Giving Compass' Take:

• Jon Steinman believes that the grocery store is the most influential force shaping food, and he urges people to look at who ultimately owns our favorite grocery stores as the key to unlocking answers about our food supply.

• What are the ways that donors can get involved in funding solutions that impact food insecurity and food supply? 

• Here's an article on grocery stores in Canada aligning with the zero-waste movement. 

“Who owns your grocery store?”

It’s the question emblazoned on the back of a van that has ferried me across 34 states to visit 128 consumer-owned grocery stores (food co-ops) and another 20 in development.

I spent 13 years investigating every facet of the food supply. It led me to the conclusion that the grocery store is, hands down, the most influential force shaping food, the planet, and our health. So I wrote a book about it, bought a tour van, and took the book on the road. The message I’m sharing is that it’s time to pay a lot more attention to who owns the grocery stores we shop at and what those answers mean to the future of food and the future of our communities.

We have invested considerable energy over the past decade into deepening our understanding of how and where food is grown and who grows it. Organic food has exploded into a $50 billion industry in the United States. Farm-to-table restaurants are plentiful. Farmers markets are thriving and community supported agriculture models are enabling new generations of farmers to usher in a new food paradigm. But there remains a cavernous gap in the effort—where we buy our groceries. If 10% of our weekly food budget is at a farmers market, what about the other 90%? It’s almost certainly being invested in a grocery store. So what are we investing in?

Read the full article about grocery stores and food supply by Jon Steinman at YES! Magazine.