The Forgotten Half of Food System Reform: Using Food and Agricultural Law to Foster Healthy Food Production

America is facing widespread problems with its food system, including environmental harms due to externalities from industrial farms; the increasing amount of food _miles traveled by the products that make up our daily meals; and the growing size and complexity of recent outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. Indeed, the entire system that covers the life cycle of food, through production, processing, distribution, consumption, and food waste management, is in crisis. One of the most disturbing of these well-documented problems with the industrial food system is the increase in rates of obesity and diet-related illnesses. Obesity rates in the U.S. have more than doubled since 1980. Rising rates of obesity stem from what has been called a toxic food culture, in which unhealthy food products are cheap and readily available,\u27 while healthy foods are unavailable in many urban and rural food deserts or out of reach for those with limited economic means

All (Food) Politics is Local: Increasing Food Access through Local Government Action

Our national and international food system has implications for a wide range of issues that are important across the political spectrum and include improving health outcomes, reducing environmental impacts, increasing social justice, fostering economic development, and even improving homeland security. This article focuses on healthy-food access, one of the most urgent food policy issues because of its social and economic effects, as well as its public health impacts. In 2010, thirty-six percent of Americans were obese and another thirty-three percent were overweight, while eight percent of Americans were diabetic and thirty-five percent suffered from pre-diabetes. Though food access is not perfectly correlated with public health outcomes, those with limited access to healthy foods often suffer most acutely, as people living in areas with access to a supermarket exhibit a twenty-four percent lower prevalence of obesity than those living in areas without supermarkets. Increased food access has been linked to results as diverse as improved educational outcomes and crime reduction. Local governments have been particularly attentive to food policy concerns. Thirteen cities in North America now have a paid local food policy director or coordinator, and more than 130 cities and counties in the United States and Canada have local food policy councils, comprised of diverse stakeholders interested in improving the way food is produced and consumed. Municipalities have enacted a range of food policy reforms, such as increasing governmental procurement of local or healthy foods, improving access to food in schools, and incentivizing consumers to purchase healthy foods. Many recent local actions focus explicitly on increasing healthy-food access, including amending zoning codes to increase urban agriculture, creating new mobile vending outlets, and enhancing transportation routes to healthy-food retailers. In January 2012, the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) convened its first ever Food Policy Taskforce, which immediately identified increasing access to healthy foods as one of its primary areas of concern. Local governments are also beginning to acknowledge that each locality faces its own food-system challenges with differing policy solutions, meaning that local responses to local issues can be more successful than federal or state approaches. This article aims to encourage those localities not yet active in food policy to join the field. The discussion focuses on methods of fostering access to healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and other unprocessed, fresh products. Local governments are particularly well suited to increase food access because they have the unique ability to identify areas of need and then work with local constituents to craft targeted responses. Part II explains the concept of “food deserts,” or areas that lack healthy-food access, and provides historical context about their development. As described in Part II.A, the federal government has attempted to respond to the problem, but its efforts have suffered as a result of its narrow food-desert definition and limited ability to work directly with affected communities. Instead, as explained in Part II.B, local government is better suited to address food access because food is such a cultural and community-based issue, and local input is vital to successfully expand food access. This section identifies steps that local governments should take to engage the community and identify appropriate solutions. Part III highlights policy responses taken by localities around the country and across the food system, illustrating that despite the similarities in the problem of limited food access, local governments have a variety of tools to address this issue and can and should tailor responses to their specific needs in order to achieve success

A Call to Action: The New Academy of Food Law & Policy

The food system is affected by unique and complex laws. These laws call for a new generation of legal practitioners and scholars. This essay announces the creation of the Academy of Food Law and Policy. The Academy creates a network of law professors researching, teaching, and mentoring in food law and policy

The Forgotten Half of Food System Reform: Using Food and Agricultural Law to Foster Healthy Food Production

America is facing widespread problems with its food system, including environmental harms due to externalities from industrial farms; the increasing amount of “food miles” traveled by the products that make up our daily meals; and the growing size and complexity of recent outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. Indeed, the entire system that covers the life cycle of food, through production, processing, distribution, consumption, and food waste management, is in crisis. One of the most disturbing of these well-documented problems with the industrial food system is the increase in rates of obesity and diet-related illnesses. Obesity rates in the U.S. have more than doubled since 1980. Rising rates of obesity stem from what has been called a “toxic” food culture, in which unhealthy food products are cheap and readily available, while healthy foods are unavailable in many urban and rural food deserts or out of reach for those with limited economic means. To improve public health outcomes, and mitigate the impact of obesity and related illnesses, our food and agricultural system requires a transformation. Most discussions about how to overhaul our food and agriculture system focus on reforming or dismantling the industrial, commodity-based food system by erecting barriers to the production and sale of unhealthy, overly-processed foods. This could entail reducing or eliminating agricultural subsidies, utilizing taxes or regulations to force industrial food producers to internalize the costs of their negative impacts on health and the environment, or decreasing consumer access to or demand for these products by implementing marketing restrictions, labeling requirements, or bans on certain foods or ingredients. While we will surely need to reform and reign in the industrial food system, this article contends that those reforms are only part of the battle, and will not necessarily make healthier foods more readily available in the immediate future. We also need to think about the other half of the picture—increasing the production and availability of healthier foods—which will require improving the climate for the production of healthy “specialty crops” (defined as “fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops”). This avenue would lead to a focus on supporting alternative, small and mid-size food producers, who are and will likely remain the primary producers of specialty crops, and would require investments of time, energy, and resources into alternative food production. To encourage sufficient production of specialty crops, we must also reduce the programmatic, policy, and legal barriers that stand in the way of these producers. This article first describes the obesity and public health issues facing the United States and explains their links to the food and agricultural system. Part III then discusses the two primary avenues for food system reform and illustrates the reasons we should focus more energy and resources than we currently do on supporting alternative food producers. Part IV lays out some key barriers to alternative food producers—including programmatic and policy barriers, legal and regulatory hurdles, and obstacles that particularly impact mid-scale food producers, even though these mid-scale producers offer the most potential to increase healthy food access on the scale needed. Finally, Part V discusses the reasons for which the legal profession should use its unique skills to support alternative food producers and presents several important ways in which attorneys can play a key role in improving the viability of the alternative food system, thus promoting better public health outcomes by ensuring that fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods will become more readily available

Keynote Remarks: Re-Tooling Law and Legal Education for Food System Reform: Food Law and Policy in Practice

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you today and to take part in this symposium on the important role law schools and lawyers can play in changing our food system. Food preferences and food choices are incredibly personal, but the way we produce and consume food, and its impacts on our environment, public health, and the safety of ourselves and others, make it a pressing societal issue as well

Keynote Remarks: Re-Tooling Law and Legal Education for Food System Reform: Food Law and Policy in Practice

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you today and to take part in this symposium on the important role law schools and lawyers can play in changing our food system. Food preferences and food choices are incredibly personal, but the way we produce and consume food, and its impacts on our environment, public health, and the safety of ourselves and others, make it a pressing societal issue as well

The New Food Safety

A safe food supply is essential for a healthy society. Our food system is replete with different types of risk, yet food safety is often narrowly understood as encompassing only foodborne illness and other risks related directly to food ingestion. This Article argues for a more comprehensive definition of food safety, one that includes not just acute, ingestion-related risks, but also whole-diet cumulative ingestion risks, and cradle-to-grave risks of food production and disposal. This broader definition, which we call “Food System Safety,” draws under the header of food safety a variety of historically siloed, and under-regulated, food system issues including nutrition, environmental protection, and workplace safety. The current narrow approach to food safety is inadequate. First, it contributes to irrational resource allocation among food system risks. Second, it has collateral consequences for other food system risks, and, third, its limited focus can undermine efforts to achieve narrow food safety. A comprehensive understanding of food safety illuminates the complex interactions between narrow food safety and other areas of food system health risks. We argue that such an understanding could facilitate improved allocation of resources and assessment of tradeoffs, and ultimately support better health and safety outcomes for more people. We offer a variety of structural and institutional mechanisms for embedding this approach into federal agency action

Expanding Farm to School in Mississippi: Analysis and Recommendations

"Farm to school" refers to any program that connects K-12 schools with local farmers. "Farm to cafeteria" and "farm to institution" are terms sometimes used for programs that include farm to school components, but might also focus on bringing local produce to other local institutions. Most farm to school efforts concentrate on what is called "farm direct" purchasing, where schools buy products directly from local farmers to serve in the school cafeteria. The business partnerships that develop through farm direct programs often lead to educational activities, with farmers and schools working together to teach students about nutrition, agriculture, the environment, and other subjects. Not all farm to school programs involve farm direct purchasing; food distributors that supply schools can also participate by purchasing locally grown products and making them available to school purchasing officers.Why Farm to School?Farm to school has been shown to have enormous benefits in the areas of local economic development, children's health, and educational outcomes.Farm to SchoolStrengthens local economies, improves livelihood of local farmers, and spurs additional spending on other local products and services.Increases the amount of fruits and vegetables consumed by students in the cafeteria, classroom, and at home.Is an effective way to enhance nutrition education and health literacy

Using Cross-practice Collaboration to Meet the Evolving Legal Needs of Local Food Entrepreneurs

This article begins by highlighting several of the legal barriers commonly faced by local food businesses. The article then demonstrates that policy lawyers and transactional lawyers can effectively collaborate to improve the food system by providing synergistic feedback that informs each other’s practices, thereby improving service for food-related clients and enhancing the legal environment for future local food entrepreneurs. The article describes the methods that two clinics at Harvard Law School—the Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Community Enterprise Project of the Transactional Law Clinics—have used to provide comprehensive assistance to food truck entrepreneurs in support of a more robust local food system in Boston. The article concludes with examples of additional ways in which a cross-practice, cyclical model of client service can be applied by different legal teams to better serve food entrepreneurs and improve the success of local and alternative food systems. Although this article details a particular model of cross-practice work, it aims to encourage proliferation of this model through tailored, cross-practice collaboration among lawyers operating in a variety of settings to address a range of local food industry issues, or those issues inherent in other emerging industries

Food Law & Policy: The Fertile Field's Origins and First Decade

Legal knowledge, learning, and scholarship pertaining to the production and regulation of food historically centered around two distinct fields of law: Food & Drug Law and Agricultural Law. The former focuses on the regulation of food by the Food and Drug Administration under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, while the latter examines the impacts of law on the agricultural sector’s production of food and fiber. Neither field—alone or in tandem—focuses in whole or in part on many of the most pressing legal issues that currently impact our food system. Consequently, elements of these two fields converged roughly one decade ago to create a significant and distinct new field of legal study: “Food Law & Policy.” This field explores legal and policy issues well outside the scope of Food & Drug Law and of Agricultural Law to address important questions about food that had never been explored fully within the legal academy. Food Law & Policy embraces a broader study of laws and regulations at all levels of government that impact the food system—covering everything from local regulations pertaining to farmers’ markets or food trucks to federal policies pertaining to obesity or hunger. Food Law & Policy now enjoys a strong and growing presence throughout the legal academy. This Article introduces ten categories of original empirical data to document the field’s vitality—including figures on law school courses, legal scholarship, clinical legal programs, and student societies at U.S. law schools. It details the past and present of Food & Drug Law and Agricultural Law alongside that of Food Law & Policy. The Article demonstrates that Food Law & Policy has proven to be a timely and vibrant addition to the legal academy and suggests next steps in the ongoing development of the field