You might say its mandate is all for food and food for all.

The Food For All Network is a collective organization made up of various food banks, community members and health-care workers from the Country Roads Community Health Centre in Portland. Its goal is to address an issue that has become increasingly prevalent in small, rural communities in Leeds, Grenville and Lanark counties over the past several years – food security.

Best defined as a lack of access to affordable, safe and healthy foods, food security has become a widely publicized issue all over the province, and locally as well, due to campaigns such as last fall’s Do the Math Eat the Math Challenge.

“Our main concern is making sure members of the community have access to nutritious food,” network member Kate Earl, a registered dietician who works at Country Roads, told The Recorder and Times on Friday.

Earl said the organization has set up numerous programs and partnerships with food banks in Westport, Portland, Athens, Seeleys Bay, Delta and Elgin.

Food security has become a large issue in these communities for a variety of reasons, Earl said. The high cost of gasoline and inflated small-town grocery prices make healthy eating a challenge for many residents in these communities, she said.

As a tie-in to its relationship with the food banks, Earl said the network this year established a community garden at the Country Roads site, where lettuce, tomatoes, beans and a host of other fresh vegetables are being grown. This initiative has helped staff at the centre provide access to these foods to clients in need.

Every Saturday morning, the town square in Mansonville, an Eastern Townships village bordering Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, is a beehive of activity, as shoppers mill about tables festooned with produce to buy bunches of beets just pulled from the earth, baskets of sun-warmed tomatoes, locally harvested honey and the freshest of flowers, picked that morning and brought to market.

Nestled between Brome Lake and Lake Memphremagog, the town has gone food crazy, with a collective of 15 producers leading the way. They are front-line members of a movement designed to highlight the fruit of local growers’ toil, as well as carefully collected honey, maple syrup, homemade jams and jellies – and in May, masses of seedlings available for sale.

After three years attending to their popular farmers’ market, some of these growers are now part of a co-operative. Known as Locomotive, the officially registered co-op is now able to launch small business projects, like a restaurant that will favour local produce, mainly serving the township of Potton, where Mansonville is located.

The inspiration for all this is the nearby town of Hardwick, Vt., once a lacklustre mill town that has been famously transformed by putting local food first. Hardwick managed to revive itself by having agriculture businesses band together, promoting each other’s products, lending each other short-term loans. A community-supported restaurant was opened by four partners and 50 investors with $1,000 each.

Mansonville has taken notice. Making it easier for people to buy locally is the engine for what the cooperative is planning, says co-founder Gwynne Basen.

In front of the N.D.G. Food Depot’s west-end headquarters, herbs, tomatoes, potatoes and turnips are growing in newly built wooden planters.

Inside the grey industrial building on Oxford Ave., mushrooms are growing in plastic buckets and bean sprouts fill glass jars. Volunteer cooks will use the fresh produce to prepare meals for some of the thousands of people who go to the food depot for help every year.

This small-scale agriculture project is part of a bigger plan by the food bank to branch out into practising permaculture, a system of ecological design that includes organic gardening, reducing waste and building strong communities.

Inspired by the systems and relationships found in nature, permaculture techniques are most often applied to agriculture and growing food, although it can also be used to deal with environmental problems such as climate change or oil spills.

Since it was founded 25 years ago as a temporary solution to food insecurity in the neighbourhood, the food depot has moved from simply providing emergency food to trying to make longterm changes in the community, said director Fiona Keats.

“We are really moving toward a vision of an integrated, holistic, community food centre,” she said.

They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but for local students involved in a partnership with Living Cities, it’s what will replace the grass that truly embodies the term “green”.

Living Cities, a Kingston-based business focused on offering urban gardening services, takes underused space and develops closed-loop agriculture systems that work with composting and waste diversion, rainwater collection and growing produce.

Begun in 2008, Living Cities is now partnering with local high schools to bring its mandate into the classroom.

The focus is to get more seeds grown locally, said Nathan Putnam, president and CEO of Living Cities.

“By involving students in these projects, we are fostering this initiative with younger people who will hopefully employ what they learn throughout their lives.”

Two Kingston high schools — Bayridge and Loyalist — are currently teamed with the company to create their own on-site gardens. These gardens will be planted with more than 15 different vegetables and different varieties of each.

The produce will be sold in shares to the local community.

“With the money generated from the sales of shares of vegetables, we’ll hire one or two high school students for the summer,” Putnam said.

“Those students will essentially work full time growing and harvesting the produce.”

The Vancouver Fruit Tree Project (VTFP) is a community-based, non-profit, registered charity that works to strengthen food security, build community and enhance urban ecology using local fruit. Our goals are to:

• Harvest and help care for our fruit trees throughout Vancouver by connecting those who have excess fruit on their properties with those who have the time, energy and resources to harvest it.
• Share the bounty of fruit with those affected by poverty and with community organizations that provide food and education to alleviate poverty and hunger in our community.
• Preserve and share valuable skills such as preserving produce and the importance of fruits and vegetables to people’s health and nutrition.
• Exploit local resources for fruit to offset the requirement of shipping fruit from other areas thus reducing the carbon emissions.

VFTP began in 1999 with 50 community members picking 2,000 lbs of fruit. In our peak year, 2006, VFTP worked with over 50 tree owners and 60 volunteers to harvest 5,000 lbs of fruit from backyards throughout Vancouver. In total, the VFTP has harvested over 20,000 lbs of fruit over the last 9 years. Harvested fruit is donated to community organizations such as neighbourhood houses and community kitchens that distribute food to people in need, either directly or through educational programs. VFTP’s main challenge is the transportation and equipment required to harvest the fruit. Currently, due to lack of transportation and logistical support, we are harvesting from only 30% of the fruit trees in our database.

Any funds we receive are used to add equipment and resources to increase the amount of fruit we pick and distribute. With transportation as one of our main concerns, we still manage to minimize this requirement by delivering fruit to partners situated as closely as possible to the trees from which the fruit is harvested. In doing so, we not only minimize food miles and the economic & environmental costs incurred, we also help to build the community by connecting individuals and organizations in their own communities.

For many gardeners, charity begins at home with contributions of fresh produce to local food banks.

Other people volunteer as gleaners in farm fields and orchards, salvaging unused crops that might get plowed under, dumped or left to rot.

Gleaning is one of the earliest forms of charity, mentioned frequently in Biblical accounts as the gathering of unharvested crops purposely left in the corners of farm fields for anyone needing it.

Times again are tough for thousands of families who can’t afford a steady diet of fresh, wholesome fruits and vegetables. Yet an estimated 27 per cent of all food crops go unharvested in the United States — billions of kilograms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Most are discarded because of cosmetic blemishes, harvesting problems or unstable market prices.

Enter such organizations as the Society of St. Andrew, Ample Harvest, Hidden Harvest, Maine Harvest for the Hungry Program, mid-Atlantic Gleaning Network, Senior Gleaners and many others that make it their business to find, collect and distribute produce for hungry consumers, from the elderly to schoolchildren.

“It used to be that gleaning was simply tolerated, that it was legal to do but had some sort of stigma attached,” said Barbara Murphy, an extension educator with the University of Maine who also oversees its Maine Harvest for the Hungry Program. “But gleaning is becoming more popular because the sheer quantity of the bounty that doesn’t get used is immense. Now it’s a matter of reducing waste.” [...]

As part of the first year of the Learning Garden, we are developing workshops and a truly collaborative community garden to help develop food skills, increase access to healthy food, improve food security, encourage physical activity, and strengthen mental health in our community. The goal of the project is to help residents learn what, when, where, and how to plant, harvest, and preserve their own foods.

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“To search for solutions to hunger means to act within the principle that the status of a citizen surpasses that of a mere consumer.”

CITY OF BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL

More than 10 years ago, Brazil’s fourth-largest city, Belo Horizonte, declared that food was a right of citizenship and started working to make good food available to all. One of its programs puts local farm produce into school meals. This and other projects cost the city less than 2 percent of its budget. Above, fresh passion fruit juice and salad as part of a school lunch. Photo by Leah Rimkus

In writing Diet for a Small Planet, I learned one simple truth: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy. But that realization was only the beginning, for then I had to ask: What does a democracy look like that enables citizens to have a real voice in securing life’s essentials? Does it exist anywhere? Is it possible or a pipe dream? With hunger on the rise here in the United States—one in 10 of us is now turning to food stamps—these questions take on new urgency.

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

When my daughter Anna and I visited Belo Horizonte to write Hope’s Edge we approached one of these stands. A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.

“For ABC sellers with the best spots, there’s another obligation attached to being able to use the city land,” a former manager within this city agency, Adriana Aranha, explained. “Every weekend they have to drive produce-laden trucks to the poor neighborhoods outside of the city center, so everyone can get good produce.”

Another product of food-as-a-right thinking is three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal. When Anna and I ate in one, we saw hundreds of diners—grandparents and newborns, young couples, clusters of men, mothers with toddlers. Some were in well-worn street clothes, others in uniform, still others in business suits.

“I’ve been coming here every day for five years and have gained six kilos,” beamed one elderly, energetic man in faded khakis.

“It’s silly to pay more somewhere else for lower quality food,” an athletic-looking young man in a military police uniform told us. “I’ve been eating here every day for two years. It’s a good way to save money to buy a house so I can get married,” he said with a smile.

The line for one of three “People’s Restaurants” a half hour before opening time. Meals cost about 50 cents; diners come from all socio-economic groups. Photo by Leah Rimkus

No one has to prove they’re poor to eat in a People’s Restaurant, although about 85 percent of the diners are. The mixed clientele erases stigma and allows “food with dignity,” say those involved.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

“We’re fighting the concept that the state is a terrible, incompetent administrator,” Adriana explained. “We’re showing that the state doesn’t have to provide everything, it can facilitate. It can create channels for people to find solutions themselves.”

For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops, online, on television and radio, and in newspapers so people know where the cheapest prices are.

The shift in frame to food as a right also led the Belo hunger-fighters to look for novel solutions. In one successful experiment, egg shells, manioc leaves, and other material normally thrown away were ground and mixed into flour for school kids’ daily bread. This enriched food also goes to nursery school children, who receive three meals a day courtesy of the city.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

The result of these and other related innovations?

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

The cost of these efforts?

Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.”

The Belo experience shows that a right to food does not necessarily mean more public handouts (although in emergencies, of course, it does.) It can mean redefining the “free” in “free market” as the freedom of all to participate. It can mean, as in Belo, building citizen-government partnerships driven by values of inclusion and mutual respect.

And when imagining food as a right of citizenship, please note: No change in human nature is required! Through most of human evolution—except for the last few thousand of roughly 200,000 years—Homo sapiens lived in societies where pervasive sharing of food was the norm. As food sharers, “especially among unrelated individuals,” humans are unique, writes Michael Gurven, an authority on hunter-gatherer food transfers. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat.

Before leaving Belo, Anna and I had time to reflect a bit with Adriana. We wondered whether she realized that her city may be one of the few in the world taking this approach—food as a right of membership in the human family. So I asked, “When you began, did you realize how important what you are doing was? How much difference it might make? How rare it is in the entire world?”

Listening to her long response in Portuguese without understanding, I tried to be patient. But when her eyes moistened, I nudged our interpreter. I wanted to know what had touched her emotions.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes—if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.

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Today, advocates say there are between 3,000 and 4,000 CSA programs connecting families directly with farmers across the country. (In the latest agriculture census [PDF], the USDA estimates there are even more: 12,549). Of course, CSAs are just one piece in a patchwork of solutions to reknit regional foodsheds, but more importantly they exemplify the value of community that undergirds a climate-friendly food system. The relationship between farmer Bill and us eaters upends a fundamental principle of the market: that producers and consumers are necessarily opponents.

I got another taste of this profound shift when I traveled to South Korea a few years ago. While there I met with leaders in the consumer cooperative movement. I thought our local Park Slope Food Co-op was impressive with more than 14,000 members. Try 150,000. That’s the membership of just one of several consumer co-ops I met with.

When I sat down with Seong Hee Kim, a leader of the Hansalim co-op, he described its programs connecting farmers with consumers: summer camps on farms for city kids, workshops on sustainable food production, investments in bakeries stocked with local food. The core business of the co-op is the direct sale of hundreds of food items, the prices of which are mostly decided at their annual meeting. When the farmers’ reps and consumer reps sit down together, the conversation always ends in a fight — just not the kind of fight you might imagine. Rice is the most contentious, Kim explains: Without fail, the consumers insist they should support the farmers by paying more than the market price for the rice. The farmers insist that, no, consumers should actually pay less than the market price, since the cost of production is lower than what the market charges.

“And then, they get into a big argument!” said Kim, laughing.

How did Hansalim achieve this shift — from producers and consumers seeing themselves as competitors to seeing themselves as on the same team? The answer, Kim explained, has to do with values — community values. “Our producers see themselves as responsible for the health and well-being of the consumers. And the consumers, they know the farmers and see very clearly how they’re responsible for their well-being,” he said.

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer today released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System,” the most comprehensive effort to date to unify and reform New York City’s policies regarding the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food.

The report, a product of the NYC Food & Climate Summit held at NYU in December in partnership with the non-profit Just Food, outlines a package of proposals that will make our food system more sustainable by prioritizing products from New York State, increasing access to healthy food in underserved neighborhoods, and expanding the food economy. To read the entire report, click here.

“By devoting serious attention to our food system, city government can in one stroke improve public health, sustainability, and job creation,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer. “In recent years, there’s been growing interest in this issue, but we’re still left with a grab bag of disjointed, independent initiatives. Now, with the help of hundreds of dedicated New Yorkers, the document we’re releasing today will for the first time present a single, comprehensive vision for food policy in this city.”

“This report provides a clear path for a comprehensive overhaul of our food system, one that will empower New Yorkers to get involved in their community and in government,” said Jacquie Berger, Executive Director of Just Food. “Support and advocacy for these policies will make climate friendly, healthy foods the most affordable, accessible, easy choice for everyone.”

“This report puts New York City at the forefront of an exciting movement across the country in which citizens are developing practical solutions to fixing our broken food system while improving our health, boosting the economy, and healing the environment,” said Anna Lappé, Summit participant and author of Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.

“If you care about New York’s food future, read this document, determine where you can help, and pitch in,” said Columbia University Professor Joan Gussow. “Without question, the best set of ideas in print about preparing the City’s food system to meet the challenges to come.”

During 29 “breakout sessions” at December’s Food & Climate Summit, experts in agriculture, nutrition and environmental sciences debated and discussed different ideas to improve the city’s food system. They looked at the life cycle of the city’s food supply, from production and distribution to consumption and disposal, with the goal of shaping a policy that integrates energy and climate objectives with social, public health and economic goals. The report details the best and most pragmatic proposals and urges reform in the following areas:

URBAN AGRICULTURE – Establish food-producing spaces in New York City for personal, community, or commercial use by the year 2030, through various legislative and land-use actions. The City should facilitate the development of rooftop gardens, in addition to creating an NYC Urban Agriculture Program, which would provide access, resources, and information to promote community gardening.

REGIONAL FOOD PRODUCTION – Promote and support regional agriculture by connecting upstate and Long Island farms with downstate consumers, and by mapping the food produced and sourced from the region within approximately 200 miles of New York City.

FOOD PROCESSING AND DISTRIBUTION – Increase the sale and consumption of regional foods by expanding distribution and processing capacity. In particular, the Administration, in conjunction with the City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), should redevelop the Hunts Point Produce Market, to both modernize this food delivery hub and ensure that the 8,500 jobs the facility maintains remain in NYC.

NEW MARKETS – Increase the number and type of retail food outlets that deviate from the traditional grocery store model by dedicating city-owned spaces for use as “alternative” food markets. By increasing the number and long term viability of farmers markets, the City can give residents both the option and the access to healthy food.

PROCUREMENT OF REGIONALLY PRODUCED FOOD – Incorporate preferences for locally-sourced food into the city’s procurement regulations. Specifically, the City Council should pass legislation that would require 20% of all food purchased by city agencies to come from local producers.

EDUCATION – Educate New York City’s children to become a new generation of healthy and environmentally aware eaters. Moreover, students should have access to some type of agricultural production, be it a community garden or urban farm.

FOOD WASTE – Launch twin composting initiatives: (a) support for large-scale composting through creation of a municipal facility; and (b) support for small-scale composting through education, decentralized composting bins, and more pick-up locations.

PLASTIC WATER BOTTLES – Ban the sale of bottled water in all city facilities and on municipal property, and increase the use of water fountains and canteens. Plastic water bottles waste an enormous amount of energy to produce and only a small portion are recycled.

FOOD ECONOMY – Actively develop the local economy’s food sector to create more jobs while elevating labor standards, environmental protections and public health. Moreover, the creation of kitchen incubators in every borough will create entrepreneurial opportunities for many New Yorkers with a talent for food production.

OFFICE OF FOOD AND MARKETS – Create an Office of Food and Markets to coordinate and lead systemic reform of the city’s food and agricultural policies and programs. In addition, the Mayor should look at amending PlaNYC to include a comprehensive overhaul of the City’s food system, like the one outlined in this report.