Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty

By Mark Winne

This powerful call to arms offers a realistic vision for getting locally produced, healthy food onto everyone’s table, “[blending] a passion for sustainable living with compassion for the poor” (Dr. Jane Goodall)
 
In Closing the Food Gap, food activist and journalist Mark Winne poses questions too often overlooked in our current conversations around food: What about those people who are not financially able to make conscientious choices about where and how to get food? And in a time of rising rates of both diabetes and obesity, what can we do to make healthier foods available for everyone?

To address these questions, Winne tells the story of how America’s food gap has widened since the 1960s, when domestic poverty was “rediscovered,” and how communities have responded with a slew of strategies and methods to narrow the gap, including community gardens, food banks, and farmers’ markets. The story, however, is not only about hunger in the land of plenty and the organized efforts to reduce it; it is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations. With the popularity of Whole Foods and increasingly common community-supported agriculture (CSA), wherein subscribers pay a farm so they can have fresh produce regularly, the demand for fresh food is rising in one population as fast as rates of obesity and diabetes are rising in another.

Over the last three decades, Winne has found a way to connect impoverished communities experiencing these health problems with the benefits of CSAs and farmers’ markets; in Closing the Food Gap, he explains how he came to his conclusions. With tragically comic stories from his many years running a model food organization, the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, alongside fascinating profiles of activists and organizations in communities across the country, Winne addresses head-on the struggles to improve food access for all of us, regardless of income level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 15, 2008
• ISBN: 9780807047323

Reviews for Closing the Food Gap

[wealhtheowwylfing · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Winne takes a look at America's food system, using his 35 years of experience as a worker in food banks, community gardens, farms, and policy-making boards. The basic problem is one of poverty. There are fewer food choices the poorer you get, and the food itself has ever-decreasing nutritional value. Hunger is a problem in America, but poor nutrition is an even worse one--heart disease, diabetes, and the health risks due to obesity are increasing every year.

Food deserts: "This shortage of supermarkets means that poor residents must travel out of their neighborhoods to purchase food, or shop at more expensive corner and convenience stores with less selection and poor quality food. The insufficient access...reduces the purchasing power of neighborhood residents, and may exacerbate long-term health problems resulting from nutritionally inadequate diets."--the Food Trust.
Food deserts are caused because poor areas are less profitable, more dangerous, and too crowded for the huge scale that most chains work in nowadays. Food deserts are not just a problem in terms of limited, expensive access to nutrition, but also because the money city residents would have spent in the city is instead spent in the suburbs. Thus the suburbs get even more money, and the city is left with even less, worsening the cycle. Supermarkets provide access to quality food--and are also big employers, pay property taxes, keeps food-purchasing dollars in the area. Three methods of addressing food deserts: create a food co-op owned by the neighborhood; create the food co-op but leave ownership and operation to an ouside supermarket firm; advocate and agitate for city and supermarket industry to respond to neighborhood's needs (generally by using public funds to decrease risks associated with supermarket development in lower income areas, or improve public transit to get to supermarkets). Then there are ideas like the Farmer's Market Nutrition Programs which give coupons to low-income families to use at farmers' markets--which leads to increased consumption of fresh produce, plus increased money to farmers, who spend money in-state.

The basic question this book asks is how to create a food system that is good for famers, the environment, and consumers?

I recommend looking at my status updates while reading this book--some of the figures Winne quotes about poverty and food insecurity blew my mind.

[rebeccablood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Highly readable, realistic view of food systems in the US, and various approaches to closing the food gap. Recommended.