The Leading Voices in Food

Written by: Duke World Food Policy Center
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • The Leading Voices in Food podcast series features real people, scientists, farmers, policy experts and world leaders all working to improve our food system and food policy. You'll learn about issues across the food system spectrum such as food insecurity, obesity, agriculture, access and equity, food safety, food defense, and food policy. Produced by the Duke World Food Policy Center at wfpc.sanford.duke.edu.
    Duke World Food Policy Center
    Show more Show less
Hygiene & Healthy Living Science Social Sciences
Show more Show less
Episodes
  • E263: Explore the Daily Table non profit grocery store model

    E263: Explore the Daily Table non profit grocery store model
    Feb 5 2025
    Today, we're going to explore Daily Table, an innovative non profit grocery chain dedicated to providing fresh, convenient, and nutritious food affordable to everyone, even those on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. In today's economic climate, where rising food prices are impacting households across the country, the concept of a non profit grocery store seems to fill a real need. Our guest today is Daily Table CEO, Sasha Purpura, a software engineer who spent 15 years in the tech industry and product management and development roles. Interview Summary Sasha, it is such a pleasure to connect with you. I'm intrigued to hear more about where Daily Table is today because I too was a Daily Table shopper. So, let's begin just hearing about what Daily Table is and what's the driving mission of the organization. Absolutely, Norbert. Simply what's driving the organization is the belief that everybody deserves access to healthy food. Daily Table is such a simple solution, but so incredibly innovative. It's a grocery store where everybody can afford healthy food. To me, seems like that should be there already. Unfortunately, it isn't. Historically, the way we have addressed hunger in this country is food pantries. And food pantries play a critical role and they're very necessary. However, there's spaces designed for people with low income. To say you're low income, you can't afford food, come here. And we know that 40 percent of the people that qualify for food pantries won't go to a food pantry because of that stigma. And because they want agency. They want the dignity of providing for their families and choosing what they want to eat. So Daily Table creates that shopping experience. People who don't use food pantries, they shop for themselves. And the sad reality is they have not been able to choose healthy food every day. They can't. It is not affordable. If you are lower on the income scale, you cannot afford to put fruits and vegetables on your table every day. Daily Table makes it possible for every person to afford to put fruits and vegetables on their table every day. And we are a normal grocery store. Anybody can come in there. We welcome everyone. It is not set up for people with a low income. It is a shopping experience. It is bright and colorful. It is dignified, enjoyable. Let's go look at all this beautiful produce. Daily Table dedicates a third of its footprint in each store to produce. Think about any grocery store you go into. That is not the case. We are focused on healthy, beautiful, fresh food. So, it's produce. It's proteins. And then finally, we have a commissary kitchen in our Dorchester store. It serves all of our stores, and we make healthy meals. A lot of people working two jobs cannot cook for themselves. Don't have the resources. And unfortunately, in many cases, turn to fast food, which isn't even that affordable these days. We make a chicken meal with a big chicken leg and 2 sides starting at $2.99. We have a large garden salad for $2.99. We have smoothies. We have soups that aren't extremely high in sodium. So, we provide healthy, tasty, prepared meals alongside fresh produce. If you can cook it, it's the ingredients are there. If you can't cook it, we cook it for you. And so Daily Table, our mission and what we do every day, is ensure that healthy food is truly affordable to everybody. This is really a useful way of hearing about what Daily Table is. As someone who used to live in Boston, I would visit the Dorchester store. And I remember all they asked is to tell us what zip code you're from and we would go shopping. We don't even ask that anymore. Oh, you don't even ask that anymore! That is awesome. And, you know, what's great it was easy to take my very young daughter at that time into the store and feel good about what we were getting. And my wife was like, can you believe these prices? In a good way! In a very good way. And so, it was always a positive experience. And it was great to know that there were people in that local community that were in the store. That were part of the staff. And it was a great place to visit. So, I'm glad to be able to connect with you on this. But I got to ask this question, how did a software engineer all of a sudden end up in a nonprofit grocery store? What happened? What drew you to this work? Well, it wasn't all of a sudden, but it was definitely a path. I met my husband when we were working at Nokia. I was in product management at the time. And in 2005, he quit to start an organic farm. A dream he'd always had. Went to it full time, that's how he makes his living. And he'd always had a big garden and just been a food person and I learned through him. I'd work with him on the weekends and getting the farm started and go to farmer's markets with him. And I, I discovered food in a way I'd never really understood it. I fell in love with it. I fell in love with the way that food creates community. I mean, it is the center ...
    Show more Show less
    17 mins
  • E262: Impact of skimming and shimming fraud on SNAP recipients

    E262: Impact of skimming and shimming fraud on SNAP recipients
    Jan 30 2025
    On our podcast, we have often talked about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. In many of those conversations, we've talked about the benefits and eligibility, and ways to improve the work that SNAP does to help low-income families meet their food needs. In today's podcast, we're going to turn our attention to a particular challenge, and it's the SNAP skimming fraud. To help us understand this and the larger context of SNAP, we have the great pleasure of talking with Salaam Bhatti, who is the director of SNAP at the Food Research and Action Center, or FRAC. Interview Summary So, let's provide a little bit of level setting for our listeners. Can you tell us what role SNAP plays in the lives of individuals who are facing low income or food insecurity? Yeah, Norbert, the problem with being in the richest, most powerful nation in world history is that we are facing a food and hunger crisis. We have the means, we have the resources to solve for it, but we haven't. For the record, the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, did a study last year. They do this study every year where they report food security in the country. In 2023, 86.5 percent of U. S. households were food secure. The remaining 13.5 percent, which is 18 million households, were food insecure. And this was an increase from 2022. So, 86.5 percent of food security is barely a B+. To be in the most powerful wealthiest nation in the world and we're barely getting a B+ in this space is unacceptable. And so, we saw some really interesting policies happen during the pandemic. We saw emergency allotments come in for the SNAP program, where all households received the maximum benefit amount for their households. And that, unfortunately, sunset. When that emergency allotment was in place, food insecurity-surprise, surprise-decreased. But not just that, we also saw Medicaid healthcare spending costs decrease as well. Because who would have thought that when people had food security, they didn't need to go to the emergency room because their blood sugar was low. So, we're experiencing a lot of challenges where we've seen the government show its hand that it can end poverty. It can end hunger. It just chooses not to. We know that SNAP is an entitlement program. It's available to anyone who meets the eligibility requirements. But we know that everyone who's eligible doesn't participate in the SNAP program. Can you help us think about how more people can be enrolled who are eligible. And maybe we even need to think more broadly about what is eligibility? What are your thoughts about this? In a given month these days, about 42 million people participate in SNAP. That's a lot of people. I would say that 42 million people are participating in it every day, but unfortunately, SNAP benefits do not last the whole month. By the third week of the month, people's SNAP benefits have been exhausted. Now, taking a step back, in case the listeners don't know how SNAP benefits work, it's a, as you said, a government program. And it comes in the form of an electronic benefits transfer card, an EBT card. It looks like a credit card, looks like a debit card. But really, it's more like a hotel card key, because it doesn't have the security measures, which we can talk about later in the show. It doesn't have the security measures that a credit and a debit card have. It is essentially a glorified hotel key. It's got the magnetic stripe on the back, circa 20 years ago. Maybe 15. I'm dating myself. I don't know how long ago it was we were swiping the cards. But all you gotta do is you swipe the card and you type in your PIN. And then you can use it at the EBT retailer. That is in a nutshell how 40 million people are utilizing SNAP benefits every single month. The program itself is also vital to retailers as well. We've seen that every dollar of SNAP benefits generates about $1.54 in economic activity during an economic downturn. So that means that when somebody is using their SNAP benefits at the grocery store, it's helping that grocery store keep the lights on. You know, employ the cashiers. And we need to employ cashiers, enough of this self-checkout stuff. It helps to pay the truck driver who's transporting the produce to the store. And it ultimately even helps pay the farmer for growing the crop. So, it's a great investment from the federal government into not just our households to help them put food on the table, but really into the whole local economy. And it is immediately used directly by the people and helps so many people. Now so, to your question about how do we enroll more people? Well, luckily we are at a time where the USDA reports that in the fiscal year 2022, 88 percent of eligible individuals were participating in SNAP. And that is the highest participation rate we've seen since they started tracking this in the past 50 years. That's great. But again, it's just a B+ so we can do better. There is room to improve. In the study, it ...
    Show more Show less
    23 mins
  • E261: Here’s what you don’t know about food safety

    E261: Here’s what you don’t know about food safety
    Jan 23 2025
    For many years in talks that I gave, I showed a slide with an ingredient list from a food most people know. Just to see if the audience could guess what the food was. based on what it was made of. It was very hard for people to guess. A few people might come close, but very few people would guess. And it was pretty hard because the food contained 56 ingredients. This is in one food. And the ingredient list had chemical names, flavorings, stabilizers, and heaven knows what else. But 56 things in one, just one food in the food supply. Pretty amazing to think what kind of things we're bombarded with in foods we eat in our everyday lives. So, one key question is do we know what all this stuff does to us, either individually or in combination? So, how does ingredient 42 interact with ingredient 17? Even if we happen to know what they do individually, which we may not. And, who's looking out for the health of the population, and who has regulatory control over these things? Today we're joined by the author of a new article on this topic published in the American Journal of Public Health. Jennifer Pomeranz is an attorney and is Associate Professor of Public Health Policy and Management in the School of Global Public Health at New York University. The food, by the way, was a chocolate fudge Pop Tart. Interview Summary So, who has regulatory oversight with these things that are added to foods? The FDA has the authority over all of those packaged foods. So, Pop Tarts, all of that type of packaged foods and the ingredients in there. Can you explain the nature of their authority and the concept of GRAS and what that stands for? Yes. So, there are two main ingredients in our food, but there is also color additives and other things that we didn't get to in our study. But the two main ingredients are called 'food additives' and then 'generally recognized as safe' or GRAS substances. And these are the two ingredients that are in all the processed foods. They're both complex substances, but they're regulated differently. GRAS is assumed to be safe. And food with GRAS substances is presumed to be safe as long as there's a generally agreement among scientists that it's safe, or if it's been in use in food since 1958. Food additives, on the other hand, are presumed to be unsafe. And so, foods that have food additives must have the food additive be approved for the condition of use. So actually, the FDA issues regulations on the food additives. Is it true that the FDA authority covers lots of these chemical type things that get put in foods that we discussed? But also, things that occur naturally in some things like caffeine? Yes. And so, caffeine is considered GRAS or generally recognized as safe. The FDA has a tolerance level for cola-type beverages for caffeine. It actually doesn't enforce that as you see, because we have energy drinks that far exceed that type of level. So, there's different types of GRAS substances. But they can be very complex substances that are actually not so different than food additives. Who decides at the end of the day whether something's safe or not? You imagine this battalion of scientific experts that the FDA has on hand, or consults with, to decide whether something's safe or not. But how does it work? Unfortunately, that's not exactly the case. When it comes to food additives, the industry must petition the FDA and provide evidence showing that it's safe. And the FDA promulgates a regulation saying that it agrees it's safe and it can be used for the things that it set forth in the regulation. For GRAS, there are two mechanisms. One is the industry can notify the FDA that it thinks something's safe. And then it actually goes through a similar transparent process where the FDA will evaluate the evidence submitted. Or, shockingly, the industry can actually decide that it's safe for themselves. And they don't have to notify the FDA. And they can add it to their food without the FDA or the public actually knowing. Now they might disclose this on a website or something, but it's actually not even required to be based on peer reviewed literature, which is actually one of the concerning aspects about this. Concerning is polite language for what one might call shocking. So, in the case of some of these things that go into the food, the industry itself decides whether these things are safe. And in some cases, they have to at least tell the FDA that something they declare as safe is going into the food. But in some cases, they don't even have to do this. Right. So, they only have to if they've determined that it's a food additive. But actually, the industry itself is deciding that it's a food additive versus GRAS. Once it made the decision, it's GRAS, it doesn't even have to notify the FDA that it considers it safe. If they do, they are supposed to rely on their own research saying that it's safe. But actually, there's some alarming parts about that as well. The other outside research that's not my ...
    Show more Show less
    14 mins

What listeners say about The Leading Voices in Food

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.ca reviews

Amazon Reviews
No reviews are available