[00:00:00] Shireen: Podcasting from Dallas, Texas. I am Shireen and this is the Yumlish podcast. Yumlish is working to empower you to take charge of your health through diet and exercise and reduce the risk of chronic conditions like type two diabetes and heart disease. We hope to share a unique perspective and a culturally relevant approach to managing these chronic conditions with you each week.

[00:00:32] Shireen: In today’s episode, we welcome Karen Gardner, Senior Policy Associate at the Center for Science and Public Interest. We’ll discuss how food policy and retail environments impact communities and how to advocate for a better food environment. Stay tuned. Karen Gardner advocates for policies that improve health food access through the food retail environment.

[00:00:59] Shireen: She has worked in food policy for over a decade. 

[00:01:03] Karen Gardner, MA: Thank you. 

[00:01:04] Shireen: It’s such a pleasure having you on. So Karen, you’re doing some very interesting stuff on the food policy side, but I do want to take a step back and really understand from you what really led you to that. What was it within your personal and professional experience that drew you into this field?

[00:01:20] Karen Gardner, MA: Yeah, absolutely. So I have always loved food, making it, growing it, cooking it, eating it, thinking about it, dreaming about food. I just think that food is so interesting and exciting to me, and I’ve always been really drawn to and thinking a lot about how food operates in people’s lives. And as a young person, I was really focused on inequity and Trying to understand structures that uphold inequity, especially around food.

[00:01:52] Karen Gardner, MA: So I found economics in college and then from there I found food policy and felt like it was exactly what I wanted to do with my life and helped me understand the structures that can create the food system and uphold the food system and can be changed to create a different food system. So after college I worked in a food bank.

[00:02:14] Karen Gardner, MA: And I started to get involved in some state level advocacy around SNAP, which is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Food Stamps. That really propelled me to want to get more and more involved in food policy and understand how In all of the levels of government and local, federal, state, we can change food policy to create a different food system.

[00:02:38] Karen Gardner, MA: So I went from there to graduate school in food policy and I’ve never looked back. 

[00:02:44] Shireen: How interesting that journey you’ve been through, you know, you’ve done quite a bit of work across the nation. You worked in New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and specifically New Orleans. Thank you. What similarities or even differences do you see between different parts of the country in terms of the food landscape?

[00:03:03] Karen Gardner, MA: That’s a really interesting question. I’ve both worked in all of those different places and I’ve also worked on different things in all of those different places. You know, in Pennsylvania, I mostly worked on agricultural policy in New Orleans. I worked on food access in New York. I worked on, you know, Several different policies incorporating both, and yet there were a lot of similarities in all of those spaces.

[00:03:25] Karen Gardner, MA: The vast inequality in access to food was present in New York and Pennsylvania and Louisiana. Deeply rooted food cultures and care for others through food. It’s really deeply rooted and present in all of those spaces and food systems where many have access to a little and there are many who are underpaid and profits are highly concentrated to a few.

[00:03:51] Karen Gardner, MA: That’s really similarities among the places I’ve worked and lived. One of the main differences that comes up specifically for New Orleans is the impact of natural disasters. You know, we hear a lot about What flooding can do to somebody’s house, but not to somebody’s livelihood, somebody’s farm, somebody’s access to food, um, you know, food pantries themselves getting flooded year after year after year and the folks who are working in that church basement trying to uphold a community resource.

[00:04:28] Karen Gardner, MA: And getting, uh, having to, you know, do so much work around natural disasters. I think that was something that was really different in New Orleans. And then, of course, in New York City, the high cost of food, the food is expensive everywhere, but in New York City, it’s especially expensive. So that’s something that came up there.

[00:04:49] Karen Gardner, MA: But I think there’s really more similarities that I found in all of those places than differences. 

[00:04:54] Shireen: And I want to double click into the similarities. You mentioned the food inequality. Can you tell us what that specific similarity is? Why are we seeing it across the nation? 

[00:05:04] Karen Gardner, MA: It’s a really good question. I think that the structures and systems that create inequality and low access to food are present across the country and are often systemic across the country.

[00:05:18] Karen Gardner, MA: So some of that can be understood by corporate consolidation. You know, Our grocery industry is run by not very many people at this point and looking at farms in the same way as grocery stores. You know, farmers were encouraged to get big and get out. The farmers got bigger. The prices for food It’s such a complicated system, so I don’t want to simplify it too much, but what is paid to folks who are working on farms got lower and lower and lower, and that is systemic across the country as, you know, farms got bigger.

[00:05:53] Karen Gardner, MA: So I think consolidation, the many impacts of capitalism, and often not enough regulation on companies and corporations that are controlling many parts of the food system. 

[00:06:06] Shireen: You know, speaking of regulation, what do you see is the biggest challenge for state and local policies to improve healthy food access, specifically through food retail?

[00:06:18] Karen Gardner, MA: Absolutely. So I think that the biggest challenge is really this inequitable access to food that we’ve been talking about. You know, affordable, healthy groceries should be Accessible to everyone. That’s just such a North star. What that means in each specific community is going to be very local and very specific.

[00:06:37] Karen Gardner, MA: So we’re working on a, at CSPI, my work, we’re working on a range of different policies and projects to try to get at this same issue from many different ways. So we’re. Looking at grocery consolidation, like we just talked about, and scorched earth tactics that grocery stores can use to not have competition, but also decrease food access.

[00:07:03] Karen Gardner, MA: Also understanding how consumers want dollar stores to change, and what local policies could lead to those changes. We’re supporting communities who are advocating for local policy changes, which would curb unhealthy marketing and encourage healthy marketing. And we’ve seen some of those policies pass and some communities really organized very successfully around that.

[00:07:28] Karen Gardner, MA: We’re also trying to understand the changing landscape of retail, you know, how online grocery shopping is booming and not taking over, but increasingly becoming a very important way that people are getting access to groceries. That’s a whole new, of how folks are getting food. And we’re doing a lot of research to try to understand how could this make healthy retail more equitable and how could it not, and how can we pressure companies and change policies to ensure that it is a step forward?

[00:08:00] Shireen: You know, we’re talking about state and local policies, and I’m always so curious to understand, like, do these policies need to be established at the federal level? Is it more something that sits at the state level or is a grassroots and entirely local? What is your take on addressing some of these challenges?

[00:08:18] Shireen: Does it happen more at the national level or at the local level? 

[00:08:22] Karen Gardner, MA: I think that it is all of them, you know, state, local and federal, but my affection, I would say, is with local policy. I have really seen so much progress happen through local policy. Local policy can happen on a quicker timescale. With federal policy, there’s a lot of different interests.

[00:08:49] Karen Gardner, MA: lobbyists, organizations, there’s so much that’s happening in federal policy, which federal policy, when it does change, affects the entire country. That is huge. And local policies can be a place where community advocates can move faster on making changes, can have more access to their local officials than they might their federal legislators, and It can be kind of like a experimental area where folks are coming up with ideas on the grassroots level and finding solutions to problems that they’re seeing in their community and then Some of those solutions are going to state policy.

[00:09:29] Karen Gardner, MA: Some of those solutions are going to federal policy. So I think that local policy can be such a great place for people to get involved and for, you know, change to be activated. 

[00:09:43] Shireen: It’s a very interesting perspective on it. Would have thought it was actually federal, but your preference was local, and I do see why.

[00:09:51] Shireen: You know, which takes me also to my next question. What do you think are some relatively effective ways to advocate for a better food environment, be it locally or nationally? What are some of those steps or initial steps that one can take? 

[00:10:06] Karen Gardner, MA: Yeah, getting involved locally with food policy council, with organizations, food access organizations and advocates that are working on these issues, given that the solutions and the policy levers that need to change are going to be so local, there’s going to be So many different and effective ways to advocate, but there’s in so many places, there’s already movements happening, movements moving, and I think that, you know, whether it’s zoning changes, whether it’s a local ordinance, whether it’s the creation of a food access program, figuring out who in your community is working on this.

[00:10:47] Karen Gardner, MA: Getting in touch with your public officials and asking what they’re doing to improve the local vote system and then voting accordingly and asking other folks around them what, you know, what they would like to know from your local officials, these can all be really effective ways to. Lead towards advocacy and remembering that, you know, there’s so many different tools and skills that can be used in advocacy campaigns and in organizing locally.

[00:11:14] Karen Gardner, MA: And so trying to think about what your skills are and if you’re a data person or if you’re an artist or if you’re someone who really likes doing GIS mapping, like there’s so many different ways that you can be involved. And so really thinking about what those strengths are that you’re bringing to the table as well.

[00:11:33] Shireen: So what I’m hearing from you is really just honing on your strengths, know what is sort of true to you and what value you can add and sort of then channel it to the appropriate entities organizations to be able to supply that value in sort of the grand scheme of thinking through what these policies need to look like.

[00:11:50] Shireen: You know, in your interactions with regional, local communities, what are some perhaps memorable stories you encountered with how food policy has impacted individuals? We always hear about start small, start grassroots, but it’s always, I feel, nice to hear about some success stories that also come out of it that gives hope in the types of changes that can be very impactful.

[00:12:15] Karen Gardner, MA: I’m going to start with a story that actually doesn’t have the ending to this story, but it was kind of my first understanding of, wow, small changes could lead to big changes in people’s lives. So I was working in Louisiana in a food bank and we were doing some assistance for folks who are applying for SNAP for the food stamps program.

[00:12:36] Karen Gardner, MA: And we were doing that assistance both in English and in Spanish. And there was legislation that. Ensured that folks who were applying for SNAP should be receiving those applications and instructions in the language that they preferred. And our clients, the folks we were working with, were receiving the application translated in Spanish, and then all of the instructions upon how to complete the application in English.

[00:13:08] Karen Gardner, MA: And it was such a, like, moment of, okay, how do we advocate, how do we, like, Find the right lever to make this change because that can continue forever. Those little things that are keeping folks from accessing food, from feeding their families, from doing the things that they want to do to thrive can often mean You know, in these local contexts, in these state contexts, some changes.

[00:13:32] Karen Gardner, MA: A totally different example and one that does end in a moment of hope. I worked in Pennsylvania on farmland access and organizing with young farmers across Pennsylvania. We were doing this organizing because there is still, and there was at the time, Not enough farmland available to farmers who, especially farmers who are just starting off.

[00:13:57] Karen Gardner, MA: Farming is a really capital intensive and land intensive career. You have to buy a piece of land. You have to buy a tractor. You have to have seeds. You have to do all of this initial investment to farm. And increasingly, the folks who don’t. You know, national data has showed that folks who are wanting to farm are increasingly not the old guard of farming.

[00:14:19] Karen Gardner, MA: It’s increasingly young folks, people of color, women who are wanting to farm. And also those folks may not have access to farmland that’s being passed down. They may not have access to the equity that they need to purchase that farmland. So we did a lot of organizing with young farmers to and with legislators and speaking with state legislators to say, Hey, how can we start to tip the scales a little bit?

[00:14:48] Karen Gardner, MA: The scales are tipped right now towards farmers, current farmers who are retiring, selling their land to developers because there’s incredible farmland that’s right outside of Philadelphia, for example, that’s a great place to grow vegetables and very close to some wonderful markets to Philadelphia, to DC, but it’s also a place where developers want land and our developers are going to have, you know, the upfront cash, they’re going to have more money, et cetera.

[00:15:17] Karen Gardner, MA: So we worked with legislators and with. Um, it’s a way for young farmers to advocate for a tax credit that it did pass and it is in place such that when a land owner is selling their farm or their agricultural equipment, they get a tax credit if they sell it to someone in the first 10 years of farming, who is actively going to farm the land and, you know, it’s not going to fix the problem, but it’s tipping the scale.

[00:15:43] Karen Gardner, MA: It’s a step forward. One other. Quick example, you can tell that like working with people is what I like most about my job, but we’ve been working with community advocates in a small city outside of Los Angeles called Paris, California, who community advocates who are in Paris, we’re getting really involved with trying to figure out how do we make.

[00:16:05] Karen Gardner, MA: The food retail environment better for our community. They were seeing diet related diseases and outcomes that they wanted to turn around and a group of parents in Paris got really involved and wanted to say like, okay, how do we, again, put a little bit on the scale to move the other way. They worked with a local California based advocacy organization and with us, Center for Science in the Public Interest, to advocate for a policy that would mean that all grocery stores have to have healthy food in their checkout aisle.

[00:16:41] Karen Gardner, MA: This is a really innovative policy. It has only been passed in one other place, and this small City in Paris, a campaign completely fueled by local advocates and local parents passed this policy, this really innovative policy and are working with their grocery stores to change what the grocery stores look like.

[00:16:58] Karen Gardner, MA: It’s not all determined by the food manufacturers. In this community, it’s also determined by what the community said they wanted. So, those are a few ideas and a few examples of folks I’ve worked with who’ve really impacted me. 

[00:17:11] Shireen: And I find that so fascinating because, again, like you said, it starts grassroots, it starts local, but then it can also fuel a fire that takes it to sort of the state and then also the federal level.

[00:17:23] Shireen: I’m going to try to squeeze in a couple more questions here before we run out of time. I did want to touch upon a sort of the corporate structure and what policies look like there. How can we ensure that companies are actually changing their policies and practices again to sort of think about food and in the way that it is supplied to a community?

[00:17:44] Shireen: What does that look like on the other side when it comes to the corporate side of the house? It’s 

[00:17:50] Karen Gardner, MA: a great question. Corporate policies can make a huge impact, but as you’re alluding to, they can be rolled back at any time, and they’re hard to enforce because there’s not a lot of transparency there. So, I think that public policy is again really important here and is the most sustainable and enforceable way to make change.

[00:18:10] Karen Gardner, MA: That doesn’t always mean federal policy. Again, you know, that patchwork of local policies that is across the country can force a fast food chain or grocery store to change. Just their full policy because it’s too hard to meet, you know, the different components, the different policies in different areas.

[00:18:27] Karen Gardner, MA: And then having strong watchdogs in our country, you know, CSPI works hard to try to hold companies accountable. We work really hard on understanding what chemicals are in. Foods, understanding what policies are being put in place and then pressuring companies to change their policies or really bringing it to outside regulators, really bringing it to legislators to say, Hey, this is what’s happening on a corporate level.

[00:18:55] Karen Gardner, MA: This is why you need to change this policy or. Hey, FTC. This is what’s happening. Look into this. And that has been really effective. So I think it’s a complicated question, but a combination of policies and watchdogs are really important. 

[00:19:12] Shireen: That’s helpful. I’m gonna try to squeeze in one more question. How can we make sure the policies Remain in force.

[00:19:19] Shireen: You mentioned watchdogs, but how do we make sure sort of broadly that these policies are stayed in force? We hold the appropriate individuals accountable and once these laws are implemented or passed or regulations change, they continue to stay in force and implemented in the way that it was originally set out to.

[00:19:37] Karen Gardner, MA: Again, such an important question, because as advocates, I’m going to look at this from the local perspective, as advocates, we’re often, we have such a clear plan for how the policy is going to be passed, and then we don’t stay engaged to ensure that the policies are being implemented and enforced. And I think part of that is making a plan, is advocacy groups having a plan and being funded to work on policy past the policy passage into implementation, into enforcement, into actually doing research on is the policy working.

[00:20:13] Karen Gardner, MA: That’s really important in making sure that we have the energy and the dedication and the funding and all the things that are needed to really continue those campaigns. I’ve seen some really effective ways that advocates have also offered help to the agencies, the organizations, offered help to the departments that are doing this implementation and saying, Hey, you know, we have extra time that we can do some research.

[00:20:37] Karen Gardner, MA: We can do some education support on this work. And help you get to success on implementation and enforcement. That’s not always welcome, of course, but when it is, it’s really gone a long way. So I think it can be really effective. 

[00:20:52] Shireen: All right. With that, Karen, we are towards the end of the episode.

[00:20:55] Shireen: Unfortunately, can you tell our listeners how we can connect with you? Just learn more about your work. 

[00:21:01] Karen Gardner, MA: Yeah, absolutely. So I currently work at the center for science and the public interest, and we are at www. cspinat. org. We’re also on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. I don’t know any of the handles, but we’re there if you search for us.

[00:21:20] Shireen: Love it. And we’ll try to find everything. We’ll do that research. Thank you. We’ll link it up below in the show notes. With that, Karen, thank you so very much for your time. To our listeners, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Yumlish Podcast. Head over to our social media and answer this quick question.

[00:21:38] Shireen: How does the food environment in your community impact your life? So let’s put our thinking caps on, think about that a little bit and head over to our social media. Again, you’ll find us at Yumlish on Facebook, on Instagram. Go over there, find this very podcast post and comment below to tell us again, how does the food environment in your community impact your life?

[00:22:01] Shireen: We will continue the conversation there with that. Karen, thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure. 

[00:22:05] Karen Gardner, MA: Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:22:08] Shireen: Thank you for listening to the Yumlish podcast. Make sure to follow us on social media at Yumlish underscore on Instagram and Twitter and at Yumlish on Facebook and LinkedIn for tips about managing your diabetes and other chronic conditions, and to chat and connect with us about your journey and perspective.

[00:22:29] Shireen: You can also visit our website, yumlish. com for more information. For more recipes, advice, and to get involved with all of the exciting opportunities Yumlish has to offer. If you like this week’s show, make sure to subscribe so you can hear more from us every time we post. Thank you again, and we’ll see you next time.

[00:22:50] Shireen: Remember, your health always comes first. Stay well.

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