<
https://civileats.com/2025/08/26/local-food-cant-reach-communities-post-disaster-this-groundbreaking-group-is-helping-change-that/>
"In October 2017, the Tubbs Fire in Northern California burned more than 36,000
acres and a large part of suburban Santa Rosa, forcing around 100,000 people to
evacuate their homes. Grocery stores, restaurants, and farmers’ markets had to
close, and because farmers were unable to get their crops to these vendors, the
produce languished on their farms. Meanwhile, displaced residents who had lost
their homes and jobs suddenly found themselves struggling to find food.
The local food system was not set up for emergencies. This realization was
catalyzing for Julia Van Soelen Kim, a social scientist and food systems
advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension in Napa County,
who saw the great abundance available yet no systems to get it to people in
need.
“The event magnified and intensified the inequalities in food access and the
abundance that our local food system could provide in emergencies,” Van Soelen
Kim says.
In typical emergency response larger relief organizations—such as the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Red Cross, Salvation Army, and state
entities—take charge of large-scale feeding. They will use food that might be
locally or regionally available from larger chains, but not food sourced
directly from area farmers—and there’s no set way for these farmers to get
their food to people in their communities.
What’s more, when outside organizations without the proper connections try to
start moving food from farms to food banks, it often doesn’t work, Van Soelen
Kim says. “They’re just picking up the food and don’t know how the farmer is
going to get paid,” she says. While there is a role for these large-scale
feeding organizations, she says, “we just want to make sure that they have
access to local foods.”
To try to improve the system, Van Soelen Kim created the North Coast Emergency
Food System Partnership to connect emergency management and local food-system
professionals. The goal of the partnership is to enable the distribution of
locally produced food in the wake of disaster. For both fields, this represents
a novel collaboration."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-local-food-disaster-relief/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
