National Food Day

National Food Day is October 24^th! 

As you may know, Food Day is a nationwide celebration and a movement toward healthy, affordable, and sustainable food that builds all year long and culminates in a day of action on October 24 every year.

The theme for 2013 is food education, with a special focus on bringing the public, especially kids, food education and cooking skills.  This serves as a great opportunity for our WIC clinics to highlight their new and ongoing efforts.

To help support our participation in this event, the coordinators of Food Day have created the attached PDF that lists ideas for how your WIC clinic can be involved. In the past, the Genesse County Health Department, for example, planned alongside community partners to host farmers’ markets events. This year, the Hawaii WIC Program will launch a "Be Sugar Savvy" campaign.

More information regarding Food Day Campaign can be found on their official website: http://www.foodday.org/

Food Day's national priorities address overarching concerns within the food system and provide common ground for building the food movement. Food Day aims to: 

• Promote safer, healthier diets: The foods we eat should promote, not undermine, our good health. Yet, every year we spend more than $150 billion on obesity-related health care costs, plus another $73 billion in reduced productivity.

• Support sustainable and organic farms: Currently, sustainable farms receive little to no federal support and often lack market access to keep them competitive. Meanwhile, the largest 10 percent of industrialized farms—which contribute to poor health and severe environmental degradation—receive 75 percent of all farm subsidies.

• Reduce hunger: Currently, around 50 million Americans are considered "food insecure", or near hunger, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) participation is at an all-time high. SNAP is vital to reducing hunger, but the program’s budget is under constant attack while federal measures to increase food access are minimal.

• Reform factory farms to protect the environment and farm animals: Today, most farm animals are confined in “factory farms”—sometimes containing as many as 50,000-100,000 cattle, hens, or pigs. These practices result in needless animal abuse and illness, environmental degradation, and harm the people who live in and around those facilities.

• Support fair working conditions for food and farm workers: 20 million workers throughout the U.S. food system harvest, process, ship, sell, cook, and serve the food we eat every day. And yet, many farmworkers earn well below poverty levels while the tipped minimum wage for restaurant servers has remained at $2.13 per hour for the last 21 years.

Click on the priorities for facts, resources, and actions you can take to help work towards a healthy, sustainable, affordable, and fair food system!

Be a leader of the Real Food movement

Host an event (or two) and bring the celebration to your community on October 24. Getting involved is easy. Anyone can organize Food Day activities in their community, whether you’re actively involved in efforts to reform our food system, or whether you’re simply interested in learning more about food issues. Food Day will be as successful as you make it.

Teach a cooking class to help build healthy relationships with food, or organize a vegetable-identification contest in your child's elementary school. A healthy potluck dinner with friends and family is another easy way to celebrate. College students could organize forums that explore how our dietary choices impact the environment, the health of farm workers, and the treatment of animals. Health departments could kick off weight-loss campaigns. And city councils could hold hearings on how to bring supermarkets and farmers’ markets to underserved areas.

Looking for something a little simpler? Try incorporating Food Day into an existing community event or harvest festival around the same time as Food Day. Invite farmers to talk with customers at your favorite local restaurant or farmers market. Or, host a healthy potluck dinner with friends and family as another easy way to celebrate.

For more event ideas and organizing tips check out our Guides for Organizers.