Engaging community groups in sustainability initiatives

Changing NYC’s food system: building public support by engaging community groups

Locally and regionally grown foods are increasingly popular in NYC:  not only do consumers prefer the freshness and better flavor, but a growing number of food policy advocates and elected officials see that the ways through which New Yorkers get food need to be completely overhauled.  

Reasons to regionalize the food system

Issues surrounding the City’s food supply, from production, distribution, and consumption to waste disposal, are addressed in the Bloomberg Administration’s PlaNYC 2011 update, a report by Manhattan Borough President Stringer,and Council Speaker Quinn’s FoodWorks Plan which characterizes the NYC food system as not sustainable, and not fully secure:

[O]ur food system faces a number of issues that compromise its long-term sustainability. Agricultural production is energy intensive, greatly contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and is not economically viable for many farmers. Food processing and distribution require large non-renewable energy inputs and further impact our environment. There is significant waste throughout the system, both from discarded food and food packaging. Moreover, New York City is not fully capitalizing on its economic power to create good jobs and economic opportunity at each phase of the food system.

Foodworks Report, NYC Council, Nov. 2010, p. 7.  

The way to comprehensively affect healthy food affordability, accessibility and awareness, is to approach food not just as a commodity, but as an infrastructural system, equivalent to our water, transportation and energy systems, that needs to be managed and considered in all urban and regional planning efforts. This approach is necessary in order to create a more resilient, secure and predictable food supply to our urban areas.

 “Regionalizing the Food System for Public Health and Sustainability,” Columbia University Urban Design Lab, November 2010, p. 17.

Not only do  locally grown foods have better flavor and nutritional value, but they travel shorter distances and burn less fuel.

Better diet will improve public health

The NYC poverty rate rose to 21% in 2010. About 1.4 million New Yorkers can’t afford healthy food choices.  Over 3 million New Yorkers live in food deserts - communities in which access to affordable and nutritious food choices is limited – as do more than 23 million other Americans. In the last 15 years the number of New Yorkers with diabetes has doubled to 700,000, and 40% of NYC children are overweight or obese, which is often a precursor to diabetes. These trends link to higher rates of chronic diseases, and rising national health care costs.  A Columbia study concluded that we must change our entire food system to address these crises in public health.  To get people to eat healthier, we must increase demand for healthy foods and improve access to affordable fruits & vegetables.

NYC is aggressively focusing on already well-known public health issues like diabetes, smoking, big portions and sugar-laden drinks with graphic ad campaigns.   What if the City were to put some of this effort to publicizing the less discussed parts of the food system dilemma?

Reducing food miles improves energy security and food security

Food is shipped a long way by truck, train and plane to NYC.  It’s often said that in the US food travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table.  Besides producing food of greater nutritional value, growing more of our food closer to where it is consumed will increase food security, reduce transportation costs and buffer the effects of increasingly volatile fuel price and supply.  The finite fossil fuel sources upon which we depend face constraints, threatening our food security.  (See Appendix A.)  The many victory gardens grown during World Wars I and II were very successful in conserving fuel.   Widespread public gardening will be increasingly cost-effective and desirable as a supplement to commercial agriculture. 

Public support will be essential to change the food system

NYC City Council’s Foodworks Plan has proposed ways to get the NYC region growing, processing and distributing more of its own food.  It’s hard to argue with the general goals of the food system transformation these officials and advocates propose – healthier diets, more agriculture and business within New York City and State, more efficiency and less waste.  Efforts to improve the NYC food system thus far have been uncontroversial.  NYC Council already passed a few laws based on parts of the FoodWorks Plan.  It’s possible but not likely that the food system can be smoothly transformed through a series of incremental measures, since the few government officials changing the food system are nearing the ends of their terms of office.

On the other hand, the NYC food market is big business.  Each year $30 billion is spent on food in NYC (FoodWorks, p. 3).  Eventually, some initiative will threaten an established industry, and will ignite well-funded, sophisticated opposition.  The fate of congestion pricing serves as a warning.    When Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC was introduced, its centerpiece proposal was congestion pricing, which would have created new tolls for drivers into Manhattan to help fund the City’s mass transit system.  However, PlaNYC’s groundbreaking portfolio of sustainability policy initiatives was created by Administration staff with little community participation, so when fierce opposition arose, mostly from tax-averse suburban commuters, the effort collapsed:  not enough public support had been built to defend it.  There’s no guarantee that PlaNYC and other Bloomberg Administration sustainability initiatives will continue past 2013. To turn vision into reality, public support for transformation of the food system must be developed beyond the relatively small food activist community. 

Seizing economic opportunity, and recruiting supporters

The Foodworks report sensibly aims for a broader audience by focusing on the economic opportunities in food system transformation. It details the benefits of a localized food system for retail businesses, regional farmers, and food processors and manufacturers (pages 3-5).  This appeal can be strengthened further by showing how projects aligned with local food can offer direct benefits not just to businesses, but to the City’s many nonprofit and community groups, especially those serving low-income communities.