Overview
DVRPC released Eating Here: Greater Philadelphia's Food System Plan in 2011 to help establish a vision for our regional food system and craft recommendations to enable our region to collectively achieve the vision and goals described in the plan.
Values and Goals
To achieve our goals of building a sustainable and resilient food system, we have based our recommendations around six core values:
- Farming and Sustainable Agriculture
- Ecological Stewardship and Conservation
- Economic Development
- Health
- Fairness
- Collaboration
Harvesting crops at Resilient Roots Farm in Camden
Source: VietLead
Indicators
The Plan identifies 10 indicators that can be used to illustrate the impact of past and ongoing changes to regional, national, and global food systems; illuminate trends in food systems; and help hypothesize what other changes or interventions are needed to shift indicators and create a regional food system that reflects the stakeholder's values, vision, and goals.
- Land in production
- Profitability of farming
- Surface water quality
- Farmland preservation
- Employment in the food system
- Food and farmworker wages
- Healthy food purchases
- Health of residents
- Affordability of healthy food
- Food insecurity
Top Recommendations
The plan's 52 recommendations include policy reforms, expansions of current initiatives and programs, and new approaches and innovations. The following are the Plan's Top Recommendations for the region:
- Access to affordable farm land: Maintain affordable land for farmers through a range of potential innovations and new business models. These include addressing the retirement needs of farmers, identifying opportunities to transition preserved land into food production, and creating investment vehicles for long-term agricultural production on preserved land.
- Natural resource protection through markets: Develop technical assistance programs or market-based solutions that enable farmers to protect natural resources.
- Agricultural enterprise development: Create or expand new and specialized programs to reduce the barriers of entry for new food entrepreneurs and new, beginning, and minority farmers, and encourage value-added activities. Examples include training programs and revolving loan, micro-loan, and low-interest loan funds.
- Healthy food awareness and access: Promote the use of new technology and community-based communication outlets by all partners- government, private sector, and nonprofits- to educate people about healthy food.
- School system solutions: Integrate all aspects of Farm to School programs into a robust and comprehensive education program.
- Regional convening and increased collaboration: Continue to convene the Greater Philadelphia Food System Stakeholder Committee and encourage shared efforts.
Eating Here follows up on the Commission's first phase of food system planning, the Greater Philadelphia Food System Study, a large surveying effort and analysis that identified prominent stakeholders, successful programs, regional competitive advantages, recommendations for improvement, and differing interests.
Development of Eating Here: Greater Philadelphia's Food System Plan was funded by DVRPC's work program with generous support from the G. R. Dodge Foundation.
Eating Here publications
Eating Here: The Greater Philadelphia Food System Plan
Eating Here: Cultivating a Robust Food System in Greater Philadelphia - Summary