Food First

Leaders see better, before and beyond the rest of us by Phil Knight

Kids COUNT by Phil Knight

Food is PowerFULL by Phil Knight

The Masks of Tradeoffs by Phil Knight

The End of an Era by Phil Knight

One Handful of Life by Phil Knight

There are over 6,500 food deserts in the U.S. These are places where economics and geography make it harder for people to access healthy, nutritious food. While the challenges for those in rural and urban food deserts may look different, their refrigerators often look the same.

Michigan’s Food Banks stand is the gap to help meet this need in both the rural and urban food deserts across our state. In Michigan, our network of 7 Feeding America Food banks and their 3000 pantries helps create access for the 1.1 M people struggling with and living under the toxic stress of food insecurity.

“Healthy things grow, growing things change and growing things change things,” says author Christine Cain. That has been the case at the Food Bank Council of Michigan over the past several years. Our work has expanded, scaled, and changed to help meet the need in the communities across our state. As we have gotten healthier, we are privileged to have earned the trust of our legislature, governor’s office, as well as the community itself.

Listen today as Gerry and Phil talk about the journey to get healthy in all our relationships so the work of creating a food secure Michigan could grow. Phil and Gerry will share a huge announcement that highlights this healthy growth experience in recent years by the FBCM. Don’t miss this edition of Food First MI.

Hunger has a straightforward solution – access to healthy food on a consistent basis. Food security is a bit different. It is a systemic adjustment to allow people to use and keep leverages to meet their daily, weekly, and monthly household needs.

On this week’s Food First Michigan we talk with United Dairy Industry of Michigan CEO Dwyer Williams. She is a problem solver who know there are many obstacles, challenges, and opportunities to help families have access to the food they want and need, specifically the most requested food item in our food bank network – milk.

Poverty in America sounds like an oxymoron. It just doesn’t seem to fit together. Why must there always be a class of people in our country that doesn’t have enough? During this week’s episode of Food First Michigan, hosts Dr. Phil Knight and Gerry Brisson examine this question.