Congratulations to Sharon Thornberry

Normally, the focus here at the Institute is on national issues or international food security or poverty in the developing world, but sometimes anti-hunger efforts at the local level speak to larger issues in such a clear and riveting way, their importance beyond what’s happening locally resonates instantly.

The Oregonian published a story on November 9 about Sharon Thornberry, who works with the Oregon Food Bank and also happens to be a Bread for the World board member, and was recently named a public health genius by the Community Health Partnership.

The citation of the award reads:

The 2009 Billi Odegaard Public Health Genius is Sharon Thornberry, Community Food Programs Advocate at the Oregon Food Bank. Sharon has been influential in policy advocacy, coalition building, and incubating many ‘grassroots’ food-related efforts from conception to completion. She has tirelessly dedicated herself to increasing access to healthy food for low-income communities – particularly in often overlooked rural Oregon.

What Thornberry has been doing for years, or more like decades, is connecting the problem of hunger with the problem of food systems. “The failure of our food system has such an affect on our health,” Thornberry says. “Without working on the food system, we will never be well.”

A food system approach to hunger, as spelled out by the Community Food Security Coalition, where Thornberry has also been a board member, “might address the problem of child obesity  by looking at the lack of fruits and vegetables in the diet; the lack of fresh fruit and vegetable vendors in a neighborhood (and the surplus of calorically dense food); the dearth of local gardening opportunities, farms, and farmers’ markets as sources of fresh fruits and vegetables; the diminishing knowledge base regarding fruit and vegetable recognition and preparation; and a decline in school-based physical education programs.”

 The term “community food security” is not intended to replace household food security as a framework for understanding hunger in a household. Rather, community food security starts by recognizing that there is underlying social, economic, and institutional factors that extend beyond any one individual or family’s circumstances. In some communities, for example, particularly impoverished inner cities and rural areas, grocery stores are few and far between.

Community food security is an important concept to understand because it begins to help people connect hunger with obesity and a host of other health-related problems associated with food. These problems are so much more prevalent in poor communities, and the reason has a lot to do with the food system there. Understanding the concept of community food security can also help anti-hunger advocates to disarm the critics who want to blame hunger, obesity and all else on what’s happening in households, when a better lens to understand complex issues like these starts in communities.

This is hardly an issue unique to rural Oregon. Through the Oregonian article, nicely written by Paige Parker, we can get a grasp of a critical problem that the whole country faces.

Thanks to the Oregonian for publishing it, and again, congratulations to Sharon Thornberry on being selected as a public health genius.

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This is hardly an issue unique to rural Oregon. Through the Oregonian article, nicely written by Paige Parker, we can get a grasp of a critical problem that the whole country faces.