 How many of you know that our community has a food policy council? Raise your hand. Okay, good. So we've got at least half the room, Len and Leslie, who know that there's a food policy council here in San Antonio. So the food policy council was established or formed in 2010 by the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District when we were funded for the community's putting prevention to work grant. And it became its own 501C3 in 2013. So if any of you are interested in learning more about the food policy council, I encourage you to touch base with several of the people in the room, Len Trevino, Leslie Provence. And there may be a few others of you, if anyone else out there is on the food policy council. These two individuals are sitting up here in front and they would be happy to give you more information about the council and how you can get involved. Now it is my honor and privilege to introduce the exceptional presenters that we have for this session. First, I'd like to introduce Dr. Julie LaBarba. She, having grown up in an Italian produce family, she learned to appreciate food at an early age. This fostered her professional commitment to child nutrition and resulted in targeted advocacy for public health education and research. Now the medical director of CHEF, Culinary Health Education for Families, at the Children's Hospital of San Antonio, she aims to empower families to make delicious, satisfying meals with affordable ingredients. LaBarba runs a study coupling increased access to fruit and vegetables with nutrition education and cooking classes for low income pregnant women. She is a board certified pediatrician. I also want to introduce Edwin Marty. He is currently the food policy manager for the city of Austin in their office of sustainability. Edwin earned a BA in anthropology from the University of Oregon and completed an apprenticeship in agroecology from the University of California. He went on to work on sustainable farming projects around the world and was a garden writer for Southern Living Magazine. Marty was the founder and director of a nonprofit called Jones Valley Teaching Farm and the director of a nonprofit Eat South. He has consulted on numerous urban farm projects around the country, helped establish the Alabama Sustainable Agricultural Network and co-authored a book called Breaking Through Concrete. Now that sounds interesting. So thank you both, Dr. LaBarba and Edwin Marty for being here. We really look forward to hearing from you and I turn it over to Dr. LaBarba. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. Good morning. Thank you all so much for being here today. This is, I think, a great sign that we're having this conference in our city. I'm going to start with a quick video about what's going on at the Children's Hospital of San Antonio. The Children's Hospital of San Antonio is bringing a groundbreaking culinary health and education program to San Antonio. The program is designed to reduce childhood obesity and improve access to good nutrition. This is about putting children first. In April of 2013, the Goldsbury Foundation gave a $20 million grant to the Children's Hospital of San Antonio. It was the largest gift in the history of Christ's health system. It was a fine expression of putting children first. As part of this extraordinary gift, $5 million was earmarked for the development of community health initiatives. And now that money will be used to create a leading-edge culinary health and education program. Because the Goldsbury said, we want this to be the destination for the children of South Texas, for their parents if there's a child at risk or in harm's way. Let us help you do that. The Children's Hospital of San Antonio is partnering with the Culinary Institute of America, the Goldsbury Foundation, H-E-B, and several trusted community organizations. But the truth of it is, it's going to come through partnership. No one entity by themselves is going to be able to move the needle on individual behavior change. It's really necessary for population change in terms of health. Do the next one where you do the tomato and then put the leaf in the middle and then put the cheese on the end. The Children's Hospital of San Antonio will offer the first Children's Hospital teaching kitchen. It will be designed by the Culinary Institute of America and will offer cooking demonstrations as well as fully interactive hands-on classes. It will also be the first Children's Hospital to be surrounded by extensive teaching and healing gardens. 2.4 acres dedicated to patients and families to learn the foundations of a healthy diet. It is going to bring the healing work of nature into our everyday presence. Another component of the program involves an innovative grocery procurement. The prescription for produce allows physicians to write prescriptions for healthy foods. So the vision is that you get this piece of paper, you can go to H-E-B, you could go to your food bank, you could go to one of their farmers markets and redeem that coupon for the most affordable produce that you can find anywhere in the country. The Children's Hospital of San Antonio, along with its partners, are extending eating education and access to healthy foods. Pediatrician and Chief Dr. Mark Gilger explains the impact it will bring to our community. It means we're going to bring world-class care in nutrition and health sciences to the children of San Antonio. It is a different way of thinking, but that's exactly what we want to do here in San Antonio. The teaching kitchen and garden are scheduled to open in the fall of 2015. It will be available both to patients and the community. Learn more about how the Children's Hospital of San Antonio is putting children first at www.chfsa.org. So that arrival date of the kitchen has been pushed out a little bit. It's going to be 2016 in spring. So the name of my talk is Please Don't Take This Personally. If only there were a way to impact dietary behavioral change without offending people, right? And at the Children's Hospital of San Antonio, we think there is. Jennifer mentioned I'm from a produce family and I'm a mother. I have four children. I'm a pediatrician. All those reasons make me care a whole lot about childhood obesity and what we're going to do to fix it. But the main reason why I do what I do in our mission at the Children's Hospital is we feel that every family deserves to eat real food, whether or not they have the means or access to do so. The things that grow on trees and come out of the ground we're not put here for a certain select group of people. And that really is the motivation for this entire program. And that's a challenge in this community. I mentioned I'm Italian. So in the face of a challenge a popular Italian saying is I voluto la bicicletta, orra fedala. And that means you ask for the bike, now pedal. And we really have asked for the bike, right? I mean this conference is asking for the bike. And I think we can all identify with a time when we set out to do something and in midstream you realize this hill is a little bit more steep than I thought it was going to be. So luckily we have a lot of support, as you saw in the video, the Goldsbury Foundation. And we have some support from HGB as well. But our plan moving forward on this bike was to shift the food culture through the kitchen, the clinic and the community. And that's kind of what you saw in the video. But what became plainly obvious as we began to tell everybody else what to do in the community was that we needed to check our own pulls at the children's hospital, right? What were we serving? What were we doing? What were we broadcasting in our built environment and our surround sound? And, you know, okay, well to execute our plan in an incredible way we've got to change a few things. So how hard could that possibly be? Well, I wasn't naive enough to think it would be all flat road and clear skies, but the terrain looked a little bit more like this. And the forecast was more like cloudy with a chance of vending machines. We had a longstanding tradition of this wonderful popcorn Wednesday. It's a patient scholarship, but the popcorn was bathed in trans fats. And we have food and beverage contracts that honestly will outlive probably my career. They're very long. It's kind of like an arranged marriage of sorts. We didn't really choose to be together. We're going to have to make this work. And then just the general predilection for high fat, salt, and sugar foods. So this is the stuff that sells in the city. And this is stuff that sells in the hospital. And because of these food and beverage contracts, we really do have to meet obligations. We really do have 10 years of sales numbers that we have to meet. So it's a really interesting conflict, you know, and I'm kind of right in the middle of it. So I have to work with our food and beverage partners but also figure out a way to do that, to meet those obligations, but also to fulfill the responsibility that we have as a children's hospital to do the right thing. And I'm happy to say that most of these examples are actually places where we've made some headway. So on the vending machines, we ended up rebalancing the food inside. And I literally sat down with a list and I just went there and I'm like, no, no, no. Okay, then yes. You know, there are containers of Cheerios that you can put in place of a Texas-sized honey bun that doesn't go bad for a year. And we just did a lot of that. And, you know, we've got families waiting in the emergency room at three in the morning with a two-year-old. You know, I'd much rather them have just some Cheerios. It's not that big of a deal. I want them to have something to eat, but we could just do a lot better than we were doing. So on the popcorn, catch me after the talk if you want to hear more. But it was named Popcorn Gate at one point because it went all the way to our president's office. We had volunteers walk out over it. We changed this popcorn. And it's such an example of how hard the smallest changes can be. You know, people don't like change and food and drink is so personal. And so even some of the doctors came up to me and said, that was the highlight of my week. And I was like, seriously? You need to get a life. But, you know, people are tied into it. On the food and beverage contract, I basically just said, okay, how much does water cost? $1.50. How much does Pepsi cost? $1.50. All right, I'm going to help you sell a whole lot of water because they didn't really care what I was selling. They just want the bottom line. So if you walk in the children's hospital entrance where the emergency room is, you'll see a glass machine with nothing but water in it. And that's like my little trophy. I'm so excited about that. But, you know, it's all about what are we broadcasting to people when you walk in the hospital and you see that we'll drink more water. You know, and it's very subtle, but it's powerful. And then finally, we did take all the friars out of our hospital cafeteria. When we reopen it, like you saw in the video, there'll be a pizza oven in the friars place. So that's a pretty good improvement. You know, when you think about what we do at the children's hospital, clearly what we do in the ICU and the trauma bay and the cath lab and, you know, saving lives on a daily basis is more important than this stuff, right? It's considered kind of small change in the hospital world in terms of what we serve. But that's really not true because it is our responsibility to send everyone out of our doors in better shape than when they came in. And I'm talking about patients, their families, their siblings, donors, our administrative assistants, our doctors, our nurses. Everybody should be able to be in that building and to walk out in better shape than when they came in. And so it's a big thing to take on, but it's just something that we feel like we really do need to practice in our hallways, in our cafeteria, what we preach in our clinics. In other words, someone needs to be able to walk out of that clinic visit and actually find what we told them to eat. You know, it's pretty basic. So that's kind of what motivates us. So this whole movement at the Children's Hospital is rooted in this concept called culinary medicine. And Hippocrates said it best without even knowing about Big Red and Hot Cheetos. He figured it out 2,500 years ago. Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food. And all he really meant by that was food and health are inextricably linked. And there's no way around that. So culinary medicine, if I had to sum it up in three points, it's food has to taste great. It needs to fill you up. And it needs to have something of value your body can use. So health food kind of gets this, well, I know it's good for me, but I don't really taste that good. And when I'm done with it, I feel kind of like deprived. I feel like I need to go have another meal. And then junk food, on the other hand, well, the taste is there. All my fat, salt and sugar cylinders are firing. It definitely fills me up for a great value. But I know I could probably do better in terms of the nutrition. And so what we're doing at the Children's Hospital is kind of like right down the middle of that. And we feel like our absolute goal is to have families empowered to turn familiar, affordable ingredients into meals that are delicious, satisfying, and just happen to be good for them. And that's really, you know, we don't talk, you won't hear me say the word obesity very much. You won't hear, you won't even hear me say the word healthy very much. Because that's really not the language that we're using. It's, of course, as you all know, doing the work that you do, it's not what you say, but how you say it. And so this is a very patient-centered approach to help families hopefully walk out of our doors realizing it doesn't have to take a lot of, you know, time, money, or gourmet cooking skills to get some real food on the table for my family. That they like, that they like, you know. And yes, it's great that it's healthy for them, but it really does have to take, you know, if it's not eaten, it's not nutritious. If it doesn't go down the hatch, we haven't accomplished anything. So that's kind of the background of what we're basing everything on. In terms of change, you know, just a couple of anecdotal stories. We have our prescriptions for Produce Program, which is where we're partnering with HEB and the Goldsbury Foundation. So pregnant women on the south side are getting $40 a month of fruits and vegetables on a voucher. And there's a barcode on that voucher, so we can actually track not only what fruits and vegetables they bought, but kind of what else was in their basket. So over a year's time, we're really interested to see did their taste and preferences change. They go through, at their clinic visits, it's a federally qualified healthcare clinic. So the beauty of that is their clinic visits are covered and will present really basic practical, handouts like this, like portion distortion, and kind of show them in a meal that they would normally eat. The biggest difference in this plate is, okay, it's half of the burrito, but it's also just fewer chips. I mean, the chips are sort of the place to save, and then more pico. And so we're trying to approach this in a really practical way where we are literally meeting people where they are. You notice there's no kale on here. There are no alfalfa sprouts, because people don't eat that and they don't want to eat it, and that's okay, and they don't have to. Some people do, and it's fine, but we really want to know our audience when we're talking to these patients. And then the HEB dietitian has a shopping tour and cooking class, so it's great that we're giving women $40 to spend, but are we really teaching them how to spend it in a way that when it goes away, they can continue to use those skills that they learn. So if it's winter, we teach them about buying frozen strawberries instead of fresh, and we also teach them about discriminating between canned and frozen foods and how they can be, if there's a sauce involved or syrup, you probably want to stick to the ones that don't have that. So label, reading, portion control, sugars, all the different, we teach them all the different names of sugars, all the names that masquerade as sugar. And just to help them also with just this executive function of budgeting and planning and to get to the store, to get the food in the basket, to check out and pay for it, to get it home, to learn how to prepare it, and then to actually have your family eat it, that's a whole lot to think about if you've got two jobs and three kids and maybe no husband. And so with some patients, we, I'll get that in a second, with some patients, it's all about this motivational interviewing approach. With some of them, it's just about affirmation. I had a woman who was there, she was on her third pregnancy, she had always struggled with her weight. But I sat down with her and I said, so what's been the hardest part? And she just said, number one, she was there. So that was a big deal. You know, she showed up to the cooking class. This was not her usual HEB. And we found out that that was a real, that was a real deal breaker. We had a lot of problem with our attendance because we just kind of picked the wrong HEB. It was a 0.8 miles from the one we should have picked. So we've learned a lot and it was very humbling. But this, this mom told me, well, the hardest part for me has been learning how to bake. And I said, okay, well, what are you baking? You know, you kind of think of fresh bread or pastries when you say bake. And she said, no, I'm just, I didn't say that. I kind of knew what she meant. But she was just learning to turn on the oven to bake chicken because she had only had it fried ever before. And so she took her fried daddy, the little thing with the basket and the hot oil, and she put it up in the cupboard. And, you know, I know there are three kids in San Antonio eating dinner differently because of this. So that's just one example. Hopefully we'll have some solid metrics by the end of the year. And I'd love to report those later. The other thing that we do in the community, we have a bilingual chef and dietician. And they were hired to really connect with people in a way that is culturally sensitive and appropriate and believable and authentic and relatable. And they're both amazing. And they go into schools and some of the stories that they have are just, you know, they'll knock your socks off. They're kids as old as seniors in high school who've never had broccoli or black beans or mushrooms. They've never even tasted them. So they've got kids coming up after demos getting baggies full of stuff and taking it home. So anyway, these are some of the ways that we're trying to impact people in this space without telling them what to do. We want it to be a want to, not a have to. Okay, and that's Selena and that's Maria. And I have about five minutes. So I'm going to quickly run through just a little bit on drinks. I know sugar-sweet beverages have been kind of a hot button topic. This is something that's, this is my favorite thing to talk to parents about because from parents on Medicaid and SNAP to parents who are sitting there because Ivy League schools, everybody kind of needs help on this because it's amazing what is happening at sporting events and what is happening with drinks. And I'll just point out really quickly, I don't worry about families being duped by NOS or Venom or Rockstar or Mel. I mean, these drinks are like, okay, we don't really buy those. A lot of times parents say, what's that? I've never even seen that. I'm like, what I'm worried about is what's on the other end. I'm worried about Sprite and I'm worried about Gatorade and tea and mango juice. And because a lot of times, I'll just jump down here. I was gonna ask for a volunteer, but I don't have time. A lot of times I'll just have the kids come up and I try to get a really tall kid and I'm like, okay, will you stand up on this chair and will you hold this up for me? And I just kinda, you know, just trying to teach kids about how much sugar that they're drinking. So the average Texas teenager is drinking two pounds of sugar a week. One out of every three Texas teens is drinking two pounds per week. And so one of the, everybody knows the data. Everybody knows that sugar sweet beverages are linked to obesity. But what I, this is on the, it's how you say it, not what you say. I try to, I'm gonna flip through my slides real quick. I'm sorry to do that. The biggest point I wanna make when I'm talking to families is people who drink in liquid calories don't feel as full as if they'd eaten the same number of calories from solid food and they don't compensate by eating less. So that's kind of the big point that I want people to take away. I talked about what we're really drinking. But the how I approach this is sort of like this. I don't like to be tricked. I don't like my children to be tricked. Children like rules and they don't like, they don't like it when someone's not playing fair. And I try to show how advertisers are not playing fair. And I show, oh this is just typical day at the grocery store, right? Just a cart full of Pepsi in my high heels. But, and here you can go to LeBron's house if you just buy the Sprite. I mean, sure. And, you know, Taylor, she's just writing songs and drinking that Diet Coke. And I am, I talked to them about the science. I say, so here's what we know. We know that portion sizes have risen dramatically over the past 40 years. We know that sugary drinks increase the chances of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. And we know that cutting back on these drinks can help people control their weight. And I have a bunch of studies that I cite and this is all, this is not a hypothesis, this is fact. But because the big food and the drink companies are so masterful at the marketing that they use, this is really, all of those facts kind of go by the wayside when we're making decisions. And oops, let's see, one second. I'm gonna play what I play for the kids. Oops, shoot. But I'm feeling 22. Everything will be alright if We just keep dancing like we're... Come on, kid. I'm Drew Brees. And I'm Harry. Who? From One Direction. Platinum album. Dudes, won the Super Bowl. On the cover. MVP. Oh yeah? Yeah. If you give him the Pepsi, you can be in a band. Really? Live while we're young. Hi, can you tell me how to give back to the end mistake? Two stop signs and then make a right at the light. A left at the light. Thank you. Baby, you got me, you got me, you got me. And get that a lot. I know what you think you're looking at. Someone who's too small. Too slow. You feel right, sports? Not in the right body? That's cool. Because overlooking me now. It's gonna make it that much sweeter. One more properly introduced. So it's all their popularity, athleticism, beauty, talent, beating the odds. That last one really gets me because there's no one famous in that last ad. But it's appealing to minority teenagers who want to be lean and mean and strong and prove everybody wrong. They're $3 billion spent on this yearly. I have another video that I guess I cannot show that. Kathy, do you want me to wrap up? Okay. Anyway, who doesn't want to drink what these people are drinking? Because, you know, this is sort of like the promise here. And I would just say that the other ad that I show is this one. And this is kind of maybe more how we should be. This could be the first generation of children in the United States that lives less than its parents. Your brain lights up with sugar, just like it does with cocaine or heroin. All Americans will be overweight or obese in two decades. We're toast as a country. Reject entirely any argument that they are in any way harmful. Lying through their teeth. Kids are being told the biggest lie they will ever hear in their lives. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure costs this country more than $120 billion each year. The long-term health of our families in the country are at stake. And as the nation's leading beverage company, we have played an important role. Across our portfolio of over 650 beverages, we now offer 180 low and no calorie choices. These diet beverages still pose serious health risks. Even though we've reduced the calories per serving, these beverages can still cause kidney problems, obesity, metabolic syndrome, cell damage, and rotting teeth. Which leaves 470 beverages, which have extremely high, unhealthy levels of calories. Consuming large amounts of rapidly digested sugar in high fructose corn syrup causes a spike in blood sugar and insulin, which can lead to inflammation and insulin resistance, both of which may increase your risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer. Coke has also been known to accelerate aging and cause high cholesterol. Singin' Beaver Beyoncé has been chosen as the brand ambassador for Pepsi in a deal estimated at $15 million. Ron James, this is shocking, but Ron James made $21 million this year playing basketball and $44 million from endorsements. LeBron has endorsement deals with Sprite, Nike, Upper Deck, Watch Company, whose name I can't pronounce, Duncan Donuts, and Powerade. Ronald McDonald never sells to children. He informs and inspires through magic and fun. If a foreign nation were doing that to our children, we would defend our families. Okay, so that's how you try to get people amped up, and then you gotta tell them, okay, now that you've fired up, what can you do about it? And really quickly, you know, the sort of like the four things I tell parents, okay, treat sugary drinks like a dessert. When you go out to eat, you can have the drink or the dessert, but not both. No need to stock these at home. Do not feel sorry for your children. They'll get it everywhere. It really doesn't matter. You don't need to spend your time and money pushing that big card of Pepsi down the aisle because they're gonna get it elsewhere. Water, this is the one that just throws everybody off water, is the best sports drink. And so I try to always have a lot of stats on hand in terms of if your child is not an elite athlete exercising more than an hour and a half a day in the hot sun vigorously, water's fine. And then finally, like I said, you know, it's not about education, because we know all this. It's all available all around us. Everybody knows the facts that I showed about obesity and about, you know, sugary drinks and how they're linked to health problems. But it's about teaching kids to think for themselves. And it's about letting them know there's somebody sitting around in a conference room trying to figure out how to get to your lawn mowing money or your babysitting money. And somebody's trying to get you to spend that on something and they don't care about you at all. And so teaching them to read labels and kind of see advertising for what it is, is it really, it's really interesting. It's very different from telling people make healthy choices. It's very different. And it incites a different sort of action-oriented mentality. And so as in parenting and in the built environment, we have to pick battles big enough to matter, but small enough to win. So I appreciate your time today. I'm sorry I went a little bit over, but I'm very thrilled about this conference. I just think it's a great sign that our city is moving in the right direction. So we'll let Edwin take over. Thank you so much. I am challenged to follow a Italian mother of four who's a pediatrician and has a really good way of presenting very, very intense subjects in a very exciting way. So food policy, which is what I do, is usually not considered a particularly sexy subject, but I'll try to infuse some humor into it. So we can have some fun. But awesome. That was really good. That was very exciting. So and I appreciate being here. I appreciate everybody's time. And I'm going to give you a quick overview of what's happening in the city of Austin. My role as the food policy manager and circle back to some of the things that we just touched on in terms of health outcomes and choices in the built environment. So again, my name is Edwin Marty. I'm the food policy manager at the city of Austin, Texas. I'll talk about what a food policy manager is. Tell you a little bit about this report that we just developed, the state of the food system report. Tell you how to get it and then talk about some of the things that are happening in the city related to the built environment and health outcomes. So anybody ever heard of a food policy manager before? Couple people. Excellent. It's a fairly new side municipalities and local governments to have somebody whose job it is to think about the food system as a whole. So we've already touched on what the food system is. It's this way of basically getting food from where it's produced or harvested to your plate and what happens after that. So my job to think about it simply is to look at the municipalities role inside that whole process. How are we as a city impacting the food system? How could we be better impacting the food system? And so how do we decide what better is? So we have this thing called Imagine Austin, which is our 30-year comprehensive plan. It sounds like the city of San Antonio is mired in that same conversation, right now, literally, as we speak. And I'm very interested in sharing more details about what Imagine Austin is, what it says about the development of local sustainable food systems, and frankly how it might have been better situated to be a better advocacy tool. So I'm really interested in following up this conversation with sort of sharing my year and a half experience as a food policy manager in the city of Austin, working off of Imagine Austin. So Imagine Austin mentions the development of local sustainable just food systems about 25, 30 different times. About once every 10 pages, which isn't bad. So what it doesn't do is give a whole lot of specificity. It gives these very large sort of, the food system should look like this. The food system should do this. So then I was hired, literally, to figure out, now that we sort of put this stuff up on the wall, how do we actually do that? So I was hired in about a year and a half ago, came in, looked at Imagine Austin, kind of laid out, where's the city want to be in 30 years? And then I tried to figure out, okay, what's the roadmap? How do we start getting there? Now, obviously, the city of Austin has been working on a food system since 1840 or 1830 whenever the city was founded. And my role is to sort of look at that existing food system, figure out where the levers of control are for the city of Austin. What buttons am I potentially able to help press or advocate to help press to push the food system in certain directions? Now, I'll give a quick analogy about the food system. I think about the food system as being this train moving down the track. Right? And so people get inspired to hear about obesity issues, or hopefully you'll get a little bit inspired by some of the other things that I talk about in terms of how our food system could be. And we go and we jump on the train. Because we want to change the direction of the train. Have you ever driven a train before? Have you ever thought about how a train changes directions? Have you ever tried to think about grabbing the wheel of the train and changing its direction? It's very difficult when you jump on the train and you try to change the direction because you think it should be going this way, but that way you realize there's no wheel. It just goes where it's built to go. And so the food system is the track that pushes our food down. The train that is the food moves down that track. So when we think about changing the food system, my job is to think about in 10 years, where should that track be laid? Where should that train be going? What kind of things do we need to put on the ground that will push the train in a different direction? Are there bridges? Are there tunnels? Are there switching stations, et cetera, that we can implement? So that by the time that train gets there, it's just going to start moving in a different direction. Now, 7,500 years ago, our food system was moving on a very different track. We've had massive transformations in our food system in the last two generations. Many of those changes have been fantastic. The rates of starvation globally have plummeted. We have an incredibly diverse food system. You can have a tomato on your Big Mac anytime you want to. Let's speak of that. There we go. So in addition to those fantastic things about a more secure and a more diverse food system, we also have some real challenges. And we touched on some of those just a minute ago. Many of the things I'm about to talk about in terms of what's documented in the State of the Food System report are really about how the food system has changed so significantly over the last 75 years. Who put those train tracks in place? Who's benefiting, frankly, from the train moving in a certain direction? And who's not benefiting from that train moving in a certain direction? So food system, very simplistic diagram. This is basically what I looked at when I first came into City of Austin. Went out, met with lots and lots of people, tried to figure out what's happening across Boston in terms of the production, processing, distribution, consumption, and either recovery or waste. And collected lots of data about what was happening. And then saw a bunch of really disturbing things. When I first got to Austin, I was so excited. You know, Austin is such a fascinating city. We've got 1,500 food trucks. I mean, it's just this epic wonderland of diverse foods. My joke in Austin is that not only is there a food truck for every kind of food, there's a food truck that fuses all different kinds of food together. So you sort of multiply every type of food together. Now those fusions are fusing with other things that are fusing with other things. So there's just incredible diversity of things. And yet, at the same time, we saw some really, really shocking things in terms of who was actually accessing all that wonderful food. Food security rates were staggering in a city like Austin, 10th most affluent city in the country. And yet, 25% of our community was food insecure. And other issues around access and cost and then started to recognize sort of why some of those things were happening. So we launched a food portal on our website to sort of bloating up a lot of that information. This food portal is where you can find this report if you're interested in following up and sort of seeing what we're doing as a municipality in terms of addressing our food system. It's austintexas.gov backslash food. It's basically a portal for housing, our research, a portal for housing, the regulations around the food system. One of the things that we've heard most prominently is that municipality's role is to really facilitate the direction that the community wants the community to go. And we unfortunately, we're putting barriers in place sometimes, our regulatory barriers making it difficult for people to understand how to do things. So hopefully our food portal is a start in terms of addressing those issues. But so let me jump into the details. So we decided to do a state of the food system report to document what's happening in our city. Basically a snapshot, sort of one time, here's where we are. This is a replication of some of the great other cities in the country doing similar things. New York City, Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, have all done state of the food system reports. We wanted this report, however, to be more than just a report. We wanted it to be an educational tool. We wanted it at some level to be an advocacy tool. So we broke down the food system in really simple five ways. Anybody in English major here? Anybody love gerunds? So we got four gerunds in our food system. We've got growing, selling, eating, and recovering food. Really simple way to think about the food system. And so what we did is we broke down the food system into those four parts. And then we looked at metrics. We looked at what the city is doing and we looked at what the private sector is doing. We wanted it to be an educational tool, mainly so that internally our city departments could understand, hey, there is a food system, A, and that we're actually impacting it. We also wanted the general public to understand that. So we made the state of the food system a highly graphic. We also correlated it directly back to our comprehensive goal of Imagine Austin, stating whenever possible how the things that we are looking at in our food system are related to the vision that we've created for our food system. And then lastly, we helped sort of prioritize some of those things in Imagine Austin against some of the metrics that we set. We recognized that this food system report is just a starting point. We recognized that while other industries or other departments like transportation and housing have been gathering metrics and analyzing those metrics for many, many decades, in terms of food systems, this work is still very new. There's not a whole lot of historical data that we have. So much of the information that we're putting in this report are really just pinpricks on a map. They're just like, here's this, as opposed to being able to say, here's where we are and here's where we're going and we see these trends happening. We also recognize that a city geographically is kind of a strange thing to look at in terms of a food system. Our food system is a global food system. About half of all our fruits and vegetables come from another country. About three quarters of our seafood comes from another country. So if we go back to this very simplified diagram of a food system, that's really, really simplified. More accurate picture of a food system would be this interconnected weaving of different information. Can everybody hear me okay in the back? You guys okay? Okay, good. So an actual diagram of our food system would really look like a big bowl of spaghetti, just this massively interconnected and complex thing. And so our diagram is intended to help simplify it, but we have to be conscious that this diagram is a simplification. And when we talk about the metrics around the food system that we can't be lulled into thinking that this is an accurate picture. So the city boundaries issues is challenging when we gather metrics about how our food system is doing. We don't track much information around our food system according to the city geographics. Most of the information is either on a county level or a state level. And then a lot of the information doesn't really care that the city starts here or ends there. So some of the metrics that we'll talk about in a minute are really a little bit more challenging than some of the other industries that can use city geographics to truly represent information. But let me get into the gist of what we wanted to talk about. So we broke down the food system into these four sections, the first one growing, and then we've got these basic metrics around how are we doing? Where is our food coming from? Who's growing it? What's happening with that farmland? And what we saw immediately was there's some really staggering things around farmland loss. We've lost about 25% of all our farmland in the last 11 years. We're losing nine acres a day. So we think about trying to encourage access to fresh, healthy, locally produced food. We're going very quickly in the wrong direction. So as of yesterday, nine more acres of farmland are gone in Travis County. I've only been at my job for a year and a half and I've already worked very hard on two different preservation projects to preserve two local organic urban farms. So it's a major, major challenge. And then on top of that, according to our metrics, we're only producing about 1% of our food in Travis County for the people of Austin. So not only are we producing a miniscule amount of our own food, we're also losing the capacity to produce food in the future. So what gets really complicated from a municipality's point of view is yes, these are staggering and scary statistics, but we're also about 50,000 units short of affordable housing. So Austin, as you probably know, has changed radically over the last 10 years. We've become a much less affordable place to live. So how do we balance the need to preserve farmland to ensure that farmers are around to produce the food that we all want and need while recognizing that we also have to make sure that everybody has not just a place to live, but an affordable place and hopefully a safe place to live. So the counter to that is that there's this explosion of interest in producing your own food. We've gone from about 10 community gardens in the last 10 years to over 52 community gardens. Almost all of the community gardens are completely at capacity. We've seen this explosion of school gardens. Most of the Austin Independent School District schools have school gardens. You could see a map here of all of the different spots that we were able to put on our GS maps. So really exciting trends in terms of while we are losing farmland, we're seeing this real resurgence of interest in people producing their own food. And then we counter that with the recognition that we've only got about three days worth of food at any one time in our city. And that's actually a national statistic that comes really from grocery stores targeting three days worth of food in a grocery store. That's really kind of based on a business model. If they can flip over all the food in about three days, the grocery store is probably profitable. And that's great for their business model. It's a little bit staggering to realize that here in the city of Austin, we've got I-35 running north and south down the middle of the city. You know, the floods in Memorial Day closed I-35. What if that hadn't resolved itself quickly, we've got, you know, roughly 850,000 people sitting here with three days worth of food. Some sort of scary things start to pop up. Especially when you look at, you know, we're losing the capacity to produce our own food. So in 10 years, there would be no farms hypothetically to produce food. And if we didn't have that capacity and the grocery stores ran out of food, what happens? I don't know. So we also face the fact that our farmers are getting old. 62 years is the average age of the farm owner. That's a little bit older than the national average and really staggering to think about. So in 10 years, we don't have any farmland. We don't have any farmers. And then even worse is this really staggering stat of about $11,000 a year is what the average farmer makes. So in terms of affordability of Austin, the recent statistic came out that you need about $120,000 a year to live comfortably in the city of Austin. So we're working on a plan where we're going to aggregate 10 farmers so they can live together in one house and maybe they'll be able to figure it out. So that's a joke. But it is a pretty significant issue and we'll talk more about equity and access to food as we move along. So the other part of the report takes all those metrics and maps and then summarizes it. I've touched on those already. And then lastly, we look back at the city. So really my job is to kind of look horizontally across the city at all of the different siloed departments with the lens of a food system and to try to figure out what departments are doing what in terms of all the things that I've just touched on. And then the food system has a little bit of a storytelling component where we found examples in the private sector of organizations that were impacted directly by things that the city was doing. So in this report you'll find metrics, you'll find what the city's doing and then some examples of organizations that were impacted by the city. So the most interesting thing really for me that came out of this report was that 18 different departments in the city of Austin are directly impacting the food system. So when I first started a year and a half ago I didn't know that there were 18 departments in the city. Much less 18 different departments that were all directly working on the food system. And in interviewing all those departments most of them if not all of them didn't really think about what they were doing in terms of we're impacting the food system. So this report is really a neat way for the city itself to reflect back and to think about what it does. And then most importantly to realize that as we do things in one department we're influencing things in another department. And so we'll talk about that a little bit more as we move forward. I'm going to move through the next couple of sections fairly quickly because I want to spend a little bit of time at the end on where we're going. So again we broke it down the food system and growing, selling, eating and recovering food and we've got these really interesting data points in terms of selling food. We did an economic impact study of our food system a couple of years ago in Austin. Highly recommend that if that hasn't already been done in San Antonio. We got this big aggregate number of $4.1 billion a year is basically the footprint of the food system. And up until that number had been published a lot of people in the city of Austin were excited about our food system and also knew that there were some issues but really didn't think about it in terms of a critical issue. When that number came up and it equaled the amount of money in terms of a footprint that our entertainment industry represents all of a sudden people were like, huh, we got all these people thinking about our entertainment industry and the fact that Austin is the live music capital of the world and yet here is the food system and nobody in the city was really thinking about it at all. And so frankly that number got me a job. So I appreciate that number. But other things in the report where our food manufacturing is a pretty huge piece of our economic puzzle despite the fact that we're tearing down warehouses as fast as we possibly can and because of challenging regulatory environments we're pushing a lot of our great food manufacturing businesses out to places like San Antonio. We still have this very large footprint. So I'm going to move quickly through these other things. We know that we've got a robust and exciting food system in terms of selling food in Austin. We've got an explosion of farmers markets. Lots of great things happening. But again, we've got some real staggering issues that I'll touch on with the eating section. Lots of different departments in the city working on regulating the selling of food. And let me just skip to this next section. And these are sort of the statistics that bring us back to the built environment and health access, healthy food access outcomes. So I already touched on the fact 18% of our communities food insecure, 25% of our children in Austin are food insecure. And again, going back to Austin being one of the most affluent places in the country, if not the world. When I first got to Austin trying to grapple with the fact that one in four kids in Austin as I walked down my children's elementary school halls realizing that I could count one, two, three, four and every fourth kid had experienced food insecurity at some time recently. And it was just a staggering statistic and just for me as a city employee, very motivating to think about how is this possible and why are we not doing more? While it is an incredibly complex equation, we can be doing more and we should be doing more. We've got 50% of the people that are eligible for SNAP are actually getting SNAP. And that's one of the things that we're very keenly aware of SNAP if you don't know is what we call food stamps now. So why are 43% of the people that could be getting food stamps in our city not getting those? There's some real challenges how we frame that conversation, how we do outreach, how we're intentionally conscious of the role of the government and who we as the government scare away from places where they could come and get the benefits that they deserve as members of our community. And so then the correlate to the food insecurity issue is obesity and this is a really confusing piece for a lot of people. You think you got hungry people and you got, you know, fat people and, you know, those are different equations and basically just tough luck for both of them. What we heard earlier is that this is a really complex issue and it's a deeply cultural issue in that it's rooted deeply in whoever you are as a representative of your culture. But we do know that obesity and hunger are directly tied together. One of my peers in Austin, a professor named Raj Patel wrote a fantastic book called Stuffed and Starved and if you're interested in learning more about that correlation really globally between obesity and food insecurity I would highly recommend taking a peek at that book. So we're grappling with this issue where we have significant food insecurity and frankly rising obesity rates despite a lot of the great work that's being done and then the horrible correlate to the obesity rate is the diabetes rate. So all of that gets to this fact that we've got incredible food retail in Austin, 6,000 restaurants, 85 full-service grocery stores and yet five zip codes don't have grocery stores. The entire southeast section of Austin about 175 square miles doesn't have a grocery store. So why is that? I'm not sure but we'll touch on in a second. So I'll skip through this section because we've already touched on many of these except really to point out that food insecurity disproportionately impacts minority communities in Austin significantly and of course children and the elderly. Those are the departments that work on food. Touch on food recovery really quickly. I love thinking about food recovery as opposed to waste. There's no such thing as waste in nature and best that I know we're part of nature so there really is no such thing as waste. It's an incorrect framing of a conversation. Food is energy and it just depends on where are we going to put that energy? So when we put food in a landfill it's probably the worst thing we could possibly do for a lot of reasons. Creates potential climate change issues as well as burns tremendous capacity in terms of feeding people and providing food for animals. So we've got some just horrible statistics in terms of how much food we waste. We are working on those things in the city of Austin and a couple of different places. Highly recommend checking out the EPA's food recovery hierarchy. It's a great way to think about what we should be doing in terms of diverting our food waste. We've got 15 garbage trucks a day head into the landfill stuffed with food every day in Austin. 38,000 bucks worth of food gets buried and creates potential climate change gases. So we're working on those issues. We're doing in addition to the publishing of this report we're doing this neighborhood food system planning process. We're going out into communities listening asking people what do you value in your food system? What's important? What can we as a city do to support the things that you think are important in your food system? It's going to be probably a three to five year process. We've just started piloting it in one neighborhood in North Central Austin. We're mapping our assets. Assets are people, places and programs. The dots on the map though are places. It's food retail locations. We're trying to figure out what food retail locations provide fresh produce, high quality fresh produce for its vegetables and then what places also provide capacity for people to use their SNAP and WIC vouchers. And that's just the beginning of the conversation. We're taking those maps out in the community listening, sharing, trying to come up with what should we be doing in the future. In addition to that, we're working on a Healthy Corner Store initiative in collaboration with a couple of different organizations in South and Southeast Austin. We're developing community and school farmers markets which we're really excited about getting kids access to really good fresh high quality produce locally grown. We're developing capacity to scale up our farmers market double dollar program. We're doing a local and healthy food purchasing policy initiative in collaboration with the city of Los Angeles really thinking about what's the city of Austin doing, how can we do it better in terms of what kinds of food we purchase and then how can we leverage that with institutions like the University of Texas and Austin Independent School District. If all goes well, we're going to have a collaborative food procurement policy in the next couple of years that will leverage millions of dollars every single year in terms of directing those purchases to go towards equitable and just sources of our food recognizing that farm labor is a major challenge but through our collective purchasing we can influence the kind of farm practices that happen and then lastly addressing farmland preservation issues recognizing that if we don't preserve our existing farms and get better access for specifically new farmers to that farmland we're not going to really be able to work on all of these issues. That's my contact information. Please check out our website for more information but thank you so much. I want to thank both Edwin Marty and Julie LaBarba for being here today. We are out of time in terms of questions because the next session I think starts in just five minutes or so. Do we have a few minutes for questions? If we do have a couple of questions okay we've got about five more minutes so if we do have a couple of questions there's a mic right up here if you'd like to step forward and go ahead and ask. Hi, I want to thank you guys for presenting and for the great work that you guys are doing and I just wanted to point out though that I'm still a little bit concerned about the extent to which we can truly reach out to the most disenfranchised aspects of our community. I have 10 years of experience in planning. I'm a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow. I have all of the experience in terms of understanding all of the sociology of social determinants of health and all of these things but recently I just moved to San Antonio and I have these kids who started coming to my house barefoot asking if they could do some odd jobs for me for money so that way they can go home and buy foods for their families and because of the fact that we moved here being sort of you know in a in a very awkward financial situation ourselves I didn't feel like I could give them money but I always told them if you want to come and cook with me I will give you half of whatever food I make and so when these kids started coming over they started talking about the salads that I would take home with them and they would say this is so great this is like what we get at McDonald's and I started realizing that this is the only place that they get salad is when they go to McDonald's and so I started trying to put myself out there to meet to to sort of bridge gaps but a lot of the people when I talk to them about planning or trying to come up with programs when I collaborate with the people who are disenfranchised they kind of don't see those next steps to know like why should I care why are you you know I mean as far as I'm concerned just you know give me food that's what I need you know and so I really appreciate this discussion but I would really like to see us take it a step further particularly for people who are just trying to figure out how to make their communities a little bit better so that's a great question and and statement and number one can we clone you because we need a lot more solid and number two I think your point is just about sustainable change and I'll let Edwin speak to that too but absolutely in terms of what we're doing at the Children's Hospital we're very aware of the fact that we can't just give people recipes and coupons and walk away and so relatable authentic genuine programming that's meant for people to learn concepts and skills versus just getting financial help is is a long way to go and you're correct and welcome to San Antonio thank you we need you my teammate tonight we work with several different high schools middle schools elementary schools community centers Dr. LaBarba how was your experience with getting healthy vending machines and what kind of barriers did you run into is it as easy as it sounds it's not easy at all but definitely it exists there's a company Human Healthy Vending which I'm considering putting in the hospital I've got to work with my existing contract right now but there's no cost of the organization to have that machine so check out Human Healthy Vending number one tell me what was your other question was there another one that was it okay thank you for your work you guys appreciate it okay thank you we have time for one more question before we need to move you all on to the next session yes Swaj had comment for each of the speakers thank you for being here Mr. Marty we have a lot of AmeriCorps and other people funded here to go out in the community and educate people about applying for SNAP but the most recently opened Texas workforce commission office in San Antonio is not handicap accessible Randolph Brooks federal credit union left that building because it was not handicap accessible the bus route only runs once an hour it has no handicap accessible restroom every single day in San Antonio people with disabilities who qualify for food assistance are denied because they have to spend two weeks in that building with no restroom to use in order to maintain that eligibility when they first apply and from Ms I think that's the main issue because they have the highest rate of unemployment Ms. Dr. LaBarba I appreciate the the situation you're in where you have to have a contract with this vendor and you're asking them to supply water instead but I think the root cause of a lot of this is that if they're selling to Sonny it is not as high quality as the water coming out of the tap in San Antonio people would have better quality water by drinking out of the tap or using herbal tea and ultimately if any of you have an IRA or other investments that have American funds or a lot of these funds groups you are stockholders in PepsiCo and Coca-Cola to solve this we need to go to our funds managers which I have done and say I want to divest of everything that has me in Pepsi or Coke stock no matter what as they're killing people in other countries it's not just here but we need to get to the root cause which is corporate greed and refuse to be a part of that ourselves thank you