WATERLOO — It could be the heart of the breadbasket, but Gallup polls show Iowans eat less fresh fruit and vegetables than those living in almost every other state.
A consortium of local government, education, business and nonprofit agency representatives calling themselves the Cedar Valley Good Food Network is working to change that locally.
The group received a boost this week when the Blue Zones initiative brought in author Dan Buettner and paid for a strategic planning session in Waterloo to help develop goals and chart a course for Cedar Valley residents to eat healthier.
Buettner’s Blue Zones research focused on environmental factors in places around the world where people live the longest. The local Blue Zones initiative, sponsored by Wellmark, has actually been working since 2012 to transfer those same attributes to Waterloo and Cedar Falls.
“Everywhere in the world where people live a long time — Okinawa, Sardinia, Greece, Costa Rica — they’re engaged in growing their own food, either in their backyard or public gardens,” Buettner said. “These big public gardens are highly visible and marquee projects to get people reoriented to do what their grandparents did: growing their own food.”
The planning session focused on policies and programs that would certainly make fresh produce more accessible and cheaper for Cedar Valley residents while making it harder and more expensive to eat unhealthy food.
Buettner also toured the Cedar Valley to look at previous Blue Zones efforts, which have actually been focused largely on making the community more walkable and bikable, getting people “out from behind steering wheels and on their feet.”
“I’m here with a National Geographic photographer to capture the successes, and there have actually been lots of of them,” he said, pointing to the 130-mile recreational trail system, improved access along the Logan Avenue corridor and a start in making the University Avenue corridor more pedestrian friendly.
Sue Beach, who previously led the local Blue Zones effort, remains active in the brand-new Good Food Network that is pulling together producers and organizations with an interest in locally grown produce.
“We have actually all these great organizations out in the community doing great work, and nobody knew about each other,” Beach said. “I feel like the Blue Zones project was kind of the platform that allowed all of the others to come to the table.
“In our community, with our (body mass indexes) and obesity rates the way they are, we need to keep talking about it,” she added.
Barb Prather is executive director of the Northeast Iowa Food Bank, which is active in the Good Food Network and hosted the planning session.
“Healthy eating is something low-income people struggle with, and one of our top goals is to get more nutritious food into the food bank,” Prather said. “We really believe our obligation is to help our clients access this but also to continue to educate the greater community on that need in the community.”
The Iowa Northland Regional Council of Governments has actually helped keep the Good Food Network organized.
“It has actually been a loose-knit group of people who’ve been meeting but it sounds like we want to become a little more formal,” said INRCOG’s Brian Schoon.
Goals include working more closely with farmers markets and continuing to encourage schools, hospitals and other institutions to have actually more local produce on their menus.
The group plans to explore perks for grocery stores to sell healthier foods; school wellness programs; fostering relationships between food pantries and growers; community-supported agriculture where employers work with producers to get food for their employees; food waste reduction; and exploring a soda tax, politically volatile measure adopted in some larger communities.
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