Over the summer, students received a collection of essays by New York Times and T Magazine columnist Ligaya Mishan. Mishan has been chosen as this year’s Mary Higgins Clark Chair in Creative Writing. She is known for her Hungry City column, which explores many of New York’s unsung restaurants and multicultural fare often found in the city’s outer boroughs. Yes, she reviews haute cuisine, but she also grapples with cultural issues found in the workaday kitchens of Jackson Heights, Queens, or Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

“My job was to tell you whether the food was good or not and describe the food, but at a certain point I ran out of words,” she told FCLC students at their Aug. 27 orientation. “I had to find the stories around the food. Once I started asking questions and found out the stories about the people who make the food, that was far more interesting than whether it was delicious or not.” Mishan’s essays and talk provided a precursor for the year that lies ahead. She delved into questions of authenticity, cultural appropriation, and the very notion of “ethnic” food.

“Everybody has ethnicity,” she said. “In the West, we only think of ethnic as nonwestern.”

Sarah Gambito, associate professor and director of the creative writing program, was on the committee that helped select Mishan as the Mary Higgins Clark Chair.

“She’s really a cultural critic,” said Gambito, adding that the Mishan also happens to be the first person of color to hold the chair.

“We were interested in food as culture,” said Gambito, author of Loves You, a book published this year that is part poetry, part cookbook. “A lot of our first-year students are new to New York City … Food is a way to travel and learn about the city.”

Mishan will return to campus on Oct. 7 to deliver the annual Mary Higgins Clark lecture, titled, “Off the Rails in Hungry City: Confessions of an Accidental Food Writer.” The lecture is open to the public, though first-year students are particularly encouraged to attend. Gambito said, “Part of the mission of the chair is to provide different avenues of thought for students to find their way in the world.” To that end, Mishan will return once again in the spring to offer students a food-centered walking tour.

Thinking Beyond Food as Culture

When one thinks of food, one often conjures images of home and one’s culture. But there are other things to think about when studying the food we eat. There are environmental concerns related to mass food production. There are body image and eating disorders to consider. There are food deserts. All this, and much more, will be parsed and pondered by the Fordham College of Lincoln Center Class of 2023, said FCLC Dean Laura Auricchio, Ph.D.

Auricchio said she, too, usually associates food with culture. She remembers when her Italian-born grandmother prepared Sunday dinners served at 3 p.m. While the meatball recipe was shared, her grandmother clearly left something out.

“No one could ever replicate them, how do they compare to grandma’s became a mythical link to our Italian past,” she said. “But when [my grandmother]came to the U.S., it wasn’t ethnic food; it was just food, it was food of the lower classes.”

But whether it was her meatballs served by her father’s side of the family or corned beef and cabbage dished out on her mother’s side, her New York City upbringing was distinct from the experience of young people growing up in “food deserts” found in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where fast-food restaurants vastly outnumber supermarkets with fresh vegetables. She said this would be one of the many issues that “Food for Thought” will also address.

On Oct. 10, up to 15 students can sign up to visit and help garden at the New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Academy. The academy is a hands-on educational garden where local kids from the Bronx get the rare opportunity to help raise and harvest vegetables. Ram Vans will take FCLC students to the garden for a tour, a bit of gardening, and a tasting.

“We want students to learn about food insecurity and food deserts,” said Auricchio. “But we also have a great relationship with the Botanical Garden that we want Lincoln Center students to take advantage of.”

With the support of the Office of the Dean of Students, Office of Residential Life, and other University groups, the Fordham College at Lincoln Center Dean’s Office has commitments to hold several other events with dates yet to be announced.

Continuing on the theme of food justice, Associate Professor of Spanish Carey Kasten, Ph.D., will take students to visit New Roots Community Farm, a Bronx collective that provides urban agriculture education to nearby residents.

A visit to “Chow,” an exhibition at the Museum of Food and Drink, will examine how Chinese American restaurants relate to notions of stereotype, tradition, food culture, and what it means to be American.

Together with Aramark, Fordham food services will provide “city nights,” highlighting the cuisine of different cities and regions, from Chicago’s deep dish pizzas to Philly’s cheesesteaks. The theme nights should help cure a bit of homesickness, Auricchio said, and allows students to share their local fare.

In partnership with Counseling and Psychological Services, the FCLC dean’s office will hold a session on eating disorders, which affects more students than many realize.

“We have a myth in our mind about who suffers from eating disorders; even if you don’t have that challenge, you may very well have friends and family who are struggling with eating disorders and you might not know,” said Auricchio.

In partnership with Campus Ministry, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, Commuter Freshmen Mentors, and Residential Life, there will be opportunities for students to engage with St. Paul the Apostle’s food projects.

“We wanted to create events where commuter students and resident students could engage in our community right here in the Lincoln Center neighborhood,” said Auricchio. “Most people think of this as a very wealthy area, and it is, but there’s also a lot of need here. We can engage with those communities and we should.”

Fabio Parasecoli, author of Food (MIT Press, 2019), will drop by for a lunchtime talk on food networks focusing on how food gets to our tables.

“Every time we eat we connect to these complex networks and we need to think of the impact that they have on the world,” said Auricchio.

“Look who’s here!” a gray-haired woman beams at her.

Grant is the vice president of community connections and reach for the Food Bank for New York City, which seeks to connect the one-in-five New Yorkers who face food insecurity each year to long-term, sustainable ways to end hunger. This means providing 60 million free meals per year citywide, plus a range of other services, including free tax counseling and assistance with enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Grant frequents the Harlem location about once a week to chat with the approximately 150 seniors who come regularly for meals, fitness activities, cooking demonstrations, and to shop in the pantry. “I check in with everybody,” says Grant, GSS ’00, ’07. “I hear about their grandkids. They tell me what they need and what we can improve. If I notice someone hasn’t shown up in a few weeks, I call their family. And, if I miss a week or go on vacation, they’ll say, ‘We haven’t seen you in a while.’”

Her job is to build partnerships citywide to help people live independently and help families have security around food. But at the heart of her work is the human connection, the kind she fosters in this dining room.

A Focus on Children and Families

Grant joined the Food Bank as a senior director in 2013, after working 17 years in foster care at the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). During that time, she earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, and served as an adjunct professor at the school for nine years. As she worked on family reunification cases at the ACS, she learned that a lack of access to food was often equated to neglect.

“I thought it was criminal to have families be at risk of losing their children because they couldn’t afford to feed their families,” she says.

The realization struck a personal chord. A native of Rockaway, Queens, Grant grew up in a single-parent household. Her working mother used food stamps to help provide for Grant and her younger brother.

“I didn’t know anything about food banking [when I worked at the ACS], but I knew a whole lot about food insecurity—and I knew how to connect with people and how to problem-solve around what they need,” she says.

She’s trying to impart these lessons to her 8-year-old daughter, Mackenzie, who sometimes helps out at the community kitchen and pantry. Grant proudly holds up a notebook on a desk there in which Mackenzie had scribbled, “I AM A FOOD BANKER FOR LIFE,” and “#SquadGoals.”

Expanding the Food Bank’s Reach

Under Grant’s lead, the Food Bank has installed food pantries on 11 campuses of the City University of New York and in probation offices in all five boroughs. She also oversees a health education program in more than 200 low-income public schools that trains teachers to implement nutrition education lessons. The Food Bank also operates campus pantries in more than 40 low-income public schools citywide.

Yet her proudest achievement harkens back to her focus on children and families. Last year, she founded a food pantry at an ACS office that now also stocks clothing, diapers, books, toys, and other items for children and babies. She is currently working with ACS to install more food pantries at ACS locations across the city.

“To be able to focus on my love and passion for children and families and create partnerships to serve those families during some of the worst times they experience, it’s a joy and a victory,” she says.

At the Food Bank, Grant is a leader. In the community kitchen dining room, she prefers to be seen simply as a friend to the people she serves.

“I feel strongly that my ability to connect with people and to understand them in their environments comes from my background in social work,” Grant says. “It’s all about human dignity.”

—Gina Ciliberto, FCRH ’12

On April 1, the fifth annual Conference for Positive Marketing drew scholars and practitioners to the Lincoln Center campus to strategize on how to tap into consumer motivation for the sake of empowering and energizing these markets to create the greatest good for the world.

“Marketing strategies look at how we can influence consumers to take a certain action or change their behavior in some way,” said conference presenter Eve Rapp, PhD, an associate professor of business at Salem College.

“This conference is a forum to talk about how we can use our roles as marketers to look at societal problems and to make a positive difference.”

Rapp and her colleagues—Jaya Rapp, senior analyst of market research at Amway Corporation, and Ben Applebaum, executive creative director at Colangelo marketing agency—offered an interactive example of positive marketing through their presentation, “Using A Human-Centered Design Process to Tackle the Societal Problem of Food Waste.”

What is a human-centered design?

EVE RAPP: Human-centered design is similar to qualitative research [as opposed to quantitative research]insofar as it’s about gathering insights from the consumers themselves. It comes down to sitting with consumers, talking with them, and finding out how and why they act they way they do, or shop the way they do. For instance, [in the case of food waste,]what do you know about the issue? What would it take for you do change the way you purchase or store food?

How do marketers create behavior change in consumers around wasting food?

ER: The EPA and the USDA have called for the food industry to cut waste by 50 percent by 2030. To do this, we need to work with food manufacturers, growers, grocery stores, and other stakeholders. But all of these stakeholders are driven by consumer behavior. So, any real change has to also involve the consumer. Our session explores what we can do to make people aware of the problem of food waste, figure out what motivates their shopping choices, and then use that incentivize them to change their behavior.

Can you give an example?

ER: One of the most successful strategies in terms of battling food waste was by the French supermarket Intermarché, which ran a campaign called “Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables” to help sell the disfigured fruits and vegetables that usually get thrown away. They put a humorous spin on “ugly” fruits by talking about the “disfigured eggplant,” the “grotesque apple,” and the “failed lemon,” and in doing so let people know that these fruits and vegetables are just as good as ones that look prettier. In addition, they sold these “ugly” fruits and vegetables at a 30 percent discount. It turned out to be a very successful campaign.

How do you approach this issue?

ER: In the first part of our talk, we set the stage about food waste and why we need to care about it. Second, we’ll do a group activity to demonstrate the process of human-centered design. Finally, we talk about how to put these ideas into a marketing platform to create messages that will start changing behavior. So, [it is]a bit of an inventive approach to show the audience—as participants and as consumers—how this process would work for a larger societal problem like this.

The conference was sponsored by the Center for Positive Marketing at Fordham. Visit the conference website for more information.

Fordham’s Garrett Broad, an assistant professor of communications and media studies, penned a new piece for The Huffington Post about the importance of the Black Panther Party’s anti-hunger initiatives during its heyday. His piece critiques the absence of this story from mainstream history and the mainstream food movement, and describes the role it plays in shaping the actions of food justice activists.

Broad, the author of the recently released More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016), says the food justice aspect of the Black Panthers Party is a “story that often goes untold, both in media narratives about the Panthers and throughout the food movement itself.

“Setting the BPP’s flaws aside – the truth is that at a moment when Black Americans were suffering from widespread hunger, sickness, unemployment, and police violence, the Black Panther Party was there to try to fill the gaps that institutional racism and government negligence had created. The late 1960s saw the Panthers develop a host of community-based initiatives, with chapters across the country shifting their focus away from armed militancy and toward the development of “survival programs” — survival pending revolution, of course,” he writes.

Read his entire piece here, and then read our story on Broad’s new book.

(Top photo: Charles Bursey hands a plate of food to a child seated at a Free Breakfast Program. Photograph via Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch/National Geographic)

Unfortunately, if you belong to the wrong demographic, then it’s unlikely you have benefitted from this cornucopia of healthful options, says Garrett Broad, PhD, an assistant professor of communications and media studies.

In his new book, More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016), Broad takes a comprehensive look at the food crisis facing marginalized communities and how the industrial food system has exacerbated the problem.

“Lower income communities have grocery stores that are more expensive and lower quality,” Broad said. “But the issue is about more than food… Inequity in the food system is not isolated from other inequities.”

Broad explained that there is an ever-widening food gap, as wealthier citizens enjoy a bounty of food options while historically marginalized communities are left to forage in “food deserts,” areas that lack access to affordable, high-quality food.

This disparity is no accident, Broad said. At the heart of food injustice is structural racism and socioeconomic inequality.

“Food is an entry point into a larger conversation about various social and political changes that can increase the health of our society. For instance, if we had better rent control, then people wouldn’t have to spend 65 percent of their income on housing and would instead have more disposable income to think about food quality rather than just low prices.”

Some groups, particularly large corporations seeking to “give back” to the community, have attempted to solve the problem by building more grocery stores or planting gardens in urban and underserved areas—a fix that Broad calls a “magic carrot approach” to solving community food access and nutrition problems.

“You can’t just plop a grocery store into a neighborhood without connecting it to other education strategies that reflect the food cultures of those local communities—especially if that store is too expensive,” Broad said.

The aim of More Than Just Food is threefold. First, Broad unpacks this complex issue and argues that it is rooted in systemic inequities and fueled by misinformation. Second, in doing so, he challenges “over-simplified and victim-blaming” narratives that fault marginalized communities for the diet-related health issues that disproportionately affect them, such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and metabolic disorders.

Finally, Broad offers suggestions about how to tackle the situation using a community-based approach. He offers the example of Community Services Unlimited, a South Los Angeles organization that began in the 1970s as the nonprofit arm of the Southern California Black Panther Party and has made significant strides in promoting urban agriculture and nutrition education.

“The conversation has to be about more than food. If all we’re talking about is food and nutrition and not race, class, and cultural knowledge… then all of this is just going to be window dressing.”

Broad’s book comes out today.