Our Call to Action. Our appreciation for the power of narrative and conversation comes from our understanding of its power to move people to action. Here are a few actions the panelists have shared for your consideration in continuing to do our parts in creating a more equitable food system:

1. Leverage your consumer power. It is stated so often because it is undeniably true, especially in the Bay Area: Consumer power should not be underestimated or taken for granted. If you have the ability to shape your consumption patterns around local, sustainable products, learn more and take action as you can. 
2. Engage beyond consumerism. It’s important to recognize and reflect on your roles in and relationships with your food communities, and in your communities more generally. How can you engage with and participate in your communities not just as a consumer, but also as a shaper of the culture around you?
3. And engage long-term. One monumental way to engage with and support your community outside of local consumerism is to support in perpetuity a non-profit or other mission-driven collaborative that you really believe in, rather than one-time giving.

Powerful Quotes from the Panelists:

“Food systems, like every system, are born from culture… If you’re going to change a system, you need to look at the culture it’s feeding from.”

– Ada Cuadrado-Medina

“From a growing standpoint, we live in this incredibly amazing Mediterranean climate that allows for so many different types of things to be grown. Combine that with – and this comes from the next generation of people doing work in the tech sector or Silicon Valley – a growing demand from people who care more about where their food is coming from and who want a high quality of food, which is also a function of affordability and access… What I would love to see is all [these resources] being leveraged into this opportunity to overhaul the food system status quo as it is and create alternative and collaborative approaches. How do we all navigate this capitalist system in an ethical and equitable way where we hold institutions and governemtns accountable and change who some of the gatekeepers and rule-makers are in the food system?”

– James Nakahara

“The food system has been always a very difficult system for working people. It has always tried to extract the most amount of labor for the least amount of renumeration”

– Perri Kramer

“We tend to think of the world as a series of objects with boundaries, and not as the relationship between features. The more we lean into realizing everything is connected more so than we know there is a lot of wisdom in shifting the paradigm from ‘this is mine and that is yours’ to ‘What are our responsibilities to each other and what is best for the planet and our communities?’ The way that can manifest is through collaboration between these different entities – be they corporate, institutional, governmental, or non-governmental.”

– James Nakahara

“All of us are working within the constraints and challenges of the capitalist system to try to create a more equitable and just existence for the people we serve. Food System 6 does a lot of work with corporate partners to try to educate them on the way in which we view entrepreneurship and innovation; we focus on food sovereignty which is people owning the means and ends of their own production, and food ownership stays within communities and that allows them to be empowered.”

– Perri Kramer

“Rudy Jimenez, a fourth generation farmer, spoke at a recent event for Real Food Real Stories and had this moment of realization when he decided to become an organic farmer that it was spiritual work that he was doing: he wanted his community to have access to that food, and was asking the question ‘How can this place that has so much abundance have such little access to that same food? And why are we letting corporations decide stories for us?’ That is beautiful to me and really captures the spirit of what democratizing really means – giving people the ability and tools to take that power and make the story for themselves and their community.”

– Ada Cuadrado-Medina

The post One State, Two Systems | Food Equity Event appeared first on Camber Collective.

by Michaela Crunkelton Wilson

Before the days of Covid-19, if one walked down Market Street in San Francisco’s Financial District at lunch time, it would be bustling with men and women in their business professional attire, speed-walking back to their offices with an expensive fast-casual, local, organic salad in hand. Or perhaps the cheaper pre-made soup from Trader Joe’s. As one continued walking closer to the less wealthy neighborhoods of Civic Center and Tenderloin, the smattering of homeless people slowly turned commonplace, most likely begging for help or counting coins they’ve collected in hopes they have enough to buy something from the number of non-local, non-organic, but much cheaper fast-food chains and street vendors that stand in stark contrast to the fast-casuals of the Financial District.

This small anecdote is representative of the hyper-locality of inequality in the Bay Area. Inequality that routinely prevents good food – or food that sustains the health of the planet and its people – from getting to those who need it. Layer on top of this a global pandemic that exacerbates these inequalities, yet ironically, also provides it hope for change.

The good news is that good food can be almost anything, as long as it is real (not heavily processed), and diverse enough to ensure a balanced diet. The bad news: For many Californians, good food is a long shot, they’re not even getting access to food – 1 in 8 Californians currently struggle with food insecurity (defined by the California Association of Food Banks as the “occasional or constant lack of access to the food one needs for a healthy, active life”). And this is despite the fact that California produces nearly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.[1] So, while there is no shortage of good food, the downstream effects of inequitable distribution and consumer access and affordability impact the qualities and quantities of available food, especially for lower income populations.[2]

One of the primary manifestations of inequitable distribution is the fact that many low-income communities live in food deserts, where access to affordable good food is hard to come by. Not unlike the anecdote above, there seems to be an inverse correlation with median household income, and quality of food options available: the poorer the neighborhood, the more liquor stores and fast-food chains instead of grocery stores. Why? Because food follows money, and money follows food, and where there is not a lot of money, there is not a lot of food.

Just think about the causes and effects of transforming a food desert into an oasis. Often, a grocery store is built in a community as a result of gentrification, simply pushing old communities into new food deserts.[3] Yet even if that is not the case, and a grocery store is built in a low-income community to help remove the physical barriers of access, diets probably won’t change given the price-tag barrier of affordability.[4] As a result, low-income consumers are being left behind with access only to unhealthy foods, resulting in obesity (almost of quarter of adults in California are considered obese), diabetes (almost half of Californian adults are prediabetic or undiagnosed), nutritional deficiencies, and other chronic yet avoidable diet-related illnesses.[5]

Moreover, these systemic inequities have been worsened almost overnight due to the global coronavirus pandemic, truly separating the haves from the have-nots. Families of kids who rely on free or reduced-price lunches at school are now facing exponential hardships – statistics mention as many as 17 of 20 low-income students experience hunger each summer, and “summer” has come much earlier this year.[6] Restaurant workers who already operate under razor thin margins have gone from supplying an abundance of food to communities, to the realities of not knowing how they might feed even their own families due to layoffs and shutdowns. Food truckers, among the many hidden heroes of the food chain, face new logistical nightmares threatening not only their own jobs but also access to food for all of us.[7] And those privileged enough among us able to hoard food in a panic, leave shelves empty for people who are not so sure where the next pay check, or meal, might come from.

Yet, in a beautiful way, because the global pandemic has exacerbated challenges of the food system to the brink of imminent dissolution, it has also created the communities necessary to keep the food system afloat. News outlets and social media have been invaluable platforms to connect the haves with the have-nots. Farmers, restaurants, and nonprofit organizations share their stories, and communities come together to provide them the support they need. People have come to realize we are in this together, that without one component of the food system in place, we all suffer. And the simple awareness of what parts are hurting the most, allow people to take action to try and mend it.

Additionally, as seed packets and active dry yeast are wiped clean from the shelves, awareness is growing for what it takes to produce food. Before this pandemic, consumers expected unsustainably cheap food, and were too far removed from the production process to understand the social and environmental implications of their food choices. Perhaps the increased proximity to the food production process will now create greater appreciation for and awareness of the true costs of labor from a farm’s seed, nourishment, harvesting, cleaning, packing, distributing, shelving, selling, and preparing, to fork. One can only hope a deeper understanding of food will also bring a deeper understanding of the implications of a race to the bottom, shifting convenience-centric consumption habits and expectations.

Above all, as COVID increases people’s openness to leveraging community networks to address issues of access and affordability, the hope is that case exemplars have the opportunity to become the norm, and long-standing visions have the opportunity to come to fruition. Take the Community Foods Market in West Oakland, for example, whose doors opened in 2019 to provide accessible, nutritious food to the community for the first time since the 1970s. Built with the advisory of the historically low-income community itself, Community Foods Market is slowly dissociating the words ‘food desert’ from West Oakland, without deliberate gentrification.[8]Imagine a world where this process can be routinely replicated.

Or take, perhaps, the handful of Bay Area actors who have been envisioning new economic models of production and consumption in which public and private actors can help cover the short-term costs of the transition to sustainability, so people and planet do not suffer the consequences of excluding negative externalities in today’s food pricing. Visions of wealthy private sector consumers paying more for their own food procurement so that others can pay less, but lacking the networks and policies in place to do so. One Bay Area food hub that connects smallholder farmers with food programs within wealthy tech companies has long understood the potential to apply this idea to their own distribution networks: Perhaps less wealthy organizations in geographic proximity – such as hospitals and schools – can achieve lower costs by piggybacking on the distribution networks already employed by wealthier consumers.[9] Now more than ever, there seems a possibility to do so.

We shouldn’t have to live in a society where only those customers who are both driven by values of health and sustainability, and also have the luxury of paying the price tag associated with it – are the only ones that can sustainably engage in a good food system. Therefore, with more awareness, community engagement, and improved community networks, actors across the food chain can co-create solutions for more equitable distribution and sustainable consumption. As we are already seeing, the global pandemic is exacerbating the challenges we face, yet also accelerating the solution: communities and networks that cross socio-economic barriers.

The post Food System Challenges and Opportunities: the Bay Area Example, pt. 2 appeared first on Camber Collective.

by Michaela Crunkleton Wilson

If the beginning of 2020 has been any indication — what with the driest February on record,[1] and a life-altering global health pandemic — factors we are sometimes unable to control (or even predict) can have indiscriminate repercussions on all aspects of the Bay Area. This includes in sectors where challenges are already acutely felt every day: sectors like food production and the admirable workers who fuel it.

Spanning 6,900 square miles of Northern California, the Bay is much more than Silicon Valley’s tech scene or San Francisco’s tourist attractions. Inclusive of extensive farmland communities, agriculture plays a key role in our economy and landscapes. California produces more than 400 agricultural commodities, with dairy being the top commodity, and grapes a close second (any takers for a glass of wine from Napa Valley while you read?). California has also been responsible for growing two-thirds of all the fruits and nuts in the country and over one-third of the country’s vegetables. It leads all other states for cash farm receipts, and accounts for over 13 percent of the nation’s total agricultural value.[2]

Broadly characterized by mild winters and dry summers, yet harboring remarkable micro climates, much of this impressive production originates from the Bay Area and surrounding counties. It’s hard to believe as one drives past the ultramodern tech campuses and pseudo-utopian landscape architectures of downtown suburbs such as Palo Alto, that there is a stark contrast of farms that exist within as close as a ten-mile radius of those very places.

Yet stark contrasts, also known as inequity, are commonplace in the Bay Area, and the farmer community sits on the unlucky side of that spectrum. Lack of power and opportunity for farmers, including inequities in farm ownership, are commonplace. The most illustrative example is the current housing crisis that has led to an explosion of homelessness and relocation in the Bay Area and is painfully impacting the farmer community: An hour south of San Jose in Salinas — a city where agriculture makes up 20% of the local economy and has long been known as “The Salad Bowl of the World” — an entire farming family might crowd into one bedroom, splitting rent with other families who might take over the living room, or even the garage.[3] In addition, many farm workers face the dark irony of living in food deserts — or an area that has limited access to affordable and nutritious food. They are unable to eat a variety of foods they produce and lack the means to relocate to food-plentiful neighborhoods.

Even for smallholder farmers who own their operations, and therefore would presumably have more power and opportunity, the punchline is the same: it’s nearly impossible to make a sustainable, living wage. For them, it’s a struggle to access distribution networks that can accommodate smaller quantities of produce, it’s hard to transport food to market given they are too busy farming, and for the many smallholders experimenting with sustainable production models and regenerative agriculture, it’s hard to find economically viable solutions that still pay their workers, and the bills.

Given the harsh realities tied to this type of work, it should not come as a surprise that there is a dangerous lack of young farmers entering the sector. And who would want to when the prospect of automation threatens to take away an already insecure occupation? Farmers average 59 years of age,[4] and one need only ponder this reality for a moment before empathizing with the urgency associated with finding their successors.

Shall we pile on top of this the threats associated with a global pandemic? In a time where demand for an uninterrupted supply of food is so high, how can we ensure there is adequate labor to meet the demand, and that this labor receives dignified care and compensation in return? Supply of labor low as it is, the global pandemic has threatened to restrict immigration policies such as the H-2A program — a program that allows employers to bring foreign nationals to the U.S. as temporary agriculture workers — which accounts for up to 60% of labor needs.[5] Coupled with pre-existing health conditions prevalent among many farmers in the aging population, no paid sick leave, and no health insurance, farmers are risking their lives for the sake of their livelihoods, and to ensure supply can meet demand.[6]

And while demand for food is high, the way consumers demand food has changed rapidly, making it hard for farmers to adapt. Take just one example: Small local farms are critical partners to Stanford University’s dining hall food sourcing portfolio, and with campus closed for an unforeseeable future, those revenue streams are lost.[7] How many and how badly are farmers impacted knowing that all restaurants and schools are closed, in addition to interrupted global supply chains and access points?

And this is more or less the half of it. The inequitable and precarious realities of those who produce our food are only additive to the challenges associated with how food is produced.

Due to tempting short-term economic gains and a controversial national policy landscape, current agricultural practices incentivize exploitative industrial production with a focus on the current cash crop trinity: grains, dairy, and meat. Such practices inadvertently and irreparably deplete lands and accelerate climate issues given the lack of soil and crop biodiversity needed for the long-term viability of environmental resources.[8]

By some estimates, agriculture currently generates about 25% of annual greenhouse gas emissions.[9] Twenty-five per cent! It’s a vicious cycle in which threats derived from climate change such as fire (Remember all the wildfires in California last year?), drought, sea level rise, and rain and ocean acidification are accelerated by agricultural practices, which create adverse effects that justify the need to promote short-term agricultural gains, which accelerate and exacerbate climate-related challenges, and so on. Therefore, while regenerative agriculture has the possibility to reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity, there are few incentives apart from values-driven ones to employ such practices.

While the novel coronavirus threatens the already precarious livelihoods of food production workers, climate change bolsters the temporalities of food production processes. That said, it’s not all gloom and doom. Silicon Valley is famously known as the hub of innovations, and research, innovation, and exploration around agriculture and food systems abound. Additionally, a relatively open policy landscape allows for atypical innovation and bipartisan action, thereby offering potential to serve the needs of different communities in novel ways. As such, the greatest opportunity lies in providing peoples and communities involved in production access to the resources and networks able to help them innovate mechanisms, knowledge bases, and policies for adaptation — and not just climate adaptation.

To the challenges associated with who is producing food: One Bay Area farmer dreams of a future of worker-owned cooperatives in which farmers own, work, and live on the same land to mitigate issues of complex power imbalances and the visible housing crisis. Visions also exist of smallholder farmers with improved access to distribution networks, able to forego traditional broadline distributors that deal in high volume, accessing instead food hubs that offer competitive prices for smaller volumes. And because push has come to shove, there are undoubtedly visions for how to ensure the health and safety of farm workers in the face of a global pandemic (Access to health care as a starter, how about?).

To the challenges associated with how food is produced: The Bay Area is already known as a pioneer in normalizing climate-related food system innovations such as laboratory-grown or plant-based ‘meat’ and urban or carbon farming. In addition to this, there are countless visions of a Bay Area where farmers and fishermen desire and are empowered to operate their land and seas for environmental sustainability and climate mitigation, in addition to profit. Farmers and fishermen would reap benefits from practices that reinforce ecosystem services rather than exploiting the ecosystem with unnecessary inputs and overfishing. In doing so, they would mitigate climate threats through lowered emissions and increased carbon sequestration.

To maintain momentum on existing innovations, achieve current visions, and dream up new ones, networks need to be strategically shaped. There is an expectation that technological innovations such as block-chain or AI will instantaneously solve all our food production problems, but without networks and partnerships — things that take time and patience — many will be left behind and unintended consequences will only create new problems. Farmers, economists, agronomists, climate scientists, food conglomerates, policy makers, health care workers, Bay Area Ag-tech startups, each have knowledge to offer and each could use knowledge from the other. Community networks allow actors to understand an entire system, making more informed decisions and allowing the appropriate actors to be the decisionmakers in order to effectively address both foreseeable and unforeseeable risks.

The biggest challenge in the Bay Area’s food production system is the precarity of farmer livelihoods, which are only exacerbated by unstable and dynamic factors, such as the global pandemic and climate threats. But, while the realities of inequality perpetuate the cycles of poverty and threaten food production’s future viability, there is an equal amount of hope that our unique policy landscape and rich diversity of actors can recreate the food system for the better.

[1] Pierre-Louis, Kendra and Nadja Popovich, “California Had Its Driest February on Record. Here’s How Bad It Was.” The New York Times, Mar. 2020.

[2] “California Agricultural Production Statistics: 2018 Crop Year — Top 10 Commodities for California Agriculture,” California Department of Food and Agriculture.

[3] Cimini, Kate. “California farmworkers struggle with high cost of housing,” The Counter, Feb. 2020.

[4] Mitric, Julia. “As farmers age, they face the challenge of finding successor to take over,” marketplace.org, May 2019.

[5] Corbett, Jessica. ”As Trump Limits Guest Workers From Mexico Amid Coronavirus, Farmers Warn of Labor and Food Shortages,” Common Dreams, March 2020.

[6] Fu, Jessica, “Pre-existing conditions, no sick leave and health insurance put farm workers at increased coronavirus risk,” The Counter, March 2020.

[7] ”R&DE launches Farm Accelerator,” Sustainable Stanford, September 2017.

[8] “Why Regenerative Agriculture?” Regeneration International, 2019.

[9] Hersher, Rebecca and Allison Aubrey, “To Slow Global Warming, U.N. Warns Agriculture Must Change,” NPR, Aug 2019.0 Likes

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