'Fresh Food' in a Soup Kitchen: Charity and the Possibility for Healthy Eating in Baltimore
By Amélie Foumena Nkodo, 2015 Trouillot Essay Prize
Introduction
Since 2010, Baltimore City and the Center for a Liveable Future of the Johns Hopkins University have partnered on the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative to address the question of “healthy, affordable food in the city.” [1] It is not a unique food politic: this initiative is an example of the way in which city governments in the United States have taken to a new model, [2] one that aims for a “food systems approach”[3] to understanding diet-related health outcomes thereby making nutrition a question of “food security” [4] that includes socioeconomic class and the built environment. For instance, in 2011 36.1% of Baltimore residents were obese and lifestyle-related conditions such as high blood pressure remained highly prevalent. [5] However data taken between 2005 and 2009 indicate that 43% of predominantly black neighborhoods can be characterized as having low availability of healthy food compared to 4% of predominantly white neighborhoods. [6] These differentials reflect the institutionalized and racialized nature of social marginalization in Baltimore City today. Given this health environment, examples of the measures undertaken under the Baltimore Food Policy Initiative include Homegrown Baltimore to promote local urban agriculture, the expansion of a Virtual Supermarket, and the “Get Fresh” program at Lexington Market. [7] These three programs target the “many disparate stakeholders [...] involved in the production, distribution and consumption of food.” [8] As historian Abigail Carroll argues, the American meal is in a constant process of invention. [9] A food systems approach to health and nutrition has the potential to shift the ways in which residents of Baltimore City understand healthy eating. It is therefore of interest to unpack the kind of meal and the kind of food system that is being invented in this context.
As a freshman at the Johns Hopkins University in 2010, the ideas and realities that have emerged out of these policy changes entered my frame of mind and way of living, spurring an interest in the “food environment” of Baltimore City. I have been learning the new modalities of food provisioning outlined by the Baltimore Food Policy Task Force through living in this city: prior to my sophomore year I had never shopped at a Farmer’s Market (Task Force Strategy 1) nor had I heard of or taken part in a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) share (Task Force Strategy 2). Both encounters were facilitated by information from Hopkins, one of the major stakeholders [11] in many of the projects on food insecurity in the city. My own behavior changes were part of a larger social force aimed at not only individual behaviors, but also the mechanisms of the food system. The shared public health and government discourse conjointly describe a notion of “healthy” and the role of the food system in its achievement. The desired changes are communicated in the description of unhealthy food as nonperishable, processed, prepared and low-cost [12] while healthy options are described as perishable or, to use the language of the discourse, it is ‘fresh food’. Within this framework ‘fresh’ coalesces with notions of ‘healthy” thereby making even more alarming the reality of a significant lack of fresh produce availability throughout minority communities as well as in low-income predominantly African-American neighborhoods. [13] The promotion of fresh produce in both the city and public health literature on the food system in Baltimore City is a reflection of many relationships whose “specificity of the particular parts” and whose “reconfiguration of their proper relationship to one another” [14] demonstrates an emerging model for the circulation of food.
Although not programmatically included in government initiatives to increase the production and consumption of fresh food, the influence of food systems changes necessarily enters the kitchen of a local center for women, one that serves hundreds of meals a day, three times a day. What are we to make of those who acquire food from outside of traditional food sources (retail businesses), specifically individuals and families acquiring food from soup kitchens and food pantries? How are we to understand the particularities of food insecurity in these spaces? This ethnographic description of the process of incorporating a CSA arrangement into the daily workings of a soup kitchen is to inquire into and detail the effects that the discourse of fresh food has on alternate (and nevertheless essential for many) food sources, namely a soup kitchen. The Baltimore City Food Policy Task Force lauds the CSA model as it provides an economic model for the language of fresh food. By being proposed and accepting the CSA share model, Helping Home [15] is part of developing systems of food distribution based on a social value for fresh food. This caught my attention for multiple reasons. For one, I had not quite yet delineated the distinction between a soup kitchen and a food pantry. Helping Home is the former: it only serves food to be eaten on the premises at determined mealtimes rather than dispensing food goods. In any case, neither the food bank nor the soup kitchen evoked an image with the same resonance as the farm-fresh CSA offerings. [16] I felt compelled to inquire more deeply into the particularities of the question of healthy behaviors and fresh food at this soup kitchen given the larger social policy and public health context. If we understand soup kitchens as food sources that have been organized around non-perishable (and often processed and packaged) foods, what are the possibilities for a shift towards the demands of the Baltimore City Food Policy Task Force? Novel patterns of eating are incorporated into the social milieu thereby shaping the everyday experience of eating. This movement of conceptualizing healthy as the consumption of fresh foods has brought with it new forms of food donations to serve its clients at Helping Home.
My aim is to demonstrate the structures in place that influence the organization of the kitchen and consequently its use of the CSA shares and the possibility for its recipients to act out healthy behaviors. The framework for this paper is one in which the topic of food, health behaviors, and Baltimore City are embedded in forming social processes. This allows for a conceptual and ethnographic interest in documenting Helping Home as a way to analyze it as an actor within said emerging frameworks for healthy eating. What stands out about this particular social push for healthy food is the importance placed on fresh produce; the use of the term “food desert” [17] is premised on the value of produce rather than pre-packaged or prepared foods that would conventionally be found at corner stores and carry outs. I begin with showing how the social context has a great influence on the ways in which the body and bodily needs are described, experienced and sustained; with this case being through the material nature, the ‘freshness’, of the food itself. This same characteristic poses many problems for a soup kitchen in that perishable goods are objects of a particular temporality: they must be used within days unless they are preserved in some form. I aim to answer the following: how does fresh food enter the soup kitchen? How does the material reality of perishable food map onto the established organization and rhythms of food donations, preparation and distribution in the kitchen? Finally, what does this mean for the possibility of healthy eating for soup kitchen recipients? I take each stage of meal preparation - donation, planning/preservation and preparation- in turn in my description and analysis. In this context, food is burdened with “symbolic loads far heavier than those of simple nutrition.” [18] Fresh food has acquired a social currency that has elevated it to the policy level. The power to define appropriate eating habits at the policy level has a profound effect on food system flows and the experience of the ‘healthy’ body. Fresh food is a social symbol for health with social structures moderating the everyday rhythms of our lives and the experience of our bodies.
The social value of fresh food
The Baltimore City Code defines food as nothing more than a material substance for consumption, whether “natural or artificial substance or ingredient, whether raw, cooked or processed [...] intended for use or sale [...] for human consumption.” A food is what we eat; beyond this the qualifiers that serve to categorize foods are socially determined and eating patterns are adaptations to the social and ecological context of the day. Descriptive indicators of food can be used to understand shifting social realities and collective values. For instance, in Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal by historian Abigail Carroll pulls together historical information on the industrialization of the workforce in the United States to trace the “invention” of the lunch. [19] This perhaps demystifies our humdrum experience of breakfast, lunch and dinner (economics willing) with increasingly more “snacks” in between. [20] The CSA share set up with Helping Home seemed particularly indicative of what Mintz describes as ‘people [...] cop[ing] with the changes in their own ways by creating new consumption situations, endowed with new meanings which they themselves engineered.” [21] The establishment of a new kind of donation of produce is a strategy to adapt to the demands of healthy eating today. What constitutes an acceptable meal in the United States has fluctuated and evolved across time up to the patterns that currently define eating in this country. A disregard for the historical and evolving nature of social experience would lead one to assume that [food] cultures can be described as isolated stable entities. What appears to be an integral part of a cuisine or food culture can often have a shorter cultural, sociological and historical existence than it would appear to at first glance. Characteristics of foods find meaning within a system of significations. As in Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle, the meanings of the descriptors for foods are to be parsed out in relation to one another. [22] A food is ‘fresh’ and therefore ‘healthy’ if establishing another set of terms to distinguish it from, namely ‘processed’ and ‘unhealthy,’ within a structure of signification. The new emphasis on the link between healthiness and freshness is not self-evident: health could be more of a matter of food groups rather than preservation method such as US Food Guides would suggest [23] or it can be tied to strict caloric makeup in the vein of low-fat alternatives. [24] Qualifiers for foods come to make sense within the boundaries of the systems in which the terms of use are negotiated. In this definition of food, the social meaning of the material form is given the possibility to shift and be reformed, to be determined by the processes that shape American consumption patterns.
This framework for understanding food is distinct from anti-hunger movements [25] previously dominant: it is no longer a matter of simply getting food to people; it is a question of social access to fresh and healthy options. The notion of ‘community food security’ is relatively new, defined in 2003 as an approach that “orients interventions toward creating producer-consumer linkages [...] while emphasizing the importance of sustainability in food production and human and community well-being.” [26] It is within the spaces in which food is dispensed and eaten that the term ‘healthy’ takes on a material form and behaviors are observed. As such, much research has focused on food sources. [27] Using “food-purchasing patterns,” [28, 29] as a dominant method of research on food consumption in Baltimore City is limited in that it presumes and values a direct producer-consumer relationship with food: the local farmer selling to a customer at a farmer’s market (see Image 1) or at least fresh food stocked in supermarkets. Structural racism is defined as “the study of public policies, private institutions, and other institutionalized structures that interact and create racialized outcomes.” The data generated from food deserts maps of Baltimore City amply describe these racialized outcomes. [30] The everyday reality of the soup kitchen Helping Home reflects this view of food insecurity. To have the perspective that food deserts are created through structural racism is to understand that the “relationship between institutions influences behavior, i.e. institutions encourage specific types of responses. This results in an understanding that social inequities such as food deserts are not necessarily the result of one institution’s actions but rather the actions of multiple institutions over time.” [31] That is to say, for many the contexts through which individual behaviors about food can be expressed do not occur at a market and the relationship between the individual and the social and built environment is more complex than the geographic distance from a supermarket and the fresh food options available there. [32]
Image 1. The Center for a Livable Future envisions a future where the neighborhood, the farm and the market share the same space.
Fresh food in a soup kitchen
There are many practical difficulties that emerge in the delivery of fresh food to all food insecure populations. Soup kitchens as alleviatory social institutions are most readily associated with canned and other pre-packaged foods as these products are favored for their non-perishable properties. [33] The ingredients are donated as people choose to give them and are then easily stored for long periods until a meal is planned where they can be used. My initial interest grew out of the temporal reality of fresh food: I planned to document the process of preserving for use fresh produce. What I found was that preservation can be quite a challenge with fresh food; this theme resonated throughout my time there and in my discussions with J, the head cook, and M, the main coordinator between the volunteer group that I participated in, the farm and the soup kitchen at the time of this study. The deterioration of fresh food occurs within the established rhythm of meal planning in place which is itself determined by the institutional context of the soup kitchen. During my time spent at Helping Home I observed two kinds of donations: groups would donate goods directly, or groups would prepare meals with the food items that they brought in themselves. The group through which I began volunteering prepares meals that it then delivers and serves one night a week. This same group had also been able to secure CSA shares from a local farm supplementing the $100 they allocate weekly to feed 100 people thereby allowing the group to both cook meals and donate food to the center. Otherwise, many of the donations came in the form of packaged goods. Perhaps this was what drew the soup kitchen to begin the CSA relationship, as J explained to me: “having fresh vegetables is very important, it’s very healthy, it shows people that even for people that don’t have anywhere to live that you can actually still eat a good healthy meal three times a day without going to McDonald’s or Burger King or 7-Eleven or places.” The symbolism of fresh food is particularly compelling in this context as the fresh food, or the possibility for healthy eating, would be extended to especially food insecure Baltimoreans.
J had been working for Helping Home for over 4 years although her initial encounter with the women’s center was at a difficult economic time in her life during which she was homeless. Today J is the Head Cook and kitchen coordinator for the center. Her commitment to the position is made evident in her welcoming enthusiasm for all volunteers, myself included, with my desire to document the kitchen as part of a research project. In total I documented 10 meal servings at the kitchen spread throughout meal service times. During these meals I helped with all parts of the meal service (described below). In her position J plans a meal 3 times a day for 365 days a year working with the resources that are donated to the center. This requires not only knowledge of health regulations (of which volunteers are reminded of by the wearing of gloves and bonnets at all times in the kitchen); it also requires culinary creativity to adjust to the wavering flow of foods that pass through the kitchen. If this were a difficult position one would not be able to tell from J’s disposition and the tight ship that she runs. Her domain over the industrial kitchen (also completely donated) is felt at all times with reminders to wear gloves, or the suggestion to begin to heat the frozen bagels. Under her chain of command J has two cooks and a group of rotating interns that she trains in food handling and culinary skills. The two cooks work closely with J to provide meals when she is not there and to manage the influx of donations during weekends. There are different rhythms involved in handling, processing and enjoying food. Cooking, service and clean up can be thought of as a four-part process: volunteers begin by assisting in the preparation of the meals if they are to be cooked in-house; otherwise the prepared food is reheated in the kitchen. An individual or group plates the meal to be served out by another group to the seated recipients. Finally, one individual washes a steady stream of dishes in a high-speed industrial dishwasher while the servers clean tables. In total, one hour is allocated to meal preparation and another to the serving. All of the meals that I saw prepared in-house were made from prepackaged ingredients; with only one hour of prep time to serve close to 100 people it is apparent as to why pre-cooked ingredients are useful. The vast storage space in the kitchen was stocked with typical soup kitchen foods: pasta, canned vegetables, canned fruits, cereals, boxed oatmeals, etc. Additionally, a large refrigerator stored pre-cooked casseroles (chicken and rice for example) prepared by community groups that would be served throughout the week.
According to J, the flow of volunteers “varies everyday. Day-to-day varies, month-to-month varies. There are months and days that we have all our groups that come once a month every month.” I was very much one of these volunteers that came and went: though I felt familiar with the routine of the kitchen after my first two or three shifts, the staff continued to explain to me how to use the industrial dishwasher, which I interpreted as an indication of the high turnover of volunteers. Due to the irregularity of volunteers (other than established scheduled groups) many of these responsibilities were taken on by the staff at Helping Home, a familiar set of faces for the dining recipients. Due to the way in which meal service occurs, the atmosphere at Helping Home feels like a homey restaurant with its demarcated dining space. This homey feeling is enhanced by the music played during mealtimes that creates a relaxed space. On a number of days I observed individuals come to meals not to eat but rather to socialize with others or to simply sit and rest. There was no typical client as the center is open to any and all women, children, and trans individuals, though most are homeless. The center serves as a refuge for many in Baltimore City. B, the Saturday cook and a former client, stated that Helping Home is like a home for her. For many, Helping Home is therefore not an “emergency” [34] stop as it is institutionally categorized, it becomes an everyday part of life and in fact nourishes (both physiologically and emotionally) the lives of the individuals who work and pass through there. It is a consistent food source for many food insecure individuals.
Ideally, to best serve as Head Cook, J would have knowledge of the food supply coming into the kitchen so as to plan a menu for the week with meals that can be executed within a limited amount of time to be served on a predictable schedule. In fact, J worked mostly unaware as to what each group would donate on any given day. J finds ways to negotiate the different streams of food items in her kitchen including the fresh food CSA in order to serve a meal with some nutritious value. White starches are unhealthy soup staples and as such J tries to avoid repeatedly using these food items in one day. A diet heavy in starches and carbohydrates was described as “[for] this population [...] the number 1 killer” and as an “easy way to fill up that plate” with low nutritional value, particularly when compared to fresh foods. When she receives fresh food, J makes sure to make full use of it particularly if she has a large group of volunteers helping her that day. For instance, when she receives fresh apples, she has a regularly returning large group of volunteers prep them for baked apples. All fresh items that she is not able to make use of she donates to a residential shelter. The key difference between packaged and fresh food is of course the timeline of expiration. J is forced to pass on the fresh food because of the established influx of other food donations at the kitchen. So, as she explains: “Because you have a soup kitchen [...] a lot of people come and volunteer and bring the food with them—like let’s say I get six cases of fresh carrots then if I have at least fifteen groups that’s bringing food within that month. That’s fifteen times that I can’t use the carrots. So that’s the only downfall to having only fresh vegetables.” Essentially, the expiration timeline for fresh vegetables does not easily fit with the established rhythm of the kitchen.
While the ‘freshness’ of fresh food is valued, it is simultaneously its drawback in this particular context. Donation schedules cannot be dramatically altered as the fresh food only make up a small percentage of the donated food items. Therefore the kitchen must fit fresh food into a prepackaged and prepared food model. Avoiding food going to waste was one of the major difficulties with the CSA donations. Some items did not require refrigeration, such as squash, but came with other setbacks namely longer prep time compared to canned or pre-packaged versions. Other items did not store well but have minimal prep time such as typical CSA greens including kale and collard greens. Few seemed to fit both storage and short prep time requirements, though M did name broccoli as an ideal fresh food that stores easily, preps quickly and cooks without problems. Nevertheless, the drawbacks of meal planning were made up for by the benefits of being able to cook with produce and provide meals from fresh food. For M, “even you know with all the hassles, the increased work for volunteers is not necessarily a bad thing and I mean we’re getting really nice produce for free so it’s hard to beat that price.” For the group, many of the items provided through the CSA would have been outside of its budget and would therefore never have been part of any meals prepared. On her end, J enjoyed the creative potential of using fresh vegetables, her interns were forced to “think outside the box,” look up unfamiliar produce, and experiment with different flavors and recipes.
The total number of meals made with CSA produce was never quite shared with me, as J answered questions such as these in possibilities. For instance, when I asked how many meals could be made with one carton of CSA produce, she answered “as many as I can get.” At another point when I asked if it was possible to make a request and to whom, J lightly giggled and explained that she would love to get fresh green beans but there was no one specific place to make food requests. I later learned that her response was a strategy of hers to receive specific kinds of donations: though she could not make requests, she could make suggestions if anyone asked. I had been suggested to donate fresh green beans in this instance. In her response we see that the need to adjust to a fluctuating reality including the number of volunteers, casseroles donated, and CSA produce quantity is part and parcel of working as a Head Cook in the space of a soup kitchen. To make optimal use of fresh foods on a large-scale would require more precise scheduling for preservation and meal planning that is not accorded to the environment of the soup kitchen. In this context, J must adapt herself to other people’s generosity; she is not extended many of the benefits of other cooks in non-emergency food sources who can have greater control over the food supply and therefore its preparation and distribution.
Conditions of possibility for a fresh food soup kitchen
The flow of food goods within Helping Home is at a socially important intersection point between a framework of anti-hunger and a changing conception of hunger as part and parcel of a framework of community food security. While anti-hunger models aim at addressing short-term acute emergency nutritional needs with a focus on providing cheap and easy-to-distribute foods, the perspective that the question of food and nutrition in Baltimore City is one of food insecurity incorporates hunger in its larger aim at addressing “all components of the food system, not just consumption.” [35] The term “emergency” for describing Helping Home is misleading as it does not accurately reflect the kinds of food relations established within the kitchen. From my own observations, I noted that many women seemed to eat regularly at the soup kitchen and yet my days of observation were neither daily nor regularly scheduled. This demonstrates that many do not experience sudden food “emergencies” but rather a chronic and regular experience of food insecurity or as stated by the Center for the Livable Future: “anti-hunger efforts have not been fully absorbed into the CFS [community food security] work.” [36] The CSA share incorporates elements of both anti-hunger and community food security strategies to nutrition in Baltimore City. It values local, fresh goods yet it is still contingent on donations, mimicking the historically established structures of emergency food assistance. In contrast to taking the lens of ‘the culture of the soup kitchen’ as a self-enclosed entity, [37] the terms of discussion for this project is to view the soup kitchen as integrally linked to broader social dynamics. The CSA donation being received by Helping Home is a reflection of the social value placed on fresh produce. In this way, the kitchen is “alter[ing] the micro-conditions as much as they can and according to their emerging preferences” [38] which cannot be isolated from the “larger institutional subsystems” that “set the terms against which these meanings in culture are silhouetted.” [39] To understand the processes at work within the kitchen one must move between multiple levels of analysis: from the symbolic value of fresh food to the particularities of adjusting to this value in the context of the soup kitchen and then back outward to the institutional framework that limits the conditions of possibility of the soup kitchen in this adjustment.
Food as an object of anthropological inquiry is an opening for understanding embodiment as a socially mediated experience. Furthermore, food is also a commodity and therefore a point of entry into a discussion of power. As I have tried to show in this case study, even as Helping Home responds to the social value of fresh food, the social conditions of the recipients and the larger institutional environment that labels the soup kitchen as an ‘emergency’ food source limit the use of the CSA. Given the structural nature of food insecurity, structural solutions must be implemented. It seems though that the ongoing gift of food donations reproduces power structures that continue to create constraints for the kitchen at Helping Home and its ability to provide a healthy meal to those that rely on it. The observations that I made at Helping Home echo much of the published literature on food assistance programs: less than desirable donations are regularly accepted, [40] the variable supply of food defines the structure and the way in which assistance can be provided [41] and there often exists a gap between client actual needs and the perceived needs by food donors. [42] If we are to understand food donations as a ‘gift,’ [43] it is therefore a form of social exchange through which certain kinds of social ties are established and maintained. According to Mauss, there is no such thing as a ‘free gift,’ all exchanges function within a total system that includes culture, economics and politics amongst other social institutions. The ‘gift’ is therefore not without social implications and these refer back to established power structures in place.
In exchange for the donation of food, the staff and clients of Helping Home engage in an "emotional currency” [44] of gratitude. It was rare to see a client express verbal dissatisfaction with the food though the women often exchanged food items amongst themselves after being served. The principal focus was to get the food out, second would be the personal enjoyment of it for each woman. The option was to exchange it or to throw it away (as was often seen) but complaining would be out of place for the kind of relationship established within a soup kitchen. J is limited in her ability to instantiate her desire to use more fresh food because of the conditions of possibility created by the context of a soup kitchen:
"I tell them the choice is theirs. It’s because we are a soup kitchen and that’s what we do, we are in the business of receiving them and we cannot be like we stick to this and this. And I would always love to get fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, things like that. It’s very seldom that I tell them what they need [to bring], most of the time they are asking what I need. So basically, like I said, I’ll get a group and they’ll say we got a donation of something and could you use it. Sure, I don’t turn anything down."
Despite its label as an emergency food source, Helping Home (and other soup kitchens, food banks, food pantries) is nevertheless part of the ‘dynamic organization’ [45] of emerging models for food in society. Working with fresh foods requires a certain level of meal planning and preparation that is not generally given to emergency food sources. Much like the clients are barred outside of the kitchen and therefore do not participate decision-making about meals, J is barred from the outside social exchanges that lead to the donation of foods and cannot provide her opinion on what kinds of foods pass through the kitchen. The established rhythms of the kitchen at Helping Home of packaged and prepared foods that are integrally tied to the moral framework of hunger and charity renders difficult the incorporation of the community food security model into the space.
Further Research
The growth of charitable food assistance under neoliberal governance is well- documented. [46, 47] The debate centers around the connection that emergency food programs have within public policy, in particular the role of public assistance programs in the fight to end food insecurity in the United States. Many see the growth of charity emergency food programs as an acceptance for “poor people to be dependent for their basic needs on the generosity of strangers, on wholly discretionary giving [which] erode[s] the cultural foundations of public entitlements.” [48] These programs are the result of conservative-led cuts in public assistance programs during 1980s. [49] Some have questioned whether shifting the discussion to community groups is not further indicative of a neoliberalization of food assistance. [50] Furthermore, on the issue of food deserts, it has been made evident that large private supermarkets do not function within the same framework as public health advocates as David Dillon, a former supermarket CEO explained in a panel discussion on “Feeding the 21st Century City” [51] on February 24, 2015 at the Johns Hopkins University. The reality is that food insecurity in the United States is created and sustained by a web of public and private institutions all acting with their own goals and intentions that do not always center on the community experiencing food insecurity.
I would further develop this research from this critical perspective: is food as ‘gift’ (charity) or ‘right?’ [52] How should the burden of responsibility and accountability be shared between public and private actors as it relates to the structural conditions that lead to food insecurity? The next direction of this study would therefore be to contextualize through ethnographic description the “organizational capacity” and “organizational effectiveness” of food assistance programs [53] at both the public and private level and to better understand the connections between the two. Beyond this, healthy eating does require a level of behavioral change. I would therefore also want to want to continue to think critically at the cultural level about the use of ‘freshness’ as the single most important factor to emphasize when trying to make a change in health behaviors. That is to say, I would explore whether a valuing of African diasporic food traditions could be of use to improving the health of Black and African-American communities. [54]
Endnotes
1 “Planning/Baltimore Food Policy Initiative,” Baltimore City,
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2 “Food Policy Task Force,” US Conference of Mayors, <http://www.usmayors.org/foodpolicy/> .
3 “Planning/Baltimore Food Policy Initiative,” Baltimore City.
4 Center for a Livable Future, “Understanding and Addressing Food Security in Southwest Baltimore.”
5 “Healthy Baltimore 2015,” Baltimore City Health Department, <http://health.baltimorecity.gov/healthybaltimore2015> .
6 Hannah Emple, “Food Insecurity Among Children Ages 03 in Baltimore City: Barriers to Access and Initiatives for Change,”
<http://www.hungercenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/07/FoodInsecurityAmongChildrenAges03Emple1.pdf>.
7 “Planning/Baltimore Food Policy Initiative,” Baltimore City.
8 “Final Report and Recommendations,” Baltimore City Food Policy Task Force, <http://www.usmayors.org/foodpolicy/> .
9 Abigail Carroll, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. Basic Books, 2013.
10 Center for a Livable Future, “The Baltimore City Food Environment.”
11 “Home,” Center for a Livable Future.
<http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centersandinstitutes/johnshopkinscenterforalivablefuture/index.html> .
12 Seung Hee Lee et al, “Characteristics of Prepared Food Sources in LowIncome Neighborhoods of Baltimore City,” Ecology of
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13 Center for a Livable Future,“Mapping Baltimore City’s Food Environment 2015 Report.”
14 Brad Weiss, “Configuring the Authentic Value of Real Food: FarmtoFork, SnouttoTail, and Local Food Movements,”
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15 Pseudonyms have been used.
16 Lisa Sisson and Deborah Lown, “Do Soup Kitchen Meals Contribute to Suboptimal Nutrient Intake & Obesity in the Homeless
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17 “Healthy Stores”, <http://healthystores.org> .
18 Sidney Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 29.
19 Carroll, Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal, 103133.
20 Brian Wansink and Collin R. Payne, Mitsuru Shimizu, “Is this a meal or a snack?: Situational cues that drive perceptions,”
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21 Mintz, Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past , 17.
22 Claude LéviStrauss, "The Culinary Triangle,” trans. Peter Brooks, in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and
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23 “Food Pyramids and Plates: What Should You Really Eat?,” Harvard School of Public Health,
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25 Stephen A. Haering and Shamsuzzoha B. Syed, “Community Food Security in the United States: A Survey of the Relevant
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26 Stephen A. Haering and Shamsuzzoha B. Syed, “Community Food Security in the United States: A Survey of the Relevant
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27 Heather D’Angelo et al, “Access to food source and food source use are associated with healthy and unhealthy foodpurchasing
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28 Drew Zachary et al, “A Framework for Understanding Grocery Purchasing in a LowIncome Urban Environment,” Qualitative
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29 D’Angelo, “Access to food source and food source use are associated with healthy and unhealthy foodpurchasing behaviours
among lowincome AfricanAmerican adults in Baltimore City.”
30 C Barker, A Francois, R Goodman, & E Hussain, “Unshared bounty: How structural racism contributes to the
creation and persistence of food deserts,” (2012).
31 C Barker, A Francois, R Goodman, & E Hussain, “Unshared bounty: How structural racism contributes to the
creation and persistence of food deserts,” (2012).
32 Tamar Marie Antin and Mathew Tadashi Hora, “Distance and Beyond: Variables Influencing Conceptions of Food Store
Accessibility in Baltimore, Maryland,” Practicing Anthropology 27 (2005): 1517.
33 “Most Needed Items,” Maryland Food Bank,
<https://www.mdfoodbank.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/04/MostNeededItems.pdf> .
34 “Maryland Emergency Food Programs,” Homeless Shelter Directory,
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35 Haering and Syed, “Community Food Security in the United States: A Survey of the Relevant Scientific Literature .”
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