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Food Deserts: Greg Silverman Of West Side Campaign Against Hunger On How They Are Helping To…

Yitzi Weiner

Food Deserts: Greg Silverman Of West Side Campaign Against Hunger On How They Are Helping To Address The Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options

An Interview With Martita Mestey

There should be more transparency in our sector and nonprofits have a duty to do efficient and effective work. Solely focusing on volume and not quality of the food is a wasteful and short-termist approach that hurts the people we serve. People should invest in nonprofits that do good work.

In many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. This in turn is creating a host of health and social problems. What exactly is a food desert? What causes a food desert? What are the secondary and tertiary problems that are created by a food desert? How can this problem be solved? Who are the leaders helping to address this crisis?

In this interview series, called “Food Deserts: How We Are Helping To Address The Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options” we are talking to business leaders and non-profit leaders who can share the initiatives they are leading to address and solve the problem of food deserts.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Greg Silverman.

Chef Greg Silverman serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director at West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH). Over the past 20 years he has led impactful work in the food security sector with broad experience in policy advocacy. As CEO and Executive Director, Greg has expanded WSCAH’s mission to help ensure New Yorkers have access with dignity to a choice of healthy food and supportive services.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I started out as a chef and multiple restaurant owner. That was never really enough for me, however. When I had my first restaurant in Ithaca, NY, I was also on the board of a soup kitchen. As I realized that the food at the food kitchen wasn’t that healthy or varied, I thought to use my restaurant connections to help. For example, I got the local coffee roaster to give us beans and they offered me a coffee machine to go with it. I even tapped up a vendor from whom I got my restaurant’s local tofu. Even managed to get venison from the one who butchered our cows. On that week, we were likely the only soup kitchen with roasted coffee, locally-sourced tofu and venison on the menu.

So early on I was leveraging my restaurant and business skills to help the community and vice-versa. Even as I joined the Peace Corps and headed to Mali thinking I was done with the food industry, I was tasked to work with an association of women restaurant owners. From there, I started building out training systems with these women leaders. Eventually we expanded to Burkina Faso where we trained groups on basic restaurant skills.

My experience in Mali stayed with me, and even as I returned to the U.S. I still wanted to do more than just own restaurants . Come 2008, I sold my three restaurants, as it was, just a few weeks before the financial crisis. My wife’s PhD took us to England and I saw this as my chance to leave the restaurant business for good. While in the U.K. I completed a Masters in food policy while working for the city of London. It turns out I was the first chef they’d ever hired as a nutrition educator. Turns out, chefs like me are uniquely positioned to know what to say, like the other nutritionists and dietitians, but I also knew how to cook. In other words, I could provide expertise in how to use a knife properly or season the right way.

When I made my second return to the US, this time in Washington, D.C, I joined Share Our Strength and the No Kid Hungry Campaign and helped lead their Cooking Matters program across the country. There I used my restaurateur and business skills to help market their products better. I was also tasked with being the liaison with the former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign and, thanks to my very eurocentric approach to food policy from my time in London, was able to add value to our nutrition education and school food efforts.

Eventually my wife’s work brought us back to New York City where I had the opportunity to take over the leadership of West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH). The organization had pioneered the first customer-choice pantry model almost 30 years ago. At the time, I saw WSCAH as a great independent outpost where I could work with an amazing team, innovate, and continue to evolve the organization. I did so, again drawing from my restaurant experience. After all, what else is a public health pilot initiative but what we’d call in restaurant parlance a “special”? In the restaurant industry we create prep lists everyday, in the nonprofit sector we create plans. The only difference is the fundraising aspect, but even in that instance it’s still about selling a great product.

Whether it was as a chef, a restaurant owner or as CEO of WSCAH, it’s always been the same for me. I want the customers we serve to get the best food possible and the best service. It doesn’t matter whether people are paying $40 an entree or getting a free box of healthy groceries. They all deserve the same thing: quality and care.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Not sure if it’s the most interesting, but it’s one of the most interesting ways I was able to use my business skills. When I was in Mali in the Peace Corps I was asked by Peace Corps HIV volunteers to visit brothels to discuss the public health crisis. Why was I there? As a business volunteer, the community businesses had heard we could help with sanitation, menu development, etc in their kitchen. The owners of the brothels would never have simply let a public health worker in, but with a bit of business consulting we were able to. Through these opportunities, we managed to also help women open up bank accounts, pay passport fees and figure out the brass tax of how much it would take for them to get out of that business.

This was a clear example of how, through food and business consulting, we were able to impact the community. And fast forward 20 years here at WSCAH, we use similar dual engagement. Since many customers come to WSCAH firstly for our food, we use the opportunity to help our customers get access to needed benefits that they might have been unaware they could apply for.

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?

My time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali (2000–02) was when I started to really see the power of restaurants and cooking. The takeaways, of me constantly realizing how my chef skills and experience applied to and benefited the communities around us, were mostly all restaurant lessons.

My kitchen work is how I do my leadership work. As a chef I followed a few key rules: adapt menus to the seasons and the market, simplify food to focus on flavor, and streamline inventory but never compromise quality. When I moved to the emergency food sector, I knew I could still use these tools and tactics. What I needed to adapt to involved gaining a deep knowledge of the operations, culture and the community of WSCAH.

Ultimately it’s about innovation, like coming up with specials, and especially about rewarding your team. Sure, we don’t give out shift-drinks like at a restaurant but it’s the same idea. People are part of a team and you need to treat it that way. Staff are not widgets and the workplace shouldn’t be like in a factory where people aren’t treated that well. We’re a team trying to do something good.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

When I joined the Peace Corps, I came to the same realization as many others: any knowledge you have is pretty useless when you go to a foreign country where you don’t know the language, the culture or the history.

My Peace Corps mentor, Sarin Sylla, was this woman restaurant owner and had written the application for Peace Corps volunteer support. She took me under her wing to show me how they do the work in a restaurant in Mali, all the while helping the community. She was laser-focused on pushing money back through a network of other women’s savings group she was a part of, as I watched her dealt with a lot of family trauma. She was a force of nature, was truly inspiring and we were able to do amazing work together training dozens of other restaurant owners across the region.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The traits that were crucial to my success and leadership are:

  1. Collaboration: I never want to go at it alone. I founded the Roundtable because I knew that, together, frontline providers could get better prices, share best practices and change the system. That’s why WSCAH founded and leads the Roundtable, which is a collective impact network of frontline providers in NYC, including Met Council, NY Common Pantry and others.
  2. Confidence: whether opening new restaurants or pushing to change our distribution models in the first days of the pandemic, I try to always drive forward with the confidence of knowing we can get it done. In a matter of hours in March of 2020 our team had rented a truck, moved all our food up the street and readied for food distribution that continues to this day.
  3. Positivity: I try to spend as much time as possible with my colleagues, volunteers, customers, and community partners. I do so simply because it’s what being human is. It’s a joy to get to know others and I feel so lucky to be able to do the work I do.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“When a big wave comes, be the ocean.”

I have always tried to roll with punches, no matter what comes at me, and use it to my advantage. Whether it was busy nights on the line cooking in the restaurant kitchen or dealing with the chaos of the pandemic, I try to see it as part of something bigger and that helps the problem get smaller.

I know this is intuitive to you, but it will be helpful to expressly articulate this for our readers. Can you please tell us what exactly a food desert is? Does it mean there are places in the US where you can’t buy food?

A food desert is a terminology coined to describe areas where there’s a lack of food, and more specifically a lack of healthy food options. But over time it has become very generic and a blanket term that doesn’t really describe or encompass everything that happens in it. Just imagine living next to a Whole Foods. It sounds great because you have geographic access to healthier food. Problem is, you may be living in poverty and can’t afford that amazing fresh produce that is within your physical reach. That is also a food desert. Hunts Point, in the Bronx, is where almost every bit of produce in NYC passes through, but people have no physical or financial access to it. That’s why access, of both healthy food and the funds to buy it, is a much better description of what a food desert is.

Can you help explain a few of the social consequences that arise from food deserts? What are the secondary and tertiary problems that are created by a food desert?

The lack of access, whether due to proximity or lack of financial means, leads to a lack of choice. The absence of choice means more people are corralled into purchasing cheap, calorie-dense, ultra processed food and less healthy foods, which leads to bad health outcomes — obesity, heart disease or diabetes, just to name a few. There’s social stigma associated with all this too. If you don’t have access to fresh and healthy vegetables, and all you see on TV is that white-picket-fence version of the world where people are eating healthy and doing well in life, you start to feel like you’re in the out-group. That’s why it’s really important to make sure people have the choices they desire, otherwise it creates more barriers .

It’s also why I always push back a bit on nutrition education. It’s always framed through the message that if we just taught people — and almost exclusively always referring to poor people — about nutrition, then they’d be healthier. But it’s not an education issue. It’s an access issue. People don’t choose to eat fast food because they hate fresh produce. It’s because they don’t have the financial access to it. As well, the financial means to try new recipes that your family may not enjoy on the first try is a huge issue. If a family does not have disposable income, they cannot just order takeout if their kids don’t like the dinner that was made. The options are not there for tens of millions of people in America. So an inability to buy fresh produce creates all these cultural stigma that only further compound the resulting health issues.

Where did this crisis come from? Can you briefly explain to our readers what brought us to this place?

It’s a big question! I would say that we’ve transitioned to more processed food diets, mainly because they’re cheaper and more convenient. That convenience culture, to accommodate our longer working hours, only accelerated that trend. There’s also an agricultural element to it too, as we pushed for higher yields in foods and this led to the development of commodity crops as opposed to promoting small farms and locally sourced ingredients.

Generally, we put less value in the idea of food as medicine and cooking as well. In our seemingly ultra hectic lives, it’s much easier to buy a microwaveable dinner or already made fast-food. After all, people work longer hours for not that much more money and so the need for more frozen and pre-made food increases. The demand for pre-made food means more food processing and therefore less healthy food options. The combination of our time-is-money mentality and wages, which haven’t kept up with food price inflation, has contributed to this ongoing crisis.

Can you describe to our readers how your work is making an impact to address this crisis? Can you share some of the initiatives you are leading to help correct this issue?

At WSCAH, we’re very conscious that a majority of our customers are working-age adults, working (full-time or part-time), but don’t earn enough to lift themselves out of food insecurity. So when we provide them access to huge quantities of fresh produce and other staples, it’s about giving our customers that extra buffer to use their cash for other purchases or expenses. There’s a saying: the rent eats first, which refers to how food insecure people often face harsh dilemmas like feeding themselves and their families or paying a utility bill, purchasing back-to-school supplies or dealing with a medical expense. It’s also why our organization offers supportive services beyond just giving out food. Whether that’s helping people sign up for healthcare benefits, apply for housing vouchers or SNAP benefits.

Crucially, WSCAH isn’t interested in pushing out “x” number of pounds of food that’s calorie-dense and/or ultra processed junk to people in need. That model isn’t cutting it and it never has, and that’s why we advocate for more city and state dollars being spent to provide affordable, fresh produce. For example, we advocated for a change in NYC’s RFP for the Community Foods Connection (CFC) program, which is a $50 million that for decades didn’t have any fresh produce. So in 2022, for the first time, there was a provision to allow organizations like mine to purchase fresh produce with these CFC funds.

Ultimately, we want to lead this space toward real change and showcase other models of emergency food giving. That’s why the Roundtable exists. Together we work to drive down prices, to advocate for things like CFC, and champion new models of emergency feeding we feel deserve to be spotlighted. WSCAH is one of those innovative models but we’re certainly not the only one.

We’ve also gotten more involved in data-driven research, like through our partnership with New York Presbyterian Hospital. The purpose is to test out these new models for emergency food distribution and do so with what most wouldn’t consider to be traditional partners (i.e. grocery stores or delivery apps). We’re seeing that families with young kids getting healthy food boxes showed slower rates of obesity.

Can you share something about your work that makes you most proud? Is there a particular story or incident that you found most uplifting?

The pandemic was a challenging time for everyone, from individuals to organizations. During that time though, WSCAH managed to substantially increase the amount of fresh produce we gave out. We rose to the moment, even in the most stressful time for frontline work, changed our model and started delivering food to people’s homes. We didn’t back down and it was a lifeline for our customers, who could take ownership of their health choices and now had options other than just takeout. We dove headfirst into our mission and what this work meant to all of us. This was a point of immense pride and testament to the WSCAH team.

In your opinion, what should other business and civic leaders do to further address these problems? Can you please share your “5 Things That Need To Be Done To Address The Problem of People Having Limited Access to Healthy & Affordable Food Options”?

To address the problem of food deserts, I think:

  1. There should be more transparency in our sector and nonprofits have a duty to do efficient and effective work. Solely focusing on volume and not quality of the food is a wasteful and short-termist approach that hurts the people we serve. People should invest in nonprofits that do good work.
  2. The charity sector also needs to collaborate better. Too many nonprofits get distracted with their own fundraising and lose sight of their mission. A greater focus on the mission leads to more collaboration, and the Roundtable we lead alongside other allies for food access was a natural evolution of our work here at WSCAH. Since 2018, we’ve explored new opportunities for collective purchasing and achieved savings of nearly 20% on food purchasing across the collective.
  3. As nonprofits, we have to be more honest about the need to spend more on administration. We need good people doing good work and not try to tackle issues as complex as food insecurity on shoe-string budgets. Doing effective work should not be framed through the nonprofit versus for-profit dichotomy. For-profit organizations are not automatically better at what they do. They’re just better funded.
  4. As an actor in the public sector, I’m a strong advocate for more investment in people. This means staff too. In other words, increasing wages so those working to feed our customers can also afford food, stable housing and healthcare.
  5. We should subsidize healthy food at the federal level in the same way we do with ultra-processed products and commodity crops like corn. In fact, small farms should also be subsidized to help develop shorter circuit local food systems and have a more sustainable food ecosystem. The current dynamic sees the availability of more food products, but the number of unprocessed products is trending down. This points to the issues in our current food supply chains and difficulties of sourcing local produce.

Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food deserts? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.

A good example are hospitals like NY Presbyterian, which is working with WSCAH to distribute food to their more isolated customers, whether due to geography or physical limitations. This collaboration underscores the importance of a holistic approach and finding the right partners who show how addressing food deserts isn’t all about having more grocery stores or developing new delivery apps.

The New York City Mayor’s Office of Food Policy has also shown great leadership on this issue. The Office has helped organizations like ours expand their distribution capacity and it’s also created an innovative working group — of which WSCAH is a part of alongside NY Met Council, Campaign Against Hunger, NY Common Pantry — to go after emergency food distribution in food deserts. The office has done a great job bringing in frontline organizations and allowing them to figure out how to distribute food in the best ways they could.

If you had the power to influence legislation, are there laws that you would like to see introduced that might help you in your work?

At the state level I would make changes to the HPNAP and NOURISH programs. I would prefer those anti-hunger efforts to be direct grants to all grantees as opposed to their being administered via larger non frontline entities. This would allow frontline organizations greater choice for products they purchase as well as in how they can utilize their budgets.

At the federal level, my main order of business would be to increase the dollar value of SNAP and expand eligibility. The dollar allowance afforded through SNAP isn’t high enough. Sadly neither of these things are likely to happen in the upcoming Farm bill to be negotiated by Congress. Finally, I would do away with the absurd work requirements on SNAP, which are hurting community members and are in effect an indirect subsidy for some of our nation’s biggest businesses.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

It’s what our team is part of: changing our food system in a customer-centric way. That means making sure all people have access to healthy food and supportive services, making sure our food system is secure and that healthy food is both affordable and supported via the public sector.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?

Right now as we head into contentious Farm Bill negotiations in Washington, I would love to invite House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to WSCAH for a sit-down with our community.

I get to have meals with our community on many days, sharing coffee or lunch with customers. Some of these customers are even part of our board today. I have the opportunity to break bread with such changemakers every day, and I am truly fortunate. I can’t imagine better or more amazing people to share a table with, and would hope they could share some knowledge and wisdom with Congressional Leadership in order to inspire them to do what’s right to feed our communities across the nation.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Obviously, they can see what WSCAH is all about and our impact via our website. Also, they can follow us via social media and my own as well:

This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.

Food Deserts: Greg Silverman Of West Side Campaign Against Hunger On How They Are Helping To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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