PediatricDigest: Latest from Food Politics: Weekend reading: Flagstaff anti-hunger efforts

By Marion Nestle

June 12 2026

Weekend reading: Flagstaff anti-hunger efforts

In September 2025, I was invited by the Flagstaff Family Food Center to give a talk on “Anti-Hunger Politics 2025: Planting Seeds for Resilience.” This is an organization in Northern Arizona doing outstanding anti-hunger work.

The Center has just produced its 2025 Northern Arizona Food Equity Report. The online copy is here. It is well worth a look.

The Center sent this to me with this message:

We hope this resource can serve as a resource for multiple stakeholders across the food landscape, like you. Data and lived experience should always be the guiding light in this work, and we are proud to be part of a community that shares that sentiment and helps carry it out.

I wrote the Foreword to the report (see page 4). Here’s what I said—and I meant every word:

It is my honor and privilege to introduce the impressive and utterly compelling
2025 Northern Arizona Food Equity Report. The Flagstaff Family Food
Center (FFFC) has done a superb job of collecting what must have been
incredibly hard-to-get data on hunger and food insecurity in the rural and
tribal communities it serves.

These data reveal a shocking truth: many people—even those working full- or
part-time—lack sufficient resources to feed themselves and their families
and require government and private food assistance to survive. Even working
people cannot keep up with the rising costs of housing, rent, utilities, and food.

Today, government food assistance programs like SNAP and WIC are under
siege and targeted for cuts, not increases. Private groups like FFFC do the
best they can to fill the gaps and meet the ever-increasing demands for
food assistance, especially from the most vulnerable members of society-
-children, the disabled, and seniors.

This report presents the stark facts: too many Northern Arizona residents
experience food insecurity, and their numbers are rising. It explains the
reasons for food insecurity, particularly for these communities, and draws on
the lived experience of community members to describe why this problem
requires an immediate solution. It describes potential policy solutions, and
the reality-based barriers to achieving them. And it presents this critically
important information without ever losing sight of the cultural context in
which food insecurity occurs in Northern Arizona.

These are tough times in America. Northern Arizona is fortunate to have a
group like the FFFC doing the hard work and clear thinking needed to solve
some of the most difficult problems facing our society today.

The post Weekend reading: Flagstaff anti-hunger efforts appeared first on Food Politics by Marion Nestle

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