“Right now there are neighborhoods around the city with such little access to healthy food, they’re known as food deserts. Go to Jamaica, Queens; Central Brooklyn or the South Bronx. You’ll see bodegas and fast food joints on every corner, but very few supermarkets or healthy restaurants.” –Speaker Quinn
Goal 7: Create a healthier food environment. Both our caloric intake away from home and the amount of money we spend on food away from home have dramatically increased over the past 30 years. Although eating out does not necessarily mean healthy choices are not available, restaurant and take-out meals tend to be higher in calories than meals we prepare at home. While many New Yorkers may not be able to transition entirely to home cooked meals, having the knowledge to make healthier choices is an important step toward combating obesity and diet-related disease. Unfortunately for many New Yorkers, their food environment does not support consumption of nutritious foods or healthy outcomes. Through programs to support local food businesses like supermarkets, bodegas, food co-operatives, and Green Carts, the city can restore a healthier balance of options in neighborhoods. In doing so, New Yorkers will enjoy increased availability of fresh foods to support better weight and health outcomes.
Strategy: Expand fresh food retail in underserved areas of the city Proposals:
• Aggressively market the FRESH Program.
• Support efforts to expand food co-operatives.
• Improve bodega infrastructure.
• Improve the Green Cart program by expanding the electronic benefits transfer (EBT) service.
Strategy: Better support food outlets that provide fresh and healthy foods. Proposal:
• Pilot a food retail workforce development program.
• Create neighborhood healthy food guides.
Goal 8: Strengthen the safety net of hunger and nutrition programs. New York City provides a safety net of various food and nutrition programs for New Yorkers who lack the financial resources to purchase enough food. Currently, 1.75 million New Yorkers receive SNAP benefits each month, a program administered by the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA). Additionally, the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is a proven means to reducing food insecurity and improving the health outcomes of children. Yet barriers to enrollment prevent many more eligible people from using these benefits. Lastly, approximately 1.3 million New Yorkers, many of them children and seniors, rely on emergency food programs. While these non-profit organizations provide a much-needed service to hungry New Yorkers, they themselves often struggle to acquire the healthy food that hungry families need. Many of them run out of food before adequately meeting demand. Strengthening this safety net of programs is therefore vital to improving food consumption in New York and the quality of life for over a million residents.
Strategy: Improve federal food programs and remove local barriers to enrollment. Proposals:
• Strengthen the federal Child Nutrition Act to improve school meals.
• Improve the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
• Increase federal benefit amounts to reflect higher costs of living.
• End finger imaging for SNAP applicants.
• Continue SNAP outreach through agency data matches and grocery stores.
• Improve the WIC program.
• Enact federal legislative changes to the WIC program.
• Help WIC vendors by translating the vendor book into multiple languages.
• Mandate breakfast in the classroom for high-need schools.
• Improve the summer meal program.
• Establish a process to make sure summer meal sites are identified earlier and outreach has begun in advance of summer recess.
• Identify and expand on high-utilization sites.
• Produce a list of nearby summer meal sites for parents receiving SNAP or TANF with children.
Goal 9: Improve the nutrition of institutional meals. The Mayor’s Office and DOHMH have worked with several city agencies to improve the nutritional quality of institutional meals and ensure they comply with new nutrition standards. While the reach and ambition of this project are impressive, there are structural challenges to improving the quality of institutional meal programs that the city should make a long-term goal for addressing. The City Council’s strategy for improving the nutrition of institutional meals will be to expand the capacity of city agencies to cook whole foods through infrastructural improvements.
Strategy: Expand the capacity of city agencies to cook whole foods for nutritious meals. Proposals:
• Agency kitchen capital investment and staff training.
• Expand salad bars in schools.
Goal 10: Increase quantity and quality of opportunities for food, nutrition and cooking knowledge. Currently, education about food, nutrition, and cooking is delivered in a variety of settings. New and expecting mothers receive nutrition education through the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Young children receive education about where food comes from and what to eat from countless innovative programs. Additionally, thousands of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients receive nutrition education through the Food Bank for New York City's Cookshop program and the Cornell Cooperative Extension. While these programs have grown in recent years and offer valuable services, they are not enough to confront the loss of food knowledge over the past several decades. Better coordination among these programs and expanding other innovative, successful models of education will help restore some of this knowledge to New Yorkers. The city should assess the various services currently available through SNAP-Education and other programs, their target audience, and their effectiveness to improve nutrition and health outcomes
