take to community gardens? What are other ideas?

One of the first steps we can take is to support the Healthy Schools Act: On March 26 DC Council is holding a hearing on the Healthy Schools Act at 11 am in Room 500 of the John A. Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

What if the DC government created something like Baltimore Public Schools’ Great Kids Farm, a 33 acre educational farm in Catonsville, Maryland in response to this act?

Let’s show  support for the DC Schools Compost Pilot Program. This could be the first step towards closing the loop in getting food waste back to the land instead of the landfill.

Here are more details about the March 26 hearing:

Anyone wishing to testify at the hearing should contact Ms. Aukima Benjamin, staff assistant to the Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, at 724-8062, or via e-mail at abenjamin@dccouncil.us. Witnesses should bring 15 copies of their written testimony to the hearing. If possible, witnesses should submit a copy of their testimony in advance of the hearing to abenjamin@dccouncil.us. Witnesses will be allowed a maximum of three (3) minutes for oral presentation.

If you are unable to testify at the hearing, written statements are encouraged and will be made a part of the official record. Copies of written statements should be submitted either to the Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, or to Ms. Cynthia Brock-Smith, Secretary to the Council, Room 5 of the John A. Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20004. The record will close at the end of the business day on April 2, 2010.

Thanks to Steven Badt, Greg Boom, Rebecca Kantar, Greg Plotkin, Jenn Roccanti, and Carl Rollins for their assistance on researching this topic on the DCFoodforAll Google Group.

Beet Street Gardens is a demonstration project combining two of my greatest passions—community gardening and harm reduction. The basic model of Beet Street is to bring gardens to social service organizations which work with marginalized adults, teens, and their families.

by Katie Aldworth

Hey Urban Gardening Enthusiasts! Do you remember your first garden? Beet Street is going to bring first gardens to four organizations working with marginalized communities–a shelter for homeless teen mothers, a domestic violence shelter, a harm reduction organization working with sex workers, and (if funding allows) a shelter working to end homelessness for people living with psychiatric disabilities.

Our Inspiration: Beet Street is inspired by the model of many a community garden: get a community together and build a garden—a safe, healthy and transformative space–with a focus on learning (skills, sustainability, food science, and nutrition) and growing (soil, food, urban sanctuary, identity, community, economic opportunity). With this model, many community gardens in low-income neighborhoods are addressing very real economic and social divisions that are often associated with limited access to nutritious food, safe outdoor space, and recreational and skill-building opportunities.

Expanding Community: Among the hardest to reach people and families are those dealing with crises such as homelessness, domestic violence, drug use, and poverty. For many, there are several barriers to participating in existing community gardens. Perhaps most important to witness is the barrier of real and perceived discrimination and stigma while engaging in an unknown community space.

Taking it to the (Beet) Street: Beet Street Gardens will strive to address these barriers by building gardens on-site at social service organizations that are already known as a safe space for their participants. From March to October of 2010, Beet Street demonstration project will plant, maintain, and harvest—through teaching and collaboration—sustainable food-producing gardens at three organizations in DC. Workshops and information sharing sessions will be facilitated on the topics of gardening, food, health, nutrition, and cooking. The organizations–a harm reduction agency working with sex workers (HIPS, yay!), a shelter for homeless teen mothers, and a harm reduction based domestic violence shelter–were chosen based on need, their reputation with marginalized communities and commitment to harm reduction principles.

Goals: In this demonstration phase, the goal of Beet Street is simply to cultivate community and improve quality of life through gardening and information sharing. As these gardens and our relationship with organizations and individuals take root, we will expand services with the vision of providing economic opportunities and job training. The program will build bridges to the larger urban gardening community and green economy in a constant pursuit of positive change.

We are raising funds on Kickstarter and have raised our minimum goal of $5,500. Yay!! This goal was set when we were planning three gardens. Additional funding will help us bring a garden to this fourth organization and help to increase the capacity of all our gardens. Also, the more funding we receive, the more we will be able to pursue entrepreneurial activities to move people and the future of the organization toward self-sustainability!!

Check out the project on Kickstarter or become a fan on Facebook.