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.
The post Could Child Care Centers Strengthen Local Food Systems? appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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.
The post Op-ed: Through Acts of Solidarity, We Can Support Immigrants in the Food Chain and Beyond appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>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.”
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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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]]>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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]]>The post This San Francisco Food Pantry Is a Labor of Love appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Priscilla “Cilla” Lee gave away nearly 50,000 pounds of food last year to her neighbors in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district.
She has hosted a weekly food pantry from her garage since 2021, stocking it with donations from local food banks, grocery stores, restaurants, bakeries, and anywhere else she can get free food for her community. Every Friday and two Saturdays a month, she hands out food boxes filled with fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy products, and dried goods like beans or rice. She still serves between 40 and 50 families per week, and 25 families come on Wednesdays, when she gives away baked goods donated by a local bakery.
In a recent week, she shared four boxes of bread and pastries and 20 pizzas. She also gave away 120 boxes of mangoes donated by a food bank and trays of papaya salad and spring rolls provided by a caterer.
Since 2022, Lee has doubled her volunteer team to 40 or 45 people and added more structure. Last year, they gave away nearly 50,000 pounds of food to neighbors in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district. (Photo credit: Tilde Herrera)
Lee, 54, began hosting the food pantry out of her garage in 2021, alarmed by the level of food insecurity in her neighborhood during the pandemic. She was inspired to help others by her late mother, who had always tried to give her family, friends, and acquaintances a hand, even during her cancer treatment. Also, Lee was on leave from her airline job, giving her a bit of extra time—and was volunteering with local food banks, which had surplus food. Starting a neighborhood food project just made sense.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
Civil Eats first covered Lee’s food pantry in 2022, when she was inviting free pickups through two local branches of Buy Nothing, an online network of neighborhood groups that share everything from extra food to old clothes and used appliances as part of a gift economy model.
Lee is an administrator for the official Outer Richmond Buy Nothing group, which has 1,100 members, and the Richmond-Sunset Buy Nothing group, which has 2,200 members. Now she limits slots for food pickup to ensure enough food for the core set of regulars who have relied on the pantry for all these years.
These regulars include Yulia Koudriashova, a single mom and teacher who saves nearly $300 a month by getting most of her family’s food through Lee’s pantry. She lives with her two daughters and her parents, who moved in three years ago after fleeing Ukraine when Russia invaded. “My parents’ income is zero in the United States,” Koudriashova says. “For them, it’s very important support because mentally, it’s very important that they know they can get food.”
Koudriashova’s mother spends her days cooking everything they receive from the pantry, and her father volunteers at the pantry a few days a week, unloading boxes or sorting food, despite not speaking any English. He worked as an engineer in Ukraine but is unable to work in the U.S., so he is happy to have a “job” and help others as he often did for his neighbors back home, Koudriashova says. Everyone calls him “Papa.”
“When he began to do it, he became alive, because it’s a very important role, mission,” Koudriashova says. “He tells us, ‘I’m working today,’ so we know he needs to go and help. He loves it a lot.”
Serving the Community
Since 2022, Lee has doubled her volunteer team to 40 or 45 people and added more structure. She has two volunteer administrators who create pantry schedules and sign-up sheets, as well as a third administrator who sends weekly reminders for volunteers to sign up for picking up donations or setting up the pantry. At each pantry, one or two hosts oversee the food pickups and support the pantry assistants, who receive the food donations and get food ready to be given out. About 75 percent of her volunteers are pantry recipients themselves.
Lee asks for a three-month commitment when recruiting volunteers, who donate their time and gas. “I’m donating my sanity and my family’s time—my partner also helps,” Lee says. “No one’s getting paid from this pantry.”
Annelissa Reynoso, a part-time restaurant manager and student, has been volunteering at the pantry for the past year. She met Lee through the Buy Nothing Facebook group when she was giving away a fruit platter. Lee claimed it and asked Reynoso if she was interested in volunteering.
“My parents’ income is zero in the United States. For them, it’s very important support because mentally, they know they can get food.”
Reynoso, 25, saw it as a sign to take action at a time when life felt overwhelming. The Israel-Hamas war was raging, and Reynoso felt helpless, hopeless, and disconnected. She began volunteering with Lee, working her way up from pantry assistant to host. She also drives to pick up donations and gives rides to neighbors who want to visit the pantry.
“I feel like I’m finally part of a community,” Reynoso says. “I’ve wanted to feel this way for a long time.”
Reynoso had already considered herself to be a human rights activist but says Lee has influenced her to consider a career helping unhoused, immigrant, or low-income communities.
“That’s awesome,” Lee says, of her friend’s new direction. “I love it.”
Growth of the Buy Nothing Model
The Buy Nothing Project continues to resonate with people a dozen years after its launch, says founder Liesl Clark, a documentary filmmaker who was fascinated by the cashless gift economies she saw in communities throughout the Himalayas. There are now more than 8,000 Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, representing 12.5 million people, and another 1.4 million people using the Buy Nothing app.
The app has added a global feed for users who are interested in a broader circular economy, Clark says. Rather than buying a product on Amazon, users can now search for it in Buy Nothing’s global feed or post an item they haven’t had success gifting locally. If they find the product, or a taker, they can use Buy Nothing shipping to receive or send the item through UPS.
“We still aim to provide every community that wants one, a gift economy, so community members can get to know each other and connect through our stuff and services offered,” Clark said in an email. “We know this builds connected neighborhoods, which is a building block toward resiliency, mutual aid, and healthy, human-centered cities and towns.”
A Labor of Love
Food donations have been unpredictable for the last 18 months, Lee says. With fewer donations, Lee must give less food to each family. She consistently receives high-quality donations from the Second Harvest food bank every week, but she says other food banks are giving her less food now compared to during the pandemic. That contribution could further decline in the wake of unsteady federal funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, designed to move local farm harvests into food banks.
“We still aim to provide every community that wants one, a gift economy, so community members can get to know each other and connect through our stuff and services offered.”
Lee estimates that she spends 32 to 40 hours a week working on the pantry. It’s more manageable since she retired in October from her airline job; when she was working, she often spent time on pantry-related tasks before and after work and during her lunch breaks.
In addition to the day-to-day logistics, Lee also keeps tabs on everyone’s food preferences. For example, she makes sure Koudriashova’s family gets plenty of their beloved potatoes and sets aside extra beans for a Hispanic family who visits the pantry. This ensures people get food they like to eat, and that food is not wasted.
It’s a lot of work to run the pantry, and the food-supply situation can be unnerving, but hearing about how the project has impacted people’s lives drives Lee to keep going.
For example, Koudriashova uses the money she saves on groceries to pay for gymnastics lessons for one of her daughters. She says she wouldn’t be able to afford those lessons without the pantry. “When I go to the shop, I buy only some food for the kids to make sandwiches for the school lunch,” Koudriashova says. “Otherwise, we use all the products that we have from this pantry. I don’t know how we would survive without Cilla.”
Lee says she had no idea she would still be running this pantry, years after it began.
“I will try my best to keep the pantry going until either I am no longer receiving food donations or community [volunteers], and as long as I am healthy, my family is healthy, and I am not neglecting my own family.”
She says none of her volunteers want to take over the pantry. For now, seeing how it has alleviated financial stress for her neighbors motivates her to continue.
Although Lee didn’t start the pantry to inspire others or seek recognition, she says she has often been told by her community, volunteers, and peers that she motivates them to help others. Which, in fact, they do.
“It is a very powerful feeling, and I feel overwhelmed by the positive feedback,” Lee says. “It reminds me of how my mother would be so proud of the person she raised.”
The post This San Francisco Food Pantry Is a Labor of Love appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>The post Op-ed: Food and Moral Courage Are Needed to End Childhood Hunger appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>Of all the reckless ways for the federal government to save money, taking breakfast and lunch away from 12 million kids in 24,000 schools across the country has to be the most reckless. We could save even more by taking away books, pencils, and computers, but then kids wouldn’t learn much, would they? The same goes for taking away their school meals.
But this is what Congress is considering, through changes to an innovation known as the “Community Eligibility Provision” (CEP) which, ironically, was designed to achieve the very efficiency for which the Department of Government Efficiency is allegedly searching. CEP says that if 25 percent of a community’s kids are pre-identified as eligible for free school meals, then those meals ought to be available to all the kids rather than go through the bureaucratic expense and time-consuming paperwork of individual applications.
“I’ve seen first-hand how kids tune in once they’ve had their cereal, yogurt, or egg sandwich. . . . how their hands begin to shoot up to answer questions.”
The House-passed budget resolution directs the Education and Workforce Committee to cut $330 billion over the next decade, which is why Congress is contemplating saving money by raising the CEP eligibility threshold from 25 percent to 60 percent. That would reverse decades of steady progress since the admirals and generals who returned from World War II first recommended feeding kids at school so America would have stronger, healthier soldiers.
Since then, countless studies and statistics have documented the advantages to kids, schools, and the economy when students receive nutritious school meals. Attendance and test scores improve. Tardiness and disciplinary infractions decline. Even if there wasn’t such evidence, would there be any rational argument for not feeding kids? For almost 20 years now, Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign has worked with thousands of school districts and nonprofit partners to increase participation in school meals.
One signature strategy of moving breakfast from the cafeteria before school, to after the bell—either in the classroom or grab-and-go between classes—increased participation by more than 3 million kids. Schools represent a built-in infrastructure for reaching most of America’s children. And as former First Lady of Virginia Dorothy McAuliffe says, “Kids can’t be hungry for knowledge if they are just plain hungry.”
I’ve spent more mornings in cafeterias and classrooms than I can count. From Mrs. Diaz’s homeroom period on New York City’s Upper West Side to the sixth-graders in El Monte, CA and dozens of communities in between, I’ve seen first-hand how kids tune in once they’ve had their cereal, yogurt, or egg sandwich. Any classroom teacher will affirm what I’ve witnessed: how kids settle and focus, how their hands begin to shoot up to answer questions, how they start to work in small groups more cooperatively and effectively. There’s no fraud, no corruption, only kids being kids, and being our future.
I heard from one such teacher recently: “As a public-school teacher in South Carolina with a daughter teaching at a Title 1 high school in Boston, we see firsthand every day what a nutritious meal means to a child’s ability to grow and learn. This proposal is cruel and ultimately, quite foolish.”
Students reach out as well: “I was one of those kids that received free breakfast/lunch because our family was dirt poor, and I can personally attest to the complete inability to focus and learn when your stomach is growling so hard it’s cramping. Few things will better enable our children to be engaged and have a can-do attitude than a full belly.”
It’s telling that even proponents of the change have not put forth compelling arguments that school meals or the Community Eligibility Provision don’t work. Only that the funds are needed for more tax cuts.
It’s a shame to see national politicians injecting partisanship into food assistance issues that have historically had bipartisan support. At the state and local level, they still do. For example, just last month Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed legislation that passed the state legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support, providing students with free breakfast. “Free school breakfast will help ease the burden on families just trying to put food on their tables and make sure kids are fueled and ready to learn,” said Governor Sanders.
“Proponents of the change have not put forth compelling arguments that school meals or the Community Eligibility Provision don’t work. Only that the funds are needed for more tax cuts.”
Additionally, 112 mayors—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—have signed a letter to Congressional leaders urging them not to cut the food assistance for kids provided by SNAP. One in five kids in America receives SNAP, which provides the nutritious food needed to stay healthy and do well in school. Mayors understand this, given their close proximity to Americans affected by indiscriminate budget cuts.
There’s a role for everyone in reaching out to Congress to urge that they protect food assistance for kids. Seek permission to visit your local school’s breakfast or lunch program and share what you observe. Dare your elected officials to join you, and then see if they are in favor of cutting it.
Members of Congress who have never before supported cuts to food assistance programs seem to be doing so now, not because they believe the cuts are right or fair, but because they are fearful of political consequences. Too many leaders in business, finance, education, the media, and elsewhere remain silent.
Bobby Kennedy was right in 1966 when he said, “Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change.”
Childhood hunger in the U.S. is solvable. There is no shortage of food, only of moral courage. But it shouldn’t require much courage to speak up on behalf of kids.
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]]>The post A Cookbook From the Host of ‘Outdoor Chef Life’ Entices Us to Fish, Forage, and Feast appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>In a Pacific tidepool in Northern California, Taku Kondo squats down, seawater sloshing around his ankles, and examines the rocks below the water. Kondo, a fisherman and forager, uses a knife to detach a purple sea urchin from a large rock. He cuts open the spiky shell, splits the urchin, and discovers a perfect sliver of orange roe, or uni—worth at least $80 a pound. “Let’s try it,” he says to the camera, then slurps up the roe. A smile spreads across his face. Success.
This was Kondo’s first YouTube video, “Camping + Coastal Foraging for Uni,” uploaded in May 2018. It’s hard to know whether Kondo foresaw what other successes awaited him and his channel, “Outdoor Chef Life.”
“When you’re off the grid, especially camping and you have no reception, you’re focused on who you’re with and what you are doing—making food or fishing, or focused on stoking the fire.”
Today, though, the former sushi chef, 33, has guided millions of viewers on his journeys, whether he’s throwing a fishing line from a rocky coast or pedaling a hands-free kayak to catch king salmon. He’s clearly built a business from what he loves. In most of his videos, Kondo spends nearly a whole day catching seafood—digging for clams, foraging sea urchins, catching crabs—then setting up an outdoor kitchen. There, he’ll create meals like crab ramen or fried-fish sandwiches, dressed with pickles made from foraged kelp.
Now he’s releasing a cookbook, Coastal Harvest, which dives even deeper. Coastal Harvest, to be published March 25, is both a culmination of his years of YouTube videos and a beautifully photographed and illustrated cookbook, with detailed instructions for sushi, sashimi, whole-fish cooking, and more. The book starts with the basics—how to fillet fish, knife skills, and how to store fresh fish—and then takes the reader through the wild foods Kondo loves: fish, shellfish, wild mushrooms, and coastal plants. Most of the photographs were taken by his partner, Jocelyn Gonzalez, a forager and angler herself.
There’s no shortage of fishing YouTubers, but, as a chef, Kondo stands out. He spent a few years working his way up in restaurants in San Francisco, progressing from line cook to sushi chef at a popular omakase restaurant, before he left that life to become a full-time fisherman, forager, and YouTuber. In Coastal Harvest, Kondo demonstrates a deep knowledge of Asian cooking through recipes that work in the wild as well as at home.
In a conversation with Civil Eats, Kondo discussed how Japanese culture has shaped his views on food, the best ways to eat seafood, and the importance of local ingredients.
Photo credit: Jocelyn Gonzalez
You seem to really like being in nature. Why is that so important to you?
I was born in Osaka. Growing up there, we went camping with my dad, usually in the summertime, and we would go fishing. That was our thing.
We did a lot of largemouth bass fishing, and we also fished off the piers for baitfish like mackerel and sardines. Just like a regular kid, I played video games too, but it wasn’t a huge part of my life. I always would rather be outside doing something else.
When you’re off the grid, especially camping and you have no reception, you’re focused on who you’re with and what you are doing—making food or fishing, or focused on stoking the fire. It’s really important for us, especially nowadays, to get away from some of the outside noise that we’re facing.
The former sushi chef has guided millions of viewers on his journeys, whether he’s throwing a fishing line from a rocky coast or pedaling a hands-free kayak to catch king salmon.
What made you want to become a sushi chef?
I always enjoyed cooking, but when I moved to San Francisco for college, I wanted to have good food but couldn’t afford to eat at restaurants. So I was cooking for myself pretty much every single meal. And I thought I was getting good at knife skills.
Sushi chefs are so skilled with the knife; it’s so surgical and precise. I wanted to see if I was up to the level of a professional. I started working at a Japanese restaurant just to see if I could hang with the pros.
I was quickly humbled. On my first day, they asked me to bring in my own knives, and I [brought] my $3 Daiso knife with a little plastic handle. That’s what I used at home. I thought, I can cut pretty well with this! They let me borrow their knives. From there, the learning began.
How did you end up making YouTube videos?
In college, I didn’t have a TV. All I had was a laptop. So I just watched YouTube videos and a lot of fishing content. But a lot of the cooking was just an afterthought.
That’s when I decided, you know what, maybe people will like videos if you do the fishing and catching, but also put more attention to detail on the cooking. That’s what I had been doing anyway when I went camping. So the first half of the videos would be the catching of the fish or sea urchin or clams or mussels. And then the second half would be focused on cooking, and at a much higher level than anybody else was doing it.
I was helping a friend open an omakase sushi restaurant in San Francisco when I started making YouTube videos. When I had, like, 20 subscribers, I told my boss, ‘Alright, boss, 200,000 subscribers and I’m out of here.’ And he was like, ‘OK, sure, buddy, good luck.’ About a year and a half later, I was up to 160,000 subscribers.
I loved working at the restaurant as a sushi chef; there were just three chefs. We were interacting with the customers, and that’s where I refined my skills. What was missing for me: Even though I loved cooking, I loved being outdoors, too. In that restaurant environment, you’re always inside. I wanted to incorporate the outdoors into my life a bit more.
I decided to quit the sushi restaurant in 2019 and go full time making YouTube videos, and traveled from Hawaii to Japan to Thailand. When we got back, that’s when COVID hit and we did a lot of local stuff. In 2021, I built out my own sprinter van and traveled to Alaska in the van. We had an amazing few months in Alaska.
What’s one thing people have said to you about your videos that stands out?
One of the things they say is they get to watch it with their significant others. So the guy’s gonna be like, “Oh, yeah, this is the only fishing channel my wife or my girlfriend would watch with me, because they know there’s some food in there and some good cooking.” I always thought that was kind of funny. So I get a lot of couples involved in watching the videos.
Photo credit: Jocelyn Gonzalez
Your partner, Jocelyn, who’s in a lot of your videos, is sometimes the one who catches the fish, even when you’ve been skunked.
She catches big fish. She has the right energy for the fish. They can sense it, you know?
In your cookbook, you focus mostly on California coastal fishing. What can readers in other parts of the country learn from it?
A lot of the recipes are interchangeable with different types of fish and shellfish. So it’s applicable to anybody that eats seafood.
What’s the overall philosophy behind your recipes and the way you catch and cook?
One of the more important philosophies that I like to highlight is using all the different parts of the fish. There’s a lot that usually goes to waste, even with people who catch their own fish. A lot of the time, you’re only using the fillet. I see it like chicken, when you’re just using the breast and leaving everything else. A fish is kind of similar. You have the head, which has a ton of meat, the collars, which still have meat, and you have the entire skeleton, which has a ton of flavor. Boil it down to make a little fish stock, just like making a chicken stock.
I can make miso soup just by making a fish stock, straining it, incorporating dashi, and mixing in some miso paste. It’s a pretty simple thing to make, and you can add in mushrooms, tofu, or seaweed. You get multiple meals out of [a whole fish].
I have recipes in the cookbook where I use tuna stomach to make menudo. There’s a recipe using fish head to make birria tacos. Those are some of the more delicious pieces. Once you get used to cooking them, it’s a no brainer. Why would you ever waste that or throw it away?
Interspersed throughout the cookbook are gyotaku prints by Dwight Hwang. Gyotaku are a traditional Japanese way of documenting a harvested food (traditionally fish) by inking it and pressing paper onto its surface.
What’s your go-to way of cooking a whole fish?
My go-to is not cooking it, since I’m a sushi chef (laughs).
If it’s a fish that’s suitable for sashimi, I’ll portion off [the fillet]. And then with the rest of [the fish], I’ll take the collars off. Depending on how many fish I have, I smoke or grill them. It’s a really delicious way to add a bit of smokiness and an easy way to cook them. [The fish] just falls off the bone.
You talk a lot about sustainability, local food, and knowing as much as we can where food comes from. What does the ideal future of food look like to you?
That’s it: local ingredients. It’s the most inspiring, as well. You let the seasons dictate what you cook, rather than your cravings. Going with the seasons, getting to enjoy what is available at the moment in the area—ideally, that’s what we’d do.
Catch the fish and sell it locally. It’s not the way the world works, but ideally catch it and sell it locally. Right now, a lot of the fish being caught in Alaska and even here in California gets shipped to Asia, processed, and shipped back here to sell as frozen fillets. It’s a lot of traveling that our food is doing, and that’s not the most eco-friendly way of getting seafood.
In the world we live in today, it’s almost impossible to trace where your seafood comes from, or even your meat. Gathering your own food connects you to the environment and makes you realize that these are important parts of our ecosystem that need to be taken care of. Otherwise, if we’re just wasting all these fish for nothing, they’re going to be gone sooner rather than later. It makes you understand the preservation of it and appreciate the bounty that we have in the moment—and to hopefully keep that same bounty as we move into the future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RECIPE: Okonomiyaki from Catch and Cook
Excerpted from Coastal Harvest and reprinted by permission of DK, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Taku Kondo.
serves 4-6 | prep 10 minutes | cook 20 minutes
“It’s always a go-to for me, and it’s always been a go-to for my family,” says Taku Kondo of okonomiyaki, a traditional Japanese dish. (Photo credit: Jocelyn Gonzalez)
Okonimiyaki is a savory Japanese pancake that’s famous as street food in Osaka, which is where I was born and spent the first half of my childhood. I make this dish a lot for my friends, and it’s always a hit. Okonomi translates to “as you like,” meaning there are infinite ways to customize it to your preference. I’m giving you my baseline recipe but don’t be afraid to add your own flavors and ingredients. It’s a great dish to clean out the fridge and use up any ingredients that need to go.
The traditional okonomiyaki sauce, called okonomi, is easy to make at home, but a store-bought version, made by Otafuku, can be found at most Asian markets. Find hondashi power (for flavorful instant dashi broth) at Asian markets as well.
For the okonomi sauce
- 1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
- ½ cup ketchup
- ½ cup oyster sauce
For the okonomiyaki
- 1 lb. green cabbage, finely chopped (or use ½ lb. each of green and red cabbage)
- 2 bunches green onion, thinly sliced
- 1¼ cups all-purpose flour
- 2 tbsp. cornstarch
- ½ tbsp. hondashi powder
- 4 eggs
- 2 tsp. salt
- 2 lb. raw squid, cleaned and cut into pieces (or substitute sliced pork, beef, bacon, or thinly sliced mushrooms)
Kewpie mayo or regular mayo, to serve
Katsuobushi (bonito flakes), to serve
- To make the sauce, in a medium bowl, combine the Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and oyster sauce. Mix well to combine, then set aside until ready to serve.
- In a large bowl, combine the cabbage, green onions, flour, cornstarch, hondashi, eggs, salt, and 2 cups cold water. Mix well so that the consistency is like pancake batter.
- Heat a skillet over medium heat. When hot, ladle in the batter to create a pancake roughly 6 inches in diameter. Place several pieces of raw squid on top. Cook for 8 minutes on one side, then flip it over and cook for another 6 to 8 minutes with the squid fully touching the hot skillet. To check if the okonomiyaki is cooked, push down on it occasionally; if you hear more of a sizzle, the pancake is still raw. When fully cooked, flip the okonomiyaki onto a plate. Repeat with the rest of the batter (or use a second skillet to cook both pancakes at the same time).
- To serve, top each pancake with drizzles of the okonomi sauce and Kewpie mayo, plus a sprinkling of katsuobushi.
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]]>The post Photo Essay: Standing in the Gaps With Feed Durham appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>I’ve fed 180,000 people from my front yard over the last five years. With more hands, more equipment, and more money, we can feed millions in even shorter time.
Back in 2020, I formed a mutual aid collective called Feed Durham to address rising hunger due to the impacts of COVID. We started “small,” cooking for 750 people on two whole-hog smokers and a couple of industrial griddles. We rented four fridges and posted them on my porches. In the months following the murder of George Floyd, we ballooned into cooking for 1,500 to 2,000 people per cookout over the course of three to four days, adding burners, steam pots, and more cooking surfaces.
“Mutual aid is a network of expansive relationships that you nurture and are nurtured by in the direction of your deepest hopes and dreams.”
Through dozens of community partnerships and donations, we feed elders, people living in cars and on the streets, widows, unsupported LGBTQ+ folks, undocumented families, the homebound and chronically ill, and elementary school students and their families, all at no charge. We are a multi-faith, multi-racial, and intergenerational mutual aid collective. We believe we are only as safe as our least hungry neighbor.
Once folks got vaccinated, and volunteers were no longer available for multi-day cookouts, we shifted to primarily hosting produce giveaways, which quickly expanded to include other items. These days, Feed Durham moves about 20,000 pounds of mostly donated food, seeds, plant starts, and household goods per month from local businesses and distributors, including Happy Dirt, Cocoa Cinnamon/Little Waves Coffee Roasters, Red Tail Grains, Maple Spring Gardens, Bulldega Urban Market, Flying Pierogi Delicatessen, Big Spoon Roasters, Ninth Street Bakery, The ReCollective, and Gaia Herbs.
We’re proud to offer every herb, fruit, and vegetable ever known, from the common sweet potato to the not-so-common kiwi berry. We prioritize fresh, organic whole foods and supplements.
Over the years, we’ve hosted two dozen cookouts and 60 giveaways, two Repair Clinics, a free photo shoot for unhoused neighbors who were able to leave with a framed photo, and a multimedia installation called “Lovingly Prepared By” at the Durham Arts Council.
Mutual aid is a network of expansive relationships that you nurture and are nurtured by in the direction of your deepest hopes and dreams. It’s not just getting by—it’s flourishing, even if you don’t have a lot of material resources, because you feel loved, seen, and supported. Historically, mutual aid has worked best amongst rural people living in geographic isolation and with a shared spiritual practice for at least one generation, and people with shared identities who have been cast out from the mainstream.
The triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement were undergirded by the vast multi-generational mutual aid networks that Black folks used to sustain one another during slavery and Jim Crow. Those networks are still sustaining people like me, whose elder family members and ancestors practiced many forms of life-giving community care.
With that, I must share what mutual aid is not. Lately, I see a younger generation that regrettably didn’t receive much mentorship from adults, calling what they do “mutual aid” because they move resources from restaurants and grocery stores into the community. Most have never experienced mutual aid.
I have found that many are more excited about realizing their power alongside other organizers their age than they are about building intergenerational relationships and power with the people they purport to help. They ignore basic input from the communities they “serve” about food quality and safety, and they rarely acknowledge or address other needs.
Recipients are tasked with piecing together a variety of offerings in settings that are often unfriendly. This is altruistic capitalism. Charity. Colonialism. Clique-driven organizing that shuts out valuable input. Not mutual aid.
For 2025, Feed Durham is focused on supporting neighbors who want to grow food for one another. We are developing lo-fi tech solutions to bridge gaps between available household and food supplies and the people who need them. We are also liberating resources that lie dormant in warehouses and closets, soliciting these materials on behalf of under-resourced Black and Brown organizations and individuals who want to provide for their neighbors. We are serving as a networking hub for Durham’s vibrant organizing community and, of course, continuing to cook tasty, nutrient-dense meals for our neighbors.
To survive what’s coming, we are launching and sustaining a national mutual aid network to facilitate rapid response. Toward that end, we are sharing Feed Durham’s blueprints with a broad spectrum of mutual aid organizations throughout the U.S. Please borrow liberally. Share freely. And remember to practice care—and joy—during the hard times.
Caleb, a Feed Durham steward who showed up on the very first day of our very first cookout in April 2020, can normally be found doing exactly what he’s doing in the photo above: prepping chicken to go on the smokers. We cook about 800 pounds of chicken at every cookout.
Caleb leads a small team of three to five volunteers in washing and seasoning several cases per night. We follow Black and Native practices, using all parts of an animal or plant across multiple dishes. We pay tribute to the animals and plants that die to nourish our bodies with spices, loving energy, and food-preparation processes that accentuate natural flavor. When the chicken comes off the smoker, the drippings will be poured into large spice containers that we send out to missions and churches to use as pot liquor for soups. We jokingly but reverentially refer to the marinade we make for the chicken as a “spiritual bath.” (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
A Feed Durham steward, Grayson spent two years learning to cook on giant 60- and 80-quart steam pots. They burned many beans, and even more rice, until they figured it out. Now, Grayson makes some of the best cabbage, pinto beans, vegan mashed potatoes, and Feed Durham’s Everything But the Kitchen Sink Stew. Remember when we said use all parts of the plants and animals we cook? Veggie scraps like broccoli cores and kale stems get cooked down into a tasty bouillon. We cook on 10 burners. Feed Durham can churn out food for thousands, just with our steam pot setup. (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
At the end of each cookout, we make family-size plates for volunteers, representing the bounty of every recipe we lovingly prepare. We call them Beauty Plates. This plate features smoked chicken, braised carrot steaks, grilled butternut squash, smoked-garlic Brussels sprouts, charred broccoli, smashed yams, caramelized carrots, and Roasted Beets Tropicale. We’ve developed a way to cook beets that removes the “clean dirt” taste.
Our kitchen has always been gluten-free and soy-free. Most of our dishes are now dairy-free. The only meat we cook is poultry. We feed our unhoused and low-income neighbors the way we like to eat, and we set a high bar for the quality of food our volunteers offer, so that they will raise the standards in other community settings where they serve. (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
Feed Durham has become a fixture at Bull City Pride. In 2021, when the U.S. was still in shutdown, Feed Durham cooked for 1,000 and served food at Pride: Durham, NC. That year, there were two vendors—us and Durham County. They set up a tent to test folks for sexually transmitted infections and COVID.
This volunteer, carrying a handwritten Feed Durham menu, is one of several who traveled in from Richmond, Virginia, to study with us as a part of our residency program, which has hosted overnight volunteers from Chicago, Baltimore, Charlotte, and Atlanta. (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
Once vaccines became widely available, Feed Durham experienced a significant decline in volunteers. People were forced to return to work before it felt safe to do so, and other folks were eager to visit faraway places to see family and to vacation. So we shifted mainly to produce giveaways.
The food pictured was given away at the Scrap Exchange’s 2024 Earth Day celebration, where Feed Durham hosted a food giveaway and Repair Clinic to fix broken household goods. For the event, we partnered with Farm Church, whose pastor/master gardener fielded endless gardening questions with grace and patience while giving away seeds, plant starts, and oak saplings donated by a community member. (Photo credit: Katina Parker; subject arrangement: Dare Coulter)
My yard operates at full tilt during Feed Durham’s Annual Thanksgiving Grocery Giveaway. A volunteer writes out the daily schedule to keep us on track, above left, while dozens of volunteers break down every single box of donated vegetables, eggs, breads, and spices, distributing the cherished ingredients across hundreds of bags. Bags contain cabbage, kale, collards, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, onions, squash, spices, bread from Ninth Street Bakery, and free-range eggs, among other things. The Saturday before Thanksgiving, our community partners pull into the driveway at scheduled intervals to receive the packed bags and deliver them to hundreds of households. (Photo credits: Katina Parker)
In 2020, Feed Durham volunteers installed eight raised garden beds in my backyard that volunteers help tend. Those beds have grown tomatoes, radishes, quirky carrots with lots of obvious personality, loads of parsley, rosemary, sage, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, and more. In this photo, volunteers harvest fresh herbs right before heading to a produce giveaway. (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
One of dozens of community partners through whom Feed Durham distributes food, Mr. Glenn supports a group of elders and a blind community. Whenever Feed Durham receives texts or emails offering food for pickup, a flurry of texts go out to partners describing what’s available, plus retrieval details. Fun fact: The very cool Coca-Cola truck in the photo happens to have a hydraulic lift that makes hefting boxes in and out of the truck bed easier. (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
In 2023, we hosted our first ever Repair Clinic at The Scrap Exchange, a reuse center located in the Lakewood neighborhood close to downtown. We recruited volunteers who sew, weld, repair electronics, and practice carpentry to teach volunteers and neighbors with damaged items how to fix their items. Dozens of community members brought in vacuums, beloved articles of clothing, lamps, furniture, etc. After being repaired, the item can be kept by its owner or donated.
We began offering Repair Clinics to teach tactile skillsets that are rarely taught in school any more, to divert from landfill, and to help neighbors reduce their expenses. Here, volunteer Mark solders a lamp as the owner watches along with other volunteers. (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
We send Love Notes with each cooked meal or grocery bag. We started this practice during the pandemic, at a time when we all felt isolated and shut off from the world. On printed card stock donated by Spee Dee Que, a local independent print house, teachers, students, and other community members craft notes for their neighbors. Gifted artists create astoundingly beautiful missives. Some messages are general; others are themed for certain holidays, including Pride.
We do have message requirements—no gaslighting, no overpromising, and no weird toxic positivity. We ask that folks write what they would want to hear if they were at home, newly widowed, or on the street in the cold with one sock, not two. Because a well-meaning message like “I love you” or “You’re awesome” can feel thoughtless or boundary-crossing to a person living on the street, we suggest encouraging words like “Sending kind thoughts your way” or most simply “Enjoy your meal.” In addition to the great-tasting food, our neighbors have come to look forward to receiving custom blessings and artwork. (Photo credit: Katina Parker)
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
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]]>A towering, two-story arch, trimmed in barrel tiles with an all-caps marquee, makes it very clear where you are: “BIENVENIDOS A LITTLE VILLAGE.” The structure rises high above bustling 26th Street in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where independent restaurants, retails, and street vendors make it one of the highest-grossing commercial corridors in Chicago. This is the threshold of the Little Village neighborhood, home to many immigrants from Central America as well as the largest community of Mexican Americans in the Midwest.
At the base of the Little Village Arch, a group of protesters gathered earlier this month. Braced against the biting winter chill, they loudly decried the raids of immigrant communities ordered by the incoming Trump administration, which aimed to arrest and deport an estimated 2,000 immigrants across this sanctuary city, and more nationwide. In this climate, members of this tight-knit community must rely on each other now more than ever.
The entry to Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood. (Photo credit: The City of Chicago, 2021)
One of the strongest advocates for the neighborhood is the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). For decades, the nonprofit has fought to protect Little Village’s land, air, and the life in between. Its multifaceted, community-led food justice program includes hot meal dropoffs, backyard garden startups, and a new farm, just a few blocks from the arch, where fresh produce can be picked up for free. LVEJO is now also a landmark for Little Village.
Last December, LVEJO received the national Food Sovereignty Prize, awarded for “grassroots, agroecological solutions from the people most harmed by the injustices of the global food system,” according to a press release from the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance. “I felt so glad that the Food Sovereignty Prize committee really got what the team was trying to do here,” says LVEJO’s deputy director, Juliana Pino. “It’s not just about simply growing food. It’s really about committing to the land, defending and protecting each other in the land, and showing up for a community in ways that are really rooted.”
LVEJO’s role in the local food system was years in the making, and it began with environmental activism. Pino recalls how, in 1994, a group of parents forced their local elementary school to restrategize renovation plans after some children suddenly became ill, likely from toxins released during the renovation process. That foundational group of parents would soon expand to include other community leaders and go on to tackle environmental injustices neighborhood-wide as Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.
“It’s not just about simply growing food. It’s really about committing to the land, defending and protecting each other in the land, and showing up for a community in ways that are really rooted.”
Over its 30 years, LVEJO has shuttered two local coal power plants as well as an asphalt roofing manufacturer, Celotex, which was deemed a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and took the better part of a decade to remediate; now it is a 21-acre neighborhood park.
Viviana “Vivi” Moreno grew up near the neighborhood, hearing these stories. “I knew people whose family members were affected by the coal power plants,” she says. In college, while elbow-deep in a detailed case study about LVEJO in her environmental health class, she fully connected the dots, and began to see “the legacy that polluting industries have in communities of color and immigrant communities of color.”
Moreno joined LVEJO as a volunteer more than a decade ago, and has evolved alongside the organization. Now LVEJO’s senior food justice organizer, she helps facilitate a multigenerational network of neighbors who offer essential insight on traditional farming practices and foodways. Pino sees the work as a multitiered form of sustenance: “A number of those folks . . . had a really hard time sustaining employment due to racism and disrespect for their skills and undervaluing the knowledge that they have. And on top of that, they were looking for ways to sustain the ancestral practices that they had back from their origin countries, as well as feed their families.” Such cultural knowledge risks being lost if it isn’t transferred to the next generation.
Viviana Moreno is Little Village Environmental Justice Organization’s senior food justice organizer. (Photo credit: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization)
LVEJO’s multi-pronged food justice program is offered free of cost and is communicated primarily through word of mouth. Eight food justice staff members and 50 to 80 volunteers run the program, which includes the pandemic-born Farm Food Familias project, created in collaboration with Getting Grown Collective. The project has served more than 50,000 meals so far, using produce donated by and purchased from local urban farms.
“What we noticed with this mutual aid program is that it wasn’t just COVID, it was an economic issue,” says Moreno. “A lot of folks lost their jobs because of either contracting long COVID or losing family members, and were having a hard time getting back to an economic space where they could provide for their families. So, that’s where some of the meals came in and they were really beautiful and healing.” Funding for Farm Food Familias and LVEJO’s other food initiatives, as well as for the organization as a whole, comes largely from private foundations that have supported LVEJO for years, as well as individual donors.
Food justice staff member Taryn Randle organizes Backyard Gardens Little Village, a program that supplies residents with education and materials—including plants and garden beds—to activate their own gardens. About 20 homes participate so far. Meanwhile, Moreno is helping to develop a blossoming 1.3-acre greenspace, La Villita Park, which opened in 2014 on a portion of the converted Celotex site.
Semillas de Justicia (Seeds of Justice), a half-acre community garden and farm, sits just outside the park. A series of painted vignettes adorn the garden’s fence: people gardening together, whimsical hearts, the landmark arch, and messages affirming the neighborhood’s existence: “Defiende La Villita!” and “Let us breathe!”
During the growing season, Semillas’ garden beds are fully occupied by 70 households. The adjoining vegetable farm hosts a weekly free farmers’ market, offering produce freshly harvested from the site. LVEJO collaborates with community members in deciding what to grow, to ensure that the land offers agency to the people of the neighborhood while fortifying their connection to culture and heritage.
Yasmin Ruiz, food justice co-organizer at Chicago’s Little Village Environmental Justice Organization. The organization won the national Food Sovereignty Prize in December. (Photo credit: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization)
This includes several varieties of tomatoes, corn, beans, pumpkin, medicinal herbs, and edible flowers such as marigolds, a key element of Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations in the fall. Last year, between the community garden and the farm, LVEJO collectively harvested and distributed nearly 16,000 pounds of produce and about 1,000 fresh eggs during a time when the price of eggs and other groceries had spiked.
LVEJO’s farm manager, Nateo Carreño, says it isn’t uncommon for elders to stroll by during the growing season and offer a hand. Every interaction is a chance to pass down ancestral knowledge, and sometimes, a pat on the back. Carreño recalls, “A señora just [told] us, ‘I walked to the park to tell you guys that your potatoes taste like they have butter in them.’”
Both of Carreño’s grandfathers were farmers, and Carreño sees the soil as a wonderland of living, breathing organisms that can heal itself over time if given the proper support. Years after being reclaimed and cared for by LVEJO, the soil here not only produces bountiful harvests, but also teems with beneficial bacteria like Mycobacterium vaccae, which get absorbed through the skin and trigger serotonin, the “happy hormone,” in the brain. “I love soil, that’s my jam,” says Carreño. “There’s just something in you that wakes up when you start working with plants and start working with soil.”
For now, in the stillness of the winter, the land sleeps. Meanwhile, its caretakers keep planning. When the new season begins, LVEJO will continue to sow its mighty vision for Little Village.
Illustration by Nhatt Nichols
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]]>The post Bans on Soda and Candy in SNAP Are Back on the Table, and They’re Still Controversial appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>May 20, 2025 Update: On May 19, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed a state waiver to restrict SNAP purchases for the first time, allowing Nebraska to ban soda and energy drinks from SNAP.
March 28, 2025 Update: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Trump administration will allow states to take soda off the list of grocery items that SNAP benefits cover. Kennedy does not have jurisdiction over SNAP, but said Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who does, has agreed to grant the waivers that states need.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is an economist who has spent her entire career studying policies meant to alleviate hunger and improve the health and nutrition of poor Americans. In the run-up to the 2018 Farm Bill, she was asked to testify in front of the House Agriculture Committee at a hearing on the pros and cons of restricting the purchase of soda and other unhealthy foods within the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Based on the body of research she reviewed, which included her own studies, she summed up her thinking at the start. “I believe that SNAP restrictions will be difficult to structure in practice, will be inefficiently targeted, and in many cases—such as a proposed ban of the purchase of soft drinks or sweetened beverages—will be unlikely to change consumption patterns,” she told lawmakers. “There are better policy options for promoting healthy eating patterns, both for SNAP recipients and for all Americans.”
At the time, Schanzenbach said, her aunt was especially proud of her appearance in front of Congress. After, she sent Schanzenbach a note.
“She was like, ‘You were great, darling! But I think you’re completely wrong.’”
Schanzenbach wasn’t surprised. While it is often presented as a common-sense issue, the question of whether to restrict what people can buy with SNAP has inspired decades of circuitous, heated debate and political maneuvering. Some argue that the program should remain a simple source of grocery dollars for Americans struggling to feed their families, while others say food and beverages associated with chronic disease risk should be eliminated from acceptable SNAP purchases.
Want to get a sense of the complications? Into a whirring blender, throw nutrition experts trying to parse limited, inconsistent data on what SNAP participants actually buy and their health outcomes. Mix in some pseudo-experts peddling misinformation and bad data. Add politicians trying to score points. Don’t forget hunger groups that often see any restriction to SNAP benefits as an existential threat to the program or the powerful soda and junk food lobbyists fighting to protect corporate profits.
All of these groups have been crashing into each other for years. Now, in the era of Make America Healthy Again, Republicans are turning the dial up to 10.
In Congress, where getting SNAP restrictions into a farm bill used to be seen as a political impossibility, that thinking is changing; now the idea comes up in hearing after hearing. That means there’s a good chance some language that implements national restrictions or introduces a pilot program could be included, should a farm bill move through Congress later this year.
At the same time, Republican legislators in more than a dozen states have introduced bills to restrict soda and unhealthy foods within SNAP. If those bills succeed, states still need a waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put the restrictions into place, and historically the USDA has rejected waiver requests under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
But Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is taking a different tack: Within her first week in office, she sent a letter to state governments outlining her guiding principles on the nation’s hunger programs. Second on her list was a commitment to “support state innovation through approvals of waivers.” She also told White House reporters she’s looking forward to working with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to figure out potential restrictions. So, state restrictions could become a reality soon.
All of this is happening at a time when Republicans have proposed rolling back Biden-era updates to SNAP that could result in up to $230 billion cuts to benefits, shrinking how much individuals have to spend at the store while food prices continue to rise. That approach doesn’t sync up with the evidence on how best to improve nutrition, said Schanzenbach, who is now at Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research. “In general, when people have more money to spend on food, they buy more food, and healthier food.”
One thing that everyone can agree on is that Americans are not eating well, and that contributes to high rates of chronic disease. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), about 42 percent of American adults and 20 percent of children have obesity. More than a third of deaths each year are due to heart attack or stroke.
Costly Logistics?
Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg recently called Kennedy “beyond dangerous,” based on his views on vaccines and spreading of conspiracy theories. But on soda in SNAP, the two have agreed.
Bloomberg—known for his public health initiatives including banning smoking in city parks and getting calorie counts on fast food menus—was central to the most high-profile effort to get soda out of SNAP. Fifteen years ago, New York City applied for a waiver to ban beverages with more than 10 calories per eight ounces (excluding fruit juice and milk) from allowed purchases.
Prominent New York University nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle (who is sits on Civil Eats’ advisory board) had opposed the idea of restrictions in the past, but she got behind the effort as she watched both sugary drink consumption and chronic disease rates rise and saw the role the soda industry played.
In the end, USDA officials rejected the waiver request based on what they said was the logistical difficulty of implementing the plan and how difficult it would be to track whether it reduced obesity.
Logistical challenges are one big reason many experts oppose the restrictions across the board. Broader bans that try to define “unhealthy” or “junk” foods run into complicated questions about how to do so.
“Right now, SNAP is a very efficient program. . . . Only about 6 percent is spent on both federal administrative costs and the federal share of state administrative costs.”
Case in point: Kennedy, now the top government health official in the country, is currently leading an online campaign to get seed oils like canola and sunflower out of fast food, while the vast majority of nutrition professionals say there is no evidence that they are responsible for health harms.
Even soda restrictions could pose a challenge, said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonprofit research and policy institute. One state bill she had reviewed, for example, exempted soft drinks that were 50 percent or more fruit juice, so a fruit-forward beverage with plenty of added sugar might sneak through, but a diet soda would be banned. Either way, she said, working out those kinks, how to make distinctions, and how to roll out new rules to retailers across the country would cost money.
“Right now, SNAP is a very efficient program,” she said. “If you look at what the federal government spends, roughly 94 percent of that amount is on benefits that go directly to families to buy food. Only about 6 percent is spent on both federal administrative costs and the federal share of state administrative costs.”
“I think if the purpose of the program is to improve diet quality, and the evidence shows that it’s not doing that, this needs to be addressed.”
Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the CEO of Nourish Science, who has been involved in SNAP policy for decades, brushed off that concern. He’s excited about Rollins and Kennedy bringing this issue to the forefront, and good policies, he said, could be written to eliminate confusion and minimize costs. For example, he said, since most SNAP purchases are made at major retailers like Walmart, lawmakers could even exempt smaller, neighborhood retailers if the new rules were a burden to them.
“I think if the purpose of the program is to improve diet quality, and the evidence shows that it’s not doing that, this needs to be addressed,” he said.
What We Know About SNAP, Diet Quality, and Health
Last week, the Idaho House of Representatives passed a bill that would take candy and soda out of SNAP. In speaking to his fellow lawmakers about the bill, Representative Jordan Redman, a Republican, referenced Kennedy’s MAHA goals. To bolster his case, he told them that soda is the “number-one commodity” SNAP participants spend money on.
It’s a statistic that gets repeated over and over, including by a conservative think tank pushing for the laws in states across the country—but it’s misleading. Very little data on SNAP purchasing exists, but in 2016, the USDA published a study on purchases using 2011 data from one leading grocer’s stores.
The data set shows a ranked list of “commodities” bought by households using SNAP dollars over the course of a year, with soft drinks totaling $357 million in spending. But soft drinks are only sitting at the top of the list because of how the items are categorized: Individual fruits and vegetables are each listed one at a time, rather than counted as a category. Pork and bacon are separate line items. Fresh chicken and frozen chicken are different.
When the purchases are combined into the categories we normally use to assess dietary patterns, things start to look different: SNAP participants spent about 40 cents of every dollar on basic foods including meat, poultry, fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, and bread. Soft drinks accounted for 5 cents, and candy for 2. Their purchases were very similar to purchases made by families not using SNAP benefits.
“The diets of most Americans across income levels fall short of what nutrition experts recommend.”
In another study using national survey data, the USDA also looked at diet quality using a measure called the Healthy Eating Index (HEI). SNAP participants scored a few points lower than people with similar income levels not using SNAP benefits and higher-income individuals, but researchers cautioned the differences were so small, it was unclear if they were significant. Their main conclusion was that overall, American diets don’t align with the dietary guidelines, regardless of how they’re paying at checkout.
“The data that we do have on what SNAP participants buy shows that there’s really no meaningful difference in the types of food that people are purchasing with SNAP benefits versus other payment methods,” said Bergh at CBPP. “The diets of most Americans across income levels fall short of what nutrition experts recommend.”
Harvard professor Mande disagreed on the first point. Any data point, no matter how small, that suggests the program is failing to improve nutrition is problematic, he felt. “If you’re spending over $100 billion a year, and the purpose of your program is to improve the diet quality of Americans, and when you check how that’s going, you find out it’s actually doing the reverse, that should be a big problem,” he said.
And he pointed to other concerns in the USDA report. For example, analysts found a higher prevalence of obesity and diabetes among SNAP participants and more risk factors for heart disease. A higher percentage of SNAP participants reported drinking soda regularly.
Still, other data points led in a different direction. The USDA found children in households using SNAP had lower rates of obesity and lower prevalence of diabetes compared to families with similar incomes not using benefits. In addition, other research has found that SNAP use is linked to better long-term health outcomes, including fewer sick days and doctor visits and $1,400 less in annual healthcare costs compared to non-participants with similar incomes.
Part of the issue, Schanzenbach said, is that it’s “devilishly hard” to study SNAP. It’s been around forever and there’s little variation. Comparing those who access benefits to people in similar income brackets who don’t is often the best you can do, but it’s still not a great research practice, she said, because those groups vary in many other ways.
Where the research is even more sparse, she said, is in illuminating whether restrictions will actually improve diets. After all, SNAP has the word “supplemental” in its name for a reason. The vast majority of SNAP recipients have other forms of income and could shift their dollars around to buy soda and candy when they want to.
And that’s their right, say many advocates and experts who feel that the entire discussion around SNAP recipients’ diets is demeaning, especially once it enters the political realm. Most Americans, after all—even those who eat as healthfully as possible—grab something sweet every now and then.
“People can have this conversation, and at the end of the day, those lawmakers will go and have a soda while they’re restricting what other people will have. There’s this idea of American values and about being to choose, but somehow that gets lost in translation if you are low-income. Then, your right to choose, it’s not in play,” said Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP deputy director at the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “Every farm bill we see it, and at its core is, ‘Who is deserving?’”
Similarly, Bergh said restrictions could be burdensome and stigmatizing. “Diet-related chronic disease is a society-wide problem. So, if you’re looking for a solution, it needs to be one that cuts across income levels and that addresses all of society,” she said.
Less Controversial, Better Evidence: Nutrition Incentives
Mande was adamant that anti-hunger groups should stay out of the conversation altogether and dismisses as preposterous the idea of restrictions being demeaning. But he agreed that policies should improve nutrition across the board. SNAP, he said, is one of the few policy “levers that the government has that is powerful enough to change the entire food system.”
A bill that introduced restrictions on using SNAP benefits to pay for soda, he suggested, could include a provision that requires all retailers accepting SNAP to stop promoting soda through the use of aisle “endcaps,” which have been shown to be effective marketing. And that could encourage all shoppers to make healthier choices.
“Diet-related chronic disease is a society-wide problem. So, if you’re looking for a solution, it needs to be one that cuts across income levels and that addresses all of society.”
Nearly across the board, experts who have spent time on the issue—whether they are for or against soda bans in SNAP—support policies that incentivize those using the benefits to buy more fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods.
At about 40 farmers’ markets across Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia, for example, Freshfarm offers SNAP participants a dollar-for-dollar match to purchase foods from local farmers. Their accounting shows SNAP participants spend 55 percent of their benefits on fruits and vegetables and the other 45 percent on market foods like bread, meat, eggs, and dairy.
In fact, said, Nick Stavely, the director of incentive programs, the organization has been forced to implement a daily cap because the demand outstrips the funding.
The program is funded through a USDA effort called the Gus Schumaker Nutrition Incentive Program, which has historically been popular on both sides of the aisle and powers similar efforts at farmers’ markets across the country. Last week, a bipartisan group of Senators including Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) and Ben Ray Luján (D-New Mexico) introduced a bill to expand the program.
“I think, through our nearly 20 years of experience and the hundreds of conversations we’ve had with folks at the markets, incentives work better than restrictions,” Stavely said. Research supports the fact that incentive programs do increase consumption of healthy foods.
But experts like Mande want incentives as well as restrictions—and in this political moment, restrictions are easier to sell. “When you take a lot of smart, thoughtful people who have deep expertise and knowledge of public policy, and you lay out the facts, they say, ‘Of course, SNAP shouldn’t be by spending money on soda,” he said. In fact, many smart, thoughtful people say it’s not that simple.
Still, when asked if her thinking has changed since the issue surfaced in New York City so long ago, Marion Nestle told Civil Eats she thought that, if anything, the arguments now are stronger.
“WIC works fine without sodas. SNAP could too. I hope the USDA finally agrees to a pilot project—health advocates have been arguing for that for ages,” she said. “With that said, the entire system is terrible, and I wish we had universal basic income instead.”
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]]>The post An Alaska Native Chef Builds Foodways for the Future appeared first on Civil Eats.
]]>As Hurricane Helene made its way up the East Coast last October, Rob Kinneen tracked the storm from his home in Durham, North Carolina. When lashing winds and heavy rains began battering the state and reports started coming in of disastrous flooding throughout Appalachia, Kinneen knew he needed to act.
“I drove up to this small town, Swannanoa, with my apron and my knife,” he says, “and within minutes of arriving at the commissary kitchen that had been set up, I was cutting up vegetables.”
Kinneen, an innovative Tlingit chef, has dedicated much of his professional life to sharing his knowledge of Alaska foodways, focusing on local, sustainable ingredients and helping the public understand the benefits of those foods. It was second nature for him to jump in to help.
“Rob’s ability to create a bridge between Alaska Native culture and the broader food world is inspiring.”
“When it comes to food relief efforts, healthy, culturally relevant foods are so important,” says Kinneen, whose jovial nature is reflected in the easygoing smile he’s donning more often than not.
He put his culinary skills to use that day and for many afterward, helping prep big batches of roasted squash and cabbage-apple slaw to be distributed alongside braised beef and pork. He was heartened to see that visitors to the makeshift pantry—many of whom had lost everything and were living in tents or cars—maintained a positive mood.
“Even though we were just weeks out from a catastrophic event that washed away people’s homes, there was still this uplifting sense of community and camaraderie,” he recalls. “It’s a good reminder that food relief, which has become increasingly political and bureaucratic, is really about basic humanity.”
For Kinneen, food insecurity isn’t just a worst-case scenario—it’s a reality he witnessed while growing up in Alaska. Then, as now, Indigenous communities depend heavily on subsistence hunting and fishing, maintaining traditional lifeways while blunting the exorbitant cost of groceries in the state, particularly for fresh foods. This can mean the gathering of land and sea plants such as berries, beach asparagus, kelp, and black seaweed as well as hunting for whales, seals, and walruses.
Tlingit Chef Robert Kinneen’s bison flank steak with tepary bean salad and juniper-epazote sauce. (Photo credit: Grace Bowie, courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution)
Many of the state’s isolated, rural villages are reachable only by plane and are hit hard when disaster strikes, even if the catastrophes are far away. Sept. 11, the 2016 Old Iliamna earthquake south of Anchorage, and the pandemic all created food shortages and demonstrated the fragility of the food system in Alaska, where an estimated 95 percent of food is imported.
“Every decade, something has disrupted the [Alaska] ecosystem, and people have been stuck without access to food,” says Kinneen, highlighting the importance of subsistence hunting and fishing. “Alaska also has limited emergency rations, so if people don’t have the resources to [meet their own needs], it can be really debilitating.” Early on, he learned the value of gathering and sharing local food within the community, and of developing the skills that enabled people to feed themselves and others.
Kinneen was born in the 3,000-person town of Petersburg, on an island in Southeast Alaska. His connection to community, food, land, and water grew from family outings to dig clams and gather wild blueberries, which sparked an early interest in cooking. As a teen, he moved with his family to Anchorage, Alaska’s most populous city, with some 287,000 residents.
There, he got his first experiences in professional kitchens, though admittedly in “lackluster” cafes and nondescript restaurants. “I’ve wanted to be a chef for as long as I can remember,” Kinneen says, adding that he “barely graduated high school” but that a culinary program teaching classic French techniques solidified his passion for cooking.
After high school, thanks to the influence of a culinary instructor and out of a yearning to make something of himself beyond his home state, Kinneen traded Anchorage for upstate New York, to attend the Culinary Institute of America. “For me, the biggest culture shocks were the sheer mass of population and the disconnect from land,” he says.
In New York, he was exposed to foods he’d never tasted before. He also encountered myriad misconceptions that people held about Alaska—that it was a food “desert,” for instance. Kinneen had never experienced that, nor had his Tlingit ancestors, who lived off the land and sea for millennia. He decided his path would be to set the record straight about Alaska Native foodways, by sharing stories about his lived experiences alongside the rich flavors of his culture, in restaurants, at special events, and through recipes online.
“We should be mapping today’s thought processes and technology onto Indigenous stewardship models to help promote food knowledge.”
“All the Indigenous communities across Alaska were thriving pre-colonialization,” he says. “There are petroglyphs and remnants of fish traps that show that we were not just surviving, but thriving. That even goes for places with a harsh climate, like Utqiagvik, where it could be 30 degrees below zero and you don’t see the sun for three months.”
After culinary school, Kinneen cut his teeth in restaurant kitchens from Louisiana to North Carolina before returning to Alaska for a 15-year stint, eager to better connect with his Tlingit ancestry and showcase the state’s culinary bounty. That took shape as multiple high-profile chef gigs in restaurants, his Fresh Alaska Cookbook, and a web video series designed to demystify life in the Far North. The series documents Kinneen’s travels across the state to meet with knowledge keepers and prepare contemporary takes on traditional foods.
For instance, his posole recipe swaps pork with richly flavorful seal meat in this classic Mexican stew, bringing together food traditions from across Turtle Island, as many tribal communities call North America. His rockfish fumet infuses a favorite French soup with important Southeast Alaska ingredients, including black seaweed, yarrow greens, and wild parsley—all topped with clarified seal oil, which Kinneen says is similar, when freshly rendered, to a heady extra-virgin olive oil.
Tlingit chef Rob Kinneen, left, with Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman. (Photo courtesy of Rob Kinneen)
Those dishes reflect a harmony between past and present, and are an acknowledgment of modern Alaska Native communities where traditional ecological knowledge is alive and well.
Kinneen’s approach and expertise made him a natural fit as outreach director for Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman’s nonprofit, NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems), which aims to promote Indigenous food knowledge and access. Kinneen’s role is very much a continuation of his lifelong efforts, but on a larger scale. He travels often to visit tribal nations across the country, learning about and uplifting their food sovereignty efforts and helping preserve longstanding culinary traditions.
That work, both through the nonprofit and on his own, has led him to the White House for the annual Tribal Summit, which brings together leaders from the federal government and tribal nations to strengthen nation-to-nation relationships and support tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
For the past two years at the summit, he has organized Indigenous-focused feasts for hundreds of attendees, featuring dishes like turkey tamales, ahi poke, and three sisters salad with corn, beans, and squash. Last year, he traveled to Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, tapped by the Wilderness Society to spend a week cooking with ingredients that existed before colonization—blue corn, wild rice, and cranberry pancakes for breakfast and maple-braised bison with roasted hearty vegetables and quinoa for dinner—for a group of 20 people in the remote Brooks Range. His setup wasn’t much more than a transportable Coleman camping stove, a double propane burner, and a water filtration system.
“How can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth when it comes to food production?”
All these efforts have left a lasting impression on his contemporaries, including Penobscot chef Joe Robbins, who worked with Kinneen at the 2023 Tribal Summit and also teamed up with him to develop recipe videos employing both government commodity foods and traditional, culturally significant ingredients. That’s especially important because many tribal communities still depend on food rations from the U.S. government, which historically have not been particularly nutritious.
“As I look at the work Rob has done with constant dedication to not just to his tribe in Alaska but to all Indigenous communities on Turtle Island and beyond, it strengthens the work that all Indigenous chefs, farmers, and producers are doing every day,” Robbins says. “When it comes to Indigenous representation in the culinary world, we are still lacking, though the tides are shifting quickly. Perspective of our cultures has always come from the outside, but the work NATIFS is doing is coming from tribal communities, giving us all a much louder voice.”
Amy Foote, an Alaska-based chef who is striving to introduce traditional foods into healthcare facilities and other institutions there, echoes that sentiment. “Rob’s ability to create a bridge between Alaska Native culture and the broader food world is inspiring,” says Foote, who is not Indigenous but has focused much of her career on the deeply Indigenous notion of food as medicine. “By working alongside global Indigenous communities, he is reviving lost or endangered food knowledge and providing a means for communities to reclaim and reconnect with their food heritage. Rob is a grounding presence to a sovereign food future.”
Indeed, Kinneen embodies a reverence for the past with a vision for the future—a juxtaposition many Alaska Native communities are currently navigating. “Although ancestral knowledge is rooted in tradition, that doesn’t mean it can’t be adapted,” he says. “We should be mapping today’s thought processes and technology onto Indigenous stewardship models to help promote food knowledge.”
As prime examples of non-extractive Indigenous ingenuity, he points to the resurgence of Zuni waffle gardens for vegetable growing, which help conserve water in the Southwest, and the kelp farming that Dune Lankard of the Native Conservancy is spearheading along Alaska’s south-central coast, simultaneously bolstering the local economy with a nutritious traditional food and helping mitigate climate change impacts like ocean acidification.
For Kinneen, his childhood lessons from Alaska, about community and resilience, apply to the wider environmental and climate crises the planet is facing. “We should be asking ourselves, ‘How can we be in a symbiotic, stewardship relationship with the Earth when it comes to food production?’” he says. “I realize that approach would likely cut down on profitability, but the flip side is that we have a place to live.”
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