food access

Before leaving Washington for the holidays, more than a dozen House Democrats stood in front of the USDA headquarters on the Mall to register their opposition to Trump administration regulations that would eliminate food stamps for 3.7 million people. Rules Committee chairman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, one of the foremost defenders of SNAP, raised the possibility of a congressional lawsuit against the cuts.

Earlier this year, when the USDA changed the vendor that runs its program that allows farmers markets to take SNAP benefits, it set off a chain reaction that could soon prevent thousands of poor people from using those benefits at the markets, reports FERN’s latest piece, published with The Washington Post. No paywall

In recent years, vacant land in cities across the country has been colonized by community gardens, giving the often-poor residents access to fresh produce. Now, though, developers of affordable housing are targeting those same empty lots, putting them at odds with the gardeners in communities that need both housing and fresh food, reports FERN's latest story, published with NPR's The Salt. No paywall

It's far from simple to qualify for food stamps, says Harvest Public Media in the first story of a five-part series this week on SNAP. Most states allow people to apply online as well as by paper applications. For Iowa and Missouri, the printed form runs six pages, but it's 17 pages in Kansas.

As several cities in the U.S. prepare to vote on soda taxes, researchers say that taxing more of our foods based on their climate impact would do a lot to help the planet and our health, says The Guardian. A 40-percent surcharge on beef, for instance, would produce a 13-percent decline in consumption, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Whole Foods and Starbucks are opening locations in Chicago’s crime-ridden Englewood neighborhood as part of a $20-million project to bring better services and products to the area. “The typically upscale Whole Foods will occupy an 18,000-square-foot store in the newly constructed Englewood Square shopping complex during a notably violent year in the neighborhood, one of the city’s poorest — it served as the setting for Spike Lee’s controversial “Chiraq” movie, and median household income is under $20,000, according to Census data,” says MarketWatch.

Purple Carrot, a vegan meal-kit company based in Boston, now sells its boxes of pre-measured ingredients in local Whole Foods stores, says the Boston Globe — a twist from the meal-kit model of shipping food and recipes to a subscriber's home. "After realizing they're literally getting their lunch stolen by these startups, they [grocers] have begun to look for ways to tap into the public's interest in the trend," the newspaper says.

Families with children are more likely to face hardship in obtaining enough food year-round than households without them, says the anti-hunger Food Research and Action Center. Based on a Gallup survey, FRAC estimated that 20 percent of households with children nationwide suffers food hardship.

Beginning this fall, the Capital Area Food Bank, based in Washington, will refuse donations from retailers that include candy, sugary soda or sheet cakes, says Civil Eats. It quotes the food bank's chief executive, Nancy Roman, as saying, "We are providing food on a regular basis to a low-income community and we have a moral obligation that it be good food that's not aggravating their (health) problems."

Better access to supermarkets and grocery stores doesn’t necessarily inspire people to eat better, according to a study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In fact, researchers found that U.S. adults buy most of their junk-food at such stores. The findings fly in the face of the “food desert” theory, which holds that people in neighborhoods without grocery stores are more likely to eat unhealthy food.