Food for Change

It’s a topic I’ve been a-blogging about frequently in the last couple of months, so it’s only appropriate that I follow up with these recent more hopeful stories on the topic of making healthy food more available in food desert areas of the city and country.

Yesterday New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand proposed $1 billion in loans and grants Monday to help build 2,100 grocery stores in areas around the nation that lack access to fresh food.

It’s estimated that the proposal would help about four million New Yorkers who live in areas like the Bronx and East New York, where grocery stores are few and far between by providing the funding for more than 350 stores statewide. This proposal has the potential to solve the problem of access to healthy food in low-income areas and that’s the first step, but as I’ve said before, the second (and perhaps most important) step is making those healthy foods affordable—more affordable than junk food. That’s a more complex step that involves our entire industrial food system, but no measure of availability or education/awareness will have complete results until people can afford to buy the food.

There’s been some good news (not necessarily NEW news, but more new-to-me news) in the education/awareness area of healthy eating and cooking. On the heels of the after school cooking program I volunteered at last week, I found this story about a professional chef teaching kids about healthy cooking. I know firsthand how engrained poor eating habits can be in kids, how reluctant they can be to try foods they think are “weird” or “gross” but I’ve also seen how much (boy and girls, small kids, teens) really get into cooking, creating, and learning about new foods. It’s not going to fix the problem or change the world, but it does give you hope.