Food insecurity in Ohio — basically, a measure of how many people don’t get enough to eat and how often — is higher than the national average, says a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture report. “We’re not talking about people who skip a meal to drop a few pounds,” says Irene Hatsu, food security specialist with OSU Extension, CFAES’s statewide outreach arm. “They’re skipping meals because they can’t afford more food.” Can more Ohioans fill their bellies, while also doing it healthfully? Hatsu thinks so. Read how she and OSU Extension are working to make it happen. (Photo: iStock.)
food deserts
‘America’s food future in Cleveland’s struggling neighborhoods’
Morten Damm Krogh takes a firsthand look at food deserts and urban farming around Cleveland in a great read on the German Marshall Fund Blog. He features the work of Morgan Taggart of CFAES’s outreach arm, OSU Extension, who showed him around on his visit. “To be perfectly honest,” he writes, “I saw more of America’s food future in the struggling neighborhoods in East Cleveland than I did in the corn and soybean fields of Nebraska.” Krogh is a special adviser for Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries and a fall 2014 European Marshall Memorial Fellow.
Bringing more and better food to eat to isolated communities
CFAES’s outreach arm, OSU Extension, is part of a new five-year, six-state effort to get more and better food into isolated communities. The Voices for Food project will serve areas defined by USDA as “rural food deserts.” “These are low-income census tracts where a substantial number or share of people are far from supermarkets,” says OSU Extension’s Dan Remley. Among the project’s goals: Teaming up with local food policy councils, getting healthier foods into local food pantries, and giving people choices among those foods, not prepackaged selections. Read more.