OPINION: 9 Ways to Get Mecklenburg’s Food System Back on Track

The following op-ed has four authors. Find their information at the bottom of the text. 

Early in December, the Charlotte Optimist published an article about Carolina Farm Trust president and CEO Zach Wyatt’s struggles in completing his aspirational CFT Market project on Hoskins Road. 

The author, Michael Graff, identified a few important barriers that exist within the Charlotte-Mecklenburg food system. Cherie Jzar of Deep Roots CPS Farm published a response on Substack two days later, adding more important details regarding our local food system challenges, identifying patterns and problems that go beyond Zach Wyatt. 

Jzar made the point that no one from the communities most affected by a lack of food options was contacted about the story. Graff posted a follow-up, titled “What We Choose to Grow in Charlotte,” a week after the first piece went live. 

This is an important discourse for our community, and it’s one we would like to add to as researchers who have spent years exploring these same issues. 

From 2019-2024, funded by UNC Charlotte and the American Heart Association, our team of more than 100 collaborators dug into the challenges of the local food system, putting the results of our direct research dating back to 2010 into the latest State of the Plate project. 

We recently shared our recommendations, which focus on access to healthy food, improving production and distribution infrastructure, increasing collaboration, rethinking funding models and building awareness for available resources and how the food system operates in general. 

Here we describe nine central challenges to the Charlotte-area food system that we feel must be addressed before real progress can be made. 

Several of these align with those in Jzar’s well-written response, and a few corroborate Graff’s account of a fractured food system and the broader critiques of Carolina Farm Trust’s approach to collaboration. 

• The Charlotte-Mecklenburg food system currently has few advocates in local government, leaving this topic usually under-thought and under-funded. Mamie Sackey-Harris, food security program manager at Mecklenburg County Public Health, and the now-retired Tom Warshauer, long-time community engagement manager for the City of Charlotte, have been important advocates for thinking about access and nutrition in the region, but this has not been enough to keep food as a focus for policy, funding or attention. 

• Expertise and local knowledge about the area goes unrecognized and underappreciated. The city often brings in external consultants who routinely tell those working in the food system what we already know, and even local organizations often fail to ask those most affected by food system challenges. The KK&P study in 2018 is a great example; organizers talked with 70 leaders in the county only to largely reiterate what was already widely known, leaving without a real plan to implement any recommendations. As pointed out by Jzar, expertise in this area doesn’t necessarily mean leaders in the nonprofit sector, but can refer to community members who live every day with the results of a broken food system but rarely have their voices heard.  

• Nonprofit organizations in the region do not often collaborate. While there are important exceptions to this, some of which are mentioned by Jzar in her post, nonprofit leaders often prefer to work on their own. Some of this is due to long-standing bad relationships between key leaders, creating a cycle of hero-focused efforts. This is not so much the “clique” that Zach mentioned in the original Charlotte Optimist article, but there are several individual local leaders who have alienated others through their own lack of interest in collaborating or bad faith efforts at such collaboration. Conversations within the food system are often not rooted in jealousy over funding but in how those funded refuse to really work with others, despite often having a veneer of “collaboration.” Some of the authors of this op-ed have had their or their organizations’ reputations used by others to get funding when they have not been actually involved in any decision-making, which undermines trust. Unfortunately, the challenges facing our food system (and many others around the country) are not solvable by one organization or approach, let alone by one person. Hero-focused efforts are not effective; we must build relationships with trust and “distributed ownership” rather than duplicated efforts. If you’re not working with other leaders and organizations, you should not be doing this work, because the work should not be about you. 

• Funders are partly to blame for the lack of collaboration. Jzar’s title, “Hero funding without systems assurance,” highlights that the funding process is often biased towards individuals with a story rather than the messy work that many organizations are doing. As she states, “It’s understandable why this happens: it’s easier to tell a story about one visionary with a big idea than to narrate the slower, messier work of coalition-building. But this approach concentrates responsibility instead of distributing it, and leaves everyone, including the designated ‘hero,’ without the support they need.” This becomes a vicious cycle of funding individuals who are held up as a hero, rather than a coalition without someone in charge of all of the decisions. Wyatt also suggests that the current funding model “pits us against each other,” highlighting the challenges of funding collaborative projects in a context where grants are small and focused on a single leader’s idea. 

• We lack opportunities to collaborate. There are no cross-county, all-inclusive planning bodies for the food system. In developing the State of the Plate project, we reached out to everyone we could find to invite them to join us for in-person or virtual meetings. We created this space because there was nothing else in place. The county (or region) needs an inclusive commission/committee/organization to address challenges to the food system that meets regularly, focuses on policy goals and finding solutions to the variety of challenges facing the food system. We also need smaller groups that address specific needs. For example, Jzar has built an important growers network that does this for some of our producers, but could be better supported. 

Read more: Deep Roots CPS Farm Builds Network of Urban Farmers (2024)

• Funding in general is a huge challenge for the food system, which limits how organizations can address needs for the food system. Specifically, funding for space and staff is not often available, nor is long-term sustainable funding. While funders would like to offer seed funding to support new ideas or programs, there is rarely a way that existing programs can run without external funding, leading to often short-term programs with little impact. Organizations rely on philanthropy from businesses or individuals to function; if your inboxes were full of food organizations on Giving Tuesday, you can see the huge need for funding the many efforts that keep people fed or keep farming going. State of the Plate found that spaces, expertise, labor and relationships are all critical needs that funding could support, but rarely does. We need to rethink the funding model for the food system, and potentially for nonprofits in general, to be able to support coalition projects that can lead to real outcomes for residents.

• Food systems are not isolated, but work within other systems. We rarely recognize that the food system is tied to economics, housing, employment, transportation, health care and many other systems. Addressing food access, grower challenges, restaurant supply and other needs will require us to think beyond just the food system to how we create better living conditions for workers and customers, land availability, technical support services and market access. A view of the whole set of systems can suggest how we can better foster upward mobility in general. 

• We have the opportunity to really address root causes together. The current political context is not helping any of this (think threats to SNAP and small farmers), but we also have the opportunity to envision how we can build back better in the future. This will take time and effort, which many of us often do not have, but with some support we could create a collaborative, inclusive, representative space to do this work. The SOTP reports suggest some directions, but there are so many options for improving our food system, including addressing the root causes of the problems that would move us beyond short-term fixes like SNAP and other aid.

Read more: Farmers, Hunger Relief Orgs Call for Budget Passage at Critical Time for NC Families

• We must continue to speak truth to power, no matter whose feelings might get hurt. Jzar suggests that people were asked about CFT, and that she was open in her responses. At least one of the authors of this op-ed was asked to review Zach’s project in 2022 before it was funded. Despite questioning connections to the community, accountability and the sparseness of details of the proposal, the county moved ahead with the funding. 

We accept that our SOTP recommendations are not perfect; we shared them in hope that as a group, we might improve and implement them.

Addressing the root causes of our food system challenges will take so much more than funding. Getting to a strong system of local and affordable food will take more than one person or one solution, grocery store or food hub. It will take all of us collaborating together. And it starts with leaders in the community, whether politicians, board presidents, heads of nonprofits, or others listening to each other, understanding where we are, and developing a joint vision of where we want to be. 

I think we can agree on the end goal: a healthy and sustainable food system. Now we need to work together on how to get there.

Authors:

Nicole Peterson, co-lead, State of the Plate research team and professor of Anthropology, UNC Charlotte

Samantha DeRosa, Farmers Market Management Services

Colleen Hammelman, co-lead, State of the Plate research team; director of the Charlotte Action Research Project and associate professor in the Dept. of Earth, Environmental, and Geographical Sciences at UNC Charlotte

Cherie Jzar, Deep Roots CPS Farm