The Good Food Kitchen

Food insecurity and access to basic needs

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Food Insecurity - According to US Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year (2018-2022) and the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA ERS 2019), Long Beach has a total population of 462,293 people, and 27.5% of those people have Low Access to Healthy Food. Four pillars of food insecurity are accessibility, availability, utilization, and stability.
Risk factors include income, employment, race & ethnicity, and disability. This project addresses accessibility and utilization and secondarily addresses income inequality given Goodwill SOLAC’s purpose is to provide vocational education, work training programs and support services for people with barriers to employment. Low income neighborhood conditions limit access to full-service grocery stores. Convenience stores and small independent stores commonly found in these neighborhoods typically have higher prices, lower quality, and less variety. CDC overlay maps document outcomes such as high blood pressure.

Low supply of healthy foods can lead to a reduced demand for healthy foods. Poor dietary habits are created over time and become normalized. Nutrition literacy education through The Good Food Kitchen can lead to healthier choices. Community engagement will include outreach to students enrolled in culinary programs at local community colleges, registered dieticians, public health professionals, and most importantly, the people who access the food pantry. Outreach to youth can change the trajectory of generational habits impact attitudes, beliefs and habits around food for future generations. Activities will include cooking demonstrations, recipe challenges and development of a cookbook using foods provided at the mobile food pantry. Input from our community will help to inform the program. We will supplement the food provided by the mobile food pantry with additional ingredients to create meals that participants can replicate at home.

Both the City of Long Beach and Los Angeles County are among the most culturally diverse regions in the United States. This cultural diversity underscores the need for inclusive educational and community programs to support all residents. The Good Food Kitchen will promote good nutrition that is culturally aligned with the communities we serve. A long term vision for scaling the Good Food Kitchen project is to facilitate small business growth by utilizing the kitchen as an incubator for people of color to realize their own food distribution opportunities. In this way, we promote better health while we also address income inequality (a causal factor of poor nutrition) by supporting entrepreneurship. Our project can be a model for other food pantries to adapt throughout Los Angeles County.

One of the most critical measures of success will be how many people attend the cooking sessions. Satisfaction surveys will help to inform development of the program. We will follow the same processes that we undertake with our periodic community needs assessment. That is, gathering community input through electronic surveys, focus groups and interviews from a spectrum of stakeholders. In 2023, the mobile food pantry directly served 3,447 individuals. Indirect family impact was 12,113. The pilot will help us determine what the community wants so we can gauge our expectations and the effectiveness of community outreach as the program goes into action.