Mark Winne's Blog

Hereford, Texas – May 2026

Look at Casa del Llano’s brochure and the image of their building on its cover;

Lydia Villaneuva, founder and head of CASA del Llano

it’s a study in modesty, humility, and maybe even discretion, as in we don’t want ICE knocking at our door. There’s barely a sign marking the building or anything resembling a parking lot. But if there was a small logo of what this place stood for in this predominantly Latino community it would probably be a small replica, no bigger than a lawn flamingo, of the Statue of Liberty. Because over the course of the last 25 years, that unassuming door has been the gateway to U.S. citizenship for about 2,000 people. For thousands of other newcomers, and not-so-newcomers who have faced a less than welcoming country, Casa del Llano has helped them navigate their way to the American dream. This non-profit organization is the proverbial lantern under a bushel basket, a lantern that is Lady Liberty’s torch.

I made the trek from Santa Fe across the badlands of eastern New Mexico into west Texas to interview Lydia Villaneuva, a former colleague from our days together at the now defunct Community Food Security Coalition. I knew of her work founding and running Casa del Llano, and I had heard many unsavory (smelly) tales of Hereford, but for some reason I had never made the five-hour journey. I felt the time had come.

But as you cross from New Mexico into Texas you soon become aware of why this is not one of America’s preferred travel destinations. Later, I googled jokes about West Texas, one of which said it’s so flat that it’s the only place where you can look farther and see less than anywhere else on earth. This assessment was more or less confirmed by my GPS directions which told me to “go right at the light, then go straight for about 100 miles.”

Hola!

CASA del Llano — Lydia and Mark

Amidst many holas!  and gracias, Lydia introduced me to several staff members and took me on a tour of the office/house (stay tuned for its origin story!). There is a sweet air of informality that pervades CASA’s operations, including a casual application of the English language. One official-looking sign in the office where payments for services are taken, including US citizenship applications, reads: “We only except cash or check only.” What the heck, I thought, it’s still better than my Spanish.

Even though an appropriate degree of professional decorum greets the visitor as they enter the reception area, a visitor’s desperation and the staff’s desire to help may soon turn procedure and confidentiality into an afterthought. Within ten minutes of my arrival, Lydia, one of her staff, and me are listening to Joey Gonzalez share his frustrations about a failed job search. “No one wants to hire me because of my record. I got out of prison eight years ago, but I’ve been clean ever since!”

Speaking only Spanish, an agitated older woman is looking for help for her two children to become citizens. Lydia provides some on the spot guidance and arranges an appointment with the woman for a later consultation.

Just off the lobby, inside a spacious, well-lit room, 21-year-old Melissa, a student at nearby Western Texas University, is instructing four women – all of whom are old enough to be her mother – in the fundamentals of English. The chatter was lively and Melissa, born in the US and a native English speaker had clearly stirred up the enthusiasm of her older students. With much good cheer and enthusiasm, each woman was filling in a large poster as if it was a resume they were preparing for a job application. With Melissa’s guidance, they were writing in English and using little hand-drawn charts and pictures to illustrate their stories.

In the next room over, every Thursday, you would find the High Plains Food Bank, whose headquarters are in Amarillo, Texas. A representative of the food bank aids people applying for SNAP.

The Neighborhood

“Let’s go see the ‘neighborhood’,” suggests Lydia, and we jump into her car to see an area that actually encompasses the better part of two counties. Our first stop is a 486-acre community where Lydia got her start as an organizer. Known as Coronado Acres, it’s divided into several dozen five-acre lots whose property lines are defined by roads that are either washboard dirt or a rough macadam surface made of recycled tarmac. They made the car bounce so hard that my tailbone hurt, and I couldn’t write notes to save my life. The staccato vibration captured on my recorder sounded, later, like we were escaping machine-gun fire. Lydia tells me that one of her first organizing projects was to convince the county commissioners to pave these roads. “I ruined my first car driving here!” she noted, “but what’s worse is that the roads had become impassable during the summer monsoons. School buses would get stuck in the mud and people couldn’t get to their doctor appointments.”

A distinguishing feature of Coronado Acres is neglect. Homes and trailers are in a state of disrepair or teetering on the brink of outright collapse. An attempt to bring small-scale agriculture into a community that was hungry for fresh food, or anything other than the nearby commodity agriculture products (farming, farming everywhere, not a bite to eat) was thwarted by dropping water pressure. In this thirsty neck of the world, no water, no food.

The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir upon which portions of eight states including West Texas depend on for their water, is declining at the rate of one foot a year. This is thanks in no small part to the gargantuan draw down required to sustain factory farming operations and their massive pivot irrigation systems. While not officially a colonias because it’s too far from the Mexican border to qualify, the outward appearance of Coronado Acres with broken appliances and rusting autos strewn about and used tires stacked up to fence off properties, gives it and similar areas around Hereford the undeniable look of third-world poverty.

What marks Hereford’s identity and catalyzes Lydia’s own brand of practical activism is the rampant presence of industrial agriculture – cattle feedlots, livestock slaughter and processing plants, “value-added” processing plants that turn discarded livestock parts into pet food (wet and dry), factory dairy farms, and two ethanol plants. While their products may feed the world – as well as Fluffy, Buddy, and Milo – the well-being of their workers is what feeds Lydia’s concerns. Merrick Natural PetWorks and its two Hereford facilities employ 400 people, almost all of whom are Hispanic. As soon as Trump began his vicious crack down on immigrants, 30 of Merrick’s employees, some of whom had been there 20 years, were forced to disappear or be arrested.

But driving through another nearby “colonias” that Lydia called El Homiguero, we encountered a defining moment of environmental injustice. One of the community’s boundaries abut a large cattle feedlot and its crop production fields. As we approached the property line and prepared to turn around, we spotted a dark-brown cloud hovering just above the ground and moving slowly in our direction. I asked Lydia to pull over so we could take a better look. I hopped out of the car and looked over the fence. What I saw was a tractor pulling a manure spreader that was shooting the feedlots daily waste material in a spiraling motion about 15 feet upward. I found myself downwind of the tractor with a strong westerly breeze propelling tiny particles of wood shavings and manure into my face. I quickly retreated to the car and noticed the same material was hitting Lydia’s windshield. Of greater concern was the gusting winds that were sending the same material into the residential properties directly adjoining the homes. God only knows what besides cow shit resided inside that ghastly cloud! “Those houses aren’t well-insulated,” Lydia told me. “And that smell of manure everywhere? We used to call it ‘Cattle Pen No. 5’.”

Later that night as I was resting at my Best Western Hotel in downtown, a powerful scent of cow manure came wafting through the room. I went outside, but there was no escaping it. By my estimation, I was at least two miles from the nearest feedlot. Over the years, I’ve heard more than one farmer tell me that’s “the smell of success.”

Lydia summed up the local political problem pretty well, “Nobody wants to take responsibility for this community! Hereford is Trump country. I hate to say it, but it’s a MAGA world – even the Hispanics!” The numbers not only confirmed Lydia’s assessment but actually make the picture worse. In spite of the fact that 79 percent of Hereford’s 15,000 people identify as Latino, 75 percent of Deaf Smith County, which is mostly Hereford, voted for Trump in 2024.

If a place’s food or agricultural identity is any reflection of its politics, then as you might expect, deeply liberal areas like Washington, DC are known informally as the hummus capital of America. By contrast, Hereford, which is known as the “Beef Capital of the World,” would be very conservative. In fact, according to a 2015 report by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Hereford is not only Texas’s most conservative city, it’s also America’s.

Tortilleria Chihuahua

Lydia and I are sitting in the Tortilleria Chihuahua restaurant on West First Street.

Tortilleria Chihuahua in downtown Hereford, TX

She’s simultaneously translating and rating items from the all-Spanish menu for me. Once I settle on the Chili Verde and a cold cerveza importada (Mexico), she explains to our non-English speaking waitress what her non-Spanish speaking friend wants. Our table faces the street, and a large picture window gives us a panoramic view of the traffic moving down this main thoroughfare. It’s a non-stop convoy of agriculture vehicles hauling silage, milk, and cows. Regardless, we’re settling into a good meal not only because the tour of Hereford and Casa del Llano made me hungry, but because I was eager to hear more of Lydia’s origin story. And if you’re Latino standing on Texas soil, that story often begins with a river crossing.

Lydia: I was born in Plainview, Texas which, if you’ll excuse the pun, doesn’t mean everyone saw me being born. But it’s my parents’ and grandparents’ story that explains my history and why helping immigrants is the most important thing I do. My father was carried across the Rio Grande on my grandfather’s shoulders. He was also carrying the family’s metate [a stone grinder used to process corn for tortillas]. At one point in the river, he fell into a deep hole and was submerged under water with my dad and the metate. My grandmother, who was a strong woman, reached down and pulled them up. Everyone made it safely to the Texas shore.

Me: It sounds like meeting adversity head-on and persisting in the face of tough odds shaped who you are.

Lydia: That’s who we are as a family. My father worked for a construction company doing road work with a shovel. By the time he retired, he held stock in the company! My mother was an entrepreneur but developed breast cancer. Since I was the oldest of six children, I was my mother’s voice for four years including going to every doctor’s appointment and translating for her since she only spoke Spanish. As I was trying to find written information to help her battle, I discovered that the American Cancer Society didn’t have anything in Spanish. This was 1988! “God dang it,” I said to myself, “that’s not right!”

I also had a brother who was mentally challenged. People would always look at him funny, which would piss me off. He’s the reason I don’t like injustice. He’s my core! That’s where I draw my strength from. But I also learned to keep my anger under control because if I fell into a rage, I couldn’t do anything about the injustice.

M: You experienced deeply personal challenges and benefitted from really good parental role models, but at what point did you decide to address the injustices in your own community?

L: I went to my family’s church, San Jose Catholic Church at first just to help prepare meals. But the church’s pastor, Father Darryl Birkenfeld picked me to work on the finance committee. Even I think I can sometimes be dopey, he saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. Later, he targeted me to work on the Rural Life Ministry which took me into sustainable agriculture and a paid job working for the Church. This took me into something we called The Promised Land Network which eventually morphed into the Ogallala Commons [this is a non-profit network whose work focuses on education about the aquifer that is the lifeblood for the region that includes West Texas] that Darryl would later become the coordinator of after he left the Church. But after one hard day of seeing bad conditions in the community, I vented my frustrations to Father Darryl. He responded with, “So, what are you going to do about it?” That’s when I became a community organizer. I never went to college; I learned on the job and from experience, from Darryl and many others, including national networks I worked with. I’ve worked with farmers, business people, immigrants, and neighborhood residents. I was trained by the Industrial Areas Foundation, the same group that Barack Obama learned from.

M: When you and I first met at the Community Food Security Coalition conferences in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you were still in your early stages of organizing work in Hereford, new to the game, so to speak. But I remember how confident you seemed and how willing you were to jump into leadership roles in spite of your lack of experience.

L: My career was never a straight path. I got married when I was 17 and had my first child when I was 18. My husband had a good job, and I was fortunate to be able devote many years to raising my two children. When I was ready to jump into community work, I felt no guilt about not being a good mother. But suddenly I felt self-conscious of being around very smart people. I was often embarrassed and insecure about being on the board of the CFS Coalition – there were people there with Ph.Ds., decades of experience, belonging to national organizations. But I said to myself that you can’t be any more real or Latina than me! I had a conversation with God, and I decided that my work speaks for itself. As I look back on my time with CFSC, and later with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, I realize that they became my colleges!

M: It seems like Providence has been on your side ever since. The story of how you got your office building is fascinating. Please tell me about it again.

L: The building where CASA is located, which is basically a six-room house, used to be a dentist’s office. I met the dentist one day at a meeting, and he told me he was retiring from his practice. I told him about the work I was doing in the community and how I wanted to serve people in Hereford. This was 1999, and we had just organized CASA del Llano a few years earlier. Before I knew what happened, he gave us the house outright! We’ve owned it – mortgage and rent free – for 26 years now.

M: Being an ambitious and justice-seeking Latina in a gritty place like Hereford where money and men rule, can’t be easy. Give me an example of how you’ve brought that fuerte personality of yours to bear.

L: I like to think that I don’t need no outside validation. But I’m only human, and I was pissed off when the local Chamber of Commerce took years to recognize CASA’s value to the community. Joining a local Chamber may not be something a lot of community organizations around the country want to do, but for us, it’s where the action, power, and yes, recognition is. I finally got fed up and did something I didn’t want to do: I took a white business owner to a Chamber meeting to plead my case because they wouldn’t listen to me! He told them CASA was responsible for making 700 employees available to local businesses. And you know what? They said, “Yo, you are all okay!” I wish I didn’t have to do that, but I reminded myself it’s not about me or my pride; it’s about how I best serve the community.

M: As we drove around today and I witnessed living conditions that can only be described as “third world,” – in a state as rich as Texas, in a country richer than any other, a place that from my perspective seems to exist as a colony of the industrial agriculture complex – have you ever thought about taking on “the Man”? In other words, have you ever thought about using a more confrontational style of organizing?

L: I could stir up a lot of crap here, but I don’t want to jeopardize the chance to serve the people we are serving. Over 2,000 people who crossed “the river” became U.S. citizens because of CASA; thousands more received legal assistance, learned English, got green cards, signed up for SNAP, and found a shoulder to cry on when they needed it from CASA. The community knows we help the people that everybody else in this town wants to ignore. Anybody who walks through that door is someone we’re ready to serve. I have five grandchildren. I want to leave the world in a better way for them. I don’t want to sound like an old lady, but I want them to learn by what I do, not what I say.

M: I’ve run non-profit community organizations for most of my life. I know very well the kind of choices and compromises you have to make. But as you look to the future of this community and the role of CASA del Llano, what do you see?

L: To be honest, it might take another generation before we get to a place of real social change here. I’m only two generations removed from my grandparents crossing the river. My children are three generations removed. Today, we have young families here who just crossed the river for the dream, but they will need the services we provide. My hope and goal for the future are that the next generation won’t need the services we now provide.

Concluding Thoughts

There should be more Casa del Llanos and more Lydia Villaneuva’s. If there were, there would be fewer places like Hereford that depend on the exploitation of people and the environment to produce our food. Just as importantly, Lady Liberty’s words – “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses…I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” – should be placed at every mile post along America’s borders rather than the Trump Wall. Until that day, we find ourselves stuck with the dueling ironies of pride in an America that is still the land of hope and dreams, and of shame in an America that treats the dreamers with brutality, abuse, and neglect. It is within that ironic tangle that people like Lydia intervene to uphold the humanity and dignity of those who struggle in a place like Hereford.

Ever since the beginning of this century, I’ve enjoyed the many and very different speaking opportunities that have come my way. Each one has allowed me to share my experience, learnings, and ideas gleaned from over 50 years in this thing I lovingly call the food movement. From hands-on work in food banks and community gardens to food policy councils and testifying before Congress, I count myself blessed to be a part of the diverse ways we have brought food justice to the people of our communities.

Mark Winne speaking at the New York State Food Summit. Albany, New York, June 16, 2026

With the hope of bringing my lessons learned to more people, as well as giving hope to those who are working through really tough times, I want to make potential audiences aware of my speaking services. I have been invited to give a couple of keynotes the first half of 2026 and based on the feedback I’ve received, I achieved my goals of informing, entertaining, and inspiring others. I would like to bring those messages to audiences that work in various sectors of the food system whether it’s health and nutrition, anti-hunger and food security, farming and sustainability, economic development, and anti-poverty.

Topics

My brief biography is at the bottom of the page (and more specific details are available upon request), but I will say that I structure my talks to address the vast range of food system challenges we face today. I have over the years acquired at least a working knowledge of most food and farm sectors, and after an extensive consultation with conference organizers who have a deep understanding of their respective constituencies, I look for cross-cutting themes, challenges that are specific to their audience, and ways to unite and inspire the participants. In sum, I’ve learned that every food system audience is utterly unique, but every food system audience shares common denominators with every other food system audience.

Like everyone else in this world, I have my values. I make no attempt to suppress them anymore than I attempt to foist them on others. But my talks will draw on a reservoir of beliefs that acknowledge food insecurity as both a grave injustice and deprivation of human liberties; that citizen democracy and participation are necessary for the healthy functioning of a food system; that diversity is as necessary in the communities and organizations where we work as it is in nature; that the public sector must be engaged not only to achieve food justice but to act as a countervailing force to those interests that are antithetical to food security, healthy food, and a clean environment. That’s not an exhaustive list, but it certainly provides the framework within which I write and speak.

What I Will Do

All the specific activities will be negotiated with the client and specified in a letter of agreement. A keynote-style speech of 30 to 40 minutes in length is the typical service I provide. Variations on that style requested by the client will be considered. Additionally, I am open to participating in other conference activities including as a panelist (moderator or participant) and leading/co-leading a workshop. I like to be present and interact with attendees throughout the day of my keynote.

What It Will Cost

Travel expenses and a speaker fee are the primary costs. Travel expenses may include economy, roundtrip airfare between New Mexico and the conference site, one or two nights of accommodation depending on conference schedule, and inclusion in any scheduled conference meals and receptions. The amount of the speaker fee will be negotiated with the client.

Please note, I am a solo act, but backup singers may be provided at the client’s expense!

My Mission

To share what I have learned over 50 years of food programming and activism with the widest possible audience with the intent of achieving a just food system for all.

References are available on request

Mark Winne’s Biography

From 1979 to 2003, Mark Winne was the Executive Director of the Hartford Food System, a Connecticut non-profit food organization.  He is the co-founder of numerous organizations including the Community Food Security Coalition and the State of Connecticut Food Policy Council. He was a Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Fellow and a member of the U.S. Delegation to the 2000 Rome Conference on Food Security. As a writer on food issues, Mark’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Nation, Sierra, Orion, and Yes!, to name a few. He is the author of five books Closing the Food Gap; Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas; Stand Together or Starve Alone; Food Town USA, and most recently The Road to a Hunger-free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne. Through his own firm, Mark Winne Associates, Mark speaks, trains, and writes on topics related to community food systems, food policy, and food security. Until recently, Mark served as a Senior Advisor to the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Mark Winne

Phone: (860) 558-8226

Email: win5m@aol.com

Website: www.markwinne.com

may we experience harmony…

Indy Rishi Singh

check me out on the Emmy-winning PBS show 

Climate California: RPG https://youtu.be/U8jNVKWgBxM

New York State Food Summit – June 16th from 8:30 to 4:30 – Albany, NY

I’ve been invited to give the keynote address to the biennial and phenomenal NYS Food Summit this June in Albany, NY. So, if you happen to be on the Thruway, the Northway, or even the Foodway, come join the Empire State’s premier food activists. For more information check out:

Food Summit 2026 | The Alliance

I was almost an art history major. What could be better, thought I, than sitting around all day gazing at beautiful images. But there were two problems: At the time my small Maine college barely had an art history department having one professor who taught all the courses; and secondly, an art history degree was worth about a nickel more than a philosophy degree.

Fortunately, the lessons I would learn about beauty also resided in abundance just outside the classroom and would coincide with my emerging interests in the environment and public policy. This happened early in the 1970s upon meeting the elder statesman of the Maine Legislature, Representative Ezra Briggs, as quintessential a Mainer as I ever had the pleasure to meet, and a strident defender of the state’s environment. He also had the distinction of speaking with a Maine accent so pronounced that my New Jersey-trained ears were always stunned when he spoke.

At the time, he was persuading the state legislature to oppose the proposed Dickey-Lincoln hydroelectric dam. Its construction would have blocked the St. John’s River, the last free-flowing wilderness waterway in the eastern United States. The region was in the remote, nearly roadless northern reaches of Maine, which prompted one legislative proponent of the dam to challenge Mr. Briggs’ opposition. He argued that the dam’s location was so inaccessible that nobody will ever see it, so why protect it? The bent and bow-tied Mr. Briggs rose slowly from his seat and said, “I may never have a chance to see the National Art Gallery in Washington, DC, but I’m darn sure I don’t want it turned into a rubber factory!” He proceeded to wonder out loud if vast numbers of sightseers were a prerequisite to staving off beauty’s destruction.  Ezra prevailed that day. The Dickey-Lincoln dam was never built preserving a beautiful waterway as forever wild, whether you ever see it or not.

Artists Help Us See and Feel

Just to be safe, I thought I’d better start taking in some of those art galleries before they are turned into a 21st century equivalent of a rubber factory, like say a Presidential ballroom. Not too long ago I found myself entranced for a deeply pleasing, contemplative moment by a scene of several robust French women wielding hayforks, some resting from their farm toils or removing extra layers of clothing on a warm summer day. Their long skirts are like drapery, hems touching the ground, and their blouses, while loose and functional, appreciatively reveal their feminine curves. My muscles strain in sympathy with their harvest labor, even as their figures and the textures of their clothing blend with the land, trees, and a distant field hand or two. The bright colors of their clothing mirror the hot flush in their fleshy cheeks, indeed the vibrant health of their physiques and choregraphed nature of their movements compose a scene of easy harmony with nature.

This 1901 composition I’m enjoying is titled Haymaking at Eragny and is one of over 100 paintings by the early French Impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro assembled late last year by the Denver Art Museum (DAM). The exhibition, The Honest Eye – Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism (the exhibition closed in February)*, pays homage to a man considered both a pre-cursor and mentor to such Impressionist luminaries as Monet, Cezanne, and Mary Cassatt. But most notably he was an artist who brought a realistic perspective to the relationship between humankind and nature. Gazing at Pissarro’s farm fields, vegetable gardens, women tending farms or selling at farmers’ markets, I sense the painter’s intrusive presence dissipate and the low thrum of strolling museum patrons reduced to silence. I’m transported through the canvas to the scene and held captive by the light, the color, even the imagined smell of tilled earth and hard-working bodies. As the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel said in eulogy to Pissarro: “It’s the life of the land that Camille Pissarro expresses, without sentimentality…. When he paints figures in scenes of agrarian life, man always takes his proper place within a vast earthly harmony.”

While growing out of the same stylistic tradition as Monet and Van Gogh who lavished their painterly eyes on water lilies and sunflowers, Pissarro rarely composed his farms, gardens, and markets without the warm and subtle presence of humanity. The DAM’s exhibition catalogue stresses Pissarro’s political convictions—he had strong anarchist sympathies rejecting the institutions of government, the army, and even the Paris Salon, the high church of sanctioned art at the time—as an underlying reason for his generous and empathetic depictions of peasant life. Pissarro’s people were not the toiling, subsistence farmers of his contemporary Jean-Francois Millet whose well-known dark, shadowy paintings The Gleaners (1857) and Angelus (1857-59) evoke our pity. Viewing Millet in my college art history classes, I was brought close to tears in much the same way that Dorothea Lange’s black and white photographs of the American Dust Bowl’s victims did. Pissarro’s “peasants” are small, independent landowners that are well-fed, never sentimentalized or romanticized, and affirm a healthy relationship with the land that is the source of their livelihoods.

As I jockeyed for a good viewing position among the other gallery goers, moving from paintings of larger fields tended by vigorous women, to gardens whose cabbages and gardeners appear rooted to the same earth, to the village marketplace where Pissarro’s frames were filled with an abundance of produce and jostling bodies, I experienced a revelation: I was viewing what might be the first artistic portrayal of a local food system! I could barely contain my joy amidst the hubbub of art lovers, most of whose thoughts of food were limited to the approaching lunch hour and the draw of the DAM’s hip cafes.

As a food system aficionado but also an amateur art critic, I run the risk of letting the social or political content of a painting supersede its stylistic and methodical achievements. After all, Pissarro would never have won the acclaim he did by becoming a community food system advocate. A back-handed compliment of sorts was handed to him by a notable art critic of his day, Jules-Antoine Castagnary who cracked that Pissarro “has a deplorable penchant for market gardens…But these errors of logic or vulgarities of taste do not alter his fine qualities of execution.” It’s one of those age-old arguments waged in the higher echelons of the arts’ world: should beauty serve itself, or should beauty serve a higher purpose, presumably social or political. Great art, beauty raised to the level of exalted human expression, can be both personally inspirational and sufficiently political to arouse one to action — to fight those who will turn farmland into a grotesquely ugly feature of modern-day life (e.g., data centers), or to confront those who degrade the stranger in our midst seeking a life free of violence and hunger. As the poet William Carlos Williams said, “Beauty is a defiance of authority.”

The artist’s power, after all, is in their empathy, in their ability to remove the distance between themselves and the objects of their fascination, and then render for the viewer, the reader, or the listener that experience in ways that are both authentic and moving. It does not mean that the artist must become the object—the person, the place, the cause—or know all that can be reasonably known about the thing before setting paint to canvas or notes to string.  They draw on unique capabilities to sense in ways that don’t come as naturally to most of us. In the context of agrarian life and the role of the painter, Pissarro said it best: “…it seems to me that one [the artist] has to be enthusiastic for one’s subject to render it well, but is it necessary to be a peasant? Let’s be artists first, and we’ll have the faculty of appreciating everything…without being a peasant.”

I’ll note one ironic twist to this declaration. Pissarro, his wife, and their six children had settled into a rented house in the French countryside in order for him to pursue his art free of Paris and its blatherings over what constituted correct forms of painting. Since his sales had yet to reach the point where they supported his large household, Madame Pissarro toiled daily in the property’s large garden both to feed the family and earn some cash from the farmers’ market. For his part, Pissarro would often sit comfortably inside the house painting his wife at work, her knees in the dirt and back bent to the laborious task of cultivation (paying her no modeling fees presumably). At the end of a hard day, one can only imagine the madame, hands red and stiff, nails encrusted with dirt, saying to the monsieur, “Mon Cher, perhaps it’s time you got a real job!”

Putting Beauty to Work for Policy Change

In the late 1990s, we discovered that Connecticut was losing a higher percentage of its farmland than any other state. As part of a public education campaign, the Connecticut Food Policy Council that I was working with convened a conference to address the topic. After hearing about cost of services studies, the fine points of zoning regulations, the economics of farming and farmland, and the arguments of developers, one person in the audience meekly raised his hand, and in a soft voice asked, “What about beauty? Does that matter when we’re asked to choose between farmland and a new subdivision?” The 150 people in the room murmured their assent.

That day launched a yearslong campaign to protect the state’s remaining farmland and enhance its food and farming enterprises. Open air painters were enlisted to capture the seasons and changing light on fields and barns; chefs, brewers, and vintners were solicited and challenged to create and display the beauty of the harvest; celebrities volunteered to inspire audiences with the power and majesty of the land (the memory of Meryl Streep’s kiss on my cheek lingers to this day). Yes, lobbyists were hired and legislators were hammered with all the arguments that could be mustered. And in the end, good policies emerged that embodied the love of beauty and saved thousands of acres.

Waxing sentimental about a beautiful farmscape might seem easy for non-farmers whose only source of callouses and sweat may be a vigorous pickleball game. But farmers have an aesthetic sensibility too, albeit one that is more rooted in the earth. Robin Chesmer is a Connecticut dairy farmer who operates a 900-acre farm and became a leader in the state’s effort to preserve nearly 50,000 acres of farmland. One day he described for me how he puts his love for the land into practice by turning it into a canvas: “Doing contours over the fields with my tractor, alternating hay with corn with fallow earth; finding the right shape and pattern across the slopes is as much an artistic expression as it a means to control runoff and erosion. There is a blend of art…it’s as much beauty as it is business.”

As a gardener I’m motivated by Pissarro’s Vegetable Garden, Overcast Morning, Eragny (1901). I want my rows neat and tidy separated by distinct bands of brown earth unchoked by weeds; I want splotches of flowery color highlighting my borders and enlivening the scene in contrast to the varying green shades of vegetable plants; I want myself and my willing workers walking slowly among the plants, picking something for dinner; at the edges and nearby I want fences, church spires, and buildings expressing their human bond with nature. Call it a sustainable and harmonious juxtaposition of activities where one footprint is not so large that it intrudes on another.

Beauty matters, even in the cauldron of political, environmental, and economic conflict. A tree in the Catskill Mountains, a rolling meadow laced by a stone wall in the British countryside, a well-mowed field in Connecticut, or a haystack in the setting sun of 19th century France awaken emotions that too often lay dormant. Like Ezra Briggs, we may never hike those hills nor sit admiringly in those fields, but we sure as hell don’t want them turned into data centers. To that end, breathtaking exhibits like DAM’s Honest Eye give us access to a world of inspiring beauty that we might otherwise never see. They may also goad us into action to ensure that natural beauty is there forever.

*I wish to express my gratitude to the Denver Art Museum and its partners for their preparation of The Honest Eye – Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism. For more information see The Honest Eye – Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism – The Shops at the Denver Art Museum

“Honey, could you pick up some fresh greens and eggs on your way home?” Ever the dutiful husband, he replied, “Of course, dear…but wait, today’s Wednesday, the farmers’ market’s not open until Saturday. Do you want me to go to the supermarket?” With a breathiness that suggested she was on the verge of revealing a big secret, she said, “Don’t you remember? We just joined the Farm Stop. We can get local food any day of the week now!”

The revelation that sent ripples of joy through this committed localist couple was the same current that buoyed nearly 250 people attending the 2026 Farm Stop Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan over Valentine’s Day weekend. If the attendees weren’t so earnestly focused on the 20-plus how-to workshops for starting, managing, and enhancing farm stops, they might have pulled out their scissors and glue-sticks to fashion a giant “I Love Local!” holiday card.

Farm stops, the answer to many devoted foodies for whom farmers’ markets and CSAs offer most of what they desire except convenience, are brick-and-mortar stores open normal retail hours. But the major attraction is their deep and abiding commitment to selling food bought exclusively from their region’s farmers—in some cases that’s up to 200 vendors per store. This values-based commitment not only celebrates and serves the bourgeoning appetite for “real food,” it’s also designed to strengthen community ties with agriculture and support its economic viability. Hence, the most unique feature of farm stops: the food is sold on consignment with the farmer receiving a whopping 75 percent of the retail price.

I had the privilege of being one of two keynote speakers at this year’s conference (the second being Stacey Abrams, which effectively made me the warm-up act). The audience was generally comprised of a youngish crowd representing the 20 or so farm stops currently operating across 12 states, mostly in the upper Midwest. Another contingent included a large number of farm stop wannabees coming from another dozen or so states. Among the former group was the Argus Farm Stop brand which has three stores in Ann Arbor currently making that city the farm stop capital of America. Also in attendance was the nation’s first farm stop, Local Roots Market and Café founded in 2009 in Wooster, Ohio. In the spirit of the larger food movement’s decades-long history, the “veterans” willingly and graciously shared their knowledge with the eager “rookies.”

Things kicked off with what amounted to a comparison between the oldest Farm Stop and the newest. Adam Schwieterman from Local Roots tells the audience that they are in a largely rural area where smaller farms abound. Wooster, with a population of only 27,000, is the area’s largest town. They opened and operated initially with lots of volunteers and are now a cooperative with 22 paid staff and a nine-person board of directors. The business includes a retail store, coffee shop, kitchen café, and artisan market (it appears customary for farm stops to have ancillary businesses to enhance sales and respond to a variety of community needs). To these ends, Local Roots also offers an electric vehicle drive-in, a school lunch program, and winter hikes. While the store sells about $1.5 million annually that benefits 170 farmers and 3360 members, the kitchen, café, and artisan market contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue that benefits dozens of local chefs and artisans.

The new kid on the farm stop block is Karissa Kary who opened the Ozarks Farm Stop this past September in Springfield, Missouri. In that city of 179,000 she found a vacant 4,000 square feet downtown space, a retail footprint that is more or less typical of early-stage farm stops. In terms of organizational and corporate structure, Farm Stops come in all shapes and sizes, from for-profit to non-profit, from cooperative to LLCs. Karissa, who has a dynamic, entrepreneurial personality, chose a limited liability corporation because it suited her business’s needs as well as her own management style. As she told the audience, “I like coops but sometimes they act too slowly!” Either way, Ozarks is fast becoming a vibrant community space that’s hosting lots of activity, and most importantly, it sold $10,000 worth of local farm goods in its first week of sales benefiting some 80 farmers.

Another feature of farms stops that is often stressed is their contribution to community economic development and quality of life. While some of that may be obvious if not a little overstated — after all, they are just one more small business competing for a community’s finite food dollars — they tend to play an outsized role with their high-profile commitment to the region’s farms. It may also be the way they enhance community connections and consciousness that send good vibrations dancing down city streets.

Something of that was evident when Ann Arbor’s Mayor Christopher Taylor spoke at a conference reception. Tall and fit, “Chris” looks and sounds like one of those new urbanist politicians who just polished off a big bowl of undressed organic greens after his daily 30-mile bike ride. “Farm stops are amazing places that add so much vitality to communities that suffer from disconnection,” he told us. “People talking to farmers; people talking to each other; it’s all great for community,” he added as a prelude to sharing his agenda for Ann Arbor which is to make it a “20-minute city.” Farm stops, in other words, are part of his vision for no one having to walk more than 20 minutes to secure their basic needs, including food. Driving less, shopping locally, and buying local food is part of what everyone hopes will make Ann Arbor carbon neutral by 2030. “I want to see a commercial and residential mix that makes neighborhoods blossom,” he added just before telling us that his daughter interned at the Argus Farm Stop during her gap year. Boy, I thought, if only the mayors I worked with 30 years ago could have put down their double-bacon cheeseburgers long enough to discuss such a vision!

While one can clearly see the attraction and draw of a farm stop in a hyper-collegiate place like Ann Arbor, it takes a little more imagination to see how they fit into places where John Deere hats vastly outnumber Yankee hats. It turns out that smaller cities and rural areas with the right kind of balance between regional agriculture, modest size populations, an emerging food culture, and the need for business development have found that farm stops are just the right ticket. Barry County, Michigan, with financing assistance from the Barry Community Foundation has started a farm stop in this mostly rural area of 63,000 people. In Jackson, Michigan, a city of 31,000, Grow Jackson, a non-profit food organization with a mission of building their community’s food security, is leading the charge for the development of a farm stop slated to open this year. To that end, they have raised half a million dollars by collaborating with the business community and local chamber of commerce. In addition to a food store, their plans include the management of a beer garden and food truck.

These stories resonated with Travis Robinson from Lexington, Kentucky and Chris DiNicolas from Asheville, North Carolina, both small to medium size cities with strong food heritages but on-going economic development needs. Travis plans to open a farm stop in 2027 adjacent to the Greyline Public Marketplace in downtown Lexington. That will add local food to an otherwise dynamic community development project that has struggled to retain a true farmers’ market. Like Travis, Chris was attending the conference to develop a farm stop in Asheville. “We’re still recovering from the impact of Helene,” he told me, the hurricane that killed 43 people in Asheville’s Buncombe County and caused $60 billion in damage across North Carolina. But he was optimistic that a farm stop would work in his community, which is why he was soaking up as much know-how as he could from the conference.

All in all, farm stops are a part of the evolutionary process we call the food movement. With the same kind of energy that has catapulted farmers’ market from a few hundred in the 1970s to 10,000 today, farm stops offer the promise of raising the percentage of locally grown food in our household meals while shoring up the regional farm sector, seemingly one season away from oblivion. But do farm stops bring us closer to completing a virtuous circle within a regionally focused food system, or do they merely perpetuate a vicious cycle of heightened expectations, never able to surmount the cold-hearted realities of the conventional marketplace? At the very least, they are capturing and recirculating food dollars within a community’s economy rather than scattering their economic impact to the far-flung corners of the food system universe. In so doing, they are testing and refining a model that doesn’t treat food like a commodity, people like consumers, or a community as merely a marketplace. They lead with values that are honed with good business practices while recognizing the multi-functionality of food and farming. And if they aren’t the answer, they are certainly one giant step closer to it.

For additional information about farm stops, you might like the following:

Food Sleuth Radio’s Melinda Hemmelgarn

I had the privilege in December to be interviewed by Melinda Hemmelgarn, the originator, instigator, and officiator of Food Sleuth Radio. With over 700 episodes spanning some 17 years, Melinda has faithfully, if not religiously executed the duties of an investigative registered dietitian to inspect, dissect, and occasionally reject nearly every element of this nation’s food system. Her co-pilot, producer, and husband Dan Hemmelgarn staffs the controls of their recording studio, and together they plot their broadcasts from an abandoned SAC missile silo somewhere under the central plains of Missouri. More likely, you’ll catch them in the heady environs of Columbia where they hang out with non-profit, listener-supported KOPN Radio which pumps the unrestrained voice of truth from the banks of the Mississippi to the shores of the Missouri. When conditions are right and sunspot activity low, KOPN distributes the words and wisdom of Melinda and her expert guests to over 50 outlets across these United States.

With more good fortune than I deserve, Food Sleuth Radio gave my new book The Road to a Hunger-Free America a generous amount of airtime to dig deeply into my story, the book’s story, and how it might enrich your story. Though listening to these two, 28-minute interviews is not an allowable excuse for not buying the book, they provide what I think is a great introduction to its themes and the 23 essays that give life to this wonderful adventure we call the food movement. And not only did Melinda do an exceptional job of enabling me to unspool my tale, she used her interrogation skills to extract some never before told facts about me!

Tune in here for Part One: PRX » Piece » Mark Winne, MS, food justice advocate and author of The Road to a Hunger-Free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne. (Part 1 of 2)

Dial in here for Part Two: PRX » Piece » Mark Winne, MS, discusses his latest book, The Road to a Hunger-Free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne. (Part 2 of 2)

And to read the entire unvarnished story, you can purchase the book here: The Road to a Hunger-Free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne: Mark Winne: Bloomsbury Academic – Bloomsbury

I’m not one to obsess over the historical antecedents of oppression. Perhaps because I take it as a given that civilization’s conflict-ridden unfolding has and always will be a dialectic of sorts between those with power and those without. But don’t let my intentional ignorance mislead you – my sympathies have always been with the oppressed because that’s how I was brought up – it’s just that a too-detailed analysis of the whys and wherefores of history sometime seem superfluous to the day’s realities. Bullies are a part of life, I’ve assumed, whether they are in the school playground, directing armed forces across the world stage, or slapping high tariffs on poor nations. All I need to know is that I should oppose oppressors, not appease them.

That simplistic model suited me fine for a while, that is until my reading and experience began to reveal certain patterns, including history’s masochistic tendency to repeat itself. Over the past year, for instance, I’ve been taking a deeper dive into the history of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. My most recent plunge was viewing the film Palestine 36, a 2025 historical drama written and directed by Annemarie Jacir. The film recounts the 1936–1939 Arab revolt against British colonial rule in Palestine prior to the formation of the Israeli state in 1948. It is powerful, critically acclaimed, and despite the fact that it is heavily slanted toward the Palestinian viewpoint, historically accurate. (But talk about a short film run! My movie-loving town of Santa Fe had exactly one screening of Palestine 36. Me and my 12 fellow audience members loved it!)

Coincidentally for me, this viewing was followed one day later by a webinar that was sponsored by the New Israel Fund (NIF) that gave a “boots on the ground” account of the current state of Jewish settler violence against Palestinians on the West Bank The West Bank at Boiling Point: Standing Up to Settler Violence • New Israel Fund. In case you’re wondering, the violence is worse now than when I wrote a post-October 7th essay on the intentional destruction of Palestinian crops and human life. That account can be found in my new book The Road to a Hunger-Free America (The Road to a Hunger-Free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne: Mark Winne: Bloomsbury Academic – Bloomsbury).

Combined, these two exposures present the heartbreaking, gut-wrenching consequences of history-past and present which appears to be continuous river of blood that may be too wide to ever bridge. We’re reminded of the millennia of the world’s Jewry perpetually persecuted and yearning for a homeland. We see Britain, at the helm of its crumbling empire, including Palestine, enabling (The Balfour Declaration – 1917; the Peel Commission – 1936) the early Zionists to begin their “Exodus” into Palestine. We witness Arabs, whose tenacious love of their land is rooted in villages where they have tended the same olive trees and grazed the same pastures for centuries. Later, Britain would aide and abet Jewish settlers in seizing Arab land (today that task is performed by the Israeli Defense Forces) in the same way that the American calvary and federal government protected settlers who were trampling Native American land. Fort Apache-like, the early Jewish settlers built (and continue to build) walled compounds with watchtowers, supposedly to ward off hostile reactions from those whose land they are stealing.

Like their forebears of 90 years ago, today’s illegal Jewish settlements continue to push into the West Bank, destroying Palestinian homes, vehicles, and agricultural fields. The New Israel Fund webinar (11/10/25) painted an updated picture of the surge of settler killing and destruction that the United Nations has characterized as “the worst violence ever.” Providing what they call a “protective presence”, the NIF creates a human shield by courageously placing its staff and volunteers between the Palestinians and hostile Jewish West Bank settlers. The NIF activists include Israeli Jews, Jews from other countries, Palestinians, and non-Jewish supporters. They also support Palestinian resilience by rebuilding homes and replanting olive trees destroyed by rampaging settlers.

Here are some highlights from the webinar’s presenters:

Eid Suleiman Hathaleen (Palestinian) from Umm al-Khair village saw a friend murdered by a settler. IDF tactics now include placing outposts in Palestinian villages and accusing villagers of being members of Hamas as a justification for their harassment. He reported that among the NIF volunteers were two American activists who were deported by the Israeli government.

Ziv Stahl, Director of Yesh Din which is a NIF partner that documents settler violence on the West Bank and provides legal support to Palestinians. He said West Bank settlers want to double their numbers from the current level of about half a million to one million. He said, “hundreds of settlers raid villages destroying chicken coops, cars, and everything. The IDF often accompanies them.” He confirmed that the West Bank is much worse and more violent than it has been.

Rabbi Avi Dabush, a leader of Rabbis for Human Rights, organizes volunteers to plant trees and harvest olives. He said they go into the fields everyday but are becoming more worried about how to protect themselves as well as the Palestinian farmers. He referred to the settlers as “Jewish terrorists who think God is talking to them.” His international group of 50 volunteers were there for 22 days this fall harvesting olives and were attacked by settlers on 3 of those days. To their traditional arsenal of guns, clubs, and machetes, the settlers are now using drones, one of which harmed a female rabbi when it flew into her head. At one point, their group was surrounded by armed settlers who fired their guns in the air. The Rabbi went on to say that “The village’s Palestinian mayor said this happens all the time.”

In addition to providing direct assistance through solidarity with Palestinians, NIF’s Executive Director Daniel Sokatch described how the organization pushes back against the authoritarianism of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his supporters, whom Sokatch labeled the “MAGA Likud.” He summed up NIF’s combined service and policy role by invoking the quote “We comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

NIF’s biggest recipient of financial support is the World Central Kitchen (WCK). Nearly $3 millions of NIF funds are directed at WCK’s work preparing millions of meals for the severely afflicted people of Gaza. Tunde Wockman, one of WCK’s key staff in Gaza, ran down the numbers of what one can only imagine is the most excruciatingly difficult relief mission in recent times. She said that six large WCK kitchens around Gaza have prepared 160 million hot meals since October 7th. Additionally, WCK operates two large mobile bread trucks that bake 60,000 loaves a day; they are serving food in Gazan schools and distributing infant formula in what remains of the territory’s hospitals. But what I found most striking about Ms. Wockman’s report was their attention to the local food system. While they will normally source their food from local sources, that task is impossible in today’s Gaza. But when it comes to the workers, it’s a different story. “We make local people the architects of their own relief,” she said. In Gaza, WCK does not utilize well-intentioned volunteers from first world countries; they train and use over 1,000 Palestinians to prepare and distribute food to their own starving people.

So much hate and heartache have ground humanity down over the centuries, that it’s not surprising we feel compelled to celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem and Hanukkah’s triumph of light over darkness. Without the star and the candle, we’d be consumed by the darkness that threatens to crowd hope from our hearts.  The long-running pain that is Palestine made me think of a few lines from Bruce Springsteen: “On the plains of Jordan/I cut my bow from the wood/Of this tree of evil/Of this tree of good.” We are all that one tree whose roots may at times be watered by the bloodlust of a thousand years. But it may also find nourishment from the good works of the likes of the New Israel Fund, Yesh Din, the World Central Kitchen, and many others whose yearning for the light may yet drown the darkness. That’s where I’m putting my money; I hope you might do the same.

Trump’s Pro-Hunger Agenda

Andy Fisher, author of Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporations and Anti-Hunger Groups (MIT Press, 2017), always has an unorthodox take on the days’ events. As we’ve watched the whole Trump-initiated food stamp debacle unfold – leaving 42 million of America’s most vulnerable people in a heightened state of food insecurity – it’s natural to take sides and simplify the problem. We see a cruel President use political leverage against Democrats by withholding Congressionally approved funds to feed SNAP recipients during the government shutdown; we see Democrats, emergency food providers, and just about every other sentient being scream at him for starving the poor. But behind what is certainly a black and white/good versus evil clash is also a more nuanced explanation of how our hard driving, take no prisoners economic system tolerates a level of desperation that necessitates the nation’s SNAP program. That’s why I’ve come to enjoy Mr. Fisher’s work over the years. He looks past the easy assumptions and takes on the underlying systemic causes and failures of the American economic behemoth. Give his new article a thoughtful read. You’re likely to see things a little bit differently. Read it here: Trump’s Pro-Hunger Agenda and the Cruel Logic of Capitalism | The MIT Press Reader

Save 30% on My New Book!

If you are reading this blog on the day it’s posted (11/24), I should warn you that you only have 31 shopping days left until Christmas! Does that realization send a hot bolt of fear through your internal organs? Do you feel a smothering blanket of anxiety descend on you? Worry no more; The Road to a Hunger-Free America: Selected Writings of Mark Winne is now available directly from the publisher at 30% off the list price. After all, nothing says “you are a special person in my life” like the gift of good literature. Even if holiday shopping isn’t worrisome, and you’ve been meaning to buy a copy all along, you’re in luck! The sale was just announced, so this is one of those times when procrastination pays off. But don’t delay any further! This offer is only available until December 7th. Here’s the link to low-cost enlightenment: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/9798765132340

All Creatures Small and Smaller  

I can remember becoming an enthusiastic amateur soil scientist in my late 20s. My interest was spurred by an effort to dramatically expand the number of community gardens where I was working in Hartford, Connecticut. Given the abysmal selection of decent, even safe growing spaces among some rather terrifying-looking vacant lots, we had to draw on a special biological alchemy to create semi-natural mediums capable of producing edible crops. With diligent research, neighborhood sweat equity, and hundreds of cubic yards of composted leaf mulch, we finally succeeded in creating enough “growable” space for a couple of hundred families.

As my personal interest in gardening grew over the years – I’ve counted 15 community and backyard gardens in my lifetime start-up list – so has my love for soil. The sensual high point of every gardening year takes place in early spring when I plunge my hands into a garden bed and cradle a cool, crumbly bowl. Inhaling it deeply, I now have enough years under my belt that I can tell, with some accuracy, what ingredients are in the mix and what’s missing. While a few books, articles, and pamphlets have educated my olfactory faculties along the way, I still know there’s a pretty big gap between what I know and don’t know about the life of that soil. Thanks to a lovely, little book called What if Soil Microbes Mattered – Our Health Depends on Them, my knowledge gap has not only closed, but it has also become enlivened by an awareness of a life I cannot see.

Written by a former colleague of mine at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future, Leo Horrigan, Microbes takes us on an underground tour of fungus, bacteria, and a “microscopic universe that is essential to plant health.” Not only is most of this life-giving activity out of sight, even when we turn the soil over with a spading fork, it’s also a busy subsurface city where millions of invisible particles move to and froe. (Get it for free: a PDF version of the book here and an audio version here.)

So, what’s the matter with the matter? Mr. Horrigan tells us that it has been estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of our soil’s carbon has been lost due to agriculture with most of it ending up in the atmosphere. “The Chemical Age of Agriculture has greatly harmed soil microbes—and therefore soil ecosystems. This damage has had a cascading effect on farms…and rural communities…. If agriculture became attuned to the needs and functions of soil microbes, this would open enormous possibilities for improved agronomic, ecologic and economic outcomes.”

Another way to put it: If we don’t learn to respect our dirt, we’re going to be in a world of hurt.

Befitting its tiny subjects, Microbes is a slim, some might say petite volume of 97 pages. Without sacrificing the science or the depth of its research (32 of those pages are citations), Mr. Horrigan presents a necessarily complex subject in a readable and accessible fashion. From fresh-faced high schoolers to decomposing gardeners like me, What If Microbes Mattered? will make us all better-informed stewards of the earth.

I’ve always been fascinated by how and what city mayors eat. One of my early favorites was the now-deceased mayor of Hartford and retired firefighter, Mike Peters. As a man of considerable rotundity, he had elevated the usual hot-dog chomping American mayoral image to a more refined version of “hizzoner” holding court at the city’s best steakhouse. Knowing his gustatory habits, I would occasionally stop by in hopes of turning his love for food into a food policy moment. But mixing his pleasure with business required more delicacy than I had yet mustered at that early point in my career. While I can point to a minor success or two – an amuse-bouche, as it were – pairing the plight of Hartford’s hungry children with the mayor’s favorite cabernet was a poor choice.

Fast forward 30 years to November 4, 2025, and we can see that food and food policy are no longer political after thoughts. The recent election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City was preceded by a New York Times headline that read, “Mamdani built a campaign around food.” It included a quote from Grant Davis Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, who noted that Mr. Mamdani had the exceptional ability to reference food at “the personal level and the policy level.” You can see how that fusion plays out when the mayor-to-be enjoys a chicken biryani with worshipful gusto at the open-all-night Kabab King, then makes a brilliant video to illustrate how the price of a chicken hallah dish can be reduced by modifying government’s regulatory burden on street vendors.

It made me wonder if Mayor Mamdani had read my new book The Road to a Hunger Free America** that includes an essay on Paterson, New Jersey and its mayor of Arab American heritage, Andres Sayegh. As mayor, Sayegh has been a tireless promoter of everything Paterson, including its outstanding Palestinian restaurants. His caloric energy was fuel for the city’s website that’s titled “Paterson: Great Falls, Great Food, Great Future,” one of the few city taglines I’ve seen that put food forward. This promotional flourish extends to several tangible city initiatives designed to solve Paterson’s numerous food access and affordability problems. In Mamdani’s case, it’s his campaign proposal to develop city-managed supermarkets in each of New York’s five boroughs that has grabbed public attention. Regardless of which side of the Hudson River you find yourself on, the message coming from elected officials is that we should joyfully celebrate the wonders of our respective urban cuisines. At the same time, city halls must deploy innovative policies to promote robust food economies and greater food security.

Colorado Goes Big on School Meals

With less national fanfare than the Big Apple, two Colorado ballot measures succeeded in putting more apples into the little hands of school children. By wide margins, the state’s voters approved Proposition LL which will allow school meal programs to keep $12 million of additional tax money to fund Healthy School Meals for All, a measure that Colorado voters passed in 2022. But even more significant was the passage of Proposition MM, especially if you’re interested in the commitment of taxpayers to childhood nutrition. MM (not M&Ms) will lower state tax deductions on income earners over $300,000 per year. This will add approximately $95 million per year to Colorado’s school food service budgets. In other words, nearly 60 percent of the state’s voters chose taxing the rich rather than eating the rich to continue Colorado’s reputation as the healthiest state in the country.

As one who admittedly finds pleasure in analyzing voting patterns at very local levels, I couldn’t help but notice that all of eastern Colorado voted overwhelmingly against both LL and MM. Yes, this is a traditionally conservative area made up of small towns, ranchers, and farmers. But they have children too, and by all accounts they want them to be as well-nourished as the kids in Denver and Boulder. Then it occurred to me that this same region constitutes much of Congressional District 4 which is represented by the notorious half-wit, Lauren Boebert. Among a long list of flaws, foibles, and failures, Boebert recently donned a racist Halloween costume that belittled and degraded Latinos. Now that Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to be having a Come-to-Jesus moment, Ms. Boebert has officially become the House of Representative’s Head Lunatic in Residence. It’s my considered opinion that with intelligent and responsible political leadership, the people of CO CD-4 will one day rekindle their innate compassion to support public efforts to bring the best food possible to all Colorado children.

SNAP

Of course, these local and statewide November 4th elections took place against the striking backdrop of a suspended SNAP program. To quote Federal District Court Judge John McConnell’s ruling that rebuked the Administration’s denial of emergency SNAP fund use, “This should never happen in America.” But it has and it did. Forty-two million Americans are now juggling their rent, food, and car money to see how to stretch their already slim budgets to accommodate the absence of SNAP benefits.

What kind of cojones does it take for Trump to resist a direct order from the American judiciary to feed the country’s most vulnerable people with emergency funds ($5 to $6 billion) that have been appropriated by Congress as well as other available funds within Section 32 (many billions of dollars). And the next headline of note, juxtaposed with the dire SNAP news, was the announcement that Elon Musk will receive a payment of one trillion dollars for God knows what. This is an amount that is capable of funding the entire food stamp program for the next ten years! In deference to my late mother who has scolded me for using the “f” word when expressing my disgust with such yawning injustices as this one, allow me to say that this is totally copulated up!

A Thousand Points of Light Across the Nation; One Burned Out Bulb in Washington

Fortunately for those who are victims of Trumpism, American community morality belies the saying that “Leaders are only as good as the people who follow them.” The people across America are far better; they are rising to the occasion by taking care of their own, while the President gags on his own venom and lavishes attention on himself. Supermarket customers are adding $5 to their tab at the check-out counter for the local food bank, food and cash donations are flowing into food pantries, pop-up food sites are showing up in bookstores, and late-night TV celebrities are setting up food donation and giveaway stations in their studio’s parking lots.

With less fanfare, food policy councils, United Ways, and other community-based service institutions are coordinating and supporting the work of numerous emergency food sites. They are also using data and their collective knowledge of the community to spotlight groups of greatest need. For instance, I’ve followed the work of the Knoxville (Tenn.) Food Policy Council over the last several months. Not only are their members gathering information about the region’s food needs and disseminating lists of resources to the wider community, but the council has also identified unique pockets of community hardship. These are about 250 people “including refugees, parolees, and asylees [who] will no longer have access to these [SNAP] benefits when the government re-opens, and SNAP is re-established.” In an additional turn of the screw, Trump’s Neanderthals have excluded categories of people, typically the most vulnerable, from receiving food assistance.

As big-hearted and motivated by an enormous charitable impulse as these private local endeavors are, remember that public food assistance out spends its private sector brethren by a ratio of 9 to 1. Food banks, etc. can never rebuild the dam, they can only plug the leaks. Most of them know that, but with enormous courage they have not retreated from shoring up the dam that threatens to burst and drown them.

What, if any, morality guides the leadership of this nation? A snake pit of unprecedented greed and servile self-interest writhes down White House corridors tarnished by the dirt of its own occupants. It will take several terms of new and decent administrations to purge “the people’s house” of the stink and filth now permeating its hallowed halls. But as a practical and political matter, we can build food policy platforms – both locally and nationally – based on access to healthy and affordable food. Trump says grocery prices are “way down.” He lies. CNN says grocery prices were up 2.7 percent in September. An NBC poll found that only 30 percent of voters believe Trump has lived up to their expectations that he would reduce inflation.

Policy actions like those proposed by Mamdani in New York City, expanding school nutrition initiatives like those underway in Colorado, and hyper-vigilance like you find in the caring community of Knoxville are the tickets we need to ride the train to food security. But we must also invite all to ascend a higher moral ground and take back a federal government quickly eroding under Republican control. As New York’s Mayor-elect said in his victory speech: “Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery bike handlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns: These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.” And how often have we ignored the world’s greatest invitation to safety and freedom that New Jersey’s Governor-elect, Mikie Sherrill’s victory speech echoed from the Statue of Liberty located only a few miles away: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Food security, dietary health, and food as an economic engine are not only important messages, they have also become the medium as well. Whether you’re discussing the price of eggs, the regulation of food trucks, immigrants working in restaurant kitchens, termination of the food stamp program, school meals, or retail food stores, food issues are not only a poignant reminder of America’s social and economic injustices; they are now vehicles for illustrating larger problems and the opportunities for a better American life.

** My new book “The Road to a Hunger-Free America — Selected Writings of Mark Winne” is available at a 20% discount if you buy it online directly from the publisher at bloomsbury.com/9798765132340. Use discount code GLRBD8.

On October 28, I attempted to “boost” my recent Facebook post that promoted my new book The Road to a Hunger-Free America (that post is replicated here). For those not familiar with Facebook (a form of ignorance I would heartily endorse), the boost function places your post before a much wider audience of viewers than most people would have as mere Facebook “friends.” A small fee and a short review process are required for Facebook to approve your boost. Within five minutes of submitting my request, I received a rejection notice with a boilerplate explanation that contained the following sentence:

My new book “The Road to a Hunger-Free America — Selected Writings of Mark Winne” is available at a 20% discount from bloomsbury.com/9798765132340 with discount code GLRBD8. L to R: Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh, Mark Winne, and Shana Mandradge.

“Your ad may have been rejected because it mentions politicians or is about sensitive social issues that could influence public opinion, how people vote and may impact the outcome of an election or pending legislation.”

I was given an opportunity to appeal their decision, which I did noting that yes, hunger is a “sensitive social issue” but not one I was taking a position on in my post. And even though the Mayor of Paterson, NJ appeared in the photo, there was no explicit or implicit attempt to support him or influence public opinion (he’s not even running for office). God-forbid that one might publicly suggest that hunger is not a desirable state of affairs, or that the chief elected official of a lower income city might be concerned about the food security of his citizens. But other than “Hunger” being in the book’s title, no clever, thinly disguised behavioral modification tricks were employed by the manipulative mastermind, Mark Winne.

Facebook’s AI Appeals Robot rendered a verdict in less time than it takes a hungry man to eat a cheese sandwich: “Appeal denied.” It then had the chutzpah to ask me if I was satisfied with the process and provided a little box in which to write a comment. Boiling over, I probably didn’t help my case by writing an expletive-laced comment describing how the CEOs of Meta/Facebook and the United States of America were probably in cahoots with each other. After all, keeping the lid on anything that speaks of dissent is clearly in the self-interests of those who have no need for democracy.

Given that 42 million Americans are staring into the abyss of a pretty lean November, it would be of little surprise that Trump, Zuckerberg, and their cronies are motivated to downplay or distract Americans from Republican efforts to inflict as much pain as possible on SNAP recipients. Refusal by this Administration to take care of the Nation’s most vulnerable–-the majority of SNAP recipients being elderly, children, and disabled—and callously shift the burden of nourishing the needy to the already over-burdened food banking community reaches new heights of unconscionability.

If Facebook is willing to squelch a benign attempt by a lowly author to sell a book about hunger, what lengths will it go to undermine the rising tide of discontent with a President who is corrupt, despotic, and immune to the sufferings of his own people.