Santa Fean Combats Poverty With Food

from Red Orbit

By PAT REED, PHOTO BY REBECCA CRAIG

Man's passion to relieve food insecurity was planted at age of 10

Poverty: As supermarkets left poor areas, food prices soared

When Mark Winne was 10, a pair of World War II refugees who lived near his family threw a Fourth of July party at their New Jersey home. At some point, the youngster wandered off to explore the vegetable garden in the couple's backyard. "I suddenly came face-to- face with my first vine-ripe tomato," Winne writes in Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.

The tomato was "lush, full, and round," he says, and "I reacted to

the sight and scent of it with the

same sense of awe that I would react with much later in life at the sight

of my first naked female breast."

That tomato was a revelation. "My stroll that day through (the couple's) backyard garden opened my senses to a much larger world of possibilities," writes the author, now a Santa Fe resident. It was an encounter with nature in its cultivated form, he says. And it eventually led him to gardening, farming and what he calls "the sensuality of food."

Ultimately, he chose food as his way to address poverty.

In 1968, as a freshman sociology student at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, years after seeing that vine-ripe tomato, Winne found himself "profoundly moved" by children who were starving during the civil war in Nigeria's Biafra region. "The hurt of these people had somehow lodged itself inside me," he writes. So Winne raised money for famine relief, his first effort at providing food assistance to the hungry.

Not long afterward, he and several college friends decided to try to "make a difference" in Lewiston, a small city on the banks of the Androscoggin River, which he describes as a "once beautiful waterway whose paper and textile mills had turned it into a wide, open sewer whose contents were

too thick to drink and too thin to plow." A breakfast program for the city's poor children

and a community food co-op were among the group's projects.

Immediately after college, he became the director of a youth program in Natick, Mass., 15 miles west of Boston. "Not wasting time on a warm, Welcome Wagon kind of greeting, the town fathers advised me that if I wanted to have a job in six months, I'd better get 'those damn kids off the street,' "

Winne writes.

So he adapted a town-owned farm in the affluent community of Weston, Mass., to Natick. Teenagers worked on the Weston farm, learned about "the rigors of farm work"

and distributed the farm's produce to people living in Boston's low-income housing projects.

The Natick Community Farm was organic, largely, he writes, because he and the farm manager -- a recent university agriculture graduate without farming experience -- had

no idea how to use agricultural chemicals. "By some miracle," he says, "we managed to

cultivate a righteous patch

of organic cantaloupes for which (a natural food store in Boston) was willing to pay top dollar."

* * *

In 1979, Winne moved to Hartford, Conn., to become

the executive director of the newly formed Hartford Food System. He was much more interested in food systems than in counseling troubled youth, he says.

"What was unique (about

the program) -- indeed,

never attempted by any other

U.S. municipality -- was

an initiative to address the city's food problems, specifically the increasing cost of

food available to Hartford's lower-income residents," he writes.

In other parts of the country, people were organizing markets to help farmers or they were creating food co-ops for those who had converted to organic food. But the Hartford Food System was attempting to blend "two separate but related movements" -- the farmers market/organic food crowd and poor people. "This was new, it was exciting, and it was risky as hell," Winne says.

But in 1981, a couple of years after Winne took over the Hartford Food System, Ronald Reagan became president. "In the face of a softening economy and growing unemployment, the Reagan administration moved swiftly to implement its conservative agenda by cutting programs that poor people depended on for survival."

Ultimately, the Reagan administration cut food stamps -- just one program -- by

$1 billion.

"The pressure to feed a

rising tide of hungry people

fell increasingly to local communities and especially to nonprofit organizations and faith-based institutions," Winne writes.

But Reagan aside, the poor neighborhoods of Hartford -- as well as most of the poor areas in the rest of the United States -- were suffering from "supermarket abandonment," as Winne calls it. When middle-class families departed Hartford for the suburbs,

the supermarkets went with them.

The few that remained smelled as if "something had rotted and was never fully cleaned up. When seasoned with a pinch of filth, marinated in gallons of heavily chlorinated disinfectant, and allowed to ferment over many years, the store released a heady aroma that brought tears to the eyes of men stronger than I," Winne writes. In addition, the poor who didn't have a car or money for a taxi to take them to the suburbs were charged more for such dismal food as black bananas and brown lettuce.

In his book, Closing the Food Gap, Winne discusses the successes and failures of his agency's programs -- community farms, farmers markets and food banks, among them -- to deal with supermarket abandonment.

As supermarkets left the city, however, fast-food restaurants and gas-station convenience stores rushed in. "Such establishments thrive in areas of poverty and low education," Winne writes. "While they presumably serve a community's immediate need for calories, they actually prey upon those who are who are weakened by insufficient money, choices, and knowledge. As a result of these factors, Hartford's major food problem shifted from hunger to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity."

Winne departed Hartford for Santa Fe after 25 years. The reason: "a woman," as he puts it, Pam Roy, the director of Farm to Table, a food-policy group. They were married several months ago. Today, he is the food-policy council program director for the Community Food Security Coalition, a national nonprofit based in California. He's also a freelance writer.

* * *

Food insecurity has a root cause: poverty, says Winne, sitting at a small coffee shop in downtown Santa Fe. Americans, he adds, believe poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But we have enough innate compassion that we don't want anybody to starve to death. So Americans, unlike much of the rest of the world, deal with poverty through food programs.

Most European countries, he points out, have fairly sophisticated social-welfare systems that don't focus on food. France, for example, doesn't have food banks or food stamps. Instead, poor people receive enough money from a single source to meet their basic needs.

Countries in Europe spend, on average, about 15 percent of their gross domestic product on social welfare programs, he adds. The United States spends 8 percent.

If poor people could afford to shop at places like Whole Foods or the Santa Fe Farmers Market, Winne asks, would they do so? Would that be their first choice? "My guess is, everyone would chose the more affluent natural food stores and farmers markets," he says.

In 2001, Winne says, the Hartford Food System talked to four Hispanics and four African Americans. The word organic meant "natural" and "healthy," they said. But buying organic food wasn't an option for them. It simply wasn't available.

The elderly women in the group -- from the American South or Puerto Rico -- "spoke animatedly of green beans that 'snapped sharp and clear,' " he writes, "and fresh garden tomatoes, cilantro and collard greens, the mention of which brought sweet smiles to their faces."

Like a 10-year-old boy coming face-to-face with his first vine- ripe tomato.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Santa Fe resident Mark Winne will sign copies of his book, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, at 3 p.m. Saturday at La Montanita Natural Foods Co-op, 913 W. Alameda St.

(c) 2008 The Santa Fe New Mexican. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.