One out of four Baltimore residents lives in a ‘food desert’ - a low-income area that lacks access to fresh food from supermarkets. At the same time, the Maryland Food Center Authority estimates that half of what’s in the Baltimore landfills is food waste. It’s estimated that includes millions of pounds of produce that could still be eaten.
Each year the Abell Foundation gives an award to students who best analyze a critical issue facing the city, and propose feasible solutions. The 2015 Abell Award for Urban Planning goes to a paper that proposes a new vendor market in the heart of the city, where unsold wholesale food that would otherwise be tossed into landfills could be sold by small businesses at a deeply discounted prices.
So, this winning paper suggests a solution both to food insecurity in food deserts and to excess food waste in Baltimore. Its authors join Sheilah Kast in the studio. Marie Spiker is a doctoral student in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins University. And Corbin Cunningham, a PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
