PUTTING FOOD EQUITY ON THE TABLE Amid substantial gaps in who has access to healthy, affordable meals, Dr. May Wang and other FSPH faculty, students, and graduates pursue policies and community partnerships that promote change.
AFTER SPENDING MUCH OF HER CAREER in the realm of maternal and child nutrition — striving to improve the life trajectory of children by focusing on pregnancy and diet during the first five years of life — Dr. May Wang decided to broaden the scope of her work with the onset of COVID-19, as it became clear that in Los Angeles and throughout the state, people of all ages were going hungry. Wang, professor of community health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, is part of a research team that found that in the pandemic’s first three months, more than 3 million Californians reported that their households went without sufficient food, an increase of 22% over the pre-pandemic rate. Equally alarming, research co-sponsored by L.A. County and published in 2021 found that 10% of the county’s households experienced food insecurity. “We have long had significant disparities in who has access to sufficient amounts of healthy foods,” Wang says. “But with the pandemic, those disparities became much more glaring.” While continuing her work on maternal and child nutrition, including a longtime collaboration with the largest local-agency Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, PHFE WIC, Wang has actively pursued collaborations with community organizations and policy groups that can reduce those disparities. In March of this year, Wang was named as one of two academics to serve on the technical advisory team of the Los Angeles County Food Equity Roundtable, a recently launched 4
effort to track and address the county’s growing food insecurity challenge. Co-led by Los Angeles County and its philanthropic partners, the roundtable includes leaders from multiple organizations committed to addressing inequities in the current food system. “Dr. Wang is extremely well-qualified for this work to support the roundtable’s mission and responsibilities to improve access to, affordability of, and consumption of nutritious food,” says Swati Chandra, director of the Food Equity Roundtable. “With her work on these issues, she brings tremendous expertise as both a nutritional scientist and public health policy expert to the team.” Wide disparities abound across the spectrum of health measures, fueled by factors that include economic, educational, and environmental inequalities; racism and discrimination; and gaps in access to and quality of healthcare. But when it comes to food, Wang notes, these societal inequities are exacerbated by a host of additional factors, starting with the inefficiencies and injustices in the food system — how what we eat is produced, processed, packaged, transported, distributed, marketed, consumed, and disposed of. “The system is certainly fragmented, and a lot of people would argue that it’s broken,” Wang says. The inefficiencies of the system lead to disturbing levels of waste. In the U.S., up to 40% of the food produced is wasted — not eaten — according to the Natural Resources Defense Council; that failure was vividly displayed early in the pandemic by images juxtaposing farmers disposing of large amounts
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of food with long lines at food banks. Wang’s focus has been on the system’s injustices. She points out that in the U.S., decades-old policies incentivizing farmers to increase the production of crops that include corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans, and rice have contributed to the ready availability and lower cost of foods higher in fats and sugars, while the fresh fruits and vegetables essential to a healthy diet are less plentiful and more expensive. The preponderance of inexpensive, unhealthy foods, along with the scarcity and higher cost of healthy foods, particularly in low-income communities — so-called food deserts — help to explain why food insecurity and high rates of obesity can often be found in the same populations, Wang notes. “The government agriculture subsidies are part of the reason foods that are processed are cheaper than fresh food, even with the labor involved,” she says. Recently, the Biden administration announced plans to hold a White House Conference on Hunger, Health