Collaboration brings bounty to residents
Fall is upon us. It’s hard to escape the bounty it brings when you see cooking shows, magazines or go to the grocery store. Apples, cider, pumpkins and squashes are in abundance.
At times, it’s easy to forget that many Franklin County residents don’t have adequate access to grocery stores. Many of our neighbors cannot easily access the fresh foods of the season. That’s why the city of Columbus and Franklin County joined together to create a stronger, more sustainable local food system.
In fall 2016, we launched our Local Food Action Plan (LFAP) to address the spectrum of factors that impact our local food system and our ability to ensure equitable access to healthy food. It is an unprecedented collaborative effort to leverage the expertise of food and food-related agencies to better coordinate programs and services with existing and available funding.
Readers might be surprised to know that more than 250,000 of our residents have “low access” to grocery stores. However, food waste made up nearly 13 percent of the material entering the Franklin County Sanitary Landfill in 2013.
There is an opportunity to connect people to food sources to decrease hunger and food waste. The Local Food Action Plan addresses these critical issues: our environment, our economy and our people. Our plan seeks to enhance coordination and communication among existing food resources and agencies; improve access to and education about healthy food, affordable food and local food; increase the role of food in economic development; and prevent food-related waste.
Some of the challenges seem insignificant until you look to solve them.
The Columbus City Schools serves 53,000 students daily and wanted to incorporate more locally sourced produce into the meals. Ohio is one of the largest producers of apples. It seems like a natural fit to buy apples from Ohio, right? The LFAP Project Team in conjunction with The Ohio State University Extension Farm to School staff observed elementary students and found most of them throw their apples away because it’s hard to bite into them when the children have lost their baby teeth.
Slicing and peeling 53,000 apples a day by hand isn’t an option. Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the district purchased equipment to clean, slice, preserve, weigh, and bag local apples with the capacity to expand to additional fresh, local produce, including carrots, cucumbers, and squash. The school district committed to ordering 3 million apples from a local farmer.
One year into our plan, other initiatives are underway that will utilize urban farmers to provide local food for our neediest residents while providing jobs and economic-development opportunities.
We know that change won’t happen overnight, but our community partners are committed to creating a fair and sustainable food system that benefits our economy, our environment and all people of our county. President pro tem Columbus City Council Columbus