- Author: Kim Girard

It's a drizzly winter morning, and dozens of volunteers at the San Francisco–Marin Food Bank are slowly breaking down a 2,000-pound sack of whole oats into 1-pound bags, their hair tucked back in neat plastic caps. A decade ago, volunteers were more likely to be boxing up canned foods items. Today, 60 percent of everything ferried out of this warehouse is fresh produce. No soda or chips are in sight, and whole grains like these General Mills oats are standard.
For food banks nationwide to move in a similar healthy direction, coordinated efforts must increase at all levels. It will take leadership like that provided by Feeding America, the national food bank network organization; expanded support for nutrition...
- Author: Ann King Filmer

When you think casually of “food,” you may think of your next meal or your favorite food. “World food” may broaden your thinking to include international cuisines, global hunger, or a growing population. But the academic fields related to food are numerous. Food is one of life’s basic necessities, and along with its associated issues it is essential to the health and well-being of everyone, whatever their locale, education, or income level.
The new World Food Center at UC Davis will take on a broad purview related to food, including sustainable agricultural and environmental practices, food security and safety, hunger, poverty reduction through...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice

As we pushed ourselves away from the Thanksgiving table last week, my family, friends and I gave a collective groan from overeating. We are fortunate to have plenty to eat. In 2009, an estimated 3.8 million California adults went hungry because they could not afford to put sufficient food on the table, according to a policy brief by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. That’s up from 2.5 million Californians who went hungry in 2001.
To supplement their food supply, Californians can turn to the CalFresh program, which was formerly known as food stamps. The federal program is called the Supplemental Nutrition...
- Author: Ann King Filmer

Nutrition, food security and sufficient family incomes are challenges in many parts of the world. Half the world’s people live in rural areas in developing countries. Because hunger and malnutrition are often linked to poverty, providing economic opportunities through horticultural production not only helps family incomes, but also addresses food security and nutrition. Training women to produce and market horticultural crops in the developing world also helps provide a much-needed income stream for families with children.
UC Davis is addressing food security and economic development in Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America, and elsewhere, by coordinating an...
- Author: Iqbal Pittalwala

The world population is more than seven billion, and by 2050 that number is set to rise to nine billion — an increase of 50 percent since 2000. Can we possibly feed so many people?
Yes, according to Prabhu Pingali, who was invited to UC Riverside last week by the One Health Center to give a talk. Pingali, the deputy director of the Agriculture Development Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has more than three decades of experience in the field of agriculture. His hour-long talk focused on how nine billion...