What’s Hot: NYC: Money in Your Pocket Initiative
The Adams administration is encouraging New Yorkers to take advantage of city, state, and federal programs that make living in the city more affordable. Here is the mayor’s Money in Your Pocket Guide, which outlines programs such as Cash Assistance, Community Food Connection, and Get the Good Stuff. Cash Assistance provides federally-funded cash for up to 60 months under the Temporary Aid to Needy Families Program. Community Food Connection provides funding to more than 500 community kitchens and food pantries throughout NYC to ensure that New Yorkers can access food and grocery items. Get the Good Stuff is a NYC add-on for SNAP recipients that allows them to get free fruits, vegetables, and beans at some NYC supermarkets. The program works by matching EBT dollars spent on eligible fruits and vegetables by up to $10 per day.
The guide is broken down into Taxes and Financial Empowerment, Housing, Youth, Health and Food, Older Adults, Transportation and Utilities, and Recreation and the Arts. Each category includes links to government websites that provide details about more than 40 different benefit programs.
The Money in Your Pocket Initiative is also doing public outreach in under-served communities (the specific neighborhoods have not yet been announced) to make sure residents are aware of and can get the support they need to access these benefits. The outreach is being performed by about 300 city employees and volunteers.
The final stage of the Money in Your Pocket Initiative, which has not yet begun, is to contact individuals to let them know which programs they are eligible for based on their analysis. Adams has tasked his chief technology officer with developing a program that finds New Yorkers who already sent their information to city agencies to reach out to them, and automatically screen and enroll them in benefits that they are eligible for.
Food Policy Watchdog: Historic USDA Payout to Black Farmers
In early August, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a historic $2 billion payout to Black farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners that is being funded by the Inflation Reduction Act’s Discrimination Financial Assistance Program (DFAP). Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, has stated that the payout “is not compensation for anyone’s loss or the pain endured, but it is an acknowledgement, reflecting the department’s recognition of the historical injustices faced by Black farmers.”
Twenty-three thousand farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners were approved for payouts of between $10,000 and $500,000. An additional 20,000 people who had planned to start a farm but were denied a loan from the USDA received between $3,500 and $6,000. While the aid is helpful, John Boyd, Jr., Founder and President of the National Black Farmers Association, has compared the payouts to putting a bandage on someone who needs open heart surgery and must be followed up with major changes in policy and funding allocation, because there are still systemic problems and blatantly racist decisions that lead to Black farmers not being able to access USDA-backed loans.
Quote of the Month:
“It is heartening to see the USDA reckon with its longstanding history of discrimination against farmers of color and other would-be farmers and ranchers and take meaningful steps to address it. The creation of the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program was a monumental and unprecedented step toward equity and racial justice, and we commend the Biden administration for making it a priority to address the history of injustices, discrimination and barriers in agriculture. We hope they will continue to expeditiously implement the recommendations of the USDA’s Equity Commission for advancing equity within the department.” – DeShawn Blanding, Senior Washington Representative, Union of Concerned Scientists
Fact Check: Ultra-Processed Foods: Are they as bad as they’re made out to be?
On August 27th, TIME magazine published an article titled “Why One Dietitian is Speaking Up for ‘Ultra-Processed’ Foods,” which has spurred debate about why people eat processed food and whether it is truly bad for them.
Processed and ultra-processed foods are two different categories, each with its own inconsistent definitions. The USDA defines a “processed” food as one that has undergone “anything that changes the fundamental nature of an agricultural product – heating, freezing, dicing, juicing.”
Meanwhile, “ultra-processed” foods are defined by the food classification system NOVA as “snacks, drinks, ready meals and many other products created mostly or entirely from substances extracted from foods or derived from food constituents with little if any intact food.” The alterations that these foods undergo before they’re put on the shelf typically include the addition of fats, starches, sugars, salts, and hydrogenated oils.
The key difference between “processed” and “ultra-processed” is that it is sometimes necessary to process food for (enjoyable) human consumption. It is the difference between eating a raw or a baked potato, a full-sized carrot with skin on or a baby carrot. Ultra-processed foods have been altered so much that a great deal of their nutritional value is gone, and have been replaced with additives, extractions, and preservatives that have proven associations with adverse health outcomes such as cancer, type-2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.
The main thrust of the TIME article was to put forward the opinion of dietitian Jessica Wilson that all the talk about how bad processed foods are ignores the systemic problems that have caused the rise of ultra-processed foods in the American diet. We are, in effect, shaming people for eating the food they’re able to afford. Many lower-income Americans face food apartheid, “a system of segregation that divides those with access to an abundance of nutritious food and those who have been denied that access due to systemic injustice.” Instead of shaming people for being food insecure or unable to afford to live somewhere that has an abundance of nutritious food, we should be trying to change the systems that have created this divide.
In addition, Wilson also wants people to understand that a wide variety of foods that are considered “ultra-processed” by some metrics are not, in fact, unhealthy. Ready-made meals like burritos and tamales may be considered “ultra-processed,” but they actually have significant nutritional value and can be included in a healthy diet. Canned soup and instant oatmeal also fall into this category. And the benefits of these foods –– convenience, shelf-stability, cost-effectiveness –– outweigh the negatives such as the addition of some sugars or preservatives, because they still hold much of their original nutritional value.
