The post Could Child Care Centers Strengthen Local Food Systems? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Ever since the pandemic, the child care sector has grappled with tight budgets, staffing shortages, and low wages. Dara Bloom, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, has watched over the years as many of these centers have struggled to serve fresh fruits and vegetables to kids, especially when inflation and food prices soared.
Last year, federal stabilization grants provided to the child care sector during the pandemic ended, leaving many centers in “survival mode,” says Bloom, a local foods extension specialist who is diligently working to build relationships between child care facilities and small farmers. Through her research, Bloom, herself a mom, hopes to improve food access for underserved communities and economic opportunities for small farmers. She says the child care sector can play a key role—if given the chance.
“Those early [childhood] stages are so important, especially in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.”
Child care centers were set to receive a helping hand this year, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) expanded the Local Food for Schools (LFS) program last October to include child care sites. Under the Biden administration, the program earmarked $188.6 million for fresh, local produce for child care facilities already participating in the Child and Adult Care Food Program, which reimburses the centers for providing healthful meals and snacks.
Participating sites range from home-based ones serving up to 15 kids to large private daycare providers and programs connected to public school systems, such as Head Start and Early Head Start.
The additional LFS funding would have been a game-changer for the child care industry, Bloom says. But five months after the USDA expanded the LFS program to child care, the Trump administration terminated the program. The decision sparked extensive media coverage of the impact on schools and food banks, but child care didn’t receive much attention—because it had yet to receive any funding.
However, child care, an often-overlooked sector, could become a larger part of local food systems, Bloom says. Through a farm to early care and education (ECE) program at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, where Bloom also serves as assistant director, she tests and evaluates local food supply chains for child care that help create better markets for farmers.
The center then creates resources to help others replicate these systems in their own communities—for example, a step-by-step local food-buying guide for child care that offers guidance on understanding ingredient seasonality, where to find farmers, and how to order and incorporate local farm food on menus.
Civil Eats recently spoke to Bloom about her research, healthy eating habits for children, and how the child care sector can support small and midsize farms.
Dara Bloom visits Locklear Farms in Pembroke, North Carolina, which sells produce to a group of child care facilities as part of a farm-to-ECE program. (Photo credit: Bhavisha Gulabrai)
What are some of the ingredients of a resilient local food system?
In North Carolina, one of the things that has helped our local food system and issues of accessibility is a strong food hub network. If you look at our food system over the years, as things got bigger, we lost some local and regional food system infrastructure.
Food hubs are produce distributors, and a lot of them, especially in North Carolina, are nonprofits, and so they have a social mission. This includes working with small-to-midsize farmers who often need training to produce for a wholesale market, in terms of scale and [compliance with] food safety requirements. Many of our food hubs are selling to schools, and we’ve worked with them to increase purchasing for child care centers. That middle infrastructure along the supply chain really helps.
What role can child care sites play in our food system?
We know from the research how important early childhood is developmentally, in terms of education and emotional, social, behavioral learning. Those early stages are also important in terms of health and nutrition. It’s a chance to set children’s taste preferences early.
Research shows it can take anywhere from eight to 15 exposures to new types of fruits and vegetables for kids to develop those preferences. And if you are a low-income family, it’s hard to put food on the plate that you know your kid isn’t going to eat, eight to 15 times.
You want to give your kid something they’re going to eat, that is going to fill them up, and that they’ll love, especially if you’re on a tight budget and maybe have to say no to a lot of things. So, there is this opportunity in child care to do what maybe some low-income families wouldn’t be able to do, which is to increase that exposure.
Children learn about fresh fruit and vegetables with hands-on activities like making spinach smoothies and art projects. (Photo credit: Marcello Cappellazzi)
What challenges do child care providers face in buying and serving local food?
Over the years, there has been a shift to purchasing more processed foods or relying on canned or frozen foods, especially produce. There can be a lot of work to help those [child care] buyers look at their menus, understand seasonality, and find recipes to try new local products. They also need to figure out how to have the staff time, the skill set, and the equipment that’s needed to process local food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables.
Post-COVID, they’re struggling with staffing. We’ve heard stories about child care programs that will lose their cook and so they’ve got teachers or the director coming in to cook meals. I’ve seen reports that staff wages are so low that they’re often on public assistance themselves.
Finding local farmers and knowing how to approach them or work with them is also a challenge, since that takes extra time, which centers often just don’t have. Space and storage are another piece. I’ve visited some child care centers with kitchens that are smaller than my home kitchen, and they might be preparing a breakfast, snack, lunch, and maybe even an afternoon snack for 150 kids. In that situation, it helps to have pre-chopped fruits and vegetables.
Much of your work is focused on farm-to-ECE programs. What are they and how would the Local Food for Schools funding have impacted farm-to-ECE initiatives?
We see farm-to-ECE programs as having three components. One is local food procurement: sourcing from farmers and getting local food on the plate for meals and snacks. Two is experiential learning in the garden. And three is food-based learning, exposing kids to cooking in the classroom. There’s something about that experiential piece of being in the garden and experiencing the food in the classroom setting and learning about it. Then it’s on the plate, they’ve had those repeated exposures and are more likely to eat it.
When we started doing this work, we heard from a teacher at a child care center who said that parents would ask, “What’s going on? I didn’t think my kid would eat this [vegetable].” They’re so surprised when those behaviors carry over at home. We had a parent who said they went to the supermarket, and their kid was yelling, “I want broccoli!”
Our hope with the funding was to reach new child care programs and expand farm-to-ECE programming to reach more children and families.
Obviously, the funding never began, but farmers could have benefited, too. What can you say about the loss of that money for farmers?
This was an opportunity to introduce farmers to a new market, create interest, and train technical assistance providers at the county level. This assistance could help farmers with barriers to selling to the school system, such as the Good Agricultural Products certification, which can be hard for smaller-scale farmers because of the cost and paperwork.
“The child care market can be a great starting point for farmers who are interested in shifting toward wholesale.”
Also, the school system can be so large that farmers don’t have enough volume for it. Child care is not the largest market, but it can be a great outlet for a smaller scale farm that’s not going to be able to meet the demands of a larger market like the school system.
Child care can also be a great starting point, almost like a steppingstone, for farmers who are interested in shifting toward wholesale. The child care market gives them the chance to work with an institutional buyer while they build their own infrastructure, with the hope that maybe they’ll be able to scale up someday to serve that larger market.
How were you and other food-system players preparing for the funding?
The funding could only be spent on local food, so it had to go directly to farmers—which was a great benefit for farmers, but it didn’t cover any overhead, like administrative fees, for non-farmers. It was hard to find an organization with the capacity to handle that much funding without being able to hire someone or pay for someone’s time to manage the funds, distribution, and record-keeping that would come with it.
We worked with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture to do outreach to partners we thought could distribute the funds. We worked closely with Working Landscapes, which is a food hub that was taking a leadership role in organizing other food hubs around the state. They felt strongly enough that it fit their mission and would be such a benefit to themselves and other food hubs that they were willing to be the fiscal sponsor.
Where will you go from here?
Moving forward, we’ll continue supporting our partners with the resources we have, and then in the future we’re trying to have a plan so that if there is ever funding available, we will know how to best implement it in a way that supports all stakeholders.
We’re trying to continue supporting child care centers, farmers, and food hubs, and we’re hoping to organize regional meetups over the summer. We’re still trying to bring those partners—food hubs and child care centers—to the table. We are creating resource documents from our research, like a local food buying guide for child care centers.
The possibility to work on the program is still there. But sometimes it feels like a lot to ask of child care providers. If they’re struggling to get by, it can be hard to take this extra time and energy and find the funds to do this. But we also know that child care programs are dedicated to the health of the children they serve.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Op-ed: Through Acts of Solidarity, We Can Support Immigrants in the Food Chain and Beyond appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As a kid, I used to cringe when my mom would pull the car over on the side of the freeway. She’d spot something growing wild in the hills around Los Angeles and jump out of the car, searching for flor de izote, a white flower that’s part of everyday cooking in El Salvador, our home country. When she found some, my mom would take it home and cook it with huevos estrellados con tomate (fried eggs with tomatoes) or stir it into a cheese filling for pupusa.
As I grew older, I came to realize that this was my mother’s ingenious way of connecting to home, even as we were putting down roots in a new land. In this way, we built a life here, away from a dangerous civil war in our home country.
I grew up cooking alongside my family, and I saw firsthand how assimilation was wrecking our health. Not only were we lacking access to our customary nutritious foods, but everyone was working hard, too, up to 16 hours a day, which left little time for meals beyond fast food.
I went away from home for college, and one day, I got a terrible call: My dad had suffered a heart attack. I knew that stress and poor eating habits had finally taken a toll. I decided then to work to change the broken food system that had failed my family.
As executive director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, an anti-hunger advocacy organization, I am heartbroken to see the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy this kind of work, uprooting people and food systems along the way. Our food system should nourish people, with dignity, care, and justice. That means everyone. Immigrant families, food workers, and small vendors are not threats; they are essential to our communities.
Immigrants comprise two-thirds of Los Angeles’s food service workers, and nearly 80 percent of the industry’s workers are Latino. (Photo credit: LA Food Policy Council)
Empty Markets, Corner Stores, and Farm Fields
Immigrants play a vital role across the entire food system—from agriculture, food processing plants, distribution, and the service industries. They make up the labor force that produces, sells, delivers, and prepares our food.
In Ventura County, a major agricultural area north of Los Angeles, about 60 percent of the 255,000 agricultural workers are undocumented immigrants, underscoring how vital their labor is to local farming. As a result of the recent immigration raids there, the city of Oxnard reported worker absenteeism as high as 70 percent, resulting in unharvested strawberry crops and projected losses exceeding $100,000 per week per farm.
“These days, I find myself trying to explain to my little ones why families like ours are being torn apart. Why innocent, hard-working people are being pulled into vans by masked men without explanation or due process.”
The historic L.A. 7th Street produce market, which supplies the region’s restaurants and small grocers with fresh fruits and vegetables, has seen empty stalls and slow business, because workers and buyers aren’t coming.
Corner stores in South Central LA are quietly losing their regulars, too; people are afraid to shop, work, or even be seen.
I recently visited a small market in the Pico Union neighborhood, where a vendor I’ve known for years stood behind a table full of produce that would likely go unsold.
“No viene nadie,” she said—no one is coming—as she described what this major setback would mean for the financial wellbeing of her family business. They’ve since pivoted to offer delivery service for their regular customers.
In Los Angeles County, immigrants make up 66 percent of food service workers, and 79 percent are Latino. Without them, many restaurants, catering businesses, and institutions would struggle to function.
In neighborhoods where immigrant-run food enterprises thrive—like MacArthur Park, Boyle Heights, and South L.A.—recent ICE raids devastated business: at a central fresh-produce market, daily sales plunged from $2,000 to $300, an 85 percent drop in revenue as vendors and customers stayed away in fear.
Safety Nets Disappearing
All of this is happening while our safety nets are being stripped away. SNAP, called CalFresh here in California, has long been a lifeline for families trying to get by. Last year, nearly 5 million Californians relied on it to put food on the table. The average benefit was just $189 a month, while the cost of groceries for a family with children is often over $1,200.
This budget was a struggle for many households, even before prices started rising. Now, under the Trump administration’s latest policies, fewer people will qualify for CalFresh, and many immigrants are too afraid to even apply. I’ve heard from families who’ve stopped showing up to the food pantry because they’re worried their names will end up on a list. The people who grow and cook our food are quietly skipping meals so their children can eat.
It’s a painful irony: Immigrant workers who fuel this economy, who bring in billions of dollars through farming, restaurants, and food businesses, are going hungry. But these policies don’t just punish individuals; they also weaken the entire structure of our food system, from labor to access to dignity. When we push people deeper into fear and poverty, we all feel the ripple effects.
These days, I find myself trying to explain to my little ones why families like ours are being torn apart. Why innocent, hard-working people are being pulled into vans by masked men without explanation or due process. Why people are afraid to shop for groceries. Why they’re afraid to walk to school or go to work.
In South Central, where my tía lives, her neighbor, Rosa, works as a cook for a taco street vendor in the Piñata District. A single mother of a 1-year-old boy, she usually brings him to work. Her boss recently told her it’s too risky for her to come in. Rosa’s $110 daily income vanished, but rent didn’t, and her food needs didn’t.
The Republicans’ “Big, Beautiful Bill,” passed earlier this month by the slimmest of margins, will only make things worse. We’ll see more of Trump’s agents of chaos on our streets, tearing families apart, driving workers into hiding, and dismantling the systems that keep people fed.
How Citizens Can Help
These systems, built up over decades, are falling apart when they are needed most. The cost of living continues to rise, but under the current administration, programs like SNAP are under threat, along with funding for programs that help keep nutritious food on people’s plates.
In our organization, we’ve pivoted our Farm Fresh LA program, and we are quietly working with trusted community groups to deliver locally grown produce to families who are too afraid to show up in public.
It’s a daunting task, sneaking food to people in this powerful country of plenty.
But we are undeterred. And we are not alone. In fact, there is much that can be done. Citizens can help by buying from farmers’ markets that source locally and equitably; supporting CSAs (community supported agriculture programs) run by worker-led farms; purchasing from local small markets and family-owned restaurants; and choosing produce from farms that treat their workers with dignity.
These are not just economic choices. These are small acts of solidarity, and they add up.
Beyond that, we all need to create coalitions and movements with long-lasting impact. In 2017, for example, our organization led a successful campaign to mandate that all farmers’ markets accept EBT (the debit cards for CalFresh benefits). It was a big step toward making fresh, local food more accessible to low-income families, and it’s the kind of work that we need even more of now.
We need to strengthen networks, too, tying together community-based organizations with deep, trusted relationships in immigrant communities. Trusted organizations have been on the ground every day, providing food delivery, wage recovery support, legal navigation, and culturally rooted care to families who have been abandoned by the system. We must support and connect the work of organizations who offer legal, housing, and food help—including food delivery.
I now look back on my mother’s search for the flor de izote not with embarrassment, but with pride. As a mother myself and a citizen of this country, I recognize the hard work she put in as we built a new life. Immigrant communities in Los Angeles have always made a way out of no way. We root ourselves in the cracks—and we bloom.
But we shouldn’t have to do it alone, and we shouldn’t have to do it in fear. With care, collaboration, and compassion—even now, against these powerful forces—we can create a food system and a community that helps everyone thrive.
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]]>The post Op-ed: The Big Beautiful Bill Won’t Make America Healthy Again appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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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]]>The post From Bees to Beer, Buckwheat Is a Climate-Solution Crop appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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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]]>The post Amid SNAP Debate, Are Lawmakers Ending Waste and Abuse—or Dismantling a Safety Net? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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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]]>The post Can This Baltimore Academy Continue to Train Urban Farmers? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In southern Baltimore, not far from the sewage treatment plant of Wagner’s Point and massive coal mounds of Curtis Bay, lies a small farm of green grass, rustling trees, and rows of radishes, arugula, peppers, and more. On a cool afternoon in late May, groups of children and their parents pass by, cutting through a dirt path on their way to some other part of this historically industrial city. As they come and go, a small crew of farmers diligently tends to the crops and land.
This is the Black Butterfly Teaching Farm, run by the Farm Alliance of Baltimore (FAB), a membership organization of urban farmers, neighborhood growers, and those interested in learning more about both. The farm was designed to turn food-curious people into urban farmers, especially those who live or work in the “Black Butterfly”—the regions of the city to the east and west of the center, shaped like a pair of butterfly wings, where the city’s majority Black population lives.
“The folks that tore it apart have no intention of fixing it.”
These neighborhoods continue to grapple with a legacy of redlining, with impacts that persist today—from a scarcity of grocery stores to a lack of tree cover (and resulting “heat island” effect) to lower life expectancy in general, often due to environmental pollutants.
Urban farms, though, represent a tangible way for people to have “a sense of control and autonomy” over their health and environment, says Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). By enriching the environment and helping build a climate-resilient food system with economic potential, urban agriculture can unlock a form of empowerment for disadvantaged communities.
“It has real big community effects,” Quigley adds. “It’s not just helping one household in a lot of these settings. It’s helping hundreds of individuals in these neighborhood settings.”
Since 2021, the FAB has operated the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy, which launched the teaching farm later that year and has graduated two groups of trainees. But this year, the program won’t be offered, as it takes a step back to finish several construction projects on the farm and to adjust to funding cuts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
(Photo credit: Sam Delgado)
“I’m really looking forward to the full vision coming to fruition,” says Denzel Mitchell, FAB’s executive director and a former urban farmer himself, about the construction. He says they’re aiming to set up fencing, a greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen, a storage barn, and additional amenities for the community by the end of the year.
The Trump administration has cut many farming initiatives, including those addressing climate change and environmental injustice. That leaves programs like Black Butterfly—which aim to instill sustainable agriculture knowledge in residents who have long been blocked from land access—in limbo. Mitchell is skeptical that the funding challenges will be fixed any time soon.
“The folks that tore it apart,” he says, “have no intention of fixing it.”
Sustainable Farming in a Polluted Community
For years, the FAB had been having conversations about the need to offer people pathways to becoming urban farmers, says Mitchell, who drives an electric Ford truck to and from the farm. In 2017, the organization ran a feasibility study to understand exactly what the membership wanted. The response was “an opportunity to train,” Mitchell says. “That was the seed, if you will—no pun intended—of the training academy.”
There are other programs around Maryland that offer farm training. Mitchell himself trained with Future Harvest, which runs a year-long program for beginner farmers in the Chesapeake Bay region. But the city of Baltimore lacked an accessible, urban-scale training program.
People here needed something that was “a little bit beyond backyard growing,” and geared toward residents who wanted to develop a business, Mitchell says. “One of the things that we certainly understand as Black and Brown working-class folks is that you got to hustle. You got to have some little side gig.”
That entrepreneurial-environmental mindset has been a key part of the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy’s framework. Its training is intended to help people feed their communities and grow potential businesses, while also learning how to sustainably steward the land.
Done properly, urban agriculture can reduce the carbon footprint of food and can help lower the heat island effect that many major cities face (while also benefiting the social, mental, and physical well-being of urban farmers and gardeners).
“The customers are really excited that we grow food in Baltimore City. They’re excited that these farms are right in their neighborhoods.”
Baltimore is no stranger to climate and environmental hazards, and this is especially true for communities living in the Black Butterfly. The teaching farm, whose nearly 7 acres of land were provided by the city’s Department of Planning, sits just a mile away from Curtis Bay, a neighborhood that has been plagued by pollution from coal dust. Black Baltimorians are also overwhelmingly worried about climate change and its harms, too.
As someone with decades of food and farming experience, Mitchell is well aware of how the changing climate has affected farming. At the same time, he expressed frustration that well-known “climate-smart” techniques, such as cover crops, are sometimes incentivized for industrial farms while smaller farms receive less support. These practices, Mitchell says, should be expected, rather than accepted.
Growing Urban Farmers
Past training programs of the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy ran for nine months and began with in-person classes on foundational topics for a beginner farmer. Mitchell and other teachers guided participants through the basics, like crop selection, pest management, post-harvest handling, safety, marketing, and more.
After 12 weeks of classes, participants attended FAB’s field days, which connected them with local farms and food organizations to gain practical experience. Past field days included instruction on subjects like composting, beekeeping, and growing herbs. Students also gained hands-on experience from shifts at the teaching farm and other local farms.
Mitchell in the fields at Black Butterfly Teaching Farm. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)
Past trainees were also each awarded a $2,000 stipend and equipped with books to further add to their understanding of the food system and farming strategies, including Farming While Black by Leah Penniman, The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier, and The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook by Richard Wiswall.
Aria Eghbal was looking for a career change when she discovered the Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy. She was working as a medical assistant during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and was feeling burnt out and frustrated by the healthcare system. She applied to the program and became one of 10 people accepted into the first training program—many of whom were also at a career crossroads, she says.
The training program marked the beginning of Eghbal’s career in the food system: as a farmer, as a cook, and, since last December, as FAB’s lead staffer at farmers’ markets. “The customers are really excited that we grow food in Baltimore City,” she says. “They’re excited that these farms are right in their neighborhoods.”
Becoming part of Baltimore’s urban farming community was one of the greatest benefits of the academy, she adds. “We really do care about each other and want to see each other thrive and succeed, through this process of growing food and flowers and processing honey and all the different things that we do.”
The Challenge Ahead
The Black Butterfly Urban Farmer Academy has seen nearly 20 people graduate from its program. But the USDA funding cuts, particularly to initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion, have also eliminated funding prospects. To operate services like the academy and an upcoming incubator program that Mitchell calls “the launching pad for the next generation of diversified family farmers,” he projects it will cost roughly $300,000. “Fundraising has been incredibly difficult this year,” he says.
Crops in the ground at the teaching farm. (Photo credit: Sam Delgado)
Added to the difficulty is a political environment where some organizations are hiding their missions. One funder recently asked Mitchell if he was “woke but cloaked”—whether, in other words, the FAB would be hiding language around equity from its website and other materials, to avoid targeting from the Trump administration. “How am I supposed to do that?” Mitchell asked, annoyed, recalling the conversation. “I’m a Black man. My politics are literally on my face.”
Despite all this, Mitchell still has plans for the land where the teaching farm is located, including a pavilion, a playground, and community and commercial orchards. “This was just us growing food and then trying to teach people how to do it,” Mitchell says. “And doing it in a way that is environmentally beneficial. So now, we got to figure out just how to do that on our own.”
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]]>The post This Man Is Feeding California’s Incarcerated Firefighters appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In January, as hurricane-force winds caused wildfires to raze entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles County, more than 7,500 firefighters risked their lives to save people, pets, homes, and communities. Among them were an estimated 1,100 inmates from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. This month, as California’s traditional fire season commences with the dry, hot summer, many of those individuals will be back.
Incarcerated individuals have been on the fire lines in the Golden State since 1915, but their numbers have increased in recent years as wildfires have intensified. The Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), a Los Angeles-based organization working toward criminal justice reform, supports those firefighters with quality food unavailable in prison, serving more than 800 during the recent wildfires.
“The goal was to give them different meals based on what they would ask for but also give them the opportunity to experience different kinds of cooking.”
ARC’s executive director, Sam Lewis, himself formerly incarcerated, worked as a butcher in the prison kitchen while serving a 24-year sentence. Now, he and formerly incarcerated prison chefs active in ARC are advocating for incarcerated firefighters—also known as hand crews—and sharing with them a wide range of foods at the fire camps.
Thanks to donations from the public, local restaurants, and food companies, the firefighters battling the L.A. fires were provided pulled pork sandwiches, brisket sandwiches, cheeseburgers, and vegetables. This is a noted departure from the substandard meals people in prison typically receive, meals that often lead to chronic health problems.
ARC will be supporting incarcerated firefighters again this fire season, throughout the state, and Lewis will be there alongside, cooking and putting donations to good use. ARC would also like to see incarcerated firefighters receive significantly higher wages, supporting pending legislation that would allow them to earn a starting hourly pay of $7.25 during active fires and built-in annual wage increases.
These firefighters work long hours, comparable to conventional firefighters, and are vulnerable to suffering serious injuries. Yet most earn meager wages, starting as low as $5.80 per day. The least skilled of the incarcerated firefighters earn about $30 a day for completing 24-hour shifts during active emergencies, a sum critics say is far too little for the risks they take.
Sam Lewis, ARC’s executive director. (Photo courtesy of ARC)
Lewis spoke to Civil Eats about why his organization makes food a priority for these firefighters, and how improving their pay could transform their lives.
Why was it important to ensure that the hand crews had a wide range of foods during the fires earlier this year?
The public wanted to know how they could say thank you to these incarcerated individuals that were putting their lives on the line to save people’s property. So we came up with the idea, with the permission of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, that we could provide them with different meals across the board. The goal was to give them different meals based on what they would ask for but also give them the opportunity to experience different kinds of cooking.
One chef who prepared meals for the firefighters, Jeff Henderson, has an interesting backstory, one that gives him a personal connection to them. Can you say more about him?
Yes, Chef Jeff was the only formerly incarcerated chef that I knew of who came and cooked. He purchases the food, cooks it, and then after the meal is cooked, we reimburse him for the cost. He cooked what he calls “correctional chicken” [the fried chicken he learned to make in prison with all-purpose flour and seasonings] and hot link sandwiches with cheese, and then they had a dessert. The dessert was sent by the cookie company Crumbl.
Chef Jeff is self-taught. Cooking was his dream. He came home a long time ago and started his program [Chef Jeff Project]. He’s written a number of books. His food is incredible. He trains a lot of the kids who work in some of the hotels in Las Vegas, where he’s based. So, if you go to those hotels and you have amazing food there, a lot of times that’s the touch of Chef Jeff.
Although you’re not a chef, food service was one of your responsibilities when you were incarcerated. What was it like to be a butcher in prison?
When I was at Soledad [State Prison], I was the lead butcher for about two years. We prepped meals for about 6,000 people, so anything that had to do with meats, any dairy products, like cheese, was our responsibility. We prepped everything—roast beef, spaghetti and meatballs, hamburgers, chicken. It was our job to make sure that it was prepped, properly stored, and then sent out to the main line for people to eat.
Do you feel like food has improved in prisons or do you think there’s still a long way to go?
So, here’s the thing: It depends on the cook. We had a guy over the entire kitchen who was incredible. This guy would go out and sample food and bring it back. He was from Louisiana, so he was serious about what he would purchase. Each institution gets a budget, so his job was to find the food and spend his budget wisely. He really worked hard to make sure that we had great fresh fruit, and he wouldn’t get the processed turkey because his attitude was like, “If I’m not going to eat it, I’m not going to serve it to the people I’m feeding.” He would also make sure you had enough vegetables on your tray.
There has been some serious effort by the Department of Corrections to move to a healthier diet, because on the back end of having people incarcerated, the cost goes up as their health goes down. But if you feed people properly, their health can be maintained at a higher level, which causes the cost on the back end of incarceration to go down.
ARC supported incarcerated firefighters in January by making sure they had access to foods they wouldn’t normally eat and that they were properly hydrated while risking their lives. And you were inundated with donations of sports drinks for the firefighters?
There were just pallet loads of those coming in. We even had some of our ARC members transport some of those drinks to different base camps. There was so much that sometimes, it was like, “Could you stop donating?” [Laughter] It was a beautiful thing because it just shows the unity of Los Angeles.
“We should always believe in the human spirit and resiliency and understand that our job as a society is to help people become the best version of themselves, even when they’ve made bad choices and possibly have hurt people.”
Beyond food, ARC is seeking donations to help improve the lives of incarcerated firefighters overall once they leave prison. Can you describe the needs these funds will meet?
The donations are for scholarships for [incarcerated] firefighters coming home who want to continue to be firefighters. When a person comes home from incarceration and they go into a training center and become a certified firefighter, then they’re deployed. They can be deployed anywhere in the state, and they have to cover the cost of living, of moving. They have to get an apartment, first and last month’s rent, so that’s one thing that the scholarships will cover.
ARC is also advocating for recently introduced legislation to give incarcerated firefighters higher wages. If this bill passes, how might it change their lives?
The legislation, Assembly Bill 247, was introduced by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan. The money would go on the [prisoners’] books, so they could do what they would like to with it. In some instances, [prisoners] may have restitution to pay, so the state would take 55 percent of that. If they don’t have restitution, or if the restitution has been paid, then they can use it for the commissary. They could just save the money until they’re released also. Walking out of prison, normally, you have $200 in gate money. Ask yourself, how far does that take you, especially in today’s economy?
What is your response to members of the public who are concerned that incarcerated firefighters are being exploited?
The firefighter program is a voluntary program. You have to apply to go to the fire camps, and there’s a whole process that you have to go through, including medical clearance, in order to be accepted. The CDCR health care staff have to clear you—physically and mentally. Because if you think about it, it’s hard work.
Incarcerated firefighters also have to be what you call minimum custody status, which is the lowest classification of security. They have to have eight years or less on their sentence. Disqualifying things that can stop them from going to fire camp are convictions like sex offenses, arson, or [prison] escapes. Other things that are disqualifying are active warrants, medical issues, or high-notoriety cases.
If a person goes to a fire camp, it’s voluntary. If they get there and don’t want to continue, they don’t have to. They can go back without being written up. One of my young people that I mentored decided it wasn’t something that he wanted to do, and so he returned to the facility.
How long have you all been supporting incarcerated firefighters?
We helped establish the Ventura Training Center (VTC) in 2018. That’s the program where people come out of incarceration, go through the training, and become certified firefighters. With the passage of additional legislation after the implementation of VTC, people who are coming home now [after having trained to fight fires] can also get their record expunged so they can get their EMT license, which allows them to become municipal firefighters if they can find a job. We have three or four [ARC alums] who are working [as EMTs] in Orange County, and the rest work for CAL FIRE [wilderness fire protection].
Are you hopeful that public perception of the incarcerated community will change in the wake of the wildfires?
I would hope that this tragic event and the attention that’s being given to our incarcerated hand crews that support firefighters help the entire public understand that people change, that redemption is possible. We should always believe in the human spirit and resiliency and understand that our job as a society is to help people become the best version of themselves, even when they’ve made bad choices and possibly have hurt people. That does not necessarily make them bad people. That makes them people that have done bad things that can be corrected.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Heart of Dinner Delivers Hope to Asian Seniors, and a Boost to Asian Businesses, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Ten years ago, Yin Chang and Moonlynn Tsai hosted a supper club in their modest Los Angeles apartment. A dozen or so people—mostly friends of friends in the Asian community—would crowd around a custom-built 7-foot-long communal table and feast on dishes like char siu ribs marinated with whiskey or share elaborate hot-pot meals with greenmarket vegetables.
Tsai, who grew up in a restaurant family and is herself a restaurateur and entrepreneur, handled most of the kitchen duties, while Chang, an actor best known for her portrayal of Nelly Yuki on the hit show Gossip Girl, would entertain guests in the dining room.
As a young couple, the two found comfort in bringing together strangers over a home-cooked meal—a communal experience they felt was lacking in their lives at the time.
“Elders like us, if we have any pain or don’t feel very well that day, we cannot go out to get anything.”
“Dinners can bring together people of all cultures and also [present] an opportunity to talk about who we are as people, our heritage, and our love stories,” Chang says. “When we were deciding on a name for our supper club, we were trying to figure out what was at the heart of dinner, and the name ‘Heart of Dinner’ became so fitting.”
Admission to these dinners was free, but guests were invited to leave donations in a large urn on the table, with proceeds going to No Kid Hungry, a child hunger campaign that supports school and community meal programs.
Heart of Dinner’s core mission took a dramatic turn during the pandemic. Chang and Tsai, who moved to New York City in 2018 to pursue career opportunities, were deeply troubled by the wave of Asian hate crimes and xenophobia that swept across the city in March 2020. After a period of feeling helpless, they sprang into action to mobilize support for the elderly Asian community. They partnered with local senior centers to hand-deliver bags of culturally appropriate groceries and ready-to-eat meals, prepared in their tiny home kitchen, to Asian elders isolated by the mandated quarantines. Within months, the couple were regularly delivering over 1,200 meals per week across New York City.
As threats to the Asian community lingered, Chang and Tsai formally established Heart of Dinner as a nonprofit in late 2020, garnering support from private donors; local, mostly Asian-owned businesses; corporate sponsorships; and foundation grants. Today, the organization continues to deliver over 700 care packages every week filled with fresh produce and hot meals to Asian seniors across four of New York City’s five boroughs. Later this year they plan to expand to Staten Island, with fundraising efforts already underway.
In April, Heart of Dinner celebrated its five-year anniversary. While volunteers from across New York City celebrated the milestone, Chang and Tsai were in Los Angeles, where they’ve lived intermittently since January, coordinating relief efforts for Asian seniors displaced by the catastrophic wildfires there (see sidebar below). They believe their experience in New York over the past five years helped them more quickly mobilize recovery efforts there.
Heart of Dinner volunteers at the Lower East Side site organize deliveries for the day. (Photo credit: Adam Reiner)
“We did not see this coming,” Chang says, “but if anything, it was kismet, and poetic in [the] way that it reminded us of the heart of the mission and how necessary this work is, anywhere in the country.”
Delivering Hope to Harlem
On a frigid Wednesday afternoon in February, about a dozen volunteers met at La Marqueta, a Latin food hall in East Harlem, to pack 75 gift bags with groceries like firm tofu, Japanese sweet potatoes, bok choy, and bananas, along with plastic to-go containers filled with stir-fried pork, purple eggplant, and white rice prepared by a partner restaurant in Chinatown. All meals included in Heart of Dinner care packages come from local Asian-owned restaurants.
Each bag, destined for Asian seniors living in nearby public housing, was festooned with colorful, uplifting artwork by volunteers from across the city: drawings and paintings of birds, lanterns, fruit, flowers, and other Asian-themed imagery. “Heart of Dinner” was written in Mandarin characters on the bags, with a personalized note stapled beneath the handle.
The notes included simple wishes for health and prosperity written in each recipient’s native language—in many cases, messages one would expect a grandparent to give, not receive: “Make sure you drink water” or “Please eat well today.” Two of the bags had notes written in Thai; other Heart of Dinner sites also prepare notes in Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tagalog.
The volunteers at the East Harlem site came from all walks of life: college students, bartenders, musicians, physician assistants, and retirees. After loading the care packages into large stroller wagons, the team divided into small groups, traversing the neighborhood’s intricate web of public housing developments by foot.
The volunteers warmly greeted each elder at the door, wearing masks as a precautionary measure, and presented the bags respectfully with two hands. They inquired with genuine concern about each person’s health, as a grandchild would. Most conversations were brief but cordial and ended with gentle bows and exchanges of “xiè xie” (“thank you” in Mandarin) with the many Chinese recipients who live in the area.
East Harlem, which spans from 103rd to 125th street on the east side of northern Manhattan, is a predominantly Latinx neighborhood. But according to the most recent Census Bureau data, Asians now comprise about 9.6 percent of its population, up from only 5.5 percent in 2010.
Due to gentrification, many Asian seniors in New York City are being displaced from Chinatown, forcing them to relocate to neighborhoods like Harlem in search of more affordable housing. The Heart of Dinner founders stressed that this can be particularly isolating for many elders, because these neighborhoods often don’t have familiar Asian businesses that cater to their needs.
An elder in Brooklyn receives her weekly Heart of Dinner delivery. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)
In one of the high-rise public housing developments along the end of the route, a soft-spoken 73-year-old woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Xie extolled the virtues of Heart of Dinner through a translator. “I feel so thankful from the bottom of my heart,” she said of the weekly deliveries she’d been receiving for months. “Elders like us, if we have any pain or don’t feel very well that day, we cannot go out to get anything.”
Another elderly woman, whose husband is in his 90s, joked, “even our children don’t go above and beyond like Heart of Dinner does for us every week.”
Creating a Virtuous Circle
Although Heart of Dinner’s primary mission is to advocate for the Asian elder community, it also provides vital support for many Asian-owned businesses by partnering with local restaurants, wholesale grocers, and organic farmers. “We intentionally purchase from Asian-owned businesses wherever possible, which also helps to build economic resilience in the communities we serve,” Chang says.
In 2023, they began partnering with Choy Commons, an organic farm collective in the Catskills, to supply their East Harlem site with Asian heritage crops such as baby Shanghai bok choy and hakurei turnips.
“The reality of many Asian seniors living in food insecurity is painful,” says Nicole Yeo-Solano, co-founder of Choy Commons, “especially because so many of us were raised by our grandparents, and we know that many of their journeys have not been easy.”
Heart of Dinner also works with Asian-owned restaurants and bakeries across New York City like Saigon Social and Partybus Bakeshop on the Lower East Side, which provide hearty soups and scallion buns, respectively, for their weekly deliveries. They also purchase freshly made soy milk from Fong On, New York City’s oldest tofu shop, which opened in Chinatown in 1933.
Pei Wei, the co-owner of Zaab Zaab, a Thai restaurant in Williamsburg, has supported Heart of Dinner since the pandemic, and her kitchen staff continues to supply over 100 hot meals every week for the Brooklyn delivery site.
“I tell the chef to cook the vegetables a little longer so it’s softer for people who have sensitive teeth,” Wei says, “or to chop the meat into smaller pieces so it’s easier to digest.” Her restaurant also frequently hosts bag decorating sessions, where young children like Wei’s 10-year-old daughter are invited to participate.
“We’re very proud that every single meal we serve with our partners is paid for by Heart of Dinner, at least what the restaurant would be charging,” Tsai says. “So, they’re able to partake in community giving while also doing something that helps sustain their business.”
Finding Connection Through Community
For many volunteers, working with Heart of Dinner has helped foster a deeper connection to the Asian community and their own Asian identities. Professional illustrator Nancy Pappas began volunteering and helping decorate bags and notecards in 2020, after feeling horrified by violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in New York City during the pandemic.
Brightly decorated Heart of Dinner bags are filled with fresh produce and prepared meals. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)
Pappas is an adoptee who was born in Korea and raised by a white family in Kansas City, Missouri. Having struggled with her own Asian identity growing up, she credits Heart of Dinner with helping further her journey of self-discovery. Her experiences with the nonprofit even encouraged her to seek out her Korean birth mother, whom she met in person in 2019, and spend extended time living in Asia.
“To be able to give back to the community—even though as an adoptee I don’t always feel like I belong at times—gives me a place and a purpose,” Pappas says. She attends at least three bag decorating sessions per month at Heart of Dinner’s Lower East Side volunteer site.
Hong Kong native Zoe Lau, who works part-time with Heart of Dinner as a volunteer communications coordinator, speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandarin and spends several hours every week calling elder beneficiaries to confirm their weekly deliveries in their native languages. She began attending weekly bag decorating sessions in New York City during the pandemic to feel closer to her grandmother in Hong Kong, who she was unable to visit due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.
“Since I couldn’t fly back to see her, I went in every Wednesday as much as I could, keeping in mind that if my grandma didn’t have anyone around to look after her, I would be very upset,” Lau says. “I hoped we could be those other grandchildren for these seniors.”
To see Heart of Dinner in action, check out this video on their Instagram.
Founders Moonlynn Tsai (left) and Yin Chang (bottom right) with volunteers in Los Angeles, where Heart of Dinner has delivered more than 300 care packages to Asian elders after the devastating wildfires. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)
In January, Chang and Tsai were on their way to the San Diego airport to return to New York City after visiting family for the holidays. Then the news spread about the catastrophic wildfires unfolding across Los Angeles.
“It was like this déjà vu moment,” Chang says. “It brought us right back to [the pandemic in] 2020. We had the same thought: ‘Who is taking care of folks like our grandparents and aging parents who can’t always speak the language to ask for help or to get the resources they need?’”
They canceled their flights and drove two hours north to L.A., taking up temporary residence to mobilize recovery efforts. Without knowing who the recipients would be, they began decorating as many gift bags as possible, even pulling all-nighters to make sure they had sufficient supply.
As they did during the pandemic, Chang and Tsai canvassed local shelters and senior centers and scoured social media to find elderly Asian victims in need. Through a GoFund Me page, they learned of an elderly couple whose house burned down in the Altadena fires and contacted Allyson Eng, their granddaughter, who organized the fundraiser. After’s Eng’s grandparents lost their two-story, three-bedroom home near Eaton Canyon, where they lived since the 1980s, she raised almost $15,000 to help them rebuild.
Without a place to live, the grandparents were forced to crowd into Eng’s parents’ modest bungalow in nearby Duarte, along with her uncle and his family, who also lost their apartment in the wildfires. “Our house gets pretty crowded when there’s six or seven of us staying there at one time,” Eng says.
Allyson Eng with her grandmother Joan after she received a Heart of Dinner delivery in L.A. this month. (Photo courtesy of Heart of Dinner)
Her 82-year-old grandmother Joan used to spend most of her time in the kitchen of the home she lost in the fire, warming its white-tiled walls with the steam of her cooking. When the Heart of Dinner deliveries began arriving, she was delighted to find her bags filled with so many familiar Asian ingredients like bok choy and Chinese noodles, which she used to make chow mein with shrimp, eggs, and scallions for the grandchildren. Even Eng’s 88-year-old grandfather Joseph, who rarely cooks anymore, used the ingredients to prepare fried rice with greens, topped with ha mai (dried shrimp) and lap cheong (Chinese sausage).
Long after the wildfires were contained, Chang and Tsai continued to gather local friends to decorate bags and load produce and dry goods from Asian grocery stores like H Mart and Mitsuwa into the trunk of their hatchback. Leaning on their years of New York City experience, they phoned elderly recipients to coordinate delivery routes, sometimes as often as three times a week, eventually staging their operations at a friend’s art studio in the heart of the city. They sourced culturally appropriate prepared meals such as Cantonese-style roast duck and jajangmyeon, Korean noodles with fermented black bean sauce, from purveyors in the Los Angeles area like 99 Ranch Market and Paik’s Noodle.
Within months, the small team of 10 friends and volunteers delivered over 350 personalized gift bags to displaced elders from the South Bay to San Gabriel Valley.
But the work is far from finished. The couple has returned to California this month to resume deliveries, with the goal of reaching 1,000 total care packages for displaced seniors by the summer’s end.
“As we’re talking to more elders, they need long-term support, so it’s important for us to remain committed,” Tsai says. “For elders who have lost everything and are completely displaced, we want to make sure to provide them hope so they don’t feel alone or like they’ve lost community or love around them.”
The post Heart of Dinner Delivers Hope to Asian Seniors, and a Boost to Asian Businesses, Too appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Everything You Know About the Dietary Guidelines Is Wrong appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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.’ ”
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]]>The post Sean Sherman Expands His Vision for Decolonizing the US Food System appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Sean Sherman walks through an expansive commissary kitchen in South Minneapolis, his eyes lighting up with excitement. He isn’t taking in the kitchen as it is—dormant but well-equipped with an industrial smoker, a walk-in sausage-making area, and plentiful storage space. Instead, he’s seeing the future of his Meals for Native Institutions initiative, when the space is up, running, and realizing a long-term vision to introduce more Indigenous foods into the American food system.
Sherman, an Oglala Lakota tribal member with an unassuming demeanor, a soft smile, and a signature long braid hanging down his back, has endeavored to revitalize Native American food traditions since 2014, when he founded The Sioux Chef, a catering and educational enterprise. His focus is on “decolonized” food—made without Eurocentric ingredients such as beef, pork, chicken, dairy, wheat flour, and cane sugar—most notably at his acclaimed Minneapolis restaurant, Owamni.
“We’re scaling up our efforts almost simultaneously in Minnesota and Montana, and the goal is that we’re developing a model that works anywhere.”
There he’s become known for cedar-braising bison (flavoring meat with sprigs of the coniferous tree), chopping up plant medicines like ramps, morels, and sweet potatoes, and finishing off dishes with seasonings like sumac and sage. His Indigenous Food Lab (IFL), also in Minneapolis, is an incubator and training kitchen where Native chefs and entrepreneurs can access equipment and information from Sherman and other knowledge keepers.
Sherman still cooks at his restaurant, but these days, he has his sights set on a triad of initiatives that bring him closer to the goal of making the U.S. food system more inclusive and indeed more Indigenous. The opening later this year of an Indigenous Food Lab satellite in Bozeman, Montana, is part of that vision. So too is his cookbook Turtle Island (Clarkson Potter), which I coauthored, covering Native foodways across North America.
But in this moment, Sherman is most excited about Meals for Native Institutions, which will provide schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and community centers with large-format Indigenous foods.
“This model has such immense potential to have a huge impact on the way we eat, especially for kids and elders—and really everyone,” he says about the larger efforts to decolonize institutional food.
Realizing a Vision
This year feels like a full-circle moment for Sherman, who grew up eating government commodity foods—think canned beef and neon-orange blocks of cheese—on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. That tribal community has endured some of the most devastating impacts of European colonization and U.S. policies on Indigenous cultures, practices, and foodways, including the government-sanctioned slaughter of the all-important bison.
Sherman cooking at the Indigenous Food Lab incubator and training kitchen in Minneapolis. (Photo credit: Bill Phelps Studio)
Today, Pine Ridge has some of the highest poverty rates in the nation and lowest life expectancies in the world. For Sherman, a TIME 100 honoree and three-time James Beard Award winner, a return to Indigenous foods can address some of those marked inequities.
“Maybe down the road we’ll even be able to get some of these Native food products into the commodity food program, which so many rural Indigenous communities like the Navajo Nation and Pine Ridge still utilize today,” he added.
His mission to revitalize Indigenous foodways began with a yearning to learn more about his people’s food while also curtailing the marked health inequities tribal communities experience, including disproportionate rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. He’s done this through his nonprofit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), and through Owamni, and now he’ll have additional ways to move toward these goals.
Meals for Native Institutions will be housed in a newly acquired space that Sherman has named Wóyute Thipi (meaning “food building” in Dakota), situated along what’s known as the American Indian Cultural Corridor on Minneapolis’ Franklin Avenue, a cultural district home to several Indigenous-owned businesses, including a coffee shop and an art gallery.
The building will serve as NATIFS’ headquarters and feature a counter-service Indigenous BBQ restaurant dubbed ŠHOTÁ—the Dakota word for smoke—that’s expected to open later this year. Like Owamni, that public-facing eatery is meant to bring more meaningful attention to his big-picture goal.
“There is a huge need for culturally appropriate foods, especially in schools and programs serving Native people.”
Although the institutional foods initiative is still in the early stages, with Sherman actively fundraising to get it off the ground this summer, he foresees the well-equipped 4,000-square-foot commissary kitchen churning out a plethora of simply prepared, nutritious Indigenous foods. Early recipes include wild rice pilaf with dried berries; baked tepary beans lightly sweetened with maple syrup; and a three sisters soup that brings together nixtamalized pima corn, tepary beans, and delicata squash.
Much like the fare served at Owamni and planned for ŠHOTÁ, the meals created for schools and hospitals will be devoid of ingredients introduced by Europeans during colonization. Sherman’s team is working closely with a nutritionist to ensure recipes will meet established USDA nutritional standards for those settings.
“We know that the menus designed for the American school system aren’t great,” he said. “For example, pizza is somehow considered a perfect food because it covers the meat, grain, dairy, and fruit and vegetable requirements all in one swoop, but we know that pizza isn’t a perfect food for schoolkids. We’re not trying to replace the entire lunch program; we’re trying to create culturally specific components so there are options to build out menus using these recipes with at least one ingredient coming from an Indigenous producer.”
Local Indigenous advocates are cheering Sherman on as he expands his purview to better serve the robust Native community in the Twin Cities, estimated at more than 35,000 individuals. “There is a huge need for culturally appropriate foods, especially in schools and programs serving Native people, and I’m grateful Sean is supporting this with his new business,” said Indigenous Food Network Program Coordinator Kateri Tuttle. “There will always be a need to continue to expand services that provide our families and community with these important foods.”
Sherman wants to introduce more Indigenous foods into the American food system. (Photo credit: Bill Phelps Studio)
As much as this is about feeding people, it’s also about uplifting Native entrepreneurs and businesses. To that end, Sherman estimates that NATIFS currently funnels some $700,000 a year to Indigenous producers and farmers. He only see that growing from here.
“We want to ensure there’s always money going toward Indigenous food production,” he said. “I think we could probably double or triple our current purchasing power with this move into institutional food, where we’ll eventually be creating thousands of servings a day. So we’re not only addressing a need, but we’re also helping create a more sustainable system.”
Muckleshoot nutrition educator and food sovereignty advocate Val Segrest, who has collaborated with Sherman on past initiatives, emphasized the importance of initiatives like this.
“Efforts like this are a powerful reclaiming of space [and] story, and strengthen food sovereignty,” she said in an email. “By establishing Indigenous-owned food hubs in the heart of our communities, we restore pathways for cultural knowledge, health, and economic vitality to thrive. This is more than a building or initiative—it’s a beacon for Indigenous food futures, rooted in our values and nourished by our ancestors’ vision.”
Sherman is also eager to launch the satellite IFL in Bozeman, developed in partnership with Montana State University’s Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative, the Montana Indigenous Food Sovereignty Initiative, and the Human Resource Development Council of Southwest Montana.
Set to open this fall, it will be located in the Human Resources Development Council of Southwest Montana building and feature an incubator kitchen, a classroom, and a large warehouse designed to replicate the model he has developed in Minneapolis. Similar satellite IFLs are in the works in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Anchorage, Alaska—all intended to empower regional Indigenous chefs, entrepreneurs, community members, and organizations with professional equipment, culinary knowledge, and other support as needed.
For Sherman’s collaborators in Montana, it’s a welcome development. “First and foremost, the Indigenous Foods Lab is about revitalizing the kinship economy for the well-being of the people and the land; in the current climate, this work is more important than ever,” said Jill Falcon Ramaker, PhD (Bishkane Mishtadim Ikwe), director of the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative.
“In the past, our [Native] food system was sustainable for more than 13,000 years because of the networked work of Native people and reliance on the gifts of the land or our older-than-human relatives,” she said. “As we return to the land in a place-based food system, we must rebuild our community amongst Native nations in the region.”
But the impact of the forthcoming IFL goes beyond just the area’s tribal communities, explained KayAnn Miller, co-executive director of the Montana Partnership to End Childhood Hunger. She pointed to alarming state statistics that she hoped the IFL could help curtail: that about two in five Montana residents have two or more chronic diseases, and that about a third of Montana children have at least one chronic disease.
An entree from Owamni, Sean Sherman’s award-winning restaurant, featuring elk. (Photo credit: Scott Streble).
“As we know, chronic diseases often have a dietary component, which means we need to eat a whole lot better in Montana,” said Miller. “Indigenous foods—which tend to be whole and healthy with an emphasis on lean proteins and fruits and vegetables—are right in line with what we all need to eat to reduce health challenges like heart disease and diabetes, which are two of the top 10 causes of death in our state. I see the Indigenous Food Lab as a way for all of us to learn more about these good foods, how to prepare and cook them, and how to grow and eat more of them.”
For Sherman, it’s an opportunity to address the inequities he grew up with back on the Pine Ridge Reservation while also uplifting local Native communities.
“We’re scaling up our efforts almost simultaneously in Minnesota and Montana, and the goal is that we’re developing a model that works anywhere—the Dakotas, Alaska, Hawaii,” he said. “Not only does this give Indigenous communities a platform to talk about the true histories of their cultures and these lands, but it’s also building skills and creating jobs within our communities. This is the kind of food sovereignty we’ve always been working toward.”
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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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]]>Ariana Dolcine moved to Texas with two dreams: to establish a thriving farm with her partner, Kennady Lilly, and open a farm-to-table Caribbean restaurant celebrating her Haitian roots. In her vision, she would cook dishes with malanga, a starchy root vegetable, calabaza, a pumpkin-shaped squash, and other “cultural crops” that she and Lilly cultivated themselves.
In February, she opened Griot Gardens, her restaurant in Houston, going into business with her mother, a seasoned restaurateur. But growing food in Hempstead, a remote agricultural town outside the city, has proven tougher than she and Lilly anticipated, with numerous losses in the past year.
LGBTQ+ people in farming are over three times more likely to experience depression and suicidal intent and about two and a half times more likely to experience anxiety than the general population.
First came Hurricane Beryl, knocking down trees and two 50-foot sunflower beds that Lilly planted solely for the joy they added to her kitchen window view. Shortly after, the winds from a tornado-strength derecho damaged their well, and then the generator broke down, leaving them without water for six months. A rare snowstorm wiped out their winter greens just a few months ago. To add to their woes, a beloved cow and its calf died during labor.
Speaking about her mental health, Dolcine named isolation, burnout from the daily grind of farming, and the “heartbreak” of their repeated losses among her challenges. “I’ve felt really hopeless at a few points this year in a way that I haven’t felt before,” Lilly said, as she expressed feeling “lonely” and “depressed” while struggling financially. Living in a remote town, and in a world rife with homophobia, she and Dolcine never know if revealing their queer identity will jeopardize their safety, adding another layer of stress to their lives.
They’re not alone in this experience.
A study released last year by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign revealed that LGBTQ+ people in farming are “over three times more likely to experience depression and suicidal intent and about two and a half times more likely to experience anxiety than the general population.” According to the researchers, not conforming to the gender and sexuality norms of farming culture while navigating potentially hostile social environments increases stress and may lead to poor mental health outcomes.
For Dolcine and Lilly, community building and cultivating a sense of belonging are crucial for maintaining their mental well-being. In October, the couple hosted the “South Side Queer Farmer Convergence,” the Queer Farmer Network’s first gathering of queer and transgender Black, Indigenous, and people of color in Texas.
For three days, 50 farmers camped out at Lillyland Farm in Hempstead, invited to shift their focus from caring for the land to tending their own mental and emotional health. Dolcine and Lilly found the gathering “healing,” both for them and those who attended.
A lot has happened in the months since then that threatens to diminish the mental health benefits they experienced.
With President Trump back in office, multiple reports have called attention to the mental health risks for LGBTQ+ Americans amid his efforts to revoke their rights, signing executive orders that recognize only two sexes, end discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, restrict access to gender-affirming care, and attempt to erase queer and trans people from public life and history.
On social media, Trump’s newly appointed Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, praised the termination of grants meant to support queer and trans as well as BIPOC farmers and consumers, implying this funding represented “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
None of this is stopping Dolcine from organizing another queer farmer gathering this year.
“People are struggling in this line of work,” she said, highlighting the additional difficulties that queer Black, Indigenous, and people of color face in accessing farmland and resources. “I want them to be connected and know they’re not alone in this journey.”
Building Community in the Trump Era
In 2018, in the midst of Donald Trump’s first term, a group of friends in Iowa got together and created the Queer Farmer Network (QFC), a national nonprofit devoted to building community and reducing isolation for rural and queer farmers. That same year, they organized the first Queer Farmer Convergence, a now annual gathering informally known as “the QFC.”
It was created “to provide a space of respite for farming and rural queers who may experience isolation . . . and who may be particularly vulnerable to the mental health struggles well known to both farmers and LGBTQ+ community members,” its website states
The 2024 South Side Queer Farmer Convergence focused on rest and restoration for LGBTQ+ farmers and land stewards. (Photo courtesy of Lillyland Farm).
First held at Humble Hands Harvest, a worker-owned cooperative farm in the northeast corner of Iowa, the QFC has branched out over the years to include gatherings in Virginia, Michigan, and New Hampshire. The QFC took place at locations in Texas and Wisconsin for the first time last fall, both of which focused on bringing together queer farmers identifying as Black, Indigenous, or people of color—a change Dolcine suggested when she attended her first QFC two years ago.
Originally from Miami, Dolcine was living in Iowa temporarily, working as an independent insurance adjuster. That’s where she met Lilly, a Des Moines native who co-founded the now-closed urban farm Radiate DSM. “On a whim,” Dolcine joined her at Humble Hands for the QFC and found a glaring lack of racial diversity. Organizers told her the network had reserved one-third of tickets for BIPOC farmers, waiving their registration fees and providing travel stipends to attend the QFC, but had limited success.
To Dolcine, moving the gathering to a region with greater diversity and organizing a BIPOC-centered event where people of color would feel safe attending seemed like viable solutions.
But BIPOC gatherings had been a long-term plan of the Queer Farmer Network. Securing a grant for farmer mental health and well-being allowed the network to finance the gatherings and assemble a team to organize them. Dolcine joined that team and agreed to organize a QFC herself, naming it to reflect its location in the South and her own Southern origins.
On the first day of the South Side QFC, farmers hailing from Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, Florida, Tennessee, Atlanta, Iowa, Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey gathered at Lillyland Farm in a welcome circle that lasted “hours and hours,” Lilly said. As the farmers went around introducing themselves, Dolcine and Lilly heard many express gratitude for the chance to be on land where they could “be themselves and be queer,” not having to mask their identities or code-switch.
“It seemed extremely needed,” said Dolcine, who co-organized the event with Cyd Keel, a queer trans farmer and herbalist living in Memphis, Tennessee.
For the rest of the weekend, the group followed a loosely planned itinerary that included printmaking, natural plant dying, beading, and yoga while leaving space for spontaneous activities like a nighttime dance party around a bonfire and communal nap in a field. Although the event was held three weeks before the election, Dolcine felt it was important not to make it all about political or environmental crises or attacks on bodily autonomy.
“At what point can we turn that all off and just say, ‘OK, I deserve peace of mind,” she explained, fighting back tears. “I deserve not to have these things on my mind for just a moment. I deserve not to think about next month. I deserve just to hear the earth as it is: the water running, the birds chirping. People deserve to just be at ease.”
Brooklyn Gordon, a queer, Black preacher, licensed therapist, and new farmer based in Dallas, attended the South Side QFC not to counsel attendees but to be in the company of other queer folks. “What was most powerful was seeing love prevail,” she wrote in an email to Civil Eats. “We dreamed together of futures for queer farmers, queer families, queer love. We dreamed of being in community with one another again and growing . . . Regardless of the mental state that everyone may have come in with, we all left better.”
Gordon has observed in her therapy practice that managing the complex interplay of racial, gender, and queer identities presents “a constant challenge to being seen, valued, and safe.” From familial and religious beliefs to social conditioning and mistreatment, “it all poses a risk for mental and emotional health,” she said. Recent studies by The Trevor Project and the Center for American Progress echo this point: Mental health risks for LGBTQ+ people stem not from their gender or sexual identity, but from stigma and discrimination.
Like Gordon, Lilly was uplifted by the gathering and the attendees’ reassurance that she was still a farmer, even though her vision of abundance hasn’t yet materialized. “I cried when people were leaving,” Lilly said. “They are my family now.” From her perspective, “family, community, and chosen family” are essential not only for the mental well-being of LGBTQ+ farmers but particularly for LGBTQ+ Black women like her and Dolcine, who face the added stress of anti-Blackness.
Living Free on Black-Owned Land
Lillyland Farm is located in Hempstead, a town roughly 55 miles northwest of Houston, with about 6,500 residents. Hempstead takes pride in its history as the top watermelon shipper in the United States. But driving there on Highway 290 conjures an uglier history: It was here that 28-year-old Sandra Bland was found hanged in a jail cell three days after being pulled over and arrested by a Texas state trooper in 2015. Bland’s name became a Black Lives Matter rallying cry, with suspicions lingering about whether she died by suicide or at the hands of police.
The Lilly family’s roots in Hempstead, Texas, date back to the 1800s. (Photo courtesy of Lillyland Farms).
“I think about it every day,” Lilly said, sitting in her camper surrounded by lush starter plants. “There is not a single day that I leave the farm that I’m not on edge. Anytime a police officer is driving behind me, I am terrified.”
Lilly feels safest at Lillyland, a 32-acre parcel that’s been in her family for eight generations. She picks up a thick stack of paper, slightly curled at the edges, that she calls “The Lilly Bible,” as it lists every member of her family, all the way back to an ancestor who arrived from Africa in 1818.
When their ancestors were freed from chattel slavery, they came across a field of lilies and adopted the flower as their surname, rejecting the family name of those who enslaved them.
A local university conducted the genealogical research, though Lilly’s family knowledge also comes from oral histories. She learned from her great-uncle, who also lives on the farm, that when their ancestors were freed from chattel slavery, they came across a field of lilies and adopted the flower as their surname, rejecting the family name of those who enslaved them.
As Lilly walked the property, four adult dogs and six mixed-breed puppies ran behind her. She stopped for a moment to greet Corotha, a horned cow that lives on the land, before moving through the pasture. With each step, she shared the rich history of Lillyland, a legacy that dates to the Reconstruction era, when Black families, denied the promise of 40 acres and a mule, bought whatever land they could.
Based on county records, Abraham Lilly, Sr., acquired 10 acres from Leonard Waller Groce, his former owner’s eldest son, in 1867. His father, Bowie Lilly, bought several plots in the area, amassing at least 82 more acres in the town. But, at some point, the Lillys’ property shrank to 50 acres and then to 32.
“What I’ve heard is that one of my aunts missed a payment,” Lilly explained. “Back then, they were trying to take land from Black people anywhere they could.”
Kennady Lilly and Ariana Dolcine’s dog Sugar happily feeds her six puppies. (Photo credit: Nicole J. Caruth)
Lillyland Farm provided an idyllic backdrop for the South Side QFC, its thick, prickly woods gradually giving way to open fields where cattle graze in the sun. A large pond covered with lily pads sits at the heart of the landscape, a feature added by Lilly’s great-grandfather. A partially submerged boat at the pond’s edge, left there by the youngest of his thirteen children, reads “The Other Woman” on its side.
Lilly’s grandfather grew up on the farm but left Hempstead to work for the United States Department of Agriculture in Iowa and returned after retirement. After he died, he left two acres to Lilly’s dad, which she and Dolcine now tend. Lilly’s great-uncle wasn’t exactly welcoming when they arrived. “His first words to me were, ‘I know about your lifestyle and I don’t agree with it,’” she said, walking past his house. “He still makes a point to say that all the time, but now he loves me. I’m his favorite niece.”
Texas is known for its particularly hostile stance toward queer and trans people, with recent legislation reinforcing this reputation. The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking 88 anti-LGBTQ bills in Texas, the highest number of any state in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Trans Legislation Tracker shows 128 anti-trans bills in Texas, compared to 33 in Oklahoma and three in Louisiana, its neighboring states.
“I had it in my body and mind not to be gay here,’” Lilly said, reminiscing about the summer when she and Dolcine first visited Hempstead. “It just didn’t feel safe.” But she momentarily forgot and kissed Dolcine at the town’s annual Watermelon Festival in July. “The second we kissed, I heard someone [holler].” A cowboy came up to them and shared that he had a gay brother. “Just be yourself,” he told them. “People are gonna’ hate, but you have the right to be yourself.”
Making LGBTQ+ Farmers’ Mental Health Needs Visible
Researchers believe there are over 23,000 queer farmers in the United States, though the exact number is unknown. The USDA Census of Agriculture, taken every five years and considered a comprehensive count of farmers and ranchers in the U.S., doesn’t ask about gender or sexual identity. Without visibility, queer farmers’ needs go unrecognized.
“I really wanted to understand better what’s going on with mental health for LGBTQ+ folks and how might that be related to the environment within agriculture,” said Courtney Cuthbertson, who led the study of LGBTQ+ farmer mental health at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “I was kind of surprised when I was starting to tell people about this project idea: Some of the reactions I would get were, ‘I didn’t know LGBTQ+ farmers were a group of people who existed.’”
Cuthbertson’s research team received 148 survey responses from LGBTQ+ farmers in 36 states. About 7 percent lived in Texas. “Most participants were white,” the study said, with 58 percent identifying as queer and 38 percent as trans. From this data, they surmised that poor mental health experiences for LGBTQ+ farmers may be connected to, among other things, the family farm model.
The idea of “family” being defined as a married male and female is codified in the American Farm Bureau’s 2024 policy book, which states, “A family should be defined as persons who are related by blood, marriage between a male and female, or legal adoption,” excluding all other forms of kinship. The impact of this on queer farmers includes reduced likelihood of securing loans and other support necessary for their success and survival.
When the USDA attempted to broaden the gender and sexual identity options on its census, it encountered pushback. “The survey asks questions including whether farmers identify as transgender, the gender they were at birth, and their sexual orientation,” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley posted on X in 2022. “For Joe Biden, even farming is about advancing his woke agenda.”
Cuthbertson warned that their team’s survey didn’t ask about legislation but about LGBTQ+ farmers’ experiences in general. Still, “We’ve seen historic year-after-year increases in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation,” Cuthbertson said. “I think it’s a fair thing to say that when you hear a lot of negative things about a group you’re a part of, and then there’s legislation proposed, that is going to have a personal impact.”
Although the study found high depression and anxiety rates among those surveyed, somewhat encouragingly, suicide risk was “much lower” for LGBTQ+ farmers than for the general LGBTQ+ population. The research team suggested that future studies investigate whether agricultural work offers some level of protection.
Living the Dream and Finding Hope
On a busy Sunday afternoon at the restaurant Griot Gardens, a server enthusiastically recommends “really, really good” Haitian dishes like akra, a fritter made from malanga root, and D’jon D’jon, rice with black mushrooms, eagerly writing down orders on green tickets. After a short wait, she places a deep-fried snapper with its head and tail still attached on my table next to a glass of vanilla-infused lemonade topped with a fresh Johnny Jump Up flower..
“I deserve just to hear the earth as it is: the water running, the birds chirping. People deserve to just be at ease.”
The song “Sonia” by the Haitian Canadian musical group Black Parents streams from a large portable speaker as couples and families eat and chat across tables. A uniformed police officer who moonlights as a DJ walks to each table, striking up conversations in Haitian Creole while waiting for his to-go order
This is the restaurant Dolcine dreamt of when she and Lilly moved to Texas. She opened it in February in collaboration with her mother, Pricia La France, who cooks most of the food. “I’m hoping for a good harvest this year,” said Dolcine, who still aspires to grow all the vegetables for the restaurant. For now, she sources them from Miami and Haiti.
Dolcine runs the restaurant seven days a week, while Lilly gears up to launch a personal chef business and manages the farm, where she has planted eggplant, tomatoes, okra, cantaloupe, watermelon, blackberries, sweet potatoes, lemongrass, and a variety of medicinal herbs. Lilly arrived at the restaurant in mud-covered boots, pitching in to help wait tables. Reflecting on their recent struggles, Lilly said, “There are also good things: There is also beauty and hope.”
Plans for the next South Side QFC are slowly developing. Dolcine and Lilly say their biggest obstacle isn’t the political climate, but rather finding time to organize the event with everything else they have going on. “I try not to let these shifts in power influence my state of mind and cause me to be worried or scared,” Dolcine said. “If I want to do a QFC, then I’m gonna’ do it however I can do it.”
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]]>The post Oregonians Can Now Taste Local Maple Syrup–and Learn to Make It appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>From late November to early March, Ella Smoot can usually be found in one of two places: the forest or the sugar shack. Like all maple syrup producers, her winter is a rush of running sap—cold mornings tapping trees and warm afternoons boiling the clear, watery liquid down to a golden, viscous substance. Though sugaring equipment has evolved over time, the basic process remains unchanged, as it has been practiced for centuries by Indigenous peoples in northeastern North America, from New England up through New Brunswick in Canada.
What is unusual about Smoot’s work is not how it happens, but where. In her role as the executive director of the Oregon Maple Project, she is among the first to make maple syrup in the Pacific Northwest.
“It’s one of the founding reasons of the Oregon Maple Project: to make maple syrup with people.”
The Oregon Maple Project is based in the sugarbush of Camp Colton, an outdoor environmental education center located 45 minutes southeast of Portland. Its 85 forested acres, composed largely of bigleaf maples, as well as fir and cedar, are the traditional lands of the Molalla and Kalapuya people. Though some tribes historically used parts of the bigleaf maple trees for medicinal purposes, it is only in the past few years that the area’s residents have begun tapping the trees for sap.
Eliza Nelson, founder of the Oregon Maple Project, was inspired by her childhood growing up amid sugar maples on the East Coast. She produced her first bigleaf maple syrup in 2018 and founded the Oregon Maple Project two years later, with Smoot joining a year after that. Though thousands of miles from most sugar shacks, they are part of a growing group of bigleaf syrup enthusiasts in the region, actively supporting its continued growth—especially through their Sugaring Collective, which consists of 22 members, drawn together by an interest in local, sustainable food practices.
As international tariffs implemented by the Trump administration affect the flow of foreign imports into the U.S., this interest has taken on a new urgency. Approximately 70 percent of the world’s maple syrup is produced in Canada. While the U.S. produces the remaining 30 percent, our cravings outpace our supply—in the past decade, we have imported more than half of Canada’s total production of maple goods. As imports from Canada are currently subject to a 25 percent tariff, this may change quickly.
The Oregon Maple Project—which produced just 2 gallons of syrup this past winter—can’t come close to meeting national demand, but what the collective offers to its members is more than just a precious, sweet taste of the season: It’s an opportunity to form a more meaningful relationship with their natural surroundings.
Following her fourth sugaring season, Smoot chatted with Civil Eats about her experience as one of the first maple syrup producers in the Pacific Northwest, the differences between bigleaf and sugar maple syrups, and how the traditional practice of sugaring is changing with the climate.
How would you describe the Oregon Maple Project?
Ella Smoot explains to the participants of a sugaring workshop how the boiler is used to transform bigleaf sap into maple syrup. (Photo credit: Elena Valeriote)
We’re an educational nonprofit with the mission of inspiring experiential learning, community partnership, and connection to nature through the local production of bigleaf maple syrup. We offer a range of programs for all ages, including workshops to teach about native plants and field trips to get kiddos outside more. The heart of our organization is the Sugaring Collective, which brings together individuals and families in Northwest Oregon who have access to bigleaf maples and an interest in learning how to produce syrup.
How does the maple collective work?
People pay a fee to participate during the sugaring season, and we provide training, equipment, and support throughout this time. We have a group email thread where people are able to ask any questions, any time, like, “What should I do here?” People collect sap from their own backyards and bring it to a community boil, where we then boil it down into syrup.
What do you love most about making your own maple syrup?
The gathering and the community aspect of it! It’s one of the founding reasons of the Oregon Maple Project: to make maple syrup with people. During the days of boiling, it gets drawn out. It’s a lot of work, but the first boil is always the best day. Through this process, people volunteer in different ways—helping make sure the sap doesn’t start foaming up, chopping wood, adding wood to the fire, thawing sap, checking the tank so that we don’t burn the sap. After all that, we bottle it.
What are the differences between sugar maple and bigleaf maple trees?
Sugar maples are native to the eastern United States and parts of Canada, while bigleaf maples are native to the Pacific Northwest. We usually tag bigleaf maples in the spring and summer, which is when you can identify them using the flowers and leaves (which are bigger than sugar maples’). We also look at the symmetry of their branching patterns.
Steam rises from the Oregon Maple Project’s sugar shack at Camp Colton as members of the sugaring collective oversee the boiling process, reducing the sap from local bigleaf maple trees down to a dense, flavorful syrup. (Photo courtesy of Oregon Maple Project)
Both are used for syrup, but there are some key differences. Sugar maples thrive in colder climates, where they have more consistent freeze-thaw cycles, and are known for producing sap with a higher sugar content, around 2 to 3 percent. This makes the sap easier to boil down into syrup. In the Pacific Northwest, we have less predictable freeze-thaw weather patterns, and the sap of bigleaf maples has a lower sugar content—about 1 to 2 percent—so we need more sap to produce the same amount of syrup.
What does bigleaf maple syrup taste like, compared to the sugar maple syrup most of us are familiar with?
Bigleaf maple syrup tends to be darker than the amber color of the sugar maple syrup most people are used to. Its flavor is usually described as richer, with a hint of butterscotch and a floral undertone.
We try to boil it to all the same properties of traditional syrup, which is sweet and dense because it has to be 66.7 percent sugar. We make sure ours is that percentage of sugar. It’s hard to get there because it’s really scary to be close to burning it when you’re getting to those higher density sugar levels. But what we found is that because there’s less sugar content in our sap, we need to boil it for longer, which gives it a darker color, plus a more molasses-y flavor.
Have Indigenous traditions connected to bigleaf maple trees or sugaring informed your practices at Oregon Maple Project?
Definitely, and moving forward, a big goal of ours is to figure out how to collaborate more with local Native people. Eric Jones (a professor at Oregon State University and a leader of the region’s bigleaf maple syrup movement) has been reaching out to Native communities trying to figure out more about the local history around bigleaf maples.
Buckets are affixed to bigleaf maple trees to capture the sap, which will then be turned into syrup at the nearby sugar shack. (Photo credit: Elena Valeriote)
For us, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass is really inspiring, especially the chapter on tapping maple trees. In our workshops, we try to share what we know about Native practices, particularly those from the East Coast, where maple sugaring traditions have been passed down for generations.
We follow Honorable Harvest principles, which means taking only what is given, using everything we take, showing respect for the environment, and leaving something behind in return. For example, to make sure we are respecting the trees, we wait until their leaves are fully off at the beginning of the season before we tap. Then, we only tap them one spile per foot of diameter and we’re not tapping all the trees in the area.
We’re also taking a really small amount of sap compared to what the tree actually creates and we try to be super-duper clean so that bacteria doesn’t grow. We remove all the taps once the trees start budding so that they have all of their energy go towards flowering and making seeds.
In terms of giving back, I think it’s the way we’re educating people about how to practice tapping sustainably. Overall, research on the East Coast has shown that sugaring is really sustainable, and there is more research being done at Oregon State University to evaluate if it impacts the lifespan of a tree at all. They’ve done samples on trees that have been tapped thousands of times on the East Coast, and it hasn’t led to anything showing that it disrupts its ability to live a long, healthy life.
How is producing maple syrup different in the Pacific Northwest as compared to the Northeast? Has climate change impacted the possibility of producing maple syrup in these two regions?
The sugar maple industry in the Northeast has a shorter season. Theirs lasts about six weeks in the spring after the deep freeze. For us, it’s late November or early December—whenever the first freeze is—through early March. And while their temperature patterns are more reliable and they’re working nonstop, we’re on and off, paying attention to the weather, collecting whenever there’s a freeze-thaw, then freezing all of our sap, because we don’t usually have enough for a boil. We have to do a lot of cleaning of all of our materials, because when there’s nothing flowing and it gets really warm during the winter, that’s a perfect place for bacteria to grow.
The maple syrup industry in general is interesting because there are a lot of small farm owners and woodland owners, and we serve people with all different political identities. Unfortunately, climate change has become a political identity.
At the Oregon Maple Project, we are curious about how the warming climate will impact the bigleaf maple trees. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how sugar maples are going to start walking up to Canada and colder regions because they really like cold. My inkling is that bigleaf maples are really resilient and they’ll stay here, but as the climate gets warmer, we won’t be able to make as much syrup because we need the freeze-thaw cycle for the sap to run.
Can you describe your work at the start of the sugaring season, and then a typical day when everything is in full swing?
The beginning of the season in November is focused on getting all of our systems up and running, developing curriculum for our educational programs, setting up the equipment for the sugaring season, and waiting for that first freeze.
Then, throughout the sugaring season, from December through March, it’s really just chaos. I’m running programs—we do two field trips every week and workshops on the weekends—but also supporting the Sugar Collective, plus collecting sap and processing it through a reverse osmosis system. Sap is made out of water and sugar, so when you run it through reverse osmosis, it’s separating out the water molecules and the sugar molecules. This allows us to freeze a higher concentrate of sugar sap and that lessens the amount of boiling time that we need to get rid of the water and turn it into syrup.
What does the future hold for the Oregon Maple Project?
We’re hoping to connect with more local Native communities to learn more of the history of this area, to keep growing the educational piece of our programs, and continue sharing the joy of making maple syrup from bigleaf maple trees.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post Op-ed: What It Will Take to Ban Ultra-Processed Food in School Meals appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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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]]>The post How One Milwaukee Food Bank Is Handling the Drop in USDA Funding appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>For months, Matt King kept an eye on federal food aid policies. He also stayed in constant contact with Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services, which, among other things, manages food disbursements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). King is the chief executive officer of Hunger Task Force, which operates a food bank, a 280-acre farm, and other aid programs in Milwaukee, providing nutritious food to more than 50,000 people every month in Wisconsin’s most populous city.
In particular, he was tracking available food distributions from the Emergency Food Assistance Program, or TEFAP. TEFAP is a federal program that provides food assistance to people with low incomes, often by supplementing food banks. An affable, soft-spoken advocate for nutrition, King was planning on the TEFAP distributions to stockpile food supplies heading into summer.
“Over the past year, we have experienced a 35 percent increase in visits to local food pantries.”
Suddenly, in late March, those TEFAP distributions were canceled. There was no formal communication around the cancelled disbursements, amounting to $2.2 million in Wisconsin, he says. They were just no longer available. Hunger Task Force lost five full truckloads of food, including canned chicken, cheese, milk, and eggs, along with other deliveries of turkey breast, chicken legs, pulled pork, and pork chops. More than 300,000 pounds of food, worth $615,000, was gone. Nationwide, a total $500 million allocated for TEFAP had been cut, leaving many food banks scrambling.
It was the second blow in March to the nation’s food safety net, as the Trump administration continued sweeping cuts to federal programs and funding. Hunger Task Force and other food banks were already coping with the loss of $500 million from the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation. The CCC oversees the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which provided funds that allowed King to purchase fresh food, especially produce, from local farmers.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has said that the USDA is cutting funding allocated during the Biden administration that is excessive or unnecessary. In an April 3 letter to Senator Amy Klobucher (D-Minnesota), the ranking member of the Senate’s Committee on Agriculture, Rollins said the Biden administration had “inflated statutory programs with Commodity Credit Corporation dollars without any plans for long-term solutions, and even in 2024, used the pandemic as a reason to make funding announcements.”
Matt King, CEO of Hunger Task Force, on a 208-acre Hunger Task Force Farm in Franklin, Wisconsin, which offers a unique source of fresh produce for the community. (Photo courtesy of Hunger Task Force)
During trips to Pennsylvania and Arkansas last week, Rollins said that states currently have more than enough funding for programs like TEFAP and that the cancelled funds were extra distributions that should have ended with the pandemic. “The money is there,” she said, and going forward the programs will be “more effective, more intentional.”
In fact, food banks are facing major shortfalls from USDA cuts, with a combined loss of $1 billion from cuts to LFPA and TEFAP.
Far from Washington, D.C., King’s Hunger Task Force, along with food banks across the country, faces drastic cuts to programs and funding, even as the cost of living, including food, continues to climb.
Civil Eats recently spoke with King to learn the extent of the cuts—and how his organization plans to move forward.
How will you close the gap in food deliveries created by the cuts in federal funding?
It’s been a challenge, and especially given the short notice. One of the real problematic aspects of the cut to the LFPA program, specifically, was that there didn’t seem to be much of a consideration for the impact on the small businesses and the impact on the farmers who were operating under the pretense that the program was continuing for the upcoming growing season.
Hunger Task Force lost five full truckloads of food, including canned chicken, cheese, milk, and eggs.
Many of them had already gone out and purchased the supplies and essentially made financial commitments, only to have the rug kind of pulled out from underneath them. Many of them had already planted their seeds and had started their seedlings for the upcoming growing season. So, for us, it was talking to some of our trusted, long-time donors and explaining the situation.
Our community of donors is also very much committed to local agriculture and supporting growers and producers, so they were able to help us to fill that gap.
What will the TEFAP interruption mean for the people of Milwaukee who have been counting on food banks?
Well, over the past year, we have experienced a 35 percent increase in visits to local food pantries. Right now, across all of our programs, we’re serving over 50,000 people every month, and over the last five years, just here in Milwaukee, the effects of housing and rent increases have been really acute.
We’ve experienced an over 30 percent increase over five years in average rent. When you add all these things together—a dramatic increase in average rent, the increase costs of living, particularly around groceries, as well as then the end of many of the pandemic-era benefits—all these things have contributed to a pretty stark increase in need. So, these cuts come at a really challenging time.
We currently have strong community support and enough inventory to make sure that our network of food pantries stays stocked.
But if the need continues to increase at the rate that it has been, there does become a tipping point. We’re about a year out from a point at which a continued increase in need would need to be accompanied with an increased level of food inventories to be able to keep up.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has said these cuts were made because the additional funding to these programs was “unnecessary.” How do you respond to that?
These particular shipments that were canceled were authorized because of the dramatic increase in need that food banks around the country have experienced. A lot of that is due to the increased cost of living that people around the country are experiencing, in particular housing, but also groceries. These shipments were a necessary part of supporting the food banks’ capacity to meet that growing need.
During the first Trump administration, when similar tariffs were enacted, the USDA purchased a lot of food to stabilize commodities and to stabilize food markets and food pricing. Right now, we’re taking a measured approach and purchasing some items, but also monitoring, to see whether or not similar investment from the USDA will be made to support producers who might be affected by the current tariff situation.
Can you describe the relationships that you’ve built with local farmers due to some of the increases in this support and funding? How do you think that those relationships are going to be impacted by these cuts?
These programs have been vital for our ability to provide access to healthy food, but they’ve also been vital for the farmers that we partner with, and we’ve been able to forge some really meaningful connections and relationships with producers here in our state. And those relationships will continue, because those weren’t contingent on a funding source for many of the farmers. They not only have appreciated the market for their products, but also the ability to see their products going to help people in need. So they don’t want to see that go away.
Fresh produce at emergency food network partner South Milwaukee Human Concerns. (Photo courtesy of Hunger Task Force)
As we all know, there’s a lot of risk that exists within farming from one year to the next, and having the security of some of these contracts has really benefited American agriculture and a lot of American small businesses. So, from our perspective, these programs are not only vital for the access to healthy food for people in need, but also really vital to our economy.
Because our commitment and partnership and friendship with our local producers here in Wisconsin runs so deep, it was no question about whether we were going to continue that programming, so we have honored those commitments, essentially with our own version of the LFPA program.
What are the ways that farmers or members of the public can help their local food banks?
Well, food banks around the country are reliant upon the generosity and compassion of their community, and that includes people giving of their time to volunteer, people giving of their funds to help the organization run and to make food purchases where needed, but then also donations of food. So we would encourage people to find a way that makes sense for them to get involved with their local food bank.
For farmers, whether it’s the possible upcoming farm bill process or whether it’s the current federal budget negotiation and reconciliation that’s happening at the Ag Committee level right now, farmers have an opportunity to reach out to their federal legislators to let them know that as constituents, they support these [LPFA and TEFAP] programs being prioritized and invested into.
I think that that’s the most impactful way they can get involved. We’ve done visits with our legislators, and it’s been our food bank and the farmers together really demonstrating our mutual support for programs like this.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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]]>The post At These Grocery Stores, No One Pays appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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.”
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]]>The post Hawaiian Taro Takes Root in Oregon appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation story, the goddess Ho‘ohōkūkalani gives birth to a stillborn son, who is buried in the fertile soil. In her grief, she waters the soil with her tears, and a sprout emerges, becoming the first kalo plant. This plant nourishes her second-born son, Hāloa, the first Native Hawaiian.
For Native Hawaiians, kalo, also known as taro—a tropical plant prized for its starchy, nutritious, rootlike corm as well as its leaves—is not just a traditional food source but an ancestor, symbolizing a lasting and reciprocal connection to land. As a staple crop, kalo has sustained Pacific Islander cultures for generations.
Especially for those who had left the island many decades earlier, it was monumental to see kalo being planted in Oregon.
Now kalo has sprouted thousands of miles from its ancestral home in the Portland metropolitan area, where a growing Native Hawaiian population resides. The land for the garden—or māla, in Hawaiian—started with just six square feet but has expanded exponentially, with multiple locations. What these gardens produce is more than just food and a bond with Indigenous culture; it is a thriving community.
“We give a safe space for our Hawaiian families,” said Leialoha Ka‘ula, one of the garden project’s founders, describing its greater purpose. “It [is] also food sovereignty, that relationship to ʻāina, or land. It’s a place of healing.”
Ka‘ula, like many Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI), left the islands due to the high cost of living there, combined with low wages and lack of jobs and housing. It’s part of a pattern that followed the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and declaration of statehood by the U.S. in 1959. Then as now, emigration is fueled by unaffordable living costs, low-wage jobs, and a housing crisis driven by tourism, luxury development, and an influx of mainlanders.
In 2020, the U.S. Census reported that, for the first time, more Native Hawaiians live in the continental U.S. than they do in Hawaiʻi, with Oregon having nearly 40,000 NHPI residents. Many in the diaspora long for stronger ties to their home and cultural identity.
According to Kaʻula and others, the relationship with kalo is binding, and without it, Native Hawaiians lose vital connections to their culture and mana, a Hawaiian term for spiritual and healing power. But growing kalo is not as easy as just planting it in the ground. Cultivation took years of effort and help from multiple hands.
Land Access and Indigenous Blessings
Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC) Executive Director Leialoha Kaʻula demonstrates the art of making laulau with fresh kalo leaves from the club’s māla, or garden. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
Born on Oʻahu and raised on Hawaiʻi Island, Kaʻula was steeped in Hawaiian culture through her family. Her grandmother introduced her to the Hawaiian language when she was little. Wanting to continue those studies, she attended a Hawaiian immersion charter school, where she also learned cultural practices like hula, chanting, and the traditional farming methods of her ancestors, including how to grow kalo.
Kaʻula came to the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s to study psychology at Washington State University and eventually settled in Beaverton, Oregon. From her first days in Washington, Kaʻula dreamed of growing kalo there, but accessing land was a challenge.
Meanwhile, she started a hula academy in Beaverton to help carry on the traditions of her elders. She also helped found Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC), one of several such clubs across Hawaiʻi and the continental U.S. promoting Native Hawaiian culture, advocacy, and community welfare after the dissolution of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Kaʻula envisioned growing kalo through the Civic Club as a part of a new youth program, but it wasn’t until she met Donna Ching, an elder at the hula academy, that plans began to take shape. Ching, also Native Hawaiian, served on the board of the Oregon Food Bank (OFB), which has gardens where immigrant communities can grow culturally important foods. Ching helped secure a modest plot for the youth program in the Eastside Learning Garden, in Portland—and the kalo project was born.
The next step was to ensure a blessing for the māla. KALO HCC invited Portland-area Indigenous community organizations like the Portland All Nations Canoe Family and Confluence Project to request permission to grow native Hawaiian plants on local land.
The ceremony and the planting took place in August of 2021. After chanting and prayers, NHPI youth from the club tossed in handfuls of rich, black soil and planted dozens of baby kalo, already sporting several tender, heart-shaped leaves. The elders in the community watered the bed. Especially for those who had left the island many decades earlier, it was monumental to see kalo being planted in Oregon.
The First Harvest
In the first season, KALO HCC harvested 25 pounds of kalo leaves, called lau, which are used for food, medicinal purposes, and ceremonies.
For her role in procuring the land, Ching was given the first harvest to make lau lau—a traditional Hawaiian dish of fatty pork or butterfish along with vegetables, all wrapped in kalo leaves and steamed. The kalo leaf softens in the process, adding an earthy flavor. The leaves are also an ingredient in other dishes like squid lūʻau. The roots, technically called corms, were left to keep growing beneath the soil; they are used to make poi, a nutritious mash that has been a dietary staple for centuries.
Siblings bond while caring for the land, or ʻāina, during a spring “Community Māla Day” on April 22, 2024. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
“I haven’t made lau lau since I left home, because [lau is] really hard to find here,” Ching said. “When you think about how more of us now live on the big continent than in Hawaiʻi, if we move and we don’t take some of that ‘ike—that knowledge—with us, or find a way to grow [it], we’re going to lose it.”
Due to the garden’s success, Oregon Food Bank allotted an additional 75-square-foot space to plant the following year. KALO HCC harvested 500 pounds of leaves, most of which were distributed to community members for free. They were also able to hire one paid staff member to help take care of the māla, thanks to a partnership with Pacific Climate Warriors, an international youth-led grassroots network led by Pacific Islanders to address climate change.
Now the garden produces other crops, too, including carrots, mānoa lettuce (a variety developed in Hawaiʻi), bok choy, and kale, all of which are eventually given to community members. The garden holds weekly work parties, and some 160 volunteers from diverse backgrounds help out over the course of the year, raking mulch, weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting.
One volunteer drives monthly from her home in Olympia, Washington, nearly two hours away.
“It’s worth every mile,” said Nicole Lee Kamakahiolani Ellison, who also serves on the board of KALO HCC. Ellison left the islands when she was 8 years old and grew up in Las Vegas. She is is a project manager with IREACH at Washington State University, a research institute that promotes health and healthcare equity within Indigenous and rural populations.
Ellison got involved with the garden a year ago while working on a project with Ka‘ula about Native heart health. She said she didn’t believe kalo could be grown in Oregon’s climate.
A KALO HCC member harvests garlic from the garden in July. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
“You go down [to the garden] and you’re not in Portland anymore,” Ellison said. “It’s like you’re somehow transported back home on some weird magic carpet ride.” She added that a bonus of volunteering is connecting with the kūpuna (elders) who also volunteer, as well as hearing the sound of pidgin, Hawai‘i Creole.
Caring for Kalo
On the islands, kalo, a canoe crop —one of the plants carried to Hawai‘i by the first Polynesian voyagers—is grown in both dryland (or upland) and wetland environments, the legacy of sophisticated traditional irrigation systems that ran from the mountains to the sea in land divisions called ahupua‘a. (Those traditional systems for kalo, once central to Hawaiʻi’s agriculture, were displaced by private land ownership, the sugar industry, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom.) Wetland taro is routinely flooded; dryland kalo doesn’t require that, but needs regular rain and humidity. Optimal temperatures for kalo are in the 70 to 90 degree range.
Planting in the Portland dryland garden typically starts in the spring, with the kalo leaves and corm maturing in about nine months. The garden uses primarily an Asian strain of kalo, but also includes descendants of cuttings from Oʻahu, Mauʻi, and Hawai‘i Island. The kalo in the Oregon dryland garden is adapting well to its new location and growing strong.
Ka ʻAha Lāhui O ʻOlekona Hawaiian Civic Club (KALO HCC) members transplanted baby kalo plants at Pacific University’s garden, preparing the garden for winter, last October. (Photo courtesy of KALO HCC)
Kaʻula said the club members have learned they can grow garlic to keep the soil warm, which accelerates the kalo’s growth in the spring. They also leave the kalo corm, the starchy root of the plant, in the ground during the winter, where it multiplies. One root can quickly turn into 10, she said. For now, the group is electing not to harvest the corms so that they continue to grow.
This winter, they put a dome over the kalo plants to see if they would last through the freeze—which they did. Now the KALO HCC can have kalo year-round, just like in Hawaii.
Native Hawaiian Foods and Health
The success of the māla comes at a time when it may be needed most. Recent data shows that nearly 60 percent of the NHPI in Oregon lives below the poverty line. The food bank has taken hits from the recent federal funding cuts, losing 30 truckloads of food due to the USDA’s food-delivery cancellations across the U.S., and said they have already seen a 31 percent increase in visits to their locations compared with the previous year.
“Our [cultural] diets are healthy, but food is expensive, and when it’s expensive, many move away from that diet to something more affordable—and a lot of that affordable food is not healthy for us,” Ching said.
“Everything that our lāhui (community), our aliʻi (royalty), and our kūpuna (elders) did was never about one person. It was about, how does it trickle down? How does it create a unified community?”
In October 2023, KALO HCC published an academic paper about their Portland kalo project, describing how establishing the māla in the continental U.S. connected people to the land, improved their mental health, and created a sense of place for Native Hawaiian community members. The paper also suggests that the garden, through cultural foods and practices, might improve health outcomes overall.
“Culture is health, is what we’re trying to argue,” Kaʻula said. “Sometimes people say that traditional healthcare aligns with the Western models, but we’re trying to say no, we want Indigenous healthcare. Can we get the FDA to approve poi as medical support? Can we get the FDA to approve kalo as a supplement, and how can we ensure better access to all of that?”
KALO HCC is currently conducting another study, this time through clinical trials, in hopes of finding the connection between traditional foods, physical health, and emotional wellbeing. For this study, they are working with Oregon Food Bank and Oregon’s Pacific University to collect and analyze data. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders living in the U.S. have some of the highest rates of heart disease, hypertension, asthma, cancer, obesity, and diabetes in comparison with all other ethnicities. Research ties these poor health outcomes to colonization and historic inequities, multigenerational trauma, and discrimination, as well as poverty, lack of housing, education, and environment.
“[From] what we see in other Native communities, their views of food and how it relates to health is huge,” said Sheri Daniels, the CEO of Papa Ola Lōkahi, a Native Hawaiian health organization that advocates for the well-being of Native Hawaiians through policy, research, and community initiatives. Daniels said that providing data can be challenging, but offering resources and opportunities for people to improve self-esteem and strengthen cultural identity are always possible, and can yield insights, too.
“The cool thing about kalo is that you get to build community, you get to meet and see others who might be in the same [emotional] space as you, trying to establish that bond of what it means to be Hawaiian,” she added.
As of this March, new kalo plants had already started sprouting through the soil. They will triple in size in a month, providing more nourishment to the local community in the upcoming year. KALO HCC has also created additional māla at Pacific University, where 25 percent of the student body is Native Hawaiian, and at schools in Tacoma, Washington and within the Beaverton School District.
“Everything that our lāhui (community), our aliʻi (royalty), and our kūpuna (elders) did was never about one person,” Kaʻula said. “It was about, how does it trickle down? How does it create a unified community?”
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]]>The post 10 Ways to Get Involved With Food Mutual Aid appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Environmental activist and author Robin Greenfield is known for his fully committed experiments in ecological living. His most recent book, Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food, covers his efforts to live entirely independently from the industrial food system. Greenfield succeeded only by relying on others who guided him in his gardening, fishing, and foraging, and came to understand the profound power of community and how naturally that flows through food.
Robin Greenfield and friends, tending a community fruit tree. (Illustration by Nhatt Nichols)
Here are Greenfield’s suggestions for strengthening your own food community:
1. Live communally! Thousands of intentional communities and ecovillages are waiting for you to join them. Check out the Foundation for Intentional Community, the Global Ecovillage Network, and the Cohousing Association of the United States to find a community near you. Or use their resources to start a co-living space or community of your own.
2. Plant public trees in your community in collaboration with others. Community Fruit Trees can support you on this path.
3. Source your seeds and plants from small-scale community seed growers, seed libraries, and seed banks that are breeding diversity and resilience. Seed Savers Exchange, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Ujamaa Seeds, and Truelove Seeds are a few high-integrity organizations that distribute nationwide.
4. Start a seed library or a community seed network yourself. Community Seed Network and Seed Library Network are excellent resources to help you get started.
5. Join a community compost initiative or start one if there’s a need. Cycle the compost back into small-scale ecological gardening and farming. Find an initiative or learn how to start your own through the Community Compost Program.
6. Harvest food that’s already growing, but not getting utilized, and get this nourishing, local produce to the people who need it the most. Concrete Jungle and ProduceGood are beautiful examples to follow.
7. Join or start a community garden or school garden in your community. Community Gardens of America and Edible Schoolyard Project can help with this.
8. Seek out or start a Food is Free chapter and share your garden bounties freely with your community members.
9. Join a community-led ecological food initiative. A few that have inspired me include Soul Fire Farm, The BIPOC Community Garden, Bartlett Park Community Garden, and the Fonticello Food Forest. Support the initiatives that are already taking place. They are doing the work and they need our support to continue.
10. Take part in land reparations for Indigenous and Black communities, so that they can achieve food sovereignty. Find communities to support via the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. Learn about and take part in the LANDBACK movement to return land to Indigenous people so they can build food sovereignty while stewarding our global resources.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
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]]>The post Photo Essay: Connecting Manhattan’s Chinatown Elders Through Food and Culture appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
When they’re not eating or talking, the seniors take painting classes—or play mahjong, Ping-Pong, and bingo. They sing Peking opera and dance Broadway musical numbers. Holidays are celebrated with joyful group fanfare.
The director of the center, Po-Ling Ng, founded the organization in 1972, with funding from the city’s Chinese American Planning Council and, later, the state of New York as well. Now in her mid-70s, she is not without humor—or youthful vigor: She says she still feels like the 23-year-old she was when she arrived in Manhattan from Hong Kong.
Food, she says, plays a key role in drawing people to the center. “A lot of [them] say, ‘I like to go to Open Door because I love the taste of Chinese food.’”
Ng personally helps deliver Chinese meals, which she coordinates through Citymeals on Wheels, to isolated seniors in the community. “Because they live alone, they feel like they have a very boring life,” she says. “Staying home creates mental problems—they’re constantly thinking about bad things. On top of that, they struggle with medical costs, living expenses, and housing issues.”
Using food as a pretext, she checks in on people to see how they are doing, which allows her to assess their psychological state, help connect them with home healthcare aides, and, if they’re not too infirm, invite them to Open Door.
Many elders describe certain foods they miss, so Ng works with Citymeals on Wheels to provide them. (Chicken with oyster sauce, baked pork, and Chinese-style bok choy are favorites.) Here one of Ng’s volunteers brings food to You Hai Chen.
Choo Tung in her home, with a fresh delivery from Citymeals. Some seniors Ng visits have lost spouses and say they want to remarry or find new partners, and ask her for help in meeting people. Ng encourages them to come to the center so that they might make new friends.
Siu Kuen Tam, 86, leads the daily bingo game.
When seniors arrive at the center, Ng ensures that their meals are both culturally and age appropriate. For instance, while the menu has a brown rice option that’s popular in the West, she insists that white rice also be available. She says, “They like the white—I mean, it just smells really good!” In her conversations, she has learned that what suits one generation isn’t necessarily right for another: People aged 60 to 75 generally prefer harder rice, while older patrons favor it softer. As they sit around the tables, those who came for the food begin to form new relationships and integrate into the community of elders.
Chong Liang Zhao (left), 79, the Peking opera instructor at Open Door, rehearses with a student.
Each year during Valentine’s Day celebrations, Ng invites a couple on stage to commemorate their marriage. Here Qi Xiong He, 78, has just lifted the veil of his wife, Ju Ying Zhou, 66. Traditionally the veil is lifted when the couple are alone in their bridal chamber after the wedding ceremony.
A photo on the wall in the table tennis room at Open Door, taken several years ago. After a championship match, someone donated a whole roast pig to the players (and friends) to enjoy.
Ng celebrates Lunar New Year 2025 at Open Door with police officers from the local precinct, as well as the center’s supporters and regular visitors.
A couple years ago, the surgeon general identified loneliness as a major public health concern, an epidemic, in fact, making Open Door’s welcoming role more critical. Yet the center struggles with funding—none at all last year, so even small things like repairing the front door become hard to afford. And expenses could rise if federal cuts to social services increase the need within the community.
But for Ng, it’s never been about the money. “If you don’t love your job, it doesn’t matter how high you’re paid—you’ll suffer. But I don’t care. I lead a simple life. After 56 years of working in the community, God has given me good health, and I don’t want to retire.”
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]]>The post ‘Dignified Food’ Eases Food Insecurity in Philadelphia appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Inside the commissary kitchen in West Philadelphia’s Dorrance Hamilton Center, a warming whiff of cinnamon, clove, and cumin fills the air, mingling with the comforting scent of beef simmered slowly with tomatoes. The kitchen is narrow, and the half-dozen chefs cooking on this Friday night in late February weave around its tight corners with a sense of purpose.
The steady thump of techno music spills from a portable speaker as they wind their way toward service. They’ll turn out 300 plates tonight, each one featuring a bed of couscous piled high with harissa-roasted carrots and a hearty Moroccan beef stew with chickpeas and spinach. A sprinkling of cilantro brightens every serving.
This is the home of the Double Trellis Food Initiative, where a group of chefs trained in the world of fine dining are cooking to feed those in need. They once served the city’s upper crust, but tonight their food will be heading to community fridges, mutual aid efforts, and youth programs, where it will feed those facing food and housing insecurity in America’s poorest large city.
With an estimated 15 percent of the population navigating food insecurity, Double Trellis aims to improve the quality of meals these residents receive from a vast network of food banks, soup kitchens, organizations, and agencies.
Over time, Double Trellis became a refuge for chefs turned off by the oppressive, abusive environment found in many white-coat kitchens.
Since its start during the pandemic, Double Trellis has developed from a fledgling operation into an established nonprofit with two full-time and five part-time employees, workforce development for juvenile offenders trying to straighten out their lives, and waste-reduction programs.
The organization receives roughly $400,000 in annual funding from donations, philanthropies, and government agencies, helping its chefs serve more than 55,000 meals last year. As the Trump administration seeks to shrink the public safety net, Double Trellis is deepening its commitment to communities facing increased need.
“Everyone deserves dignified food made from real ingredients by people who care,” says Adrien Carnecchia, a history teacher turned pastry chef who started volunteering with Double Trellis three years ago when it was still a ragtag operation turning out one offering each week.
Today, he and his colleagues send, to two dozen partner organizations across the city, four different meals each week—an evolving menu that recently featured chicken adobo, veggie fajitas, frittatas with potato-and-pepper hash, and butternut squash curry. The cuisine changes, but the food is always nutritious, filling, and flavorful.
The Origins of Double Trellis
Matthew Stebbins, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director, has felt the same hunger experienced by many of the community members Double Trellis feeds, lending extra weight to the standard that guides his kitchen: “If this is the only thing you ate today, would that be OK?” he says.
Executive director Matthew Stebbins updates a recipe board that breaks down the cooking tasks for that day’s meal and the plans for the next day. (Photo credit: Kat Arazawa)
Stebbins has been a chef most of his life, training under James Beard nominee Townsend Wentz and then manning the sauté station at Laurel, once named a top 10 restaurant in the country and the best in Philadelphia. But as his career progressed, so did his drug and alcohol addictions. At his professional peak, he was unhoused and struggled to reliably access food—let alone treatment. He spent five years on and off the streets, he says, before leaving the city to get sober.
When he returned to Philadelphia, Stebbins worked at a catering company whose business cratered at the start of the pandemic. When protests erupted a few months later after the murder of George Floyd, he had time and wanted to help. He rallied some friends to cook and feed the protesters, but quickly realized he should instead be serving the unhoused people he was marching past. Their grateful response to being offered a hot meal as simple as a breakfast burrito showed him the void he’s sought to fill ever since.
“It’s about investing directly into young people so they can have opportunities and things they haven’t had access to before—so they can get the life they deserve and want.”
“There’s a difference between skipping lunch and not eating for three days,” Stebbins says, recalling a moment in 2015 when he was at his lowest. “That sort of debilitating pain isn’t just in your body; it’s in your heart and soul. I think about that often when I get tired. There’s absolutely no reason in the richest nation in the world why that should be happening to anyone.”
When it launched in 2020, Double Trellis—its name drawn from the system Stebbins’ grandfather used as a grape farmer in New York decades ago—hand-delivered meals to unhoused people and soon began placing a portion of their food in a community fridge accessible to all for free. In March 2021, the organization began operating a fridge of its own in Kensington, a neighborhood that has long been the epicenter of the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.
In that first full year, Double Trellis served around 10,000 meals, split between direct service and community fridges, which surged in popularity and prominence when the pandemic pushed food insecurity into the spotlight. Philadelphia was home to more than 30 community fridges at one point, most of which still exist.
The one Stebbins helped establish has since moved to the LAVA Center in West Philadelphia, closer to Double Trellis’ base of operations, and still receives some of the organization’s meals. Two others—The People’s Fridge, just a few blocks away, and the South Philadelphia Community Fridge—are the main recipients of meals made during this Friday night service.
For Staff, a Refuge and Source of Strength
Over time, Double Trellis became a refuge for chefs turned off by the oppressive, abusive environment found in many white-coat kitchens. Most of the staff is queer and gender-nonconforming, and they collaborate rather than compete. Stebbins is focused on “recreating kitchen culture from a fear-based system to a support-based system,” he says.
The Double Trellis team after wrapping up in the kitchen. Left to right: Adrien Carnecchia, Sarah Grisham, Mads Pryor, Dani Chaquea, Eli Rojas, and Matthew Stebbins. (Photo credit: Kat Arazawa)
The effort seems to be working. By last year, Double Trellis’ service had expanded nearly sixfold, even as it sought to broaden its impact by introducing a workforce development program for juvenile offenders. Through a partnership with YEAH Philly, which offers support for teens and young adults impacted by violence, Stebbins and his team spent four months teaching their first two young trainees the skills necessary to get a job in the food industry.
The trainees were paid $17 an hour and had externships at candymaker Shane Confectionery and Honeysuckle Provisions, an acclaimed Afrocentric restaurant. Both are now ServSafe certified in food safety and handling practices, which will make them more employable in the food industry. More importantly, both have had their juvenile court cases dismissed with support from YEAH’s legal team, according to co-CEO Kendra Van de Water.
Shamp Johnson, now 18, came to Double Trellis wanting to learn how to cook for himself and his mother. During the training program, he sharpened his knife skills, learned to navigate a professional kitchen, and fell in love with cooking. The relationships he built will stay with him, he says.
“Matt came from a similar lifestyle as me,” Johnson says. “He really showed me that whatever you put your mind to you can do. You really can achieve [it]. That really opened my eyes up, his whole story and what he’d been through. Now all I want is a job cooking.”
The organization’s second group of trainees is set to start this spring, remaining small so its members receive undivided attention, Stebbins says.
“Meals are just a stopgap, not a solution.”
The project is in good company in Philadelphia, where other initiatives share a similar goal. The Monkey and the Elephant, a café in the Brewerytown neighborhood, trains and employs former foster youth as they transition into adulthood, while Down North Pizza in Strawberry Mansion exclusively employs the formerly incarcerated. Philabundance, the largest food bank in the region, offers a 16-week culinary vocational training program for those with low or no income.
For Van de Water, who met Stebbins when Double Trellis began contributing meals to the free, youth-staffed grocery store YEAH operates, the program is helping to change how the Philadelphia community views teens affected by poverty, racism, and violence.
“It’s about investing directly into young people so they can have opportunities and things they haven’t had access to before—so they can get the life they deserve and want,” Van de Water says.
Carnecchia developed the curriculum, which includes one hour each day of classroom education—such as math skills for kitchen measurements and recipe building—and five hours in the kitchen. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve done here, by far,” he says, but also the most rewarding.
Stebbins hopes to expand the program if funding allows; last year, he says, Double Trellis’ revenue was around $400,000, including personal donations, support from private philanthropies like the Claneil Foundation, and backing from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. This year, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health began contributing funds.
Forecasting an Increased Need
Double Trellis’ work has only become more urgent as inflation continues to put healthy food out of reach for more people and the Trump administration threatens the social safety net by vowing to “correct Biden’s financial mismanagement” of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Economists also warn that tariffs will increase food prices. Following the election, volunteer signups at Double Trellis filled up for months in advance, with people recognizing the need that would likely ensue.
The organization hasn’t been directly affected by the attempt to slash federal government spending that has frozen funding for farmers, Stebbins says, but he anticipates a trickle-down effect. The kitchen sources most of its produce and meat from Sharing Excess, a food rescue nonprofit, and the Carversville Farm Foundation. Now, Stebbins is worried about food donations declining or drying up if his partners’ work is hampered. “Anyone [working to address] food insecurity is pretty nervous right now,” he says.
“We have to care for our community. We have to care for our neighbors.”
For Mads Pryor, a Double Trellis cook who has worked in kitchens for 15 years, most recently as private chef for a wealthy family in Philadelphia’s ritzy Main Line suburbs, working to address food insecurity is more important than ever. “We see the cost of groceries rising, an uptick in health issues, and not enough structural support for the citizens of Philadelphia and this country,” Pryor says.
These challenges underscore the need for Double Trellis’ workforce development program. As Stebbins points out, food and housing insecurity are deeply rooted, tangled up with poverty and the systemic failures that allow it to persist.
“Meals are just a stopgap,” he says, “not a solution.”
In the long term, Stebbins hopes Double Trellis can do more to make a difference. The kitchen’s emphasis on reducing food waste is part of that equation. Last year, it used 40,000 pounds of excess food rescued by Sharing Excess and composted 10,000 more. Meanwhile, Double Trellis makes the most of its ingredients. Lemon peels, for example, are preserved in salt and used in vinaigrettes and slaws.
To further expand its impact, Double Trellis hopes to find a kitchen of its own, which would make it possible to prepare breakfasts and lunches and triple its output to 1,000 meals a day, Stebbins says. His long-term vision includes nutrition workshops and cooking classes for the community, and more culinary training for young people.
For now, though, he and his colleagues are simply responding to the need they see as best they can.
“We have to care for our community,” Carnecchia says. “We have to care for our neighbors.”
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