Community Food Assessments are important in the world of urban planning in that they look at all the characteristics of an area to determine if the food system in that space is a working environment or not.
CFA's deal with local city planning, food security and the environment all at the same time.
In the Thompson article, he said that a small group of people make the decisions for the whole and there needs to be more facilitated community discussion.
The steps to involve more people are to educate, use local newspapers to talk about the issues and to have town meetings. There should be experts assigned to focus groups to figure out the best possible alternatives the people can take to better their surroundings.
For if the people don't take control, the food corporations will (and they have).
According to Pothukuchi, there are three major streams of the food system; large corporations and grocery stores, food banks and the federal nutritional safety net.
Food businesses that make junk food have won out by saturating the market. In 1997, 94% of food advertisement dollars went to junk/fast food while 300,000 people die of obesity every year.
Urban planners can apply their knowledge of understanding community dynamics, spacial dimensions and policy making to strengthen CFA's.
They can do this by bringing communities togethor, focusing on transportation in (mostly low-income areas) that can bring people to a grocery store, creating neighborhood gardens and interacting with local lawmakers to provide incentives for grocery stores to set up shop in distressed areas.
Placing a food bank in a mixed use area will not attract a "criminal element" like some may argue but it will provide better access to good nutrition for all people; regardless of wealth, class or race.
Bobby I agree with your post. Planners need to utilize community food assessments to learn where there is gap in food distributions in a community. This includes food swamps as well as food deserts, and most notably where all the healthy food is. Making healthy food more accessible to low-income communities should be a integral aim of CFA's, because those numbers you have presented are very scary. To think that food businesses put so much money into advertising unhealthy food that society has no issue gobbling up, while food banks that can provide the food people need for nutrition or in cases of emergency is spun to appear "criminal". People, planners, government, and big businesses need to be educated on food systems to change this ideology.
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