City Council Adopts First Ever Food Plan

The plan to fight hunger has been in the works for a long time (image via Getty Images)

Last Thursday, City Council adopted the Austin-Travis County Food Plan, a first-of-its-kind roadmap for the city to fight food insecurity and halt the rapid loss of local farmland.

“Our city is at a crossroads. We’ve grown so much in such a short amount of time,” said Nitza Cuevas, a co-chair of the plan’s advisory committee. “We’re having a loss of farmers and farmland. Workers can’t afford to live here. People are hungry.”

In 2021, Winter Storm Uri caused many Austinites to go hungry. The City Council then resolved to develop a food plan to create a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient food system. The Food Plan takes an anti-racism stance in its goals to eradicate unequal access to food, prevent food waste, and decrease Austin’s food insecurity rate, which sits at more than 14%. After three years of planning, the city is finally moving forward to assess funding and put local organizations at the forefront of implementing new food strategies.

“It’s a huge and amazing feeling to see what our community is capable of when we lock arms and put our intention into something together,” said Amanda Rohlich, a food policy advisor in the Office of Sustainability. “This is really a mosaic of community effort.”

On Oct. 29, the Commissioners Court will also vote on whether to adopt the food plan, setting it into motion for both the city and county. However, funding for this five-year plan won’t be secured until budget discussions begin next March and conclude in October 2025.

In addition to the hundreds of volunteers among the advisory committee, the Community Food Ambassadors, and the specialized Issue Area Groups, more than 3,000 Austinites engaged with the planning process at workshops and outreach events. The food plan outlines seven far-reaching objectives, such as strengthening community food production, increasing access to nutritious food, and improving the livelihoods of food workers. Dozens of strategies and policy proposals accompany each objective, which could create radical changes all across the food cycle.

“Not only does it feel great, I think that it’s also a really good example that politics can work for the people,” said Larry Franklin, a co-chair of the Community Advisory Committee.

The plan proposes financial incentives for restaurants that pay a living wage and farms that use regenerative farming practices. It also suggests creating a local food assistance program similar to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, but with more inclusive eligibility requirements.

“There’s a lot of people who are right on the edge of needing support, or who desperately do need support, but can’t get SNAP for one reason or another,” Rohlich said. “It’s a terrible place to be in, and we’ve got to do better for our neighbors.”

Members of the Community Advisory Committee aimed to put equality at the core of the food plan. According to the 2022 Agricultural Census, 89% of the farmers around Austin are white, and 61% are male. While Austin’s food insecurity already rates higher than the national average, the city’s Black community faces an even more staggering 27% food insecurity rate.

Franklin’s nonprofit Black Lives Veggies analyzes the intersection of food insecurity, incarceration, chronic disease, and homelessness. He also builds community gardens and provides agricultural training to disenfranchised communities. Last year, Franklin received grant money from the city to create green jobs, and he launched an internship program teaching students at Huston-Tillotson University about sustainable farming with hydroponics.

“I believe that food could be used as a small-scale economic mobility tool,” he said. “We can really solve problems through food.”

Now that his time developing the food plan is complete, Franklin wants Black Lives Veggies to continue working with the city in the next phase. He hopes he will receive more grants, so the nonprofit can carry out strategies in the food plan. However, Franklin worries that the competitive process for funding could lead the city to partner with larger organizations instead.

“Implementing this thing is just as hard as the development,” Franklin said. “Once again, I feel like it’s my responsibility to try to have an impact on policy, so some of the smaller organizations that participated in the development of the food plan can now receive the financial benefit of their thoughts.”

While funding remains undefined, Rohlich assured that the city is dedicated to working with organizations large and small. She said they want to ensure this food plan reaches every margin of the community.

“The special defining characteristic of this plan is how much it’s been co-created by the community,” Rohlich said. “It lifts up the collective intelligence of the entire community, rather than just driving forward on one entity’s perspective.”