Joel Berg: Good Food, Good Jobs

In a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute, Joel Berg can be tough on writers who are naive about food policy.

For example, Berg quotes Marlene Kennedy, who suggested in the Albany Times-Union in 2008 that SNAP (food stamp) participants take up gardening:

Rather than working hard to increase participation in food and nutrition assistance programs, why not try to reduce the need for such aid? Instead of spreading the word about food stamps to the urban poor, why not give them a way to grow their own food?

Berg responds with a tart call to realism:

The idea that people should work in a community garden instead of getting food stamps is simply preposterous. SNAP is a vital safety-net program that makes a real difference in the lives of millions of Americans, providing mass sustenance in a way community gardens still have yet to achieve.... Saying that seasonal gardens can take the place of a year-round government safety net is ridiculous and counterproductive.

On the other hand, Berg can also be rough on writers who are too narrowly realistic.

For example, many community food programs start small, but Berg disagrees with those who sneer at the small initial scale of such programs.

[J]ust as I rebuke food security theorists for glossing over the class-insensitive aspects of the movement, I must also chide my colleagues in traditional hunger organizations for too frequently looking down their noses at the community food security movement just because most of the projects are still small-scale. If anti-hunger advocates agree that such projects are helpful but believe their scale is too small to make a meaningful difference, the most logical response should be to work together to develop public policies to help them expand.

So, using Berg's perspective, in which it is possible to be too naive, too realistic, or just right, I invite comments on the balance struck in several of the proposals in Berg's report.

A. A new $1 billion tax credit.

The president and Congress should authorize $1 billion in new, special tax credits for food-related businesses, contingent on their paying living-wage salaries to their employees, locating or staying in areas of particularly high unemployment, or providing affordable food to low-income Americans.

B. The bully pulpit.

The president should use his “bully pulpit” to encourage private investments in food-related social innovation projects.

C. A food access index.

USDA should develop a “food access index,” a new measure that takes into account both the availability and affordability of nutritious foods, and use this measure as another tool to judge the success of all the efforts it funds.

D. $50 million in community food grants.

The president and Congress should increase the funding for the USDA Community Food Grant Program to $50 million, from its current $5 million level.

Berg directs the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and is author of and author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?

A food policy debate

The Economist debate this week addresses the proposition:

This house believes that governments should play a stronger role in guiding food and nutrition choices.

Kelly Brownell of Yale University is for the motion:

Three major food issues face the world. Local, national, and global governing authorities must take bold and innovative action to avoid catastrophic health consequences, political upheaval, and political and financial instability around the globe.

Melanie Leech of the Food and Drink Federation is opposed:

The food and drink industry shares society's concerns about the health of the nation, particularly rising obesity levels, and it is committed to playing a positive role in responding to this vital debate.

Food stamp participation by race and ethnicity

The New York Times recently posted a terrific web utility for mapping SNAP (food stamp) participation across the counties of the United States.

The federal government's Food and Nutrition Service publishes only state-level SNAP data on the web, not county level. When one maps state-level data, the visual result is too blocky to communicate much information. So, the clever and hard-working New York Times data folks contacted states directly for county-level information.

As a result, one gets a clear image of the landscape of American poverty from county-level data. At a glance, one sees the layout of high rates of SNAP participation across Appalachia, the Mississippi delta and the deep south, the Texas borderlands, and remote rural parts of the West.


Mostly, the outstanding features of the map above reflect the economic landscape rather than state boundaries (although I wonder what to make of the Missouri / Arkansas border, which may reflect either data quality issues or policy differences across states).

An especially interesting feature of the New York Times utility is the ability to map changes in SNAP participation from 2007 to 2009:


Here, the outstanding features are not the overall level of poverty, but instead: (a) the impact of the current financial crisis, including terrible rates of foreclosure in places like Atlanta and Florida, and (b) state boundaries seem more pronounced. For example, notice the Wisconsin border, and the Ohio / Indiana border. Does this mean differences in state SNAP policies have contributed to differences in enrollment recently?

The New York Times utility also permits the user to break down the data by age (children versus adults) and by race and ethnicity. For some purposes, it would be even more interesting to look at the number of SNAP (food stamp) participants relative to all poor people, by race and ethnicity, rather than relative to all people. Such a map, which cannot be created using the New York Times utility, would be more useful if you are interested in discrimination issues in food stamp policy.

A few years ago, Chris Dicken at ERS and I created maps of that sort using California data in a working paper. For example, here is a map of white and black food stamp participants as a fraction of the corresponding poor population.


Similarly, here is the map showing Hispanic food stamp participants as a fraction of the corresponding poor population.


The New York Times mapping utility was produced by Matthew Bloch, Jason DeParle, Matthew Ericson and Robert Gebeloff. DeParle and Gebeloff wrote a related feature article on the SNAP program, which has experienced rapid growth recently. The newspaper also ran a lively debate about SNAP policy with leading bloggers and new media writers.

Gaining Ground Cookbook

The Gaining Ground community is excited about its new cookbook, which is already on its second printing run. My Friedman School colleague, Lisa Troy, president of the board for Gaining Ground, writes that the organization has been contacted for an entry to be included in the White House Cookbook for Children, featuring recipes using produce grown in the White House garden.

Gaining Ground is a not-for-profit 17-acre community farm in Concord, MA, which donates its produce to area food pantries and meal programs.

Local processing for poultry

Tom Laskawy features my Friedman School colleague Jennifer Hashley in his fascinating Grist article about an innovative poultry processing operation sponsored by Whole Foods.

Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own backyard, Hashley knew that selling her chickens would be easier if she used a licensed slaughterhouse. Nor is she alone in her troubles. Despite growing demand for local, pasture-raised chickens, small poultry producers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even New York can’t or won’t expand for lack of processing capacity

It isn’t only small producers who are feeling the pinch—a widespread lack of processing infrastructure appropriate for small farmers has caused supply chain problems for the big retailers as well. Whole Foods—the world’s largest natural-foods supermarket—wants to aggressively expand its local meat sourcing, according to its head meat buyer, Theo Weening. But it faces the same limitation as Hashley. Most regions of the country have “lots of agriculture but nowhere to process,” Weening told me, adding that the phenomenon is most acute in the northeast.

Whole Foods wants to change all that. In a move that has national implications, the retail giant has confirmed to Grist that it is working with the USDA as well as state authorities to establish a fleet of top-of-the-line “mobile slaughterhouses” for chicken. Starting with a single unit serving Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Hudson Valley, N.Y. area, Whole Foods hopes to offer small farmers an affordable way to process chickens as well as to vastly increase the amount of locally-sourced chicken it sells. If successful, this program could be expanded to any region of the country with similar infrastructure shortages.

See an earlier post about Hashley's work.

Climate science emails

Peter Watts writes about the recent climate change email disclosure controversy (quoted on boingboing):

Science doesn't work despite scientists being asses. Science works, to at least some extent, because scientists are asses. Bickering and backstabbing are essential elements of the process. Haven't any of these guys ever heard of "peer review"? ... That's how science works. It's not a hippie love-in; it's rugby.

My comment :

Peter Watts implies that the bickering and backstabbing in the recent email disclosures are a good thing.

But science usually works better than this. Though it is true that all scientists gossip and complain about peer review, science is usually more cooperative than rugby. Rugby is a zero sum game. Science is usually a positive sum game, where each team's discovery advances that team's interest in part and the collective interest of all competing teams in part.

There a couple reasons why the climate scientist's emails showed more bickering and backstabbing than usual. Climate science is more intertwined with partisan politics than most science is, and the future of civilization is at stake. I think those folks are playing a rougher ballgame than scientists usually play.

In contrast with Peter Watts, with hindsight I think they would all have scored better if they had played a more fastidiously high-minded game.

Food insecurity jumps to 14.6% of U.S. households, highest level since survey began

Following the post earlier today, here is the new report from USDA's Economic Research Service:

More American households had difficulty putting enough food on the table in 2008.

In 2008, 85 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year, but 14.6 percent of households were food insecure at least some time during that year, up from 11.1 percent in 2007.

This is the highest recorded prevalence rate of food insecurity since 1995 when the first national food security survey was conducted.