If you think of the yearlong Bates Contemplates Food initiative as an arch built from many stones, Mark Winne ’72 set the moral keystone in place with a lecture on March 30.

In contrast to burgeoning consumer demand for natural and local foods, he said, low-income Americans have less access than ever to healthy foods. Affluent folks shop for pricey organics at Whole Foods while malnourishment, obesity and related illnesses proliferate in disadvantaged communities whose residents lack access to even reasonably wholesome foods. This is the “food gap” that Winne has fought to bridge for the past 40 years– a disparity between the haves and the have-nots, he said, that “doesn’t just divide the nation, but somehow defines it.”

• Watch a WCSH-TV interview with Mark Winne ’72

A sociology major at Bates, Winne served for 25 years as executive director of the Hartford (Conn.) Food System, a nonprofit that developed innovative ways to deliver high-quality and affordable foods to low-income urban families in Connecticut.

Now a resident of Santa Fe, N.M., he writes and consults on food system issues and is the author of Closing the Food Gap — Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon Press, 2008).

The laid-back Winne (pronounced WIN-ee) shared lessons from his life in food justice in a talk capping a two-day Bates visit sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Winne’s picture of the American food gap wasn’t pretty. The supermarket industry and public transportation policy have left many low-income people in “food deserts” — locations with no ready access to healthy, reasonably priced groceries. The government food-welfare system is biased toward industry interests rather than those of its needy clients, among whom are 32 million food stamp recipients — a record number.

And charitable emergency food providers, such as food banks, often just manage the symptom of food insecurity rather than addressing the disease of poverty.

Winne’s remarks included a list of recommendations for President Obama — whose administration, he later told a student during a question-and-answer period, gives him hope about the prospects for advancing food security — including:

A major government incentive — Winne estimated $1 billion — to encourage the supermarket industry to build stores in “food deserts,” both to improve the food supply for residents and to stimulate the local economy. “We can actually fix this one,” he said;

More money and better administration for school food programs;

And more support for farmers, including funding for farmers markets, CSAs and similar direct-marketing programs. “We’re in danger of running out of farmers,” Winne said.

At Bates, “food was not something we contemplated when I was here,” a droll Winne said early in the evening. “The only contemplation I can really remember was the evening when there was kind of a slow arc of a plate of spaghetti, moving skyward across the dining Commons, somehow suspended for several minutes above our heads as it moved toward the far wall, where it eventually landed with a tremendous splat.”

More seriously, Winne explained that as a Bates student from privileged circumstances, it was in Lewiston where he first encountered poverty. Working as a Big Brother, he visited the Lewiston home of his young charge — a visit that left him with an indelible memory of the child’s apartment, its smell of decrepitude and the way it shook from the looms at the nearby Bates Mill.

In Lewiston, too, Winne first took on the social justice work that would define his career. He and other Bates students founded a community center to do peer drug and alcohol counseling, then added a breakfast program for children and a food co-op.

Forty years later, Winne shared with the Bates audience some precepts distilled from his long experience, a body of experience that spans working a community farm, collaborating with community organizers in Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods and mingling with D.C. power brokers.

A dominant theme was the need to address poverty as a whole, rather than hunger as an isolated phenomenon. “The role of poverty in causing hunger is paramount,” Winne said. We need creative responses to address poverty more than hunger: “We need to pause, reflect, critique and consider what alternatives might exist.”

Winne concluded with a tribute to Bates and its early leadership in food issues, in terms of both on-campus food service and community food system work.

“We really got started with this earlier than most places,” he said. “I’m very proud to be a Batesie.”

By Doug Hubley

As part of a two-day visit to Bates, food activist and author Mark Winne ’72 gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The event is open to the public at no cost. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event is sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

Winne’s time at Bates will also include visits to classes and meetings with students.

Food, like air and water, is a basic necessity, but stands as a glaring example of how the gap between America’s “haves” and “have-nots” remains deep and wide. No matter what aspect of the subject we consider — hunger, obesity or recent food trends like local and organic — food is emblematic of a promise fulfilled for some but falling ever so short for many.

Winne has worked for 35 years to close the food gap. From organizing breakfast programs for low-income children in Maine to developing innovative national food policies in Washington, D.C., he has dedicated his professional life and writing to finding local, state and federal solutions to America’s food disparities. To this end, and to those whose passion for this purpose is no less than his own, he dedicated his first book Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon Press, 2008).

Closing the Food Gap tells the story of how we get our food: from poor people at food pantries or bodegas and convenience stores to the more comfortable classes, who increasingly seek out organic and local products. Winne’s exploration starts in the 1960s, when domestic poverty was “rediscovered,” and shows how communities since that time have responded to malnutrition with a slew of strategies and methods. But the story is also about doing that work against a backdrop of ever-growing American food affluence and gastronomical expectations.

From 1979 to 2003, Winne was the executive director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Conn., area. During his tenure with HFS, Mark organized community self-help food projects that assisted the city’s lower-income and elderly residents. Winne’s work with the Food System included the development of commercial food businesses, Connecticut’s Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, farmers’ markets, a 25-acre community supported agriculture farm, a food bank, food and nutrition education programs, and a neighborhood supermarket.

Winne currently writes, speaks and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment and food policy. He also does policy communication and food policy council work for the Community Food Security Coalition.

He lives in Santa Fe, N.M., where he serves on the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Southwest Grass-fed Livestock Alliance.

Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral and food activist-author Mark Winne are among Bates College alumni featured during March events relating to the Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food initiative.

All these events are open to the public at no cost.

First on the menu is a lecture about the impacts of globalization on poverty, food security and nutrition by Cornell University professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52). The talk is sponsored by the economics department.

Two weeks later, Bates alumni involved in food production and nutrition in Maine discuss a variety of issues in a panel presentation at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 16, also in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).

Moderated by Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates, the panel comprises Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral ’80; Maine farmers Steve Hoad ’72 of Windsor and Nicolas Lindholm ’86 of Penobscot; and Kirsten Walter ’00, director of the St. Mary’s Nutrition Center of Maine. The event is sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Finally, food activist and author Mark Winne ’72, gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event too is sponsored by the Bates Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

This academic year, inspired by the opening of a new dining Commons and a $2.5 million gift supporting the use of organic, natural and farm-fresh foods, Bates launched Nourishing Body and Mind: Bates Contemplates Food. The initiative explores the ramifications of our food choices and spotlights Bates’ own award-winning sustainable food-service practices.

• Monday, March 16 at 4:30 p.m.
• Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).