The Hidden Mental Health Impact Of Cultural Food Insecurity
HuffPost – “To support cultural food access at a local level, community members need to be a part of the solution. Take the San Xavier Cooperative Farm in Arizona, for instance. Sixty-five miles west of Tucson, the 2.8 million-acre Tohono O’odham Nation has just one grocery store that often has high prices. But some individuals have rallied together to grow more tepary beans — a dietary staple whose annual yield on the Nation shrunk from about 1 million in the 1920s to a couple hundred pounds in the 2000s, said Amy Juan, the Farm’s administration manager. Today, the Farm is revitalizing traditional foodways. The members are growing a few thousand pounds of tepary beans each year, encouraging kids to become the next generation of farmers and optimizing seed-saving efforts to ensure there’s enough to meet the Nation’s demands in the future.”