Developing Food Policy

I've been asked to help develop a food policy for STL. The initial meeting is tomorrow night at my place, after market.....market dinner.....
small group, the environmental coalition leader, an ex-restaurateur (30 years) who is now brokering local food to restaurants, a writer who is into local food.....met her at Joan Dye Gussow and Sidney Mintz forum, and me.

Have any of you helped develop a food policy?
What questions would you ask?


Things that come to mind are,
1) who are the stakeholders?
2) mission statement?
3) who will implement?

Since we are in Monsanto land, and their advertising is now espousing "sustainable" ......it will be interesting to see how the other members feel about using monsanto $ or including them at the table. Frankly it's always been a deal breaker for me....there's a super inner city garden developer with 130+ gardens that gets funding from Monsanto, just checked them off the list through the years.

mission statement first, then goals and objectives follow
\STL aka st. louis, if it expands to cover more area that needs to be discussed asap.

who the stakeholders will be is integral

a chef friend who has a degree in political science recommends working with the city......

I've been on several boards developing policies, grant writing that includes multitudes of groups, 2 university boards, a Gov panel and an active chef's collaborative group....
I hate working with government, or massive red tape generating groups....it stifles creativity and work flow.....that's why developing a policy but not having to generate paper, works for me.

mission statement comes before goals, goals fit within statement......

sorry for confusion, not my party....I was just asked to be on the ground floor.....

Nope, I talked to a friend tonight who holds educational workshops for coalitions & boards of non-profits for MO. health and senior services.....mission statement then goals.
I'm talking to her tomorrow and will get the website that spells out procedures.

An example of STL chef's collaborative's mission statement: To educate people on how to cook local food.

From that came:
1) educational growers only market with cooking demos every week using market shtuff

2)farmer chef dinner series, each restaurant would prepare a 4 course meal that would be based on what the featured farmer grows.

3) farmer/chef/rd in schools

Many more projects but those were the primary ones, each had goals that fit under the mission statement.

Pete (moderator pete)......the missouri environmental coalition approached me to help form a "food policy" for St. Louis. Tomorrow is the initial meeting. So basic questions will hopefully be answered. St. Louis is both a city and a county.....each under different elected officials.
To get fundage, big $$$$, the more entities you pull together under your umbrella the better chance you have......depending on their past track records of course. One $1m USDA grant I peer reviewed was intense....the primary administrators had projects already being funded, they had Boston U and Harvard backing them....the project included school gardens, cafeterias, getting parents to visit farmers markets, art projects, etc.....pulling in many different groups to help impliment the goals.

yep. thank you. it was semantics.....

What I've discovered is that a clear clean mission statement will keep you on track. Through the years I'd go back to the mission statement when something would come around and see if indeed it fit......

After a couple years hiatus it's nice to get back into the game.


So Pete moderator as a culinary teacher with many community based projects do you have to write or follow grants? Do you work with other non-profits on developing their programs? just curious.


*I'm not into thou shalt nots......more like, HEY, there are hungry people in STL how do we as a community deal with that issue.
When I ran the markets a couple of community food groups that feed the elderly came at the end of market to get donations of left over produce.

An inner city garden/market got grants to give $5 scripts to people so they could purchase fresh food at the market.

Years ago I helped line up chefs to teach at St. Patricks Center, they've got a program for homeless drug/alcoholics to teach them how to cook at a working restaurant. But the connection was to get chefs in to teach another skill and to acquaint them with the program so that when the participants needed jobs they would not have to cold call but the chefs would already know what was going on. In that vein I started another project that had restaurants donating small wares that could be for home use, a bakery would make the pick ups....get their foot in the door of potential business, a friend that owns a restaurant equipment house donated 10% off the next order for those restaurants that donate equipment. Since the people had been homeless and most had burned bridges with family, they were starting out raw.....this gave them a start. The downfall was that there was no dedicated person to disperse the equipment and no big space to store all that was donated. It was a cool idea and from 3 sides of the equation it worked well, but bottom line was the fourth wheel was necessary.

I've always felt very strongly about community food waste being better utilized, gleaning fields makes sense.....selling less premium product to less advantaged.....using the abundance that goes to waste, one year I bought 30 cases of tomatoes (300+#) at the end of market (of course height of tomato season is august, and of course the kitchen had no A/C or windows....read into that processing tomatoes in the **** of summer.....how farm women did it I don't know, many died young.... But those tomatoes were earmarked for compost if they didn't sell.....

Not only getting the food but knowing how to prepare it......what do you store it in.....one of the grants I participated in with a university nutrition dept had a canning component with the garden segment, well if you know anything about canning you know it's expensive start up, it takes some expertise.....just really did not make sense.....

The after school programs I developed for the 4th grade inner city kids utilized foods they were familiar with, with a twist.....sweet potato muffins, they all had eaten reg. sweet potatoes, they all knew "chocolate chip muffins" (there is a vehement thread somewhere in the archives on chocolate muffins really being cupcakes) so it was taking a known and teaching them how to make a healthier version.

Tonight will be interesting.....I'll let you know what comes from it....thanks guys.

oh my, dinner was great....conversation was tremendous, food policy was brought up a few times but it just got sidelined. Nothing was resolved....
This just means instead next time I'll not invite guests.

Best laid plans. This is not over, I'll let you know where it goes from here.

nope food journalist from the paper, entrepreneur and the environmental coalition guy who came to me in the first place. Just kept getting side tracked by the journalist who had loads of topics she was interested in.....the coalition member really had no ideas of his own so instead of a hand holding one on one meeting it became a 3 btls of wine mid-week meal with great conversation but nothing to work with on the food policy.
Just means that I help this guy accrue people that will be good stakeholders and help define shtuff so that it's not a floppy mess at the next go round.

This is not my baby. From experience, it takes someone with a vision that wants to follow through.....really put whatever it takes to make it happen into working the project. Dog and Pony shows hold no interest for me, time is much to valuable to spend working with anyone not willing to "work it"....so my litmus will be to decide if this guy has follow thoroughness. :rolleyes:

Just read KC's food policy that is going under Healthy youth.....and heard today that a state senator is heading up a MO group to design a state agency (dept) for sustainable food projects already in action.