Even though he knew nothing about farming, Ed Zigas became the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association’s first Food and Agriculture Policy Director in 2011. Since then he has co-authored research about city support for urban agriculture, the benefits of strong regional food systems, and improving access to healthy food—all issues with a broad impact in the nine-county Bay Area, a complex web of urban, suburban, and rural areas steeped in agriculture where 10% of adults struggle to put three meals a day on the table. Zigas’s next a big project is to build political support for state or federal funding of matching public assistance dollars to low-income people similar to the ones that have become popular at farmers markets around the country—but at grocery stores. He’s applied for funding from the USDA to launch a pilot grocery store program, based on a similar initiative in Michigan.
Source: Civil Eats, 9/2/16, Food Activist
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