By Gabriella Sotelo for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Sentient/Just and Climate-Friendly Food System-Public News Service Collaboration

For the past four decades or so, the Florin farmers market has been a source for affordable produce for many living in the small Sacramento, California suburb. According to Sam Greenlee, executive director of the Sacramento-based food justice group Alchemist CDC, the market’s vendors take steps to meet the needs of the community. “They tend to set their prices a little bit lower here than at other markets,” Greenlee tells Sentient.

Of the 196,524 households in Sacramento, around 40 percent rely at least in part on California’s food assistance program.

Helping communities eat more plants has many benefits — health and food justice among them — but it’s also good for the climate. Food production accounts for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Brent Kim, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, the largest source of these food-related emissions comes from the farm itself, not food miles. “What we eat and how it was produced matter more for the climate than how far it travels.” Eating a plant-based diet, even for just one day a week, can have a greater positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions than eating local food every day, Kim says.

While the largest source of food-related emissions stems from meat made from methane-belching ruminant animals, namely beef and lamb, successful grassroots initiatives, like community gardens and farmers markets, play an important role when they help shift what people eat. Local programs encourage sustainable and healthy food choices, but also offer a path for addressing challenges important to each community.

Elizabeth Bowman, former executive director at Food Access LA, sees these local efforts as part of a broader vision for sustainable food that includes, but also goes beyond, greenhouse gas emissions.

“To me, sustainability is very holistic, bottom up, top down, and allows people to have access to healthy foods without barriers,” Bowman says. Transparency and food sovereignty are two very important goals in the work. And that means, Bowman adds, making food choices from the “soil up” — starting with healthy soil but also thinking about whether farm workers have good working conditions.

Bowman’s work with Avenue 33, a small hillside farm in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, illustrates this approach. Avenue 33 partners with Los Angeles Leadership Academy (LALA) to operate LALA Farm, which offers opportunities to zero in on different aspects of food systems. Classes held on the farm include hands-on topics like composting and its climate impacts to science students learning about photosynthesis. Lessons also include the history of agriculture, the farm labor movement and how farming practices of some Indigenous populations compare to contemporary farming.

Both Avenue 33 and LALA farms provide fresh produce to farmers markets that are EBT-authorized (an electronic system that enables people to use government assistance dollars for food purchases) as well as a free weekly food distribution at a nearby school. Food grown on the LALA farm, like tomatoes and peppers, are added weekly to the high school’s salad bar, sometimes alongside a nutrition lesson. 

California supplies nearly half of the fruits and vegetables eaten in the United States. Yet a significant portion of the population, around 8.8 million Californians, face food insecurity. The issue is not only economic — though affordability is a key factor — but also one of access, rooted in land-use policies. These policies have contributed to a disparity in food access, with larger supermarkets concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods. This is known as “supermarket redlining,” and forces people to rely on convenience stores or fast food outlets as their main source of food. A 2008 study found that individuals without access to supermarkets were 25 to 46 percent less likely to maintain a healthy diet.

Farmers markets, supported by federal, state and private food assistance programs, are helping to bridge the gap by offering a direct distribution model. While there are systemic abuses that stem from a system of “food apartheid,” these programs are at least an effort to get more produce at competitive prices in markets close to food insecure communities, at prices lower than those in chain grocery stores. 

A 2021 study highlighted the role farmers markets can play in reducing food insecurity, noting that by 2019, around 50 percent of farmers markets accepted some form of federal food assistance. Access alone does not address all of the challenges associated with dietary change, programs like California’s Market Match, where EBT value is doubled, can help improve the affordability of fresh, local food. The Florin market has become one of the top 10 EBT markets in the country, with around $300,000 in EBT and Market Match funds spent in 2023. 

“Neighborhoods that lack access to fresh produce have an abundance of fast food and heavily processed foods,” Bowman writes, yet “communities are responsive when fresh produce is simply made available and especially when incentivized with programs like Market Match.”

“I think that when people have access to fresh produce, they will buy it,” Bowman told Sentient in an email. There are many reasons they might make a change in what they eat. “In general, fresh produce is less expensive than meat products, so there is evident economic value there,” writes Bowman. 

Earlier this year, budget cuts in California threatened the program’s success when California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a $37.8 billion cut to the state budget. The threat was averted after advocacy groups, including Alchemist CDC, were able to persuade Newsom to preserve the program’s full $35 million budget. 

There are other challenges however, says Kim Bowman, who worked on food security for decades in Southern California. “Accessing healthy food in Los Angeles can be really challenging. While grassroots initiatives are making strides, there is a lack of infrastructure to support these efforts comprehensively.” 

Bowman stresses the need for policies that not only help younger generations enter agriculture by making land acquisition easier, but also support farmers adopting regenerative practices. Subsidies for such practices could help reduce reliance on synthetic chemicals and build a more sustainable agricultural sector. However, these efforts must be paired with broader systemic changes. This can mean subsidies for farmers like Bowman mentions, or in other cases, could mean changing livestock productivity.

“Ultimately there’s no one silver bullet recipe for a sustainable food system — and we benefit from a diversity of different scales, including local, regional and, sometimes, national or international,” according Johns Hopkins’s Brent Kim. “The important thing is approaching what we grow, how we grow it, and what we eat with an eye toward kindness, conservation and equity.”


Gabriella Sotelo wrote this article for Sentient. If you have a climate solution story you'd like to share, you can do that through Project Drawdown's Global Solutions Diary.


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Indiana families are navigating the summer without SUN Bucks, a federal grocery benefit which delivered $120 per child last summer.

Gov. Mike Braun's administration chose not to participate in 2025, citing prior planning gaps.

Mark Lynch, director of advocacy for the Indy Hunger Network, said the funding blackout hit the state hard.

"We really are feeling and seeing the impacts of not having the SUN Bucks program this year," Lynch emphasized. "That $120 per summer for those students that they had last year have created some longer lines at our food pantries."

State leaders said administrative hurdles kept Indiana out of the program. Supporters argued skipping SUN Bucks puts pressure on food banks and leaves low-income families with fewer options.

Lynch noted to help bridge the gap, Indiana expanded its summer meal sites to include prepackaged meals, which do not require daily pickups.

"But there's school starting soon and they're giving their workers some time off for the summer, so that might be ending in the next week or two," Lynch explained. "That's just an example and that happens around the state in rural, suburban, and in city communities."

The Indy Hunger Network and other partners continue to support Hoosiers through tools like the Community Compass app, which shows nearby meal sites and grocery assistance programs.


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Almost 3.5 million Texans utilize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to purchase food.

The budget reconciliation bill recently signed into law by President Donald Trump cuts SNAP benefits by approximately $186 billion nationwide.

Celia Cole, CEO of the nonprofit Feeding Texas, said the state has three options to make up for the $800 million needed to keep the program operating at its current rate.

"Raising new revenue, which is not going to happen in a state like Texas, or diverting revenue from other essential services or simply cutting benefits," Cole outlined. "Worst case scenario, just walking away from the program entirely."

She pointed out the cuts will push seniors, veterans, working parents and children further into poverty. Even with SNAP benefits, more than 17% of Texans experienced food insecurity last year.

Feeding Texas is a network of food banks assisting Texans in all 254 counties across the state. Cole noted they are helping as many people now as they did during the pandemic and cuts in the federal budget will only increase the need for help.

"For every meal food banks put on the table, SNAP puts nine meals on the table," Cole emphasized. "It's the most effective way to get food to people in need. We are going to be reaching out to our supporters, our donors from philanthropy to corporations to the state government to try and make up for as much of the loss as we can."

She added fallout from the cuts will also negatively affect farmers, grocers and the overall Texas economy.

"It's not the way to go about balancing a budget," Cole argued. "We've said this before, a budget is a moral document and this one clearly fails the test."


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Now that President Donald Trump's big budget bill has been signed into law, Arkansas nonprofits that rely on federal funding to help people in need are trying to figure out how they will continue to serve their clients.

The legislation calls for cutting billions of dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Lance Whitney, advocacy director with Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance, said it would cost food banks across the state almost $46 million a year to continue to help those who face food insecurity.

"That does not include the cost of increased capacity needed to serve those individuals," said Whitney, "like in warehouse space, the vehicles the staffing to hand out that, the refrigeration. With those included it would ramp it up to an additional probably $10 million."

Whitney predicted that children, veterans, caregivers, and older adults in Arkansas will suffer the most because of the cuts. Arkansas has the highest food insecurity rate in the nation.

The federal government will start cost-sharing with states for SNAP benefits in 2027. The amount the government contributes to administrative costs will be cut from 50% to 25%, leaving states responsible for 75% of the total cost.

Whitney said state and local governments will have to divert money from other essential services to cover SNAP benefits.

"It can't be ignored when you have people who can't eat, health care that's going down, school lunches that can't be provided for," said Whitney. "So every community, every person in the state of Arkansas - whether you're a SNAP recipient or a Medicaid recipient, or just a community person - you're going to have a challenge with this."

The legislation expands work requirements for older adults and parents with children age seven and older.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, that could take food assistance away from more than three million adults a month.





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