Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty » (None)

For 25 years Mark Winne was the Executive Director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Connecticut area. During his tenure with HFS, Mark organized community self-help food projects that assisted the city's lower income and elderly residents. Mark's work with the Food System included the development of a commercial hydroponic greenhouse, Connecticut's Farmers' Market Nutrition Program, several farmers' markets, a 20-acre community supported agriculture farm, food and nutrition education programs, and a neighborhood supermarket.

Winne now writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community assessment, and food policy. He also does policy communication work for the Community Food Security Coalition. His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in The Nation, Hartford Courant, Boston Globe, In These Times, Sierra, Orion, Successful Farming and numerous organizational and professional newsletters and journals across the country. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

From the War on Poverty to new farmers' markets, a food expert tackles America's dangerous dietary split

With a new Foreword

Closing the Food Gap exposes America's dangerous dietary split: from patrons of food pantries, bodegas, and convenience stores to the more comfortable classes who increasingly seek out organic and local products. Calling largely on his own experience in food activism, and mixing in surprisingly witty observations, Mark Winne ultimately envisions realistic partnerships in which family farms and impoverished communities come together to get healthy, locally produced food onto everyone's table.

Mindy Rhiger - Library Journal

"Nearly every urban community in America, and countless rural areas as well, has confronted the failure of the retail food industry to adequately serve its citizens." From Winne's own experience as executive director of the Hartford Food System in Connecticut, he writes about the lack of options for many elderly and poor people in the United States. He discusses strategies tried by numerous communities to combat this problem-e.g., farmers' markets, community gardens, food pantries-pointing out where, why, and the various ways in which these strategies have managed to fail or succeed. Chapter content ranges from largely factual accounts of various food-systems projects to memoirlike accounts of the author's experiences in Hartford and elsewhere. The book closes with a call to action to "re-store America's food deserts" by looking at the larger picture rather than focusing too narrowly on one aspect of the problem. More suitable for academic readers than general audiences; recommended for academic and larger public libraries.

Preface ix

Introduction: I've Come to ... Shop? xiii

The History

Chapter 1 Suburbia, Environmentalism, and the Early Gurglings of the Food Movement 3

Chapter 2 Reagan, Hunger, and the Rise of Food Banks 21

The Reactions

Chapter 3 Farmers' Markets: Bringing Food to the People 37

Chapter 4 Community Gardens: Growing Our Own 50

Chapter 5 Food Banks: Waste Not, Want Not 69

The Current Landscape

Chapter 6 Re-Storing America's Food Deserts 85

Chapter 7 Growing Obese and Diabetic; Going Local and Organic 110

Chapter 8 Community Supported Agriculture: Communities Find the Way 137

Chapter 9 Public Policy: Food for the People 149

Chapter 10 Income Disparities, Poverty, and the Food Gap 173

Conclusion: Resetting America's Table 183

A Note on Sources 195