School meals are an important source of nutrition for the approximately 1.1 million students who attend New York City’s public schools, especially for those students who come from very low-income households. Since the 2017-2018 academic year, New York City has adopted universal free school lunch throughout the city’s more than 1,000 public elementary, middle and [...]

On February 24, join us for a book talk by Dr. Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Human Ecology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, on her newest book "White Burgers, Black Cash: Fast Food from Black Exclusion to Exploitation" (Forthcoming by University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Dr. [...]

A panel discussion to assess the potential and limits of the concept of ultraprocessed food to inform food policy and advocacy.   Recent research suggests that ultraprocessed food – industrially prepared food high in fats, sugar, salt, additives and preservatives – makes a major contribution to the global and local rise in premature deaths [...]

Drawing on the seminal work of food policy scholars, activists, and trailblazers Marion Nestle and Robert Gottlieb, this urban food policy forum focuses on the key question of how to combine food policy scholarship and activism and examines it through an intergenerational dialogue. The two authors and guest speakers' most recent books, Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics (Nestle, 2022; University of California Press) and Care-Centered Politics: From the Home to the Planet (Gottlieb, 2022; MIT Press), will inform and frame this timely exchange. Nestle and Gottlieb will be joined by CUNY students who will facilitate the discussion and share their views and questions on this and related food policy and activism topics. Join us on December 15 for this virtual CUNY Urban Food Policy Forum!

This urban food policy forum focuses on the key question of how to translate into action some of the core ideas and solutions put forward at the 2022 White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health and the concurrently released National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. Invited guest speakers will offer insights into this question in the context of three central food policy goals: making free school meals available to all, ending college food insecurity, and reducing corporate influences on community food environments, including through reducing predatory marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to young people. On November 17, join us for this virtual Urban Food Policy Forum!

This forum will address the policy dimensions of using institutional food procurement — or the food purchased with public dollars through government agencies and government-funded institutions — to advance racial equity. What are some of the different policy options and implementation strategies to achieve greater racial equity in the food system by leveraging the [...]

Predatory marketing describes the practice of aggressive advertising of products known to damage health. A growing literature documents that predatory marketing of unhealthy food, alcohol, tobacco and other harmful products increases premature deaths and preventable illnesses and widens racial/ethnic, income, gender and other inequities in health. This session explores the strengths and weaknesses of [...]

This forum focuses on how cities can use food as a lever for climate change mitigation and the reduction of their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Can cities change institutional food to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions? What are the opportunities and barriers, and how do we track success? What does it mean for cities [...]

The topic of this forum is Food is Medicine, focusing on the policies to replicate, scale, and finance food as medicine programs, from medically-tailored meals to prescription produce programs. On February 24, join the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute and guest practitioners and policy experts to learn more about the most recent developments in [...]

Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By [...]

App-based food delivery workers have kept New Yorkers fed throughout the pandemic despite facing low pay, harassment, traffic injuries, and lack of basic labor protections. Thanks to the organizing efforts of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a movement of mostly immigrant food delivery workers, and their advocates, the New York City Council passed a first-in-the-nation package [...]

The UN has described its Food Systems Summit, an 18-month process culminating on September 23, 2021, as a “peoples’ summit,” bringing together food producers, Indigenous communities, youth activists, researchers, and business leaders to identify strategies to transform the global food system in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet hundreds of civil society [...]