Addressing food issues at Baruch College

Food Matters aims to bring students who are passionate about cooking together through outings and food tourism activities.

"To prepare students for careers in nonprofit organizations and to increase the expertise of those individuals leasing and managing in the nonprofit sector in New York City." This is the mission statement of Food Matters, a graduate student club that discusses food policies in New York City.

On Thursday Nov. 15, Food Matters hosted a nonprofit seminar along with the School of Public Affairs.

This seminar focused on increasing access to healthy foods throughout New York City. The panelists present at this seminar were Dr. Diane Gibson, an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs, Jordan Brackett, the deputy food coordinator in the office of Mayor Bloomberg, Reverend Robert Jackson, co-founder of the Brooklyn Rescue Mission, Terry Kaelber, the project director of United Neighborhood Housing and Kate MacKenzie, the director of City Harvest.

Dean of the School of Public Affairs, David Birdsell kicked off the event by talking about nonprofits and its connection to food access.

"Food support is one of the reasons why non profits were organized in America beyond  simply counting the calories, thinking about the quality of food available to communities and thinking about how organizations put themselves together best to be able to support some of those broad goals," said Birdsell.

Jacqueline Fortin, president of Food Matters then took to the podium to talk about the club itself.

"Food matters was born out of the need to generate a dialogue on food policy issues at Baruch College and together we are a collection of graduate students dedicated  to bringing food related issues to Baruch's campus," said Fortin.

Gibson served as the moderator for this event, citing previous research about how people gain access to food.

However, in order to fully understand what food access means, it should be clearly defined.

"A census track is defined as a food desert if 20 percent or more of the residents are poor, and the center of the census track is more than a mile from a supermarket or a large grocery store," said Gibson.

According to the definition of a census track, there are only seven of them in New York City, with only 26,000 people living in these areas.

Research from the Food Bank however, shows a much different picture. Approximately 3 million New Yorkers have difficulty accessing food, and another 1.3 million of them get their food from soup kitchens and food pantries.

"A lot of what we do is getting the right people to talk to the right people and make sure what we're doing is consistent," said Brackett about his job in the Mayor's office.

He went on to talk about the fact that they recently launched a new website called NYC Food.

"We realize that we have all these great food programs but the word was not necessarily getting out about it," said Brackett.

They decided to consolidate all their information into one where everything would be easily accessible to the public.