nutrition

by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

Rhys Powell gave up his Wall Street finance career to follow his entrepreneurial muse and to serve the community by doing something good, something right, and something that just plain needed doing.  He developed a business plan and, in 2005, took the plunge, starting Red Rabbit, a unique school catering service delivering healthy food to independent and charter schools in New York City.  The Red Rabbit mission is to provide school children with nutritious, well-balanced meals and, while so doing, foster in them healthy relationships with food that will serve them well throughout their lives.

Rhys started small, with a business plan that focused on parents’ as customers.  Rhys planned to prepare and deliver individual, healthy school lunches that were made to parents’ specifications and, as might be required, with regard to individual kids’ allergies and dietetic restrictions.  Rhys found that a tough proposition and re-focused his business plan on schools, particularly small, independent and charter schools.  Red Rabbit now prepares about 1,300 meals per day, including about 600 lunches, for kids at 14 schools, of which 12 are private and two are NYC charter.

by Kristin Pederson, FSNYC VISTA Member

Sunday’s New York Times carried a story stating that food stamp enrollment is at an all time high and increasing, helping to feed 1 in 8 Americans and 1 in 4 children.  It is wonderful that food stamps, now actually called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), are having such an important impact in the aggregate.  But I have learned through my own experience that each individual’s journey to receiving assistance is idiosyncratic in spite of the bureaucracy surrounding the process.

Parts of that bureaucracy can be dehumanizing.  Arriving mid-morning at the Williamsburg, Brooklyn Food Stamp Center, I joined an outdoor line reaching down the block.  As the line inside was processed, we moved through the doors in groups of five or so, strictly managed by security guards who stood watch every few feet against line jumping and disorder.  Once indoors, it was possible to hear the shouted announcement, made every few minutes, that the building was literally at its capacity, so anyone without business there had to leave.  This meant no friends to look after babies as mothers filled in forms, and elderly wives unaccompanied by their husbands.

Food Systems Network NYC will be holding a panel to celebrate the tomato and explore the tomato blight crisis and the impact on local farming. Farmers who grow tomatoes will talk about their tomato crops or losses due to late blight. A local agriculture expert and others will also contribute their views at this forum, the Network’s first evening program.  It will take place Thursday, September  24, 2009 at the Ethical Culture Society, 53 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn, in the Library, from 6:30 to 8 p.m.  There will even be a few local tomatoes to sample, if available.     Suggested donation: $7. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Please let us know you are coming, as seating is limited. 

RSVP: 646-233-3058 or kristin@foodsystemsnyc.org.  

Posted by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Healthy Bodegas program seeks to make healthier food choices available in communities where fresh produce, whole grains, and low fat dairy products can be hard (or impossible) to find. Donya Williams, Program Coordinator for the Healthy Bodegas initiative, chatted with Kerry Trueman about the twin challenges of encouraging shopkeepers to stock more wholesome foods, and enticing customers to buy them. KT: What was the genesis of the Healthy Bodegas initiative? DW: There was some research done at the district public health offices, looking at food retail establishments in Harlem and Brooklyn. And through this research, they found that bodegas were the most common food stores in these neighborhoods. So, based on that, they did a pilot program trying to get bodegas to increase their stock of low-fat milk and fresh produce, which would provide a lot more people with access to healthy food.

Posted by Lexi Van de Walle

New York State is leading the way in improving access to fresh, locally grown and nutritionally dense fruits and vegetables for low-income mothers and their children. Beginning July 1st, New York is the first of hopefully many states to allow pregnant women and mothers who are enrolled in the Women’s Infants and Children’s Supplemental Nutrition (WIC) program to use their monthly checks at farmers’ markets to buy eligible fruits and vegetables.

Until last month, when Governor David Patterson announced the addition of farmers’ markets as an approved outlet for WIC mothers to add to their shopping routine, a WIC participant living in New York could only buy locally grown produce if either their supermarket sold locally grown fruits and vegetables or she received one of the $24 Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program coupons good from June-November from their local New York WIC agency.