Community Ag, Local Farmers & Healthy Food Access

Food, Gardening, Nutrition, Podcast

Are you a fan of local and community agriculture? If you’re like me, I love to hit the farmers market on the weekend in my town for a cup of coffee and a chocolate croissant and wander. While that habit is a lovely way to spend a morning, when we understand the potential impact of our choices, it becomes so much more. On this episode of the Southern Fried Girlfriends podcast, Jess Collett, Dee and I get into a great conversation about how our choices can support our health, the health of our communities, and economies.

Jess Collet comes from South Africa and has embraced southern living for almost 14 years. She grew up going to food markets and getting groceries at small chain grocery stores where potatoes and carrots still had a little dirt on them. She has fond memories of her “papa”, her paternal grandfather, growing hot chillies, vegetables, and lychees to use in his French-Creole-Mauritian cooking.
She studied Dietetics in South Africa to better understand the blended environment of food insecurity, chronic diseases linked to emerging western food concepts, and the diet industry.
Having worked as a dietitian in the UK, she travelled parts of Europe and explored its food, often fresh, local, and simply a way of life. She never thought much of this until she came to the US and completed her thesis examining community access to fruits and vegetables. To this day, her findings are upheld; disparate communities lack access to healthy food, creating further disparities in health outcomes.

She has worked in community and public health nutrition to implement and support nutrition programs that connect communities to healthy food. Ten years ago she was doing cooking demos at the East Atlanta Farmers Market. Currently she is a board member for Truly Living Well, a non-profit urban Ag organization empowering communities to grow food and/ or purchase directly from farmers.

She looks forward to developing new channels to support local food and agriculture.

Listen to Episode 23: Community Ag, Local Farmers & Healthy Food Access here or subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and more by searching for Southern Fried Girlfriends Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Swing on over to The Southern Fried Girlfriends Facebook page to chat about this topic, get some other resources, and stay connected!

– Anything by Wendell Berry
– Farmacology by Daphne Miller
– Third Plate by Dan Barber
– Farm City (haven’t read this but it’s got rave reviews, on my list!)

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