Originally published by Food Tank

Bonnie Haugen and her family run a grazing dairy farm in Southeastern Minnesota. She recently spoke about the impacts of corporate concentration on her community in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform: “When we bought these acres 29 years ago, there were about 12 dairy farms within a three mile radius of us. Now, there’s only one other dairy with approximately 400 cows aside from us. What I’ve seen in my community mirrors national trends: the pressure of corporate ag has taken a fair opportunity away from my neighbors who wanted to keep or pass on dairy farming.” 

Squeezed by inflation that is pushing up the cost of both everyday goods and farm inputs, Midwest farmers increasingly support candidates committed to busting up corporate monopolies in food and farming. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, for instance, in a tight re-election race against Republican opponent Jim Schultz, has led the charge on tackling anticompetitive practices in the agricultural sector that are contributing to inflation. 

“Three of my grandkids ages 8, 6, and 3 want to farm,” continued Haugen in her July 2022 statement, “I want them to have the opportunity to farm without being a serf to corporate ag.” Haugen is a supporter of the Land Stewardship Action Fund (LSAF), dedicated to electing leaders that promote family farming and strong rural economies. 

Farmers Doubly Squeezed

Farmers don’t just grow food, of course; they also consume food–and all manner of basic goods. This means farmers are doubly squeezed by the higher cost of both production and consumption. On the consumption side, farmers and non-farmers alike have felt the increase in living expenses; grocery prices, for instance, are up 13 percent from a year ago. With a few large firms dominating every step in the food chain—from retailers like Walmart to processors like Nestle to seed and chemical giants like Bayer—consolidation is a major contributor to high food prices. 

Former Whole Foods executive and retail market expert Errol Schweizer explains: “Corporate concentration is the strategy, but the goal is extreme profiteering, redistributed upwards to investors and executives. Market concentration increases prices to consumers while hurting worker bargaining power Squeezing farmers is just the first step in a radically inequitable value chain.” 

The Midwest has been beset by precarious farm incomes for decades—dipping into the red more often than not, which means assuming more and more debt. As food analyst Ken Meter points out in his book Building Community Food Webs, between 1996 and 2017, growing corn resulted in an aggregate loss of US$524 per acre while cumulative losses for wheat farmers totaled US$1,236 per acre.

“The commodity system draws wealth out of rural communities,” Meter said. “Over the past century, farmers have really only made money when there was some external crisis, such as the oil crisis of 1973, the global housing finance crisis of 2008, and the war in Ukraine. Otherwise, net income keeps falling even as food prices rise for consumers. But the monopolies in the middle profit every year.”

A new report from Midwest Healthy Ag confirms that Midwest farmers are struggling under the weight of rising costs, including for fertilizers, diesel, and renting land, combined with decreased income from selling milk, grain, and other products. One farmer interviewed for the report said, “Increased fuel prices, along with decreased price for a bushel of corn make me doubt I can survive after 2021.”

Policymakers Rally Against Consolidation

While corporate concentration in agriculture has gone relatively unchecked for decades, food cost inflation has brought the issue front and center. “Corporate profiteering and out-of-control consolidation by big agricultural firms have led to increased prices at every point on the food chain, from the farm to the grocery store,” said Representative Mark Pocan (D., WI—2nd) in a statement announcing the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act of 2022. 

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has also disparaged corporate concentration in agriculture: “Highly concentrated local markets in livestock and poultry have increasingly left farmers, ranchers, growers, and producers vulnerable to a range of practices that unjustly exclude them from economic opportunities and undermine a transparent, competitive, and open market—which harms producers’ ability to deliver the quality, affordable food working families depend upon,” said Vilsack.

Vilsack’s statement was made in September 2022 as President Biden announced a new US$15 million fund to ramp up collaboration between the USDA and State Attorneys General on enforcement of competition laws, such as the laws against price-fixing. The news follows a December 21, 2021 letter to Secretary Vilsack from a bipartisan coalition of 16 attorneys general offering recommendations for improving competition in the livestock industry.

“One of the ways corporations keep profits high at consumers’ expense is by creating unfair markets where there’s no meaningful competition,” said Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, who spearheaded the letter, “This is especially true in agriculture, where farms and farming communities often face artificially high prices and struggle to afford their lives because antitrust behavior by Big Ag deliberately leaves them with few choices.”

Randy Krzmarzick, a row crop farmer and LSAF supporter in Sleepy Eye, MN, commented, “I’ve been farming some 40 years and I’ve seen continued consolidation in all parts of agriculture, fewer companies that supply our products and buy our commodities.” When asked why he’s planning to vote for Keith Ellison, Krzmarzick said, “I think it’s important to have an attorney general who’s watching out for abuses and who’s on our side—the side of family farmers, of which there’s less and less of us all the time.” 

Photo courtesy of Jed Owen, Unsplash

The post On Eve of Election, Midwest Farmers Squeezed by Inflation Eye Corporate Concentration appeared first on Real Food Media.

Community food webs strive to build health, wealth, capacity, and connection. Their essential element is building greater respect and mutual trust, so community members can more effectively empower themselves and address local challenges. Farmers and researchers may convene to improve farming practices collaboratively. Health clinics help clients grow food for themselves and attain better health. Food banks engage their customers to challenge the root causes of poverty. Municipalities invest large sums to protect farmland from development. Developers forge links among local businesses to strengthen economic trade. Leaders in communities marginalized by our current food system are charting a new path forward.

Building Community Food Webs captures the essence of these efforts, underway in diverse places including Montana, Hawai‘i, Vermont, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, and Minnesota. Addressing challenges as well as opportunities, Meter offers pragmatic insights for community food leaders and other grassroots activists alike.

The post Building Community Food Webs appeared first on Real Food Media.

Although the majority of farms in the United States have US-born owners who identify as white, a growing number of new farmers are immigrants. Many of them are from Mexico and originally came to the United States looking for work in agriculture.

In The New American Farmer, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern explores the experiences of Latino/a immigrant farmers as they transition from farmworkers to farm owners, offering a new perspective on racial inequity and sustainable farming. She finds that many of these new farmers rely on farming practices from their home countries—including growing multiple crops simultaneously, using integrated pest management, maintaining small-scale production, and employing family labor.

Drawing on extensive interviews with farmers and organizers, Minkoff-Zern describes the social, economic, and political barriers immigrant farmers must overcome, from navigating USDA bureaucracy to exclusion from opportunities based on race. Immigrant farmers, with their knowledge and experience of alternative farming practices, are actively and substantially contributing to the movement for a more sustainable food system—scholars and food activists should take notice.

Click here to download the open-access book. 

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The Labor of Lunch aims to spark a progressive movement that will transform food in American schools, and with it the lives of thousands of low-paid cafeteria workers and the millions of children they feed. By providing a feminist history of the US National School Lunch Program, Jennifer E. Gaddis recasts the humble school lunch as an important and often overlooked form of public care. Through vivid narration and a dose of much needed imagination, The Labor of Lunch offers a stirring call to action and a blueprint for school lunch reforms capable of delivering a healthier, more equitable, caring, and sustainable future.

Check out the Labor of Lunch YouTube playlist!

The post The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools appeared first on Real Food Media.

By Tiffani Patton 

One of the most satisfying aspects of being part of the movement for a just and nourishing food system is getting to work on such a wide range of issues:  racial justice, land rights, income inequality, environmental justice, and labor rights, just to name a few. The fight for a just food system must be “intersectional” because food intersects with so many aspects of our identities and our society. And while that may seem overwhelming, it is actually an exciting leverage point. Food is something we all have in common: it is a powerful way to open the door to conversations (and action) around many other issues. 

At Real Food Media, we’ve had the pleasure of speaking and working with some brilliant people who are using their platform to drop knowledge, build community, and spark change. This Black History Month, we are showcasing a few of our favorite Real Food Reads authors who are working at the intersection of food, health, sustainability, and Black identity. These authors, farmers, cooks, and activists dig into the history of Black people’s relationship with food and with the land—and inspire the creation of new ways of being in the world that value Black culture, bodies, and communities.

What’s on your Black History Month reading list?

“To farm while Black is an act of defiance against white supremacy and a means to honor the agricultural ingenuity of our ancestors.” 

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman 

Farming While Black is an empowering reclamation of agricultural history: no-till farming, crop-rotation, terrace farming—all started by Africans, yet rarely advertised as such. Equal parts practical guide (applicable to a windowsill planter or a farm), decolonized history book, and love letter to the land: the lessons from Farming While Black are a powerful tool in reconnecting with history, healing ancestral trauma, and finding liberation through, and on, the land. 

Listen to the Real Food Reads episode with Leah Penniman.

“Black farmers acted, not only to improve their own and their communities’ circumstances, but to advance a broader political and activist agenda to challenge racially oppressive rural social structures.”

Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White 

Dr. Monica White’s award-winning research shows how Black people in America used food as a strategy to build power at the intersection of issues from the mid-Atlantic crossing to present-day urban farms in Detroit. The perfect academic cousin to Farming While Black, Freedom Farmers also unveils some little known African-American agricultural history, like that CSAs, cooperatives, and the start of “farm-to-table” dinners were all started and popularized by African-American farmers.

Listen to the Real Food Reads episode with Monica White. 

“How do we as Black queer people celebrate ourselves and love ourselves? I am working to create spaces where we can champion that message and where we can see ourselves in other people—not be weaponized or demonized for who we are.”

Son of a Southern Chef: Cook With Soul  by Lazarus Lynch 

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone as fearless as Lazarus Lynch. His passion for cooking came from his father, the Southern Chef, and every dish in his cookbook merges familial legacy with his own creative spark. The pages are filled with some of the most eye-catching and funkiest (in a good way!) food photography you’re ever likely to see, and affirmations are generously sprinkled throughout: Lazarus brings his whole self into his work. 

Listen to the Real Food Reads episode with Lazarus Lynch. 

“For me, recipe creation is a praxis where I honor and bring to life the teachings, traditional knowledge, and hospitality of my blood and spiritual ancestors by making food.” 

Vegetable Kingdom: The Abundant World of Vegan Recipes by Bryant Terry

Long-time Real Food Media friend Bryant Terry is a triple threat: chef, activist, and author. (And did we forget to mention James Beard Leadership Awardee?) His latest book confirms his status as vegan-food royalty. This beautiful book is organized by ingredient and each recipe is accompanied by a song so you can get your groove on. Like the other authors in our Black History Month reading list, Bryant Terry uses food as a tool to decenter whiteness. One of his aims is to challenge the myth of “ethnic” cooking that exoticizes non-white food traditions. For vegans and omnivores alike, these recipes (and this ethos) are sure to inspire you. 

Podcast coming soon!

“Democracy is about people having a voice, having a say in society.” 

Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil by M. Jahi Chappell 

Since 1993, the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, has significantly decreased rates of infant mortality, malnutrition, diabetes-related hospitalizations. That’s because people were given a voice in shaping how their local food system works in one of the world’s first-ever Food Policy Councils. Diet-related diseases aren’t unique to Brazil—in the US, these diseases disproportionately impact Black (and Latinx and Indigenous) people. And, communities of color are coming together to take a stand and reclaim their health, from taking on Big Soda to organizing for healthier corner stores to farming the land. Beginning to End Hunger is an inspiring example of what can happen when marginalized communities take control of their local food systems. 

Listen to the Real Food Reads episode with M. Jahi Chappel. 

The Big Letdown: How Medicine, Big Business, and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding by Kimberly Seals Allers 

In The Big Letdown, Kimberly Seals Allers shows how corporate interests influence  hospitals’ (and physicians’) support for breastfeeding—and actually undermine women’s decision to breastfeed. Part exposé of the infant-formula industry, part rallying-cry for breastfeeding mothers, The Big Letdown exposes corporate spin and the racialized structural barriers that prevent mothers and infants from making healthy choices.   

Listen to the Real Food Reads episode with Kimberly Seals Allers. 

Listened to all of the episodes and are hungry for more? We’ve got you covered: here are some additional ways you can deepen your learning, connect to the issues, and organize for change. 

Build Healthier Communities  

• Dive into our toolkit, Taking on Big Soda
• Join the Healthy Corner Store Network
• Find out if there’s a food policy council where you live (or look for resources to start your own)

Dig in to Land and Agriculture Issues

• Check out the Reparations Map for Black and Indigenous Farmers, and see how you can give. 
• Donate to the Land Loss Prevention Project
• Get engaged with the Detroit Black Food Security Network, who inspired Dr. Monica White.
• Learn more about the National Black Food & Justice Alliance

Learn More About Reproductive Justice

• Deepen your learning with GroundSwell Fund  
• Explore “Irth”, Birth Without Bias, a social change app founded by Kimberly Seals Allers that filters hospitals and physicians for bias in the care that women receive.
• Find out about BabyZoos, the latest venture from Tunde Wey that seeks to address infant mortality disparity in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

Light Up Your Taste Buds

• Stay connected to Bryant Terry’s work as Chef-in-Residence of the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, CA (pro tip: these are my favorite events for learning, connecting, and getting my soul stirred). 
• Check out some of Bryant’s other books: Afro-Vegan and Grub: Ideas for an Organic Kitchen (co-authored by our own Anna Lappé). 
• Get to know the Son of a Southern Chef: check out Lazarus’ YouTube Channel and make sure to follow him on social media.

And, of course, subscribe to Real Food Reads, our monthly book club and podcast. 

Header image: Audre Lorde reading at the International Feminist Book Fair in London, 1984. Photo by Dagmar Schultz.

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By Peter Tinti, VICE

Sixteen years ago this week, Lee Kyung Hae, a South Korean farmer, scaled a fence in Cancún, Mexico, and stabbed himself to death with a penknife while wearing a sign that read “WTO kills farmers.” Lee was outside a ministerial meeting for the World Trade Organization, or WTO. Comprised of 164 member nations, the WTO sets the rules for 98 percent of global trade, and on that particular day in September 2003, thousands of farmers from all over the world had gathered to protest free trade policies they said robbed them of their livelihoods by privileging multinational businesses at their expense. “I am taking my life so that others can live,” read a note on Lee’s person at the time of his death.

Lee’s tragic story still resonates with farmers and activists around the globe, as evidenced by shrines in his honor that often appear at protests. “He is a very potent symbol of what they are fighting for,” said Timothy A. Wise, author of Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food, who was at the Cancún protests. “Those were the relatively early days of globalization and the fight at the WTO was about whether developing countries were going to get a say in what the globalization process looked like.

Sixteen years after Lee’s self-immolation, political and economic upheaval throughout the globe has reinvigorated debates over who really benefits from free trade agreements. Farmers are still suffering much as they were in Lee’s time, and for the same reasons: free trade agreements continue to decimate local food markets, accelerate environmental degradation, displace entire communities, and strip farmers of their livelihoods.

In the U.S., the gospel of free trade has been a tenet of the “neoliberal consensus” that has guided foreign policy for the better part of three decades.The basic idea is that by removing barriers to exports and imports, consumers will have more access to a wide variety of goods and businesses that rely on imports or supply chains that stretch across borders will be able to reduce their costs. With some exceptions, the dogma of free trade has been faithfully adhered to by both Democrats and Republicans, and dutifully championed by policy wonks and media elites.

But in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and amid growing economic uncertainty worldwide, some are challenging the core assumptions about the benefits of globalization via free trade. The removal of trade barriers may have made consumer goods cheaper, but it also pitted manufacturing firms against foreign factories that paid much less for labor, leading to job losses for many American workers. Farmers around the world have faced a similar problem, as a sudden influx of cheap foreign-grown products from huge agribusiness firms have undercut local producers and forced them into desperate circumstances.

“There has been an acknowledgment—particularly after the financial crisis in 2008, which revealed the inner defective workings of globalization—that this economic program is faulty and it has to be revisited,” said John Feffer, director of the Foreign Policy in Focus project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies. Feffer said a growing number of policymakers have acknowledged, in recent years, the need to “look under the hood and see what we can do about fixing it, or even getting an entirely different vehicle altogether.”

An environmental activist at a climate summit carrying a banner-sized photo of Lee Kyung Hae Photo by Juana Barreto/AFP/Getty

As a successful cattle farmer and the president of the Korean Federation of Small Farmers, Lee Kyung Hae witnessed the ways that free trade deals benefited multinational firms and agribusiness at the expense of farmers. Due to trade liberalization policies in the 1990s, manufacturers flooded South Korea with rice and meat sold at below the cost of production. This practice, known as “dumping,” devastated the country’s small farmers.

“Once I went to a house where a farmer abandoned his life by drinking a toxic chemical because of his uncontrollable debts. I could do nothing but listen to the howling of his wife. If you were me, how would you feel?” Lee wrote in a statement distributed at protests in Geneva in 2003 and later in Cancún.

Lee’s calls to “keep agriculture out of the WTO” became a rallying cry for groups like La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement of 182 farmer organizations in 81 countries. “La Via Campesina has long been warning the world of the risks of deregulation and unbridled expansion of global capital,” the group wrote in a recent newsletter commemorating Lee and calling for governments to embrace peasant-led alternatives to free trade agreements.

Lee advocated for keeping agriculture out of free trade agreements, in part, because it limits countries’ rights to define their own food policies. Many free trade agreements include rules that actually preclude developing countries from implementing food and agricultural policies that would help feed the poor by empowering peasant farmers. Since 1996, La Via Campesina has promoted the concept of “food sovereignty,” which asserts that countries should have the right to prioritize local agricultural production for local consumption, and implement protections against international prices if necessary to feed its own people.

India, for example, recently passed a national food security pact that, according to Wise, would guarantee basic rations for up to 800 million people by purchasing the food from Indian farmers and distributing to poor citizens. “That’s food sovereignty, and it is being challenged by the U.S. at the WTO for astonishingly hypocritical reasons,” said Wise, noting that the U.S. subsidizes many of its own farmers, and India’s food security program uses the same farm policies that the US employed to bring itself out of the Great Depression.

“The biggest misconception about trade agreements is that countries are winners and losers,” said Wise, whose book critically examines how industrial agriculture has hijacked food policies in the service of corporate interests. “But it’s not countries that are the winners and losers, it’s multinational firms that are winning, and by and large workers and farmers who are losing.”

One particularly poignant example Wise cites is of Mexican hog farmers who were put out of business after the North American Free Trade Agreement, (NAFTA). Many of these Mexican workers were actively recruited by Smithfield Foods, Inc., to work a North Carolina plant which is the largest slaughterhouse and meat-processing plant in the world. Part of the reason these workers were brought in, Wise explained, was to undercut unionization efforts by Black workers at the plant. “It’s the consummate example of how multinational firms win on both sides of the border,” he said.

Free trade adherents tend to spin these realities as the growing pains of a world becoming more prosperous as a whole, but farmers in the developing world tell a different story. “For the economic benefit of some large corporations… Korea’s agricultural base has completely collapsed,” said Jeongyeol Kim, a leader within the Korean Women Peasant Association in South Korea and a member of La Via Campesina. “Sixteen years later [since Lee’s death], the economic gap between urban and rural areas has widened significantly, and because of the neoliberal agricultural system, income gaps in rural areas are increasing and rural communities are collapsing.”

Carlos Marentes, who works with migrant farmworkers on the US-Mexico border and is also a member of La Via Campesina, sees the negative consequences for farmers on both sides of the border every day. “Poverty and landlessness among people who used to rely on sustainable farming is a huge factor in the displacement and destruction of rural communities,” Marentes said. The majority of the people he helps at the farmworker’s center he runs in El Paso, Texas, he said, are former peasants who could no longer provide for their families after NAFTA went into effect in 1994.

“They had no other option than to sell their piece of land,” Marentes said. He recalls one farmer who told him he sold his previously profitable land, in an act of desperation, for the paltry fee of $6,000, the exact amount it would cost to pay a coyote to smuggle him and his family in the U.S.

In the best cases, Mexican farmers have been able to find work picking fruits and vegetables for export to the U.S. But Wise said this type of “job creation” is hardly worth the cost. “You are trading farmers working their own land for a growth in the number of jobs for seasonal farmworkers going from strawberry fields to tomato feeds with the harvest. They have no stable employment and no guarantee of food.” This trade-off, Wise said, sparked a “rural crisis” that is widely cited as one of the drivers of displacement in Mexico.

Despite all of these setbacks, peasants and farmers have scored some victories in recent years. In 2018, for example, the United Nations passed the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which began as a proposal put forwarded by La Via Campesina and its allies.

According to Tanya Kerssen, a food systems researcher and author of Grabbing Power: The New Struggles for Land, Food and Democracy in Northern Honduras, the declaration demonstrates the growing power of peasant organizing over the last 20 years. “It matters precisely because national governments have so often facilitated the theft and destruction of peasant and indigenous lands,” Kerssen said. “It sends a global message that, as those responsible for feeding most of the world’s population while safeguarding biodiversity, peasants are deserving of special protections… And it gives greater legitimacy and a policy framework to peasant movements advocating for the rights [of] small-scale producers and local food economies in their own countries.”

Due to disagreements between rich and developing countries, WTO discussions are now largely at a stalemate, with new rules barely even being negotiated. But trade liberalization continues apace, with multilateral free trade agreements proliferating throughout the globe, and it is hard to find an example of peasants benefiting from these agreements, despite claims by free market economists that free trade would be a force for reducing rural poverty. “Economists are famous for making assumptions about the world that leave them sounding like fools,” said Wise. “They are describing a world that does not exist.”

One key indicator of the changing narrative, Kerssen noted, is the U.S. political discourse. “Elizabeth Warren has been talking about her proposals for farm policy, which are along the lines of this kind of language that you haven’t heard in the U.S. since the New Deal era.”

Peasant movements have responded in kind, expanding their critiques and proposed solutions beyond just the scope of agricultural policy. “One of the big changes in the last 16 years is that Via Campesina and the broader food sovereignty movement has become much more intersectional and much more complex,” Kerssen said. “They are talking much more about a cultural shift and on transitioning whole economies, than just about one policy lever like keep agriculture out of the WTO.”

For Marentes, who was at the protests in Cancún when Lee killed himself, these renewed debates and the UN declaration are an indication that “the spirit of Mr. Lee lives on” as peasants continue to fight for their rights. “The self-sacrifice of Mr. Lee called the attention of the world to the plight of farmers,” Manteres said. “Now, you can say in a way that the self-sacrifice of Mr. Lee was not in vain.”

Header photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty 

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In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico—food. Mexicans are now faced with a food system that favors industrial and imported food over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, free markets over social welfare, and ideologies of individual self-care over public health. Trade agreements have resulted in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives.

The post Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico appeared first on Real Food Media.

The farmers’ market is the place to go for fresh, seasonal, local produce. But it’s not just about the produce, it’s about the people. At the farmers market, you get a chance to support your local economy. Farmers who sell locally create roughly thirteen jobs for every $1 million in revenue, in comparison to the three jobs created by those who don’t sell locally. And those farmers? They are the true stewards of the land, growing diversified crops instead of engaging in environmentally degrading monocropping.

But you know what else you get at the farmers market? Human interaction. Shopping at the farmers market results in three times more social interactions than shopping at a grocery store. While this may sound panic-inducing for some (hello introverts), we have to admit that in this age of digital everything, there’s a special magic—and real community-building—that can only come from those increasingly rare face-to-face interactions.

If you’re not convinced, check out these great videos from our friends at the California Alliance for Farmers Markets. Live in California? Find your local market at FMFinder.org.

Header photo by Caleb Stokes/Unsplash

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Eleven billion dollars. That’s the total tally of the national school-food program in the United States and just a small fraction of what public institutions in this country spend every year in taxpayer dollars on food—including food for county jails, hospitals, city parks, and more. Public food procurement is clearly big business. But we also believe it can also be a force for good. On May 16, Cook County—home to Chicago and one of the largest counties in the country—joined a growing movement of public institutions when it adopted a procurement program that does just that: promotes public health, community well-being, animal welfare, social justice, and environmental protection.

It may seem like common sense that public institutions should promote the public good, but when it comes to food purchasing that’s not usually the case. All around the country, in local governments and public-school districts, officials pore over the minutiae of contracts for bread rolls and chicken patties, pizzas and salad greens. The dominant decision-making criteria? The cheapest bid.

In 2011, community leaders in Los Angeles started asking what it would take to transform that decision making so that city leadership could make food purchases based on shared principles, not just price tags. The result is the Good Food Purchasing Program, passed first in Los Angeles in 2012 and now in four cities nationwide. The Good Food Purchasing Program views purchases through five values: public health, local economic development, animal welfare, worker wellbeing, and the environment. The program can also be used, as it will in Cook County, to incentivize public institutions to support under-capitalized businesses—that is, those that have been historically shut out of tax incentives and access to technical and financial support. The idea is to help to correct long-standing inequities in the food system.

In the cities where it has passed, we’ve seen real impact. In Los Angeles alone, with support from the Center for Good Food Purchasing and other partners, program implementation catalyzed 220 new, good union jobs in the local food economy and a $70 million multiyear poultry contract with a producer committed to keeping antibiotics out of its feed. Following adoption of the program, the school district cut meat purchases by 28 percent, reducing water use by 1 billion gallons a year among other benefits. And the district’s largest food distributor rethought the source of its wheat, choosing to buy from California farmers for the first time and milling it in the heart of the city. Now more than 80 percent of all bread products served in LA schools come from California-grown, sustainably produced wheat.

Inspired by this impact, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council and a coalition of over 40 organizations have led the way in Cook County. As a first step, the groups helped press—and win—the adoption of the program in the City of Chicago in 2017 transforming the way food is purchased by its public schools as well as its parks department. Now, with leadership from Cook County Board Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, the county is following suit, making it the first in the nation to adopt the Good Food Purchasing Program. The Chicago Food Policy Action Council estimates that the county spends $20.6 million on food annually across its agencies.

In Cook County, enthusiasm for the program came in large part from those businesses, workers, consumers, and farmers that have long been marginalized in the food system. Under the program, the County will incentivize contracts with minority- and women-owned businesses, help to preserve urban farmland with community ownership, and transition publicly owned vacant lots to minority-owned social enterprises and public land trusts. Says the Chicago Food Policy Action Council’s Rodger Cooley, “The Good Food Purchasing Program has the power to transform the food system in every region where it is implemented as it will in Cook County where we are creating a model for food procurement that supports frontline communities most impacted by existing inequities.”

This all sounds good, you might be thinking, but these are tax dollars at work; shouldn’t public institutions entrusted to use money wisely make the most economical choice? Well, here’s the rub. Cheap food isn’t always so cheap. Consider the costs in the United States of the illnesses and deaths linked to unhealthy food (blights that fall mostly on low-income communities and communities of color, where millions live either without access to good food or in food environments with too much unhealthy food). Health-care costs from diagnosed Type 2 diabetes total a staggering $327 billion a year—a cost we all share.

Or consider the price to taxpayers when private-sector employers fail to pay living wages. Around the country, food-sector workers are among the most underpaid and exploited and are twice as likely as workers in any other sector to rely on government assistance to put food on their table. With the Good Food Purchasing Program, good food means good jobs.

But let’s also be clear: While the program incurs a range of community benefits, it doesn’t always cost more. Analysis of the Good Food Purchasing Program has found that food costs don’t necessarily go up after implementation. In Oakland, for instance, the school district’s choice to buy better and, yes, more expensive meat—increasing the amount of 100 percent grass-fed beef and antibiotic-free chicken purchases, for instance—was coupled with a reduction in meat purchases. The result? The more expensive choice was actually cost neutral and the customers—those finicky kids—reported high rates of satisfaction.

Cook County’s groundbreaking decision to adopt the program is just the latest sign of the momentum nationwide for tapping the enormous buying power of public institutions for the public good. Another 13 cities across the country—including Austin and New York, Cincinnati and Washington, DC—are actively pursuing the program. If all pass it, the program will reshape a whopping $880 million worth of food purchases annually.

Cook County’s adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Program is a huge leap forward in the quest of good food for all. Who’s next?

Originally published in The Nation

Photo by Mike Blake / Reuters

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