Food for Equitable Thought

In the third listening session for the WIN Measures Update, researchers, community leaders, and measurement practitioners grappled with how to measure equity, racial justice, and intergenerational wellbeing in the food system.

By Aliaa Eldabli, Social Transformation Intern at WE in the World and Peter Eckart, Senior Fellow at WE in the World

At the foundation of our understanding of human existence is the basic need for food.  As Dr. Marcus Coleman exclaimed in our recent listening session on food and agriculture, “People have to eat!” This idea is recognized in the current set of WIN Measures for Food and Agriculture, which includes measures of food insecurity and fruit and vegetable consumption. Of course, our basic need to eat is embedded within a larger food system that is much larger than nutrition alone.  That system is reflected in the farming, economic, environmental, and social domains depicted in the diagram from the session pre-readings, and in an excerpt of this reflection included there:

It is a broken food system when farmworkers cannot afford to pay for the very food that they grow and are on the frontlines of human-created record-breaking heat waves. It is a broken food system when grocery store and food delivery workers are deemed essential in the midst of a global pandemic, yet receive minimal pay and protection. It is a broken food system when migrant farmworkers do not have feasible pathways to naturalization opportunities yet they are the stronghold force responsible for growing the food that we have the privilege to eat every day. It is a broken food system when we do not learn from the wisdom of our elders of Tribal agricultural practices when instead we have arsenic in our soil and lead in our water pipelines that permeates the very food we eat each day. We need metrics to identify our weaknesses in an unsustainable food system, as well as to identify the strengths that come from across generations and across racial lines, to generate an equitable and sustainable one.

On August 19, a group of equity-minded practitioners and people with lived experience of inequities gathered to consider the current and future state of how we measure equity within the food system, with a special focus on racial justice and intergenerational wellbeing.  The presentation slides, meeting recording and shared documentation are available here, and will all be inputs to a shared process to propose updates to the widely available WIN Measures.

In 2019, the National Center for Vital and Health Statistics partnered with 100 Million Healthier Lives to establish a curated set of social determinant measures.  The Well Being in the Nation (WIN) Measures have since been picked up by implementation partners large (Healthy People 2030, US News and World Report) and small (organizations across the country seeking to understand and improve their own communities).  In the wake of righteously loud calls for racial justice and generations of people experiencing a tumultuous global pandemic, just two years later, the Well Being in the Nation Network is revisiting the WIN Measures.  

The August listening session on “Food and Agriculture” featured presentations by Dr. Marcus Coleman, Visiting Assistant Professor, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts, and Diane Sullivan, Strategic Consultant, Center for Law and Social Policy, and person with lived experience of poverty and hunger.

Dr. Marcus Coleman grew up in a small farming community in northeast Louisiana and has been connected to agriculture and food systems throughout his entire life.  His recently completed dissertation focuses on “the Five As.”

The intersection of food access and the food system is based upon these five A’s: accessibility, affordability, availability, but also acceptability and accommodation. The core of this is the notion of affordability, but also within our communities accessibility and availability plays into that, as well.  I have to highlight the importance of affordability, availability, and accessibility related to food access. Based on my work relating to new and beginning farmer development, on the other side of food access is the notion of agriculture and food systems development -- how are we working with, building, and developing new farm and ag businesses?

He spoke about the limits of nutritional consumption as a measurement of the food system and the intersectional nature of the food system.

Nutrition is more of an outcome measure.  Healthy nutrition is a function of food access, agriculture and food system development.  In order for individuals and communities to have great health and well being of individuals, that requires so many different other factors to be in line and things that happen to get to that.  Access to affordable fruits and vegetables is the outcome of so many other different factors that come into play.

Time spent traveling to a grocery store to get necessary groceries is something that's important to look at.  If you grew up in a rural community, like me, you may have had to drive 30-45 minutes to the next largest town to go to a grocery store; that requires you to have access to transportation or reliable transportation.

Finally, Marcus also spoke to his personal commitment to building an equitable food system:

Looking at the ‘how,’ the ‘who,’ and the ‘why’ is one of the reasons why I made a career decision to stay in higher education. So many times when I'm looking at food and agriculture, I don't see people who look like me doing the work.  As a person that identifies as living and being born and raised in the country in a rural community, but also as a black man, it is on me to do my part in this work. If I have access to the resources at the university to go into communities and work with communities and help them and point them in the right direction for the resources, that's my role.  That's how I've tried to fill the void of the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ because I come from those experiences, where I didn't always have access to the best food.

Strategic Consultant Diane Sullivan opened her remarks by picking up on Marcus’ reflection the importance of representation of lived and living experience:

Lived experience is a term that I have embraced as I reflect on what I and others who've experienced poverty bring to the table in policy decision-making rooms. I want to describe the living experiences, having been traumatized through public policy design, implementation or even advocacy.  These experiences are not simply something from our past, but, rather, this is our living experience and is indeed expertise of the highest caliber.  To achieve equity through systems-designed justice, we must center those experts with lived and living expertise and data gathering and the resulting policy work. And I’ll tell you this work is not easy, as it challenges the very power structures that brought us here.”

Diane went on to describe the dangers to people of living experience who are willing to engage in these spaces:

What's too often missing from the data is this human element. I've never really considered myself a data person, though I love data. But I often wonder about how data is gathered, synthesized, stored, shared -- and exploited, too -- which often upholds biases and shapes public opinion and policy.  Imagine if you could -- and some of you don't have to imagine this -- how it feels to show up in these spaces, when your expertise is your trauma. When we're packaged as data, it's easy to overlook, dismiss, tokenize, and exploit us.

Diane offered this critique of the current WIN Measures, including the “developmental” measure of “average number of times during the past 30 days adults drink regular soda pop that contain sugar:”

In my home, ginger ale is a medicine, and so is cranberry juice, which, by the way, happens to contain more sugar than soda. Sadly, I've seen this data used to shape seemingly well-intended policy that seeks to reward SNAP recipients -- our federal government's largest nutrition program -- who do not use their SNAP benefits to purchase sugary drinks, while punishing those who do.

She spoke of the ways that anti-hunger poverty programs reflect a disconnect between those receiving food support and those who do not:

“If you've ever experienced hunger or if you've ever even had a conversation with the person who has shared about their struggles and accessing safe affordable nutritious food, you know that--as have been noted--two of the biggest barriers to nutritious food are access and affordability. I don't need a study to confirm that for me. Why, then, does the anti-hunger community not seem to talk much about food affordability? Is it perhaps because they aren't forced to shop by their wallets like we are?  My policy work began, while I was experiencing homelessness 20 years ago. I defined food gentrification as those with money, satisfied choices, and nourished bodies dictating the food options for those with none of that.

Diane closed with this reality check about the current conversation about “healthy” foods:

All of those terms -- fresh, organic, local, natural, free-range --  exist to make sure that one product stands out over the other, that you're spending more money on that product.  That’s actually impacting hunger itself, because that then drives the market.

In addition to the comments from Diane Sullivan and Marcus Coleman, the session featured feedback on the existing measures and a robust consideration of possible future measures.  In recognition that the current measures do not cover the breadth or depth of our entire food system, we reached out to community organizers, researchers, people with lived/living experience of inequities, and practitioners to explore what measures in the food system support equity.

“I would say, just access; a number of my neighbors have said they’ve wanted to eat healthy. Either it’s way too expensive, or it’s just not here.”  - Community organizer and PwLE

“I live in a neighborhood where it took us 10 years to get an Aldi, and once we got one, we found that we were getting a lot of the old moldy produce, and a few miles away in the white neighborhood they were getting the fresh [produce]… so we would just be having conversations around this, like it is hard to find [fresh healthy food], we just don't have as much access.” - Community organizer and PwLE

Potential measures that were discussed and recommended by participants included the following; all of the comments are available here.

• “How many people in a geographic area grow their own food?” - community organizer & PwLE

• “Access in communities to healthy foods. Also, the challenge with educating people on different foods and relationships that need to be formed to connect residents to urban farmers.” - community organizer & PwLE

• “Farmer work safety, as well as conditions for migrant workers and working conditions on the farm” - practitioner

• “Access to capital resources and access to being able to get the necessary financing to purchase land” - researcher & community organizer

• Composition and structure of the agricultural landscape and the existing food environment: farm ownership and tenure, farm operated demographics, land loss and land access by race, age, and other demographics - academician

As participants “digested” what was said during the listening session, they had further questions:

• “Are there any measures related to Growers, Economic Impact, or Health Outcomes?” - practitioner

• “Who developed these measures related to food security and agriculture? Who's currently benefiting from use of these measures? Who's being harmed?” - practitioner

• “I am thinking about the importance of measuring the education of people most affected by this injustice in the policy and access. How are those people being mobilized to advocate and create change instead of having their lives mined for data?” - community organizer & PwLE

• “What if we just stopped looking at any kind of individual metrics [and instead] looked upstream? Let's look at corporations, let's look at policies, let's look at the larger entities that really create the [systemic] conditions and the three times a day choices about food, and be willing to ask very challenging questions and to tell a different kind of story around food.” - practitioner

Diane Sullivan offered this final word of encouragement: 

We must move from the transactional norms of extracting data from community toward a model that builds transformational relationships with and among communities; that's how we'll get to the real policy solutions.

WE in the World Executive Lead Dr Somava Saha closed with this:

What will matter, of course, is how we change because of these reflections.
The presentation slides, webinar recording and meeting notes are all available now.

Materials from past webinars on this review process and demographics are located here.