“I think policy is everything,” said Dr. Angela Odoms-Young, a professor at University of Illinois Chicago who researches environmental and social impacts on diet-related diseases. Odoms-Young is one of two dozen public health experts, food justice advocates, and city officials who gathered at the beginning of the year to assess how Chicago’s government can serve as a guiding hand in building a more equitable food system. “We tend to think of this as a household issue,” she said. “It’s a community-level issue and a society-level issue. It’s business, it’s infrastructure. In most things we understand that. For instance, if you drive your car and a bridge is not safe, we think a policy needs to change to make that bridge safe. We expect societal structures are going to make the bridge safe to drive on.”
The collective efforts of decentralized volunteer groups and larger institutions like the Food Depository had an impact. “You saw news reports of long lines of cars in Texas for food distribution. You didn’t see that here. There’s a reason for that,” Robinson said. Cook County has 450 food pantries, only 35 percent of which have a paid staff person. Robinson said many of the rest are volunteer led. “Some are connected to faith-based organizations, some are connected to grassroots organizations, some are anti-hunger organizations. There are 4,000 volunteers working across the pantries. Many of them are older adults. These are the heroes and the people who got us through the pandemic. That’s what I think about when I think of the strength of the food system.”
The advisory group assembled in early 2021 was the first concerted effort by the city to take the entire Chicago food system constellation in view. The group included leaders in community organizations like Austin Coming Together and Enlace Chicago; urban agriculture organizations Grow Greater Englewood and Urban Growers Collective; public health organizations Alliance for Health Equity and the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children; public health experts with Alliance for Health Equity and Odoms-Young from UIC; lender/developer Illinois Fresh Food Fund; and a slate of city agencies: Family and Support Services, Planning and Development, Public Health, the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, and Chicago Public Schools. Over a handful of meetings, the group agreed on food system “pillars” to fortify—production, retail, processing and procurement, entrepreneurship, nutrition benefit programs, and emergency systems—and set priorities for the coming year to shore up emergency services and build long-term, equitable food system infrastructure.
Immediately after quoting the start-up costs of the Green Era campus, Allen jumped (as anyone advocating for infrastructure investment learns to do) to the long-term returns in dollars and lives. “If you measure impacts around public safety, property values around food systems—if that entity keeps two neighborhood teens out of prison that’s about $350,000 of taxpayer money,” she said. “It’s a lot cheaper to give people a good job in their neighborhood.”
“It aligns with how institutional racism operates,” Allen said. “With non-clarity. You have to know someone.”
Everyone I spoke with was optimistic—if cautiously—about the process thus far and the future of a food equity governing council, coordinated at the city level. Cooley said the city had not made this level of commitment on paper and invested this much time and energy in equitable food policy in his 20 years of food advocacy. Robinson said that the food system is at the highest level of collaboration she’s seen. “I think this is unprecedented,” she said. “It’s a bold experiment and I’m very optimistic.” v
