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?
Closing the Food Gap with Mark Winne [31:20m]:
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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.
Using anecdotal evidence and a smart look at both local and national policies, Winne offers a realistic vision for getting locally produced, healthy food onto everyone’s table.
Mark Winne was the Executive Director of the Hartford Food System from 1979 to 2003 during which time he led this non-profit organization’s efforts to develop farmers’ markets, community gardens, neighborhood food stores, a community supported agriculture farm, nutrition education programs, and a food bank. Over the past several years, Winne’s involvement with food and agriculture policy led to the development of the Working Lands Alliance and the Connecticut Farmland Trust, two organizations working to preserve farmland in Connecticut. His policy work also resulted in the creation of the City of Hartford Food Policy Commission and the State of Connecticut Food Policy Council, two groups that he has served on and provided staff services to.
Winne was a co-founder of the national Community Food Security Coalition, a 400-member non-profit organization that conducts training and policy work designed to promote community-based solutions to food insecurity and the decline of local agriculture. He is a past-President of CFSC and is currently a member of its board of directors.
Winne provides consulting services to the New Mexico Task Force to End Hunger and the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council. He currently writes and speaks nationally on issues related to community food systems, food insecurity and hunger, local agriculture, and food and agriculture public policy. He is a member of the Hartford Courant Place board of contributors and writes regular articles for this newspaper on subjects related to farming and farmland. In addition to his consulting work in New Mexico, Winne has been providing assistance to groups in Chicago, New York City, Boston, Seattle, and California in the development of food policy councils.
Click here to get Closing the Food Gap from Amazon.
Click here to visit www.MarkWinne.com
Brad Lancaster
