{"id":104,"date":"2008-08-03T18:32:31","date_gmt":"2008-08-03T22:32:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/?p=104"},"modified":"2008-08-03T21:00:52","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T01:00:52","slug":"mind-the-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/mind-the-gap\/","title":{"rendered":"Mind the gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I read a good book<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ve been trying to write something about it for a couple days now, but can’t shake the straitjacket of book-reviewerese. So, eh. You should read it! It may not be a page turner, but if you care about poverty and hunger, and if you are among the many<\/a> starting to wonder how the current boom in “conscious eating” might leap its class barrier and facilitate better access to healthy, affordable food in, as they’re called in public policy circles, “underserved communities,” this is the book for you.<\/p>\n

Mark Winne<\/a>, a career food activist and for 25 years executive director of the Hartford Food System<\/a>, doesn’t sanctify local, seasonal, organic (locaseasganic?) food. Though he clearly believes in the power of a community garden to impact lives–especially the lives of poor, urban kids who’ve never seen a tomato on the vine before–he’s deeply unromantic about it. You’re not going to find him posting photos of his kale crop on the internet or waxing poetical about the first snap peas of spring.<\/p>\n

Instead he talks a lot about food deserts and the institutional forces that create them. Prime among these is the essential redlining of the ghetto by the big supermarket chains, who can make more money at less risk by setting up shop in affluent and\/or suburban neighborhoods. But he also points the finger at woeful public transportation systems that can turn travel from the ghetto to said well-stocked, spankin’ clean grocery store into a daylong ordeal. (Being poor, as someone once pointed out to me, is a full time job–and if you don’t believe that try taking four city buses round-trip to the supermarket with a toddler or two in tow.) And of course shouldering some of the blame are the perennial contenders, bureaucracy and racism.<\/p>\n

What I found refreshing is the solid emphasis Winne places on boring old unglamorous policy change. Without significant structural and financial support from city government, he argues, even the most well-meaning endeavors are doomed to fail and we will be left, as he says more than once, with two separate and unequal food systems, “one that serves an elite class very well and one that serves all others poorly.”<\/p>\n

The market alone, in other words, destroys as much as it creates–a charge he backs up with a motherlode of anecdotal evidence. When the wealthy suburb of Greenwich started a farmers’ market, for example, “farmers left the hard-pressed urban markets faster than spinach bolting in July.”<\/p>\n

In that vein, I also appreciated his reluctance to place farmers on the romantic haystack they have often occupied of late. “I love and adore most of the farmers I have met in my lifetime, even a few who operate some of the nastiest industrial enterprises in our food system,” he writes, but . . . “I will not defend to the death the right of farmers to charge whatever they think they deserve any more than than I will vigorously defend policies that that have allowed unlimited and questionable commodity crop subsidies for what seems like an eternity. We must have food and farm policies in this country that are just as good for consumers as they are for farmers.”<\/p>\n

Winne doesn’t have a magic bullet; his virtue is that he doesn’t believe in them. Instead, he calls for a systematic overhaul of the way poverty and hunger are “managed” nationwide. Rather than the current patchwork of food banks, food stamps, WIC benefits, and school lunch programs–all of which have their own bureaucracies and special-interest agendas–he advocates the creation of a comprehensive food security plan, along the lines of this one<\/a> proposed by his colleague Joel Berg, who runs the New York City Coalition Against Hunger<\/a>. Throughout he’s pragmatic, clear-eyed, and sounds a little weary–none of which makes for a good Sunday Styles article. I haven’t seen Closing the Food Gap<\/em> reviewed much of anywhere outside some\u00a0niche<\/a> and\u00a0left-leaning<\/a> outlets. Maybe it’s too much to expect people to get worked up about incremental policy change and bus routes. But I think it’s a shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read a good book. I’ve been trying to write something about it for a couple days now, but can’t shake the straitjacket of book-reviewerese. So, eh. You should read it! It may not be a page turner, but if you care about poverty and hunger, and if you are among the many starting to … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marthabayne.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}