Food shed movement offers cream of the local crop

Instead of getting apples shipped across the nation, some locals in West Harlem and Morningside Heights are hoping to pick fruit from their own backyards soon. In Harlem and at Columbia University, several neighborhood and citywide food projects have recently sprouted up alongside the nationwide urban agriculture movement—now gaining momentum as a new way of thinking about fresh, local, sustainable, and affordable food. At the Urban Design Laboratory of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, a group of researchers are now working on an initiative called the New York City Regional Foodshed Initiative designed to analyze the geographic origins of New York City’s food consumption to help them come up with local solutions. According to Richard Gonzalez, a recent graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and the food shed project manager, they are trying to determine how much of New York City’s demand for food can be met by local farms and food production companies. “Basically, we want to know how far food travels to get to a New Yorker’s plate,” Gonzalez said. “Right now, a majority of New York City’s apples are flown in from Washington State. Can we create a regional radius within which a certain percentage of New York City’s food must be produced?” he added. Along with the design of this local radius for food production, the Lab is also working to research the effects of local food on the health and affordability of eating for poorer communities—particularly within the Northern Manhattan area, Gonzalez said. This, he said, includes potential educational programs for local communities and school children on the benefits of healthy foods and the agricultural process. Gonzalez and his partners are working in conjunction with Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture to bring their “food shed” project to life on a citywide scale. For Gonzalez, the role of the Urban Design Lab is to provide a model for a sustainable local food production system. “The Urban Design Lab basically brings the research and academics to the food shed project,” he said. “We try to show graphically what ‘sustainable development’ means in terms of food production for New York City.” Stringer, in a February press release urging the city to create a regional “Foodshed,” said, “Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers live in ‘food deserts’ where there isn’t enough fresh food; meanwhile, food prices are going through the roof, and yet thousands of eligible families cannot get food stamps.” At the same as this academic team partners with Stringer to implement the citywide effort, at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, (West Harlem Environmental Inc.), a community-based non-profit aimed at bringing local and affordable foods to Harlem, is working to address issues on the neighborhood level—through initiatives that revive small supermarkets in the neighborhood and reexamine the contents of school lunch. James Subudhi, the coordinator of the program, said, “Our goal is to improve access to healthy food for people living in Upper Manhattan.” Subudhi said that they are interested in bringing affordable supermarkets back to communities with food-scarcity problems. Subudhi said that he recently testified before the Department of City Planning to advocate for the attachment of standards to the city’s new Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, which is a city-wide initiative trying to bring supermarkets to underserved communities through tax breaks and incentives. “These incentives need to come along with standards,” Subudhi said, adding, “We’re trying to make sure that these supermarkets will be hiring local workers, accepting food stamps, and making food affordable for people living in these communities.” In addition to working to bring supermarkets back to West Harlem, WE ACT is trying to integrate healthy and local foods into public school lunch programs. For Subudhi, the situation is fairly serious. “72% of public school students are on free or reduced lunches which means that a majority of students are living in food insecure families,' he said.