The heat is on the Department of Education this summer, after environmental tests at a Bronx elementary school revealed yet another case of contamination.
Just five weeks before the start of the new school year, parents at PS 51X, known as the Bronx New School, received surprising news from the Department of Education. In a letter dated Aug. 5, the department announced that it was closing the current building and moving the school to an undisclosed location. Air quality tests had revealed unsafe levels of trichloroethylene (TCE), an industrial solvent. Although the New York state Department of Health stated that there were "no immediate medical concerns for students and staff," the city determined that adequate remediation could not be completed before the school starts in September.
The city leased the Bedford Park property, a former industrial site, in 1991. For two decades, it has operated as a school; but some parents now say that their children have complained of chronic headaches.
PS51X now joins a growing list of schools across the city that may be toxic. Under current law, the city can lease property and open a school on it without notifying community members, or making public any concerns about environmental hazards in the area. With approximately 96 schools throughout the city on leased properties and more in the pipeline, this could affect tens of thousands of children.
Many parents had no idea Bronx New School sat on a former industrial site. According to the city, the building's lease came up for renewal, triggering the environmental tests. Initial sampling occurred in January and found levels of TCE 10 times higher than the health department's standard for safety. A second round of tests, conducted in March, sampled the soil vapor beneath the school's basement floorboards, finding levels of TCE more than 10,000 times than the limit set by the state.
Now, parents, teachers and environmental advocates are demanding to know why the city waited so long to move the school. They will have the chance to ask such questions at a meeting with schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott scheduled for this Thursday, Aug. 18 at 6 p.m. at the Bronx High School of Science auditorium (75 W. 205th St.).
Education department spokesperson Marge Feinberg explained that the DOE waited for final scientific determination on the tests, which came in mid-July, before making a decision about relocating the school. She also emphasized that the highest levels of TCE were found under the building, in an area not used by teachers or students. But environmental advocacy groups worry that TCE vapors could have been migrating upward into classrooms from underneath the floor for some time.
Feinberg maintains that the city is "very conservative" when it comes to making sure schools are safe for occupancy. "Since the first term of the Bloomberg administration, we have renewed more than 65 school leases, and 51X is the first one where environmental conditions have caused us to abandon the lease renewal," she said. The city will conduct environmental audits on another 31 leased school sites over the next eight weeks, though it has not made a list of those schools available.
According to Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, before 2003 the city did not necessarily conduct environmental investigations when it leased properties. It is unclear, then, whether the Bronx school had ever been tested before now.
Placing schools on former industrial properties is not a new practice. Over the past few decades, the city's own school buildings have reached and even exceeded capacity while other available space has become increasingly scarce. Former industrial properties are often the only sites large enough to accommodate new school buildings. "Our leasing program has been extremely successful in identifying sites for new school build-outs in districts where finding new school construction sites has been extraordinarily difficult," said Feinberg. Over the years, the education department's construction arm, the School Construction Authority has spent billions of dollars to remediate toxins.
However, a growing number of parents and advocates question whether, in its haste to make good on promises to reduce overcrowding, the School Construction Authority takes too many shortcuts. In particular, they charge that the city deliberately keeps the public in the dark when it comes to remediation plans. Lenny Siegel of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, an independent consulting firm that has been called in to evaluate several New York City school sites, told the Daily News, "Someone should be on the ball making sure the air, water and soil are safe."
At some schools, they are.
Last September, the city opened the Mott Haven Educational Campus, the Bloomberg administration's largest school construction project to date. A four-building site, the campus spans six acres and seats 2,000 students. It sits on a site purchased by the city that once contained a rail yard, a laundry and a plant that made gas from coal.
The project sparked controversy from the start. Both the Public Authorities Law and the State Environmental Quality Review Act require the city to solicit public comment and approval from the City Council on its plans for constructing on publicly owned properties and managing their environmental issues. In Mott Haven, community and City Council members argued that the city's plan for mitigating toxins was inadequate. Council members refused to approve it until the city provided for more intensive environmental study and remediation.
Eventually, the Department of Education spent $30 million to clean up the Mott Haven site. But community members continued to oppose the project, contending that the city kept them in the dark about long-term plans for maintaining and monitoring contamination there.
In 2007, the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, acting on behalf of the Bronx Committee for Toxic Free Schools, a coalition of parents, neighborhood residents and community organizations, successfully sued the School Construction Authority and the Department of Education for violating the Public Authorities Law and the State Environmental Quality Review Act by not disclosing a Site Management Plan. This July, a state appeals court unanimously uphelda lower court ruling that, indeed, the city violated state environmental law in building the Mott Haven campus.
No such ruling is possible for the Bronx New School, however. Unlike Mott Haven, the city leased, rather than purchased that school property. Although the School Construction Authority must test and clean all sites before opening schools on them, when it comes to public information and oversight, leased and owned schools are not at all equal.
Leased sites fall through a gap in the Public Authorities Law, known as the "leasing loophole." The courts have interpreted the law as applying only to sites that the city owns and not those that it leases. In a nutshell, that means that leased schools do not require an environmental review under the State Environmental Quality Review Act , nor does the city need to make public its plans for building, remediating or monitoring those schools. As a result, "Parents, school staff and community members often have no idea that a leased school site sits on top of contaminated property and, more importantly, what the SCA has done to eliminate any health risks," said Dawn Philip, a staff attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest who handled the Mott Haven case.
The Department of Education plans to create 30,000 new school seats over the next five years. By 2014, leasing will meet one third of its total capacity needs. That means one third of all city's schools will be subject to the leasing loophole.
The loophole first attracted attention in the 1990s when the city leased a former dry cleaning plant to house PS 141 in Harlem. The city spent millions of dollars converting the property into a school, but it opened it before environmental testing was completed. Within a week, tests revealed levels of perchlorethylene, or PCE, up to double the state's acceptable levels. The school shut down and has never reopened.
In another example, Mary McKinney walked out of her house in the Soundview section of the Bronx one day in 2004 to find construction crews. They were working on the former site of a military contractor that had generated tons of toxic waste including lead and industrial solvents. To her surprise, McKinney, who was a member of her community board at the time, learned that the land was slated to become a 1,000-student school, the Soundview Educational Campus. The education department had leased the property and the city's deputy mayor for education -- and now chancellor -- Dennis Walcott, had quietly signed a zoning waiver so the city could locate the building in an area zoned industrial -- all without any public notification.
Community members along with Lawyers for the Public Interest and then New York State Sen. Eric Schneiderman convinced the School Construction Authority to commission an independent environmental review of the site. According to the New York Times, testing revealed levels of mercury, chromium, lead, arsenic and other toxic substances much higher than state standards allow. Yet, the state health department determined that the levels did not pose immediate health risks. The campus remains open.
More recently, in 2009, Inwood parent Susan Ryan discovered that her son was zoned for P.S. 18 and P.S. 278. When she went to look at the schools, she found that both are adjacent to a carwash and within a block of the Kingsbridge bus depot, a Department of Sanitation garage and at least six auto-body repair shops. Ryan contacted Dawn Philip at Lawyers for the Public Interest and asked for help in filing a Freedom of Information Law request. The request revealed that "an oil spill at the school sites was reported to the [state] Department of Environmental Conservation in September 1999, yet due to a backlog, it was just assigned to an inspector [in 2009],Ryan wrote in a 2009 op-ed for the Daily News.
The construction authority agreed to hire Siegel's Center for Public Environmental Oversight to conduct an independent review of the school. The report found that current air quality levels were safe, but that the site carried significant risk of exposure to contaminants. It recommended careful, ongoing monitoring to ensure that neither vapors from the oil spill, nor other nearby contaminants migrate into classroom areas. As of now, it remains unclear whether and to what extent the School Construction Authority has taken up those suggestions, as the agency is not required to publicize such information.
While Ryan and other parents are relieved to hear that their children face no immediate dangers, they still have concerns. Because the leasing loophole allows the city to circumvent certain public notification processes, parents and advocates worry that there is no way to ensure that their children and others throughout the city will remain safe from contamination over the long-term. In some cases, even low-level exposures can cause harm, if they occur over long periods of time. "Why do we have to wait until our children are exhibiting symptoms of illness before we take action?" asked Ryan.
"We have teachers who are in these schools for years and years, we have students who are in these buildings for much of their childhood. So to answer parents' concerns by saying 'there's no immediate risk' misses the point," Philip agreed.
Take, for instance, PCBs, another toxic school issue that made major headlines this year. The federal Environmental Protection Agency maintains that the high levels of PCBs in lighting ballasts and caulking at multiple city schools do not constitute an immediate danger to students or school staff. Yet, the agency also pointed out that prolonged exposure to PCBs can cause brain damage or cancer in students and their teachers.
Similarly, the EPA associates long-term exposure to high levels of TCEs, such as those found in certain places at the Bronx New School, with disorders of the central nervous system and several types of cancers in humans, especially of the kidney, liver, cervix and lymphatic system.
Ensuring that toxins stay contained is, then, crucial, especially as contamination remains below the ground at most of these sites.
"The trick is to keep the protections in place over the life of the contamination and the life of the school," said Siegel. "Thus continuing vigilance is required to prevent exposures." That kind of vigilance only happens if the public knows what is going on.
Philip and her colleagues at New York Lawyers for the Pubic Interest have been working with state Assemblymember Catherine Nolan and others to pass a bill that would amend state law to ensure that schools on leased property undergo the same community notification and City Council review processes as schools on city-owned land. The bill has come before the State Assembly several times and passed, but has gotten caught up in the State Senate. Philip remains hopeful that public pressure is growing to demand reform.
In the meantime, advocacy groups are working to identify and track the 31 leased schools sites currently slated for environmental testing. They also hope for a large turnout at the Aug. 18 meeting about PS 51X.
More generally, at any school that faces potential contamination, "Parents can request indoor air or an explanation for why it is not necessary to do any sampling," Siegel said. They can also pressure the city to hire an independent firm to analyze sampling results and to make all information public.
"Similar to the PCBs issue, this is fundamentally a right to know issue," Philip said, "We want new schools as much as anyone else but we also want safe and healthy schools. Children's health should not be compromised for the sake of expediency."
Melissa Checker is associate professor of urban studies at Queens College, CUNY and of anthropology and environmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Despite once being a legendary city for food manufacturing -- Clarence Birdseye invented flash freezing here, for example -- New York for decades saw food processing slowly decline. Storied companies, like Stella d'Oro, Old London, Bazzini Nuts and Schaefer Beer left the city. City officials used almost every tool at their disposal to stem the tide -- nearly always unsuccessfully.
Yet even as brand-name, commercial companies were moving out to the drumbeat of apocalyptic headlines, a food revolution had started and today continues to transform the rules and the dynamics of New York's $5 billion food processing industry.
All over New York (and in other cities as well), well-educated, energetic young entrepreneurs are re-creating food manufacturing in their own image and according to their own ideology -- hip, local, creative, fun, unique, retro, sustainable. Propelled by many diverse forces -- the local food movement, climate change, immigration, the recession, waterfront development -- the products of New York's food revolution are now on display at all sorts of new venues, both profit-making and nonprofit. Breads, biscuits, syrups, beer, noodles, sauces, coffees, chocolates, cookies, ice cream, etc., are sold -- many after having been prepared at one of the two city-financed food incubators.
While food companies have closed or left, enough have opened to keep the numbers fairly steady. Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in 1990 the city had 938 food establishments. That decreased to a low of 872 in 2006, before climbing to 1,009 last year.
One might argue, however, that the artisanal products are not quite real in the same way that Old London Melba Toast or Stella d’Oro cookies are. Will they evolve into truly profitable businesses?
Seth Pinsky, president of the Economic Development Corp., notes that the city doesn’t need all the new producers to succeed, though it would like as many as possible to make it. He said that many food producers traditionally started small -- thus the incubators, which, says, Pinsky, are meant to nurture, but not provide a permanent home. When the companies reach a certain scale they need professional space and will move on.
This kind of city program directed at tiny (even one-person) firms is a far cry from the economic development strategy of, say, the 1970s, when the city focused on large enterprises, particularly Fortune 500 companies. Even then it was understood that 90 percent of city businesses had fewer than 50 employees -- but dealing with small businesses was deemed just too difficult, and the pay-offs too distant.
Today's zeitgeist is entirely different, with an admiration for the unique, particular and local -- especially in food. But can that zeitgeist be exploited to profitability? Can the many adorable vendors with their adorable products at, for example, the Smorgasburg or Dekalb Market in Brooklyn or the New Amsterdam Market in Manhattan, evolve into stable businesses?
Karen Karp, a prominent food consultant whose company motto is "good food is good business," points out that quite a few niche brands have gone mainstream. Terra Chips, for example, which was founded in a tiny private kitchen in Brooklyn 20 years ago to make delicious but nutritious root vegetable chips, was bought by the Hain Food Group (now the Hain Celestial Group) in 1998. In 2002, Hain moved Terra's production plant and its 90 jobs from Brooklyn to a 75,000-square-foot building in Moonachie, N.J.
Tom Cat Bakery, which opened in Long Island City in 1987 with a $120,000 investment, initially produced 300 loaves of French bread and sourdough and 400 rolls a day. By the time it was acquired by food-oriented venture capitalists in 2008, it had 275 employees, 900 customers, and $32 million in annual revenues.
But will Tom Cat have to follow Terra Chips -- and other successful companies -- across the water to New Jersey, or even out of the region altogether? "They really want to stay in Queens," says Karp, "but they’re bursting at the seams. Real estate is a problem."
To help entrepreneurs cope with New York's high cost of real estate and chronic space shortage, the city has responded with two very different options. The first is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which has some 3.6 million square feet of space in 40 buildings distributed over 300 acres. The yard charges market rents but its city-owned status exempts tenants from paying property tax, which can be a significant savings.
Second, the Economic Development Corporation set up the entrepreneurial incubators, creating over 135,000 square feet of affordable work room for food. The incubators in turn have generated over $20 million in venture capital investment.
Take the Entrepreneur Space, which is a partnership between the Queens Economic Development Corp., headed by Seth Bornstein, and Mi Kitchen es su Kitchen, headed by Kathrine Gregory. Bornstein’s office had $500,000 in capital resulting from a shopping mall development that had to be reinvested in development projects in Queens. Using part of these funds plus an Economic Development Corp. grant of $175,000, Bornstein upgraded the former union training hall at 37th Street and Northern Boulevard into sleek, efficient kitchens, classrooms, and conference rooms. The 5,500-square-foot, professionally equipped commercial kitchen is open 24/7 and currently incubating over 150 clients, though the number fluctuates. The cheapest shift is early morning -- 1 a.m. to 7 a.m.—for $154; the most expensive is daytime -- 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. -- at $231.
Danny Lyu, who makes immensely popular Mexican sandwiches called Cemitasthat he sells at the Smorgasburg, says Entrepreneur Space is expensive but worth it. "The space is divided and segregated well," he notes, "but the atmosphere is communal. You help each other, and make sure everything is clean when you leave. If you don’t have your own bricks and mortar, you have to go into shared space, and you have to help each other to make it work."
The incubators provide kitchens that already meet health regulations and negotiates with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to encourage a reassessment of regulations that can be destructive for fledgling enterprises. An ongoing problem for start-ups is that the health department requires caterers to have permanent premises.
"We're one of the licensed spaces," says Gregory. "All manufacturers operating here can get the appropriate licensing that allows them to sell food legally.”
One of the first elected officials to recognize the economic implications of food was Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer who in February 2009 released Food in the Public Interest. Noting that New Yorkers spend an impressive $30 billion annually on food, Stringer argued that the city should officially encourage and support local food systems -- New York State farms, farmers markets, urban gardens, processors.
The city, said Stringer, needed to analyze and designate its foodshed, the territory between where food is produced and where it’s consumed. Much like a watershed, which outlines the flow of water serving an area, a foodshed outlines the flow of food from land to table. Stringer urged giving growers of healthy food within roughly a 200-mile distance special access to the city's food markets and outlets. He also pushed for City Hall to allocate 20 percent of the $435 million school food budget to local producers and processors.
Joan Dye Gussow, the well-known nutritionist and gardener who is often called the matriarch of the sustainable food movement, recently commented, "If 20 years ago any elected official had talked to me about New York's foodshed I would have thought they were smoking dope. Nobody was discussing it. Nobody, at least in government, understood the implications of the city being hideously dependent on petroleum to get its food."
Part of the problem is that even as the old-style food industry was breaking down and being re-created in a different model, the city's food distribution system -- centered on the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx – also was showing its age. Handling some 70 percent (and $2 billion worth) of the fruits and vegetables eaten by New Yorkers, Hunts Point's physical plant has become dangerously inadequate. Dozens of diesel-run tractor-trailers are used to store produce, which is not only environmentally unsound but in violation of federal cold chain standards, which increasingly require an unbroken cold chain to maintain food within a stipulated temperature range.
Meanwhile, even as the city tries to figure out how to upgrade Hunts Point, the new upscale chains that have moved into New York -- Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, to name two -- have bypassed Hunts Point altogether, shipping in their own superior and often local produce. Only 2 percent of Hunts Point produce is local, according to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
Just five years ago, city residents wanting New Jersey peaches or New York apples bought them mainly at the Greenmarkets. Now they're available in good grocery stores -- and from suppliers like Fresh Direct. Even Wal-Mart, the nation's largest food seller that is anathema to some community activists, has a corporate policy of reaching out to small and medium-sized farmers, says Nevin Cohen, assistant professor of environmental studies at the New School. These suppliers have structured a very efficient distribution system that ignores Hunt’s Point, except when they run low on supplies.
Even as many markets offer ever more local produce to New Yorkers, Stringer makes the leap to the next problem: food processing. He urges City Hall to pursue "an industrial retention policy to promote the food processing industry by creating financial incentives for small-scale processing in the foodshed, which may include streamlining fees and permitting processes, incorporating food processing in wholesale market development, and training local workers."
Take fees. Nearly all local produce is shipped in by truck. But every truck coming over Port Authority bridges must pay tolls kept deliberately high both to support the port and to deter traffic. The tolls act as an unyielding, high tax on small business and are also often the first problem cited by established food businesses. When asked what he would most like government to reform to help his business, Steven Eisenstadt, CEO and president of Cumberland Packing Corp. (which makes Sweet’N Low and Sugar in the Raw, among other products) said: bridge tolls. At $80 a crossing, the trucks make hundreds of trips annually to deliver Cumberland’s raw materials, all of which must be imported to Brooklyn.
Cumberland is the kind of stable, profitable food business that once drove New York’s economy. Located both outside and within the gates of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Cumberland is a family business that is committed to its products, its neighborhood and its 385 employees, about 340 of whom are members of the United Food & Commercial Workers. "We've always made job retention and creation part of our mission," says Eisenstadt, "and have never laid anyone off. We have some antiquated machinery from my grandfather’s day that we keep going for the jobs. We believe in a double bottom line of profit and social responsibility."
Were Cumberland to automate fully, it could slash its workforce to some 80 workers -- which Eisenstadt says it has no intention of doing. Some 200 workers have been with the company for over 20 years.
The 19th century buildings are precisely the kind economists often cite as outdated for today's manufacturing: multi-story with cut-up floor plates and inefficient elevators. But, says Eisenstadt, "We've made it work. We’re profitable and happy here. The navy yard has been very good to us."
The question for the future is: Can the city hold onto its remaining old-time food manufacturers, like Cumberland in Brooklyn or Streit's Matzos on the Lower East Side? At the same time, will it be able to attract and nurture to profitability artisan manufacturers, and use its buying power to support local food?
"Over the last 25 years New York has remade itself into a world-class food city, with a new generation of high-end destination restaurants and markets," says Karen Karp. "Food is why many people come here. Yet our infrastructure, which is from the dark ages, doesn’t match our status as a world-class food city."
Can this be fixed? One thing for sure: The combination of elected officials paying attention to food issues and young voters pouring into the food sector as entrepreneurs and consumers means that food and its many issues will be on the agenda for the next set of elections. That will be a first for city politics and a development that may trigger a new phase in the food revolution.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association and director of its Center for Urban Innovation.
In 2007, when New York City released PlaNYC 2030, "locavore" had been named the word of the year and Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma was a bestseller. Despite that, PlaNYC was virtually silent on the role that food plays in our city's sustainability.
The network of activists working to create a sustainable urban food system found this oversight particularly striking. Policies and programs to improve food access, nurture community gardens, promote healthy school food, and run composting programs were being ignored by the city’s sustainability plan.
In response, the four-year update to PlaNYC, releasedon the day before Earth Day this year acknowledged for the first time that sustainable food systems are critical to the city's well-being and included food as a cross-cutting issue. The update included a wide variety of food initiatives, including:
Although Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and various advocacy groups already proposed most of the initiatives in PlaNYC, their inclusion in the mayor's sustainability document signals his intention to carry them out. And that's an important step forward. However, several limitations of PlaNYC raise questions about the long-term impact these disparate policies will have on the city's food system.
PlaNYC does not articulate a vision of a sustainable food system and does not explain how the discrete pieces fit together. A comprehensive food plan, on the other hand, would consider questions such as to what extent urban agriculture contributes to neighborhood sustainability, food security and environmental quality. It would look at how much space we should devote to it, and what additional resources are needed to support urban food production. What mix of farmers markets, CSAs, green bodegas, green carts, community gardens and supermarkets provides ample access to healthy food, and how can the city help ensure that each neighborhood has the right mix? Should New York City change how it buys food for schools and social service programs in order to support regional farmers, or should cost and minimal nutritional quality be the sole criteria?
PlaNYC claims that food "presents a unique planning challenge" because much of the food infrastructure "is privately owned and shaped by the tastes and decisions of millions of individual consumers." But many other complex urban systems addressed in more detail in PlaNYC include private infrastructure and are influenced by consumer decisions. Individual consumers shape the city's housing, energy, telecommunications and transportation infrastructures, all of which include public and private facilities.
In fact, the city controls an extensive food infrastructure. It owns and leases the terminal food markets, regulates and is a major land owner in the rural Catskill-Delaware watershed, and owns the land many urban gardens lease and farmers markets use. Beyond that, the city controls the infrastructure that prepares and serves food to our children and the residential waste disposal system that manages organic matter. And, as one of the largest institutional food buyers in the nation, the city could use the power of its purse to influence large institutional food producers and processors.
Despite this, the city has, until this point, devoted few resources to analyzing the food system comprehensively and so lacks information about it. (It is unfortunate that such research was not conducted between the initial PlaNYC and the update.) As a result, well-intentioned initiatives have been advanced in the absence of basic information about the food system, like the provenance of the food purchased by the city, how much food moves into and through the city, the availability of grocery stores, where people shop for their food, or the location of vacant city-owned land that might be gardened or farmed. The lack of understanding has made it difficult to design efficient, comprehensive, complementary policies as well as to prioritize new initiatives or evaluate their impact. Legislation pending in the City Council (Intro 615) would require gathering these basic metrics about food system, but the mayor's representatives have raised concerns in hearings about their capacity to do so.
Some 45 city agencies purchase food, support food growing, produce compost, teach about food, bring people to supermarkets, make decisions about land use, or regulate how food is grown, processed, distributed and sold This would seem to indicate the sustainability plan could have a major effect on our food system. But, because PlaNYC lacks the force of law, there is no assurance that any initiatives it mentions will be reflected in other agency plans, or that agencies will focus on the food system.
This has real consequences. For example, in the recently released Sustainable Stormwater Management Plan, the Department of Environmental Protection did not consider the role of urban farms in absorbing stormwater, while enhanced tree pits and porous pavement were featured. The Department of Sanitation chose to suspend its leaf and yard waste composting program a few years ago even though urban farmers have been clamoring for compost. The Office of Environmental Coordinationdoes not require developers preparing environmental impact assessments to consider the effects of their projects on the availability of fresh food, although it does require them to assess many other impacts, from open space to traffic. City procurement agencies have never been concerned about buying regionally-produced food, so they have not yet developed systems to track where the food served by the city comes from.
One of the goals of PlaNYC is to accommodate a million new residents in adequate housing located near transit, with functioning infrastructure and sufficient open space. Achieving this goal requires not only higher density development in locations with public transportation within New York City, but also fostering a sustainable foodshed that allows the peri-urban areas surrounding the city to remain relatively undeveloped.
Some cities, like San Francisco, have looked beyond the city boundaries in seeking to obtain municipal food from the region's foodshed. PlaNYC, however, suggests that such an effort would not be within the city’s purview, ignoring the connection between our city and the surrounding foodshed, and how New York City can influence the environmental impacts associated with food production outside of our five boroughs through the power of the public purse.
Overall, the Department of Education serves some 860,000 meals a day, while other New York City agencies serve 225 million meals and snacks annually. Adjusting procurement to give preference to regionally grown food for these millions of meals would channel a portion of what we spend on food to the region's farmers. A bill pending in the City Council (Int. No. 452) would require the city to try to purchase food grown or prepared in New York State. The administration has testified that it would be too difficult to do so for most food contracts.
PlaNYC offers no estimate on how much it would cost to bring the initiatives mentioned in the plan to fruition. For example, increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables through farmers markets, CSAs and upgraded bodegas requires infrastructure, from wireless Electronic Benefit Transfer readers to refrigerators. Increasing urban farming requires more land, technical assistance, and clean compost. Yet city agencies like health, parks and sanitation are already stretched thin, while a single food policy coordinator, not a fully staffed food department, bears the responsibility for coordinating all these activities.
Only two of PlaNYC’s 198 pages are actually devoted to food. In contrast, just a week prior to the PlaNYC update, Minneapolis issued a comprehensive plan addressing only urban agriculture. Chicago's regional plan, Go To 2040, has an entire chapter devoted to sustainable local food. The New York City Council's own FoodWorks report is a comprehensive 90-page policy plan.
Now that PlaNYC officially acknowledges food to be essential to a "greener, greater New York," food advocates should press for a comprehensive food plan and changes to local law that make sustainable food practices a permanent part of city government.
Nevin Cohen is assistant professor of environmental studies at The New School.