Food Advisory Council Forum Talks Urban Agriculture, Fresh Food Accesibility

According to Nic Esposito, an urban agriculture activist from Philadelphia, "It always starts with that one garden bed."

That's the way a lot of urban agriculture and sustainable farming initiatives start, Esposito said, and in New Brunswick, garden patches helped give way to the New Brunswick Community Food Alliance.

On Saturday morning, the Alliance hosted several dozen community members at New Brunswick Middle School for a forum to discuss local food accessibility, urban agriculture, and community health initiatives.

The New Brunswick Community Food Alliance is a group of volunteer community members and representatives from city entities such as Johnson & Johnson, the mayor's office and city council, and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

The group's main focuses include access to healthy, affordable fresh food in New Brunswick, urban agriculture, which includes things like widespread use of community gardens, health and wellness initiatives, and policy change to make sustainable, organic and fresh food access easier for residents to obtain.

Attendees heard a presentation from Esposito on urban agriculture projects in Philadelphia and broke into groups to meet with the heads of the Alliance's eight work groups that address different topics and issues.

Elijah's Promise and The Fresh Grocer provided breakfast and lunch, volunteers provided free childcare, and a bus was provided to shuttle attendees to and from the forum who could not drive themselves.

"We have a ton of work to do," said Keith Jones, Alliance chairman.

That work includes a USDA grant-funded project that is being undertaken by the Alliance to survey local bodegas and corner stores and their customers to see what fresh food is available at those shops, said Lisanne Finston, Executive Director of Elijah's Promise and chair of the Alliance's Healthy Food Access work group.

The idea is to bring fresh food into shops that offer a lot of processed, high sugar and salt offerings through a grant program by the Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit.

After the results of the survey are analyzed, Alliance volunteers will meet with shopkeepers to see if they would be open to changing two things in their store to make fresh food more accessible to their consumers, Finston said.

Finston said that many small stores in New Brunswick already do a good job of offering fresh and ethnic varieties of produce. For them, it will be a question of finding ways to establish cooperative buying practices, so they will be able to obtain their produce at a cheaper price and pass those savings along to their customers, she said.

Another Alliance project will make use of the new facilities at the Health and Wellness Plaza.

A community room, equipped with a demonstration kitchen, will be the site of healthy cooking demonstrations for the public, said Mariam Merced, Director of the Community Health Promotions Program at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and chair of the Alliance's Community Engagement work group.

Tours of The Fresh Grocer will also be offered, in which Alliance members will demonstrate how to best navigate the supermarket for a healthy shopping trip, she said.

The focuses of the Alliance go beyond just healthy and fresh food. According to Finston, New Brunswick and Middlesex County are not giving free breakfast to enough eligible children.

In New Brunswick, where 5,900 children were eligible for free breakfast in the 2010-11 school year, 3,810 of those children did not receive breakfast, according to a study performed by Advocates for Children of New Jersey, a Newark-based public research firm.

In all of Middlesex County, 33,307 children were eligible for free breakfast in 2010-11, and 23,476 of those children were not receiving it, according to the study.

For more information on the New Brunswick Community Food Alliance, visit www.nbfood.org.