 We're in the studio once again here at Davis Media Access. My name is Autumn Laberino and I'm your host today for another community-oriented segment. My guest today is Grace Perry. Grace is a graduate student in the Community Development Department at UC Davis. She's also the co-organizer of an event centered around food and an upcoming forum on February 28th called Let's Talk About Food, Tapping the Potential. Welcome, Grace. Great to be here. Thank you so much for coming today. So I mentioned the forum and we'll come back to that. But the forum is part of an overall process that started last fall. So let's start there. How did this all come about and how did you get involved? Yeah, that's a great question. So this project was really born out of Mayor Brett Lee's initiative to have food and economic development plans in Davis. He worked with a few women in the community. One of them is Ann Evans, the author of the Davis Farmers Market Cookbook, a co-founder of the Davis Food Co-op, and Farmers Market, Dima Tamimi, who has founded two nonprofits focused on food scarcity and access, and Catherine Brinkley, who's a professor in the College of Agriculture at UC Davis. So they started having discussions about what food-centered economic development would look like in Davis and convened a series of meetings in the fall of 2018 with community organized or community members to decide kind of what that would look like, what initiatives would need to take place, and policies for a better food future in Davis. And you're relatively new to Davis, as I understand, so how did you get involved with that? Was that through your graduate work? Yes. I started last fall in the graduate program, and my advisor is Catherine Brinkley. So I started, my interest in food comes from working directly on small farms, most recently in Colorado, and I started, I came back to school to study food systems and economic development and just kind of fit right into this project at the perfect time spot. I did. Yeah. Talking about food scarcity, and let's define a few terms first, okay? So food scarcity, let's start there. So food scarcity is something that many people in Yolo County experience. It's, you know, not having access, as much access to food as others. And so I have some statistics here that more than one in five Yolo County residents relies on a local food bank and other food assistance programs. About a third of those residents are children who were ineligible for federal nutrition programs because their family incomes were above 185 percent of the federal poverty line, which is 44,000 for a family of four. For Davis specifically, the city has a higher average family income than the surrounding areas with more than double the county rate of food insecurity as measured by eligible food stamp redemptions. So nearly half of the Davis population consists of students and nearly 40 percent of the students at UC Davis are food insecure according to a 2016 study. Right. And so food security is another term that comes up. That's the opposite. That's when you have enough to eat and you don't have to wonder where your next meal is coming from. And then what I was going to say is in terms of food and economic development, it's something that, you know, has been a big topic in Yolo County as a whole. This is the first time I'm really aware that it's coming down to a sort of a policy level so specifically at the Davis City Council. Now I understand that after the forum, your group, all of you, all the women you mentioned will be generating a report that will then go to the City Council. And will that report contain specific policy recommendations? Yeah, specific policy recommendations. So the meetings that I spoke of earlier really provided an opportunity for community members involved in the process to dictate what the food and economic development initiatives would be and having specific food policies were part of that. We really wanted to give the City Council kind of a, here's how you, here's how and this is what to implement. And there's a timeline associated with that as well. Some of the forums that were held last fall were the ideas all over the map or did they seem to kind of fall into some kind of regular pattern that the City Council will be able to look at and say, yes, we can move forward with this. Yeah, so the people who attended those meetings really dictated what kind of, what categories we are now using in the report and yeah, they're very much community dictated and they really fell into like four main categories. Can we talk about this? Yeah, yeah. So one of them is ensuring access to a healthy diet for all of Davis residents. Another one is to have climate friendly food practices. So addressing food waste is an example of that. Davis being a leader in food innovation and entrepreneurship and then the last one is establishing a food brand and narrative for the City of Davis. Okay, I'm going to hone in on those last two. Branding I think I understand. We're talking about there's a campaign, it's branded and it's publicized and maybe that's writ large on a billboard on the Cosway, right? But entrepreneurship, can we focus in on that for a second? What does that mean? Food entrepreneurship? Yeah, so to me that means giving people an opportunity who want to be involved in the food system at a business level or entrepreneurship, the opportunities to do that. So many of the conversations were focused around having city policies and zoning laws that actually allow for food based development and providing like kind of a food lab of sorts for people coming out of the university doing research about sustainable food practices like alternative meats or people who want to have are involved in like producing jams or producing jams having access for a space to do that. Right, but to some degree we're also talking about startups and innovation too, right? Yes, yes, absolutely. So giving people an opportunity who want to invest in Davis, the place to do that. Right, an example of a food innovation that is kind of the hot topic right now, I think about the beyond burger product and I'm not trying to promote it, but it's just this thing that sort of, to my mind, came out of nowhere and is everywhere now. It's become the ubiquitous, you know, plant-based burger and next month the local organization Cool Davis and Cool Cuisine are doing the burger battle to find the best plant-based. So that's a perfect example of what we're talking about, right? Yes, that's great. Right, let's talk about the forum on the 28th a little bit, the when, the where, who will be participating and what people can expect when they go. I will say that the forum is being produced by Civ Energy who is one of Davis Media Access's partners on election issues and will be recording it. So if you can't, if people can't make the forum on the 28th they can certainly tune in, but they are invited to come to community chambers, right? Yes, on February 28th it's a Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. It's really an opportunity for the plan to be committed or to be presented to the community and have them make comments and ask questions to a panel of speakers about the key initiatives and recommendations that are in the plan. Okay, and what time does it take place? 7 to 9 p.m. 7 to 9 p.m. And I think most people are familiar about community chambers is where the council and the school board meet and it's at 23 Russell Boulevard and the city complex. Grace, what has been the most surprising thing you've learned in this whole process? So you came, you wanted to focus on food and what are you learning? I'm really learning how a community can drive a policy process, an initiative as big as something like this and how, you know, while the mayor has adopted this into his initiative, how it has really been a bottom-up approach of community organizing, of the initial community meetings and then now presenting this plan to the public forum to the rest of the community to comment on, it's really neat to see a process like that take place that's not, you know, wholly top-down but really bottom-up grassroots. Right, and Davis is the perfect place for this to happen in many regards. I've lived here long enough that I remember when the Davis Food Co-op was a much smaller store before it was remodeled and built out. That was, you know, Ann Evans was completely involved in that. That was a completely grassroots-driven effort and the same with our farmer's market, which is now a national award-winning farmer's market. So how will the work that you're doing today inform you as you move on? Any clue about that? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I've learned a lot from the three women that I've been working with, especially how something can be done from the grassroots level. But I think just being really inspired by what a grassroots level community can do and the changes that they can make and potentially go on to affect change at a regional or national level. Right. Before I forget, I wanted to touch briefly on, you said that Dima had started two non-profits that are very related to that. Can we just mention them so she gets some credit for it? Yeah, absolutely. So one is the Giving Garden and the other is Land and Ladle. And there are websites for both of those. OK. And the emphasis for each of them, Dino? I don't. OK, so Giving Garden and. Land and Ladle. Land and Ladle. All right. So just to recap, we're talking about this forum on February 28th and a website where people can get more information about the event and about the work that you're doing would be. Land and Ladle is a great place to access that on the menu bar on the website. There's a page that says Food Discussions and it has recaps from all the meetings that happened in the fall and then information about the public forum. Great. Well, I want to thank you for coming in and talking with us today and helping raise these issues. I do know that there is a lot of food insecurity in Davis. When people look at, they have kind of the 5,000 foot view of our community. They don't see that because we're a university town. There is a lot of affluence here. But as you mentioned, there are students. There are families. There are migrant farm workers who live here. There is real insecurity. So this is important work that you're all doing. And thanks for coming in and talking about it today. Thanks for helping raise awareness. All right. I've been chatting with Grace Perry, who's involved with Let's Talk About Food, Tapping the Potential. It's kind of an ongoing effort that will culminate in a forum later this month, February 28th, in the Davis Community Chambers, 7 to 9 PM. And then a follow-up report to the Davis City Council. And we're going to learn more about how our community can really learn to address these issues of food scarcity and be innovative. So thanks for tuning in in the studio. I'm Autumn Levy-Renau.