Environmental Commission recommends Council’s adoption of food plan

The Austin Environmental Commission on Wednesday approved a recommendation to City Council to adopt the proposed Austin/Travis County Food Plan and ensure its complete funding over the next four years.

The recommended resolution, sponsored by Mariana Krueger and approved unanimously, also called for the allocation of a “significant amount of resources” in the new fiscal budget, which goes into effect Oct. 1.

Council will begin its budget adoption process Aug. 14 and is expected to consider approval of the food plan at its Aug. 29 meeting. Council members were briefed on the proposed plan in July.

In presenting the plan to commissioners, Angela Baucom, food and climate coordinator for the city’s Office of Sustainability, provided some background, noting that a State of the Food System report prepared by her office a few years ago pointed to “some troubling issues with our local food system.”

Most troubling was the finding that less than 1 percent of the food consumed in Austin and Travis County is produced locally.

“This is an issue because it highlights that we are not investing in the local food system the way we could be,” Baucom said. “Our food is coming from outside of our area, which is of course a less sustainable transportation process.”

The need for locally produced food became most dire during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021, which exposed the seriousness of Austin’s food fragility.

“The food system in our area at any given time has about three days’ worth of food,” Baucom said. “That is simply untenable, especially under circumstances similar to the winter storm when we have residents who are without power and without transportation access for extended periods of time.”

Baucom also noted contradictions within the local food system: About 1.24 million pounds of food is wasted daily in Austin and Travis County, while 14 percent of the local population is food insecure.

“That is not a number that should ever exist in the same sentence,” she said. “We want to see why there’s so much food being wasted and going into our waste system and doing devastating damage in our landfills while there are people who are going without food.”

When food in a local landfill decomposes, it produces harmful greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane, Baucom said.

“Getting that food waste out of our landfill is just as much as a priority as it is getting it into the hands of people who can use it – either by human consumption or by using the waste for compost that could benefit the food system.

Other troubling signs will persist until government entities take action. The food plan recommends making land acquisitions for agricultural use while the market is currently favoring buyers.

“We are seeing a huge loss of agricultural land in our area, losing more than more than 16 acres on average a day in Travis County,” Baucom noted.

Food disparity along racial lines in the Eastern Crescent is another pressing concern, Baucom said.

“We can compare the geography of where our grocery stores are located with the geography of where we have higher concentrations of Black and Latino residents.” Those are the areas where there hasn’t been sufficient investment in infrastructure to attract full-service grocery stores, she said.

Still, it’s not uncommon for displacement to occur when new infrastructure comes into a community.

“We’re recognizing that when an HEB comes into a neighborhood, that is when some of those demographic shifts start to happen, and it is not a coincidence,” Baucom said.

“So when we are looking at making improvements to areas that we know have income disparities and racial disparities … the goal is to work with communities to ensure that as improvements come to their community that those residents are not pushed out,” she said.

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