Does Guilford County need a food council?
And what is a food council anyway?
These questions were the focus of a meeting Friday afternoon at the Guilford County Agricultural Extension auditorium. One key moment in the meeting gave a partial answer to both questions.
“How many of you are working in education?” asked Christy Shi, a community-based food systems consultant, who helped facilitate the meeting.
Many hands went up.
“How many of you are working together?”
Few hands, if any, were raised.
One of the things that a food council can do is bring people together so that everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and groups pool their efforts instead of competing for resources or duplicating efforts, Shi said.
Food councils study how the local food system operates and creates policy recommendations to make it work better.
In researching food policy issues for the last six years, UNCG professor Marianne LeGreco says the need for such a council has become clear.
“People have been asking for a hub where they can find out about other efforts and other groups in the community,” LeGreco says. She helped organize the meeting and will follow up with people interested in forming a council.
More than 70 people came to the interest meeting, representing government entities, nonprofits, schools and environmental groups. They were nearly unanimous, by a show of hands, in their support for forming a food council.
Read about a local project aimed at one of the city’s worst food deserts in Sunday’s News & Record.
reposted from the Greensboro News & Record
Written by Susan Ladd, Greensboro News & Record
Contact Susan Ladd at (336) 373-7006, and follow @susankladd on Twitter.