This complex food system feeds directly into greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated climate change. Last year the journal The Lancet identified a global “syndemic” linking climate change to obesity and poor nutrition, referencing dozens of studies. Earlier, in 2017, the journal Public Health reported “significant and new insight about the causal link between obesity and environmental emissions.”

In Connecticut, 27% of all adults, almost 12% of children and 14% of toddlers (ages 2-4) have obesity. In 1990, the rate for adults was 10%, reports Connecticut Data Haven in its 2019 Community Health Well-Being Survey.

Obesity affects people of color at higher rates: more than 30% of Hispanic adults and more than 35% of Black adults are obese, compared with 25-29% of white residents, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Many factors have contributed to the obesity crisis: lack of access to healthy food, socioeconomic factors, a car-oriented culture, and food marketing, said Marlene Schwartz, director of the University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. She said the center studies “how we can use policy to change the food environment. You can’t expect personal responsibility and willpower to be enough to overcome all the factors in the environment.”

Former Rudd Center researcher Rebecca Boehm led a study in 2018 that found 68% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production came from industrial farming and manufacturing, 30% of which was from animals.

“A majority of the emissions are coming from the production phase,” said Boehm, who now works for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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Boehm’s research showed that “consumption activities of all kinds create greenhouse gas emissions, and food is one of those integral parts of our lives that’s a consumption activity. It’s less obvious than the emissions coming out of your car. It’s a little hard to think about and conceptualize because the food system is so complex.”

Farm To City

In Connecticut, small farms have been working for many years to help those who live in cities and some rural areas far from markets get affordable fresh produce.

Teri Smith of Smith’s Acres in East Lyme said she started selling produce in downtown New London about 35 years ago and expanded to Stamford, Bridgeport and a dozen more farmers markets. She said part of the work was talking to customers about how to use what she was selling. “I was amazed at the mothers and the children who would come in and ask questions about vegetables: ‘Why is this cucumber curly? The cucumbers at the grocery store are straight. Why are the beans different sizes? What can I do with Brussels sprouts?’”

She added, “That was the best part of doing the markets in a place like New London or Stamford, talking to the people. You can buy $10 worth of apples and go home and make applesauce and freeze it for your baby. How about this butternut squash, how about cooking and mashing them up and saving them and you have baby food for a year for your baby?”

Staying healthy has become even more challenging during the pandemic. Just getting out, running errands, and getting exercise has gotten more complicated or even impossible for many people, especially those who live in food deserts. In cities, food deserts are where markets are more than a mile away and in rural areas where they are 10 or more miles away. Connecticut’s food deserts are mostly in its cities.

Thirteen years ago, to help those who live in food deserts, Connecticut farmers markets in cities began doubling coupons from federal assistance programs like Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). These programs are designed to help people living at 130% of the poverty level and below afford produce and other healthy food. Of Connecticut children between 2 and 4 years old whose families participate in WIC, 14.4% fall in the obese range.

The SNAP and WIC discounts at farmers markets were the project of the Connecticut nonprofit Wholesome Wave, which formed in Bridgeport in 2007. It pushes for better federal benefits for low-income people. Its co-founder, Michel Nischan of Fairfield, is a nationally recognized leader in bringing locally grown food to the underserved.

Wholesome Wave’s first initiative was boosting SNAP benefits at farmers markets. Today, the initiatives started with private donors in 2007 are part of the federal Farm Bill. Two years ago, Congress designated the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program, which gives states grants to make fresh produce easier to buy. It’s named for Wholesome Wave co-founder August Schumacher, a local food advocate who served as the Massachusetts agriculture chief from 1984 to 1990 and USDA undersecretary of agriculture for farm and foreign agricultural services from 1997 to 2001.

A dozen farmers markets across Connecticut—including in Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Stamford and Willimantic—now double SNAP benefits with support from UConn Cooperative Extension. They issue tokens or coupons for fruits and vegetables that can be spent that day or later.

Melanie Stengel Photo.

Wooster Farmers Market manager Alyssa Gant, left, settles up with Kyle Tamo of Rose’s Berry Farm, Glastonbury. Gant has baskets of tokens that she collects from the vendors. In the background is Elpidio Trejo-Ramirez.

CitySeed’s farmers markets and stores in the New Haven area have one of the highest redemption rates of food assistance in the state, said Cortney Renton, its executive director. Last year, CitySeed redeemed $63,000 in SNAP, WIC and Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program coupons at its markets and stores.

Renton said many activists have begun referring to food deserts as “food apartheid.” They believe the lack of access to healthy food grows out of broader policies that need to change.

Wholesome Wave co-founder Nischan said his desire for policy change dogged him from his early career as a chef. A native of Chicago, he spent childhood summers helping out on his grandfather’s small Missouri farm. “The farm was in a state of decline for a long time because food policy made it really hard for small family farms,” Nischan said. He struggled in the 1980s and 1990s to incorporate fresh produce into restaurants where he cooked in Milwaukee and New York. Then, 25 years ago, Nischan’s son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, so good nutrition became even more important to his family.

For the past decade, Wholesome Wave has been working with hospitals to subsidize fresh produce purchases after prescribing their patients nutrition counseling. “What we are trying to prove is if we invested Medicaid dollars in prevention [like good food], it might cost less than treatment,” Nischan said.

Healthy food “should be an essential right for every American, regardless of income,” he said.

For information on Connecticut farmers markets go here.

In November, after a temporary financial boost from the Recovery Act expired, some 47 million Americans lost a portion of their food stamps, one of the nation’s most effective anti-poverty programs.

Those cuts, along with the effects of sequestration, which one study called a “slowly growing cancer,” have amounted to a bomb dropped on the most vulnerable families in Connecticut – most of whom are headed by women.

Couple that with: Women are roughly twice as likely as men to rely on food stamps at some point in their lives. But it’s not just women who are suffering. It’s the children who depend on them.

If I had a talent for sewing – any at all – I would make sure that every elected official had the Boone Clause embroidered on a pillow placed in their well-appointed offices. The Boone Clause comes from Nancy Boone, of the Connecticut Alliance for Basic Human Needs, a Hartford-based non-profit concerned with issues and symptoms of poverty in the state. She describes the results of cutbacks and the sequestration thus:

“I wish we would call people on their words when they talk about these things,” Boone said. “When you say you’re ‘cutting food stamps’ what you’re really doing is creating hunger.’’

“You’re not cutting food stamps. You’re creating hunger.”

I couldn’t have said it better, myself.

Call the results of the divisive political climate what they are. It’s not a cutback. It’s creating poverty for Connecticut’s families.  Cutbacks aren’t just theory. They’re blood and bone, skin and teeth.

Jacqueline Guadalupe is a single mother of two who bought a house in Hartford a year and a half ago. Then last June, she lost her job as a school secretary. Since then, she’s steadily looked to find a job (if you’re hiring and looking for an efficient, well-spoken, employee, I can put you in touch with her). She started by applying for office work, but at this point, “I am applying for anything,” she says. “I tell my friends that as long as it’s not illegal, as long as it’s not prostitution, I will take it.”

She has also been going back and forth between offices to try to line up food stamps and health insurance, and financial aid to keep her house. She’s been put on hold to state agencies for as long as three hours at a time. She’s ricocheted between offices where no one could help her. At age 40, she’s enrolled in Charter Oak State College. She knows she needs a bachelor’s degree, and – though the fates look like they’re conspiring against her — she knows she needs to keep her credit score up. If she loses the house, she will need good credit in order to find a decent apartment.

“I am a responsible person,” Guadalupe says. “But I have to keep that number up.”

A recent compromise on the much-discussed Farm Bill cuts $8 billion from the food stamp program – known as SNAP, as opposed to the $40 billion cut suggested by the Republicans last year.

It’s not a pretty compromise, and while Congress dithered, families like Guadalupe’s went wanting. A December report from Legal Momentum said that single mothers in the United States work more hours but have higher poverty rates than their contemporaries in other affluent countries.

And things aren’t getting any better. We’d be a whole lot better remembering the Boone Clause.

You heard it here first.

Case in point: October’s government shutdown is over – for now – but in recent history, the government has shut down 18 times. Six of those times – arguably seven, but let’s not quibble – have been the end result of arguments about funding women’s health and/or welfare. October’s two-week shutdown was a petulant attempt to defund the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – which contains an unprecedented amount of initiatives aimed at women, including extending free preventive care (birth control), maternity coverage and eliminating the so-called gender rating, where women are charged more for insurance simply because they are women.

Obviously, those kinds of radical stances cannot be supported. And so the government wheezed to a halt.

Nothing new here. Shutdowns in the ‘70s tended to center around disagreements over funding women’s reproductive health – particularly, the Medicaid funding of abortions. The government paid for abortions – just like any medical procedure — right after Roe v. Wade, but in 1976, the Hyde Amendment began limiting the circumstances under which Medicaid would pay for an abortion. Today, abortion is covered in cases of rape, incest, and life endangerment.

And who seeks abortions? Well, women. But the meanness doesn’t stop at a woman’s private parts.

In September, Washington-based Wider Opportunities for Women, issued a report that explored states’ economic security, and found that 70 percent of single mothers who work full time do not earn enough to be considered economically secure.  The number of at-risk single mothers is higher among African Americans — 77 percent — and Hispanics — 83 percent.

A recent Pew Research Center report said that women (23 percent) are nearly twice as likely as men (12 percent) to have received food stamps at some point in their lives.

And guess what? Back in September, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to slash $40 billion from the SNAP (food stamps) budget, because — according to every news report I could find — some of our U.S. representatives believed there is widespread abuse in the system, and gosh-darn it those people should go out and get a job.

In fact, overwhelmingly, SNAP recipients aren’t loafers. They’re women. There’s a difference. The incidence of fraud is rare, but that doesn’t stop politicians of a certain stripe from digging in. And no matter their misguided attempts at fighting a non-problem, SNAP recipients saw an automatic 5 percent cut in their benefits the first of this month, after funds from the American Recovery Act expired. And before you say 5 percent is manageable, using the government’s own calculations, that’s roughly 16 meals a month for a family of three. (Coincidentally, the cut is affecting nearly 1 million veterans, another group to whom we give lip service.)

Feeding America, an organization that knows more about hungry people than any lawmaker, says that 76 percent of SNAP households include a child, an elderly person, or someone who is disabled. Those households receive 83 percent of all SNAP benefits. Nearly six in 10 poor children live in female-headed households. More than four in five poor, single-parent families are headed by women, according to a 2012 study from the National Women’s Law Center. So when lawmakers draw knives over programs that benefit the poor, they’re going after the most economically vulnerable. They’re going after women.

So ladies, we should remember as we move through this off-year election season, and into the next threatened shutdown we are capable of great feats of strength.

But the next time someone tries to load a deficit onto our backs, we should borrow a page from another government program and just say no.