Rebuilding Our Regional Food System | The Local Food Report
Liz Wiley is executive director of the Marion Institute — a non-profit focused on improving human and environmental health and food quality in southeastern Massachusetts. And when I asked her what she’s working on right now, she said regional communication.
"So if you think about the food system, it's made up of producers, processors, distributors, the food relief system, food waste and recovery, right? There's all these components of the food system. But the people operating in all of those different segments or sectors are so involved in doing the direct service work and they're very siloed from one another," she explained.
"They don't have the time, the bandwidth or the ability, right? To like look up from the direct service work, to look up and look out and to look down the road and think about, okay, what are the long -term systemic changes that we need to see happen so that we’re in a significantly different, more resilient place in five, ten twenty years from now."
That’s the goal of the recently formed South Coast Food Policy Council — to get every part of the regional food system functioning and communicating. In the immediate future, Liz says, the most likely change is that Massachusetts residents will see big cuts to services like the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, which helps feed more than 12 percent of Mass residents or almost a million people. And to address this the council is dusting off pandemic-era approaches to making food assistance more local.
"One of the big things we did back in 2020 was pull together a list of all the food pantries, and identify which food pantries are open, what’s their hours, who’s the contact person, get them involved, let them know what things are happening, I think that’s going to become critical again so that we can make sure that we have good lines of communication," said Liz.
And there are infrastructure issues to address. For instance, what if SNAP gets cut altogether and the EBT cards stop working that recipients use to get not just federal funding but also state benefits like HIP or the Healthy Incentives Program?
"Let’s really get behind HIP and make sure the Healthy Incentives Program in the state of Massachusetts is well supported, and that the infrastructure to support it is getting put in place now because it's so connected to SNAP, right, and the SNAP cards, that if those SNAP cards are shut off, what's the infrastructure for getting access to HIP funding?"
This is an example of a potential immediate issue. But just addressing crises isn’t sustainable, Liz said, which is why she and her colleagues are also working longer term to build a regional food system that isn’t so reliant on the federal government and far away producers.
"You know people recognized it and learned it during the pandemic, and then everybody sort of slides backwards back into their comfort of, oh, I can just go to the grocery store and pick up what I need. And yet we know that in 10, 20 years, as we have more supply chain issues, and climate disasters and natural disasters that impede the ability to get food here, it is really becoming very important to re-regionalize our food system and for us to really you know re -localize."
This includes not only farms but processing plants, distribution warehouses, packing centers, transportation networks — all the jobs we’ve outsourced to huge industrial systems.
"We have so many farmers here in southeastern Mass but there’s no infrastructure to go from farmers to restaurants, farmers to colleges, farmers through K-12 schools, right we’ve completely lost that infrastructure and we’re rapidly losing the farming industry?"
This means it’s not only important right now to try to revitalize our regional food system now, but to rebuild it permanently so that it’s here, no matter what happens.
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