September is NOFA-NY Locavore Month!

In addition to it being National Hunger Action Month, NOFA-NY is celebrating local food, farmers and farm-to-table cookery during September. This is a chance to talk up your love of local food and your support of sustainable farming to your friends and family.  It's a great time to share in experiences cooking together, dining at farm-to-table restaurants, taking action to shape policy in support of organic farms, and visiting the farms themselves! From asparagus and apples to wine and wheat, we are fortunate to live in an abundant agricultural state. NOFA-NY's online directory can help you find the most delicious, fresh, healthy food available in your region.

Check out a current listing of Locavore Challenge-inspired events around the state.

NOFA-NY will be offering resources through their website, sharing experiences on a blog and Facebook, and keeping you informed of Locavore events in New York.

At GardenShare, we are working to make the connections between local food, sustainable agriculture, and the problem of hunger in our midst, so what a great way to start bringing these issues together!

How to Donate Surplus Food from K-12 Schools

Changing How We Think About Our Resources for a Better Tomorrow:  
How to Donate Surplus Food from K-12 Schools

Join us for a free webinar on Thursday, September 17^th 2015 at 1:00pm -2:30pm EST / 10:00-11:30 am PST

Register here or go to: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/9090418359952984578

Every year, Americans throw away $165 billion worth of food.  World-wide, 1/3 of all food is lost or wasted.  We use 25% of our potable water to grow food that is ultimately lost or wasted.  This occurs while 1 in 6 Americans is food insecure.

This U.S. EPA-hosted webinar will show K-12 schools how to improve their bottom line, feed hungry people, and reduce wasted food by learning from schools engaged in surplus food donation from school cafeterias.  Also, the USDA will clarify its food donation policy and the legal implications of surplus food donation.

SOONER OR LATER, MOST OF US WILL FACE POVERTY

Poverty is actually a common experience in the US. Most of us will be poor, and most of us will be on welfare, too. The official Census Bureau measure shows a 2013 poverty rate of 14.5%— that’s 45 million people in households with gross annual income below the poverty line of $24,624 for a family of four. But this measure counts only those whose total income ended up below that line at the end of the year; it tells nothing about how their income may have fluctuated during the year. Suppose someone supporting a partner and two young children on an annual salary of $50,000, is laid off on June 30 and doesn’t find another job by the end the year. His or her gross income for the year was $25,000. Even though the person had zero income for the second half of that year, the poverty rate doesn’t include the person because their annual income was above the threshold. That’s a problem. The Census Bureau knows this, so it publishes a “dynamic” poverty rate that looks at movement in and out of poverty over time. This data show that 34.5% of the population were poor for two months or more at least once in the four-year period from 2009 to 2012. But this still understates the problem. Examining relative poverty rates from 1968-2011, shows that more than 60% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 fell into the bottom 20% of the income distribution for at least a year , and 25% were in the bottom quintile for five years or more. The boundary between being poor, low-income, and middle income is thin and permeable, and many of us are just an accident, illness, job loss, or newborn baby away from slipping into poverty.

Source: Spotlight on Poverty, 8/12/15, Close to Poverty

Improving child nutrition programs - action needed

Across the North Country, children are going back to school this week.  For some of them, the highlight of getting back in school is having a healthy meal at lunchtime, and maybe even breakfast.  In St. Lawrence County, more than half of our children qualify for free meals at school.  Did you ever wonder where they eat in the summer?

Congress has a chance to do something about this challenge and help ensure that all of our children have healthy diets, for The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act expires on September 30.  This legislation authorizes the following programs:  National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Summer Food Service Program, Child and Adult Care Food Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (commonly known as WIC).  Failing to pass this legislation puts all of these programs at risk.

In the course of the conversations about these programs in Washington, our elected officials have started to understand some of the challenges of these programs, particularly the Summer Food Service Program, face in rural areas.   While the Summer Food Service Program was designed to serve children who get a free lunch during the school year, there are particular challenges implementing this program in rural areas like St. Lawrence County.  The current legislation requires that the meals be served at a central site that has an enrichment activity - a good idea, but hard to do with the distances involved here.  The program also requires that at least 50% of children in a district be eligible for the free meals in order to have a site - also challenging in places where the poverty is less concentrated than in urban areas.

However, some great ideas have come up as it relates to that question of where the kids from low-income families eat in the summer. One idea is to remove the requirement for on-site feeding, so meals could be delivered via other models to children in remote communities.  Another idea is to lower the threshold for a summer food site to 40% of the area children being eligible for a free meal - this would also help our small towns.  Finally, there has been conversation about streamlining and simplifying some of these programs, including the idea of providing families with extra benefits on their EBT cards for food purchases while their children are out of school.  This last model has been piloted and tested successfully in a number of communities around the nation.

What can you do?  Senator Gillibrand and Congresswoman Stefanik sit on the respective committees considering this legislation in the Senate and the House.  Send each of them an e-mail urging them to support alternatives in the Summer Food Service program that will help rural communities, including the summer EBT option, the non-congregate meal model, and streamlining of the program.

Here's where to contact them:

Senator Gillibrand

Congresswoman Stefanik

SCHOOL BREAKFAST USE DOUBLES IN 20 YEARS

Breakfast is available at nearly 90,000 schools across the country courtesy of USDA’s School Breakfast Program. On an average school day in fiscal 2014, some 13.5 million students participated. The breakfast program began in 1975, and throughout its history participation was considerably less than in the National School Lunch Program, which is 30 years older.  Nevertheless, as breakfast funding increased the number of participating schools and children has steadily grown. The School Breakfast Program has historically targeted low-income areas; and its share of reduced-price or free meals has been larger than the School Lunch Program’s. But this difference between the two programs has narrowed, with each serving over two-thirds of its meals at reduced price or free. A notable increase in the free and reduced-price share in both programs in recent years likely reflects more children qualifying and choosing to participate during the 2007-09 recession, along with policy changes that have simplified the process of program qualification.

Source: USDA, 8/26/15, School Breakfast

The supply and demand of apples

"... tens of thousand of tons of domestic apples are being dumped due to oversupply and cheap Chinese apple juice concentrate is coming into the other side of the country to supply a large, nationally distributed hard cider manufacturer. Does this make sense? Why do we simultaneously export and then import the same crops, or in this case, waste crops and then import the same crops? Of course, it would take an entire economics lesson to tease out this distribution conundrum..."

Read the full story here.

FEDERAL PROGRAMS SUPPORT CRUCIAL EARLY NUTRITION

An explosion of recent research has deepened our understanding of how crucial early life experiences are to the physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Poor nutrition during the critical first five years of a child’s life can negatively affect child development in both the short- and long-term and hinder adult achievement and productivity. A new issue brief from the Food Research and Action Council explains how federal nutrition assistance programs, like WIC, and CACFP,  provide infants and children with access to nutritious food  and set the foundation for their healthy development.  Extensive evidence demonstrates WIC’s importance in reducing food insecurity and supporting all facets of child health and development and diet quality. CACFP has a smaller but growing evidence base demonstrating its importance for young children’s diet quality, weight status, and overall health.

Source: Food Research & Action Council, 8/25/15, Child Nutrition