Listen Here:
By Olivia Clark, Voice & Viewpoint Staff Writer
Read the Transcript of the Audio Story Below:
Diane Moss: So when the federal government and others start talking about cutting snap benefits or WIC benefits, these subsidy kinds of programs, it hits our communities harder.
A few months ago, Voice & Viewpoint Intern Alyssa Thomas revisited the rising prices of food and groceries impacting our low-income Black communities here in San Diego.
She spoke with Dr. Sally Sadoff, Professor of Economics and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, and Diane Moss, Managing Director of Project New Village, about their thoughts and perspectives on the issue of growing food insecurity in San Diego.
Dr. Sadoff’s work, as she describes it, is focused around inequality, particularly in education, and on understanding how achievement gaps can be closed.
Dr. Sally Sadoff: Food prices rising, less support for food assistance, what is it gonna mean for those families, who we know their children are most vulnerable for suffering educational consequences when they can’t put enough food on the table?
As Thomas reported in her article titled “The High Price of Food in San Diego”, “Per the USDA, Black children are twice as likely to face hunger, while 27% of Black children live in a food-insecure household, making that 1 in 4 Black children without access to reliable food. Access to quality food has a direct impact on how much Black children are able to succeed in school and how beneficial they will be in the labor force.”
Sadoff: There’s a lot of evidence showing, especially for families that receive food assistance like CalFresh or SNAP or food stamps, that when they reach the end of their benefit month, they tend to run out of food. And in those periods, where families are eating less, we see that children do less well in school.
In her research, Thomas found that “According to a study done by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 30% of San Diego’s Black population spends nearly a third of their monthly income on housing, preventing them from having the resources to meet their basic needs. For children especially, the increase in food costs doesn’t just impact the dinner table; it has the potential to affect the direction of their future.”
Dr. Sadoff has also seen clear differences in how food insecurity impacts higher income families versus lower income families, and white families versus black families.
Sadoff: We know that families are now spending sort of a growing share of their income on food and this is particularly the case for lower income families they spend a higher share of their household income on food than higher income families do and so when food prices rise, it has a larger impact on those families. And this is especially an issue for black families who report much higher levels of food insecurity than say white families so about a quarter of black families report some level of food insecurity compared to about ten percent of white families and I expect that those rates will grow with the combination of rising food prices and declining federal support for food assistance.
On top of concerns about how we will be getting food on the table, it’s important to also be mindful of what the food we get on the table looks like. Some of Dr. Sadoff’s work has looked at this very thing: the decisions we make about what food finds its way into our bodies.
Sadoff: We see that people intend to make healthy choices, but when it comes down to actually making the choice and taking the food off the shelf, they tend to default to less healthy choices. We think about the rise of diabetes and other diseases that are closely linked to diet, and so I think its too early to see if we’re seeing those rises, but I think that would be something to look out for.
Thomas was searching for new ways for families to adapt to a changing, uncertain economic climate. She asked Dr. Sadoff:
Thomas: So, based on any sort of knowledge that you have about these trends, I did wanna see if you can give me some insight about how you see, if this continues to increase as far as this inflation of grocery prices, what do you think that looks like in terms of long term spending patterns?
Sadoff: Food is a necessity, right, and so that’s why we see that low income families spend a higher share of their budget on food than higher income families. Higher income families spend more on food than lower income families, but it doesn’t grow proportionally, because we all have to eat and at a certain point you can only sort of spend so much on food. But its one of those things that is much harder to cut back on than sort of leisure activities or luxuries that you treat yourself to because you need to put food on the table. So I think that families are going to be strapped. I think that you know they can make adjustments to what they eat, but to some extent you have to spend a certain amount of money to get that food on the table. Especially if you don’t want it to just be cheap, unhealthy filler calories, but a balance of sort of healthy and maybe less healthy foods. And if you’re a family, to try and think about, ok, I’m under this budgetary strain, and its not your fault, right, this is coming from outside beyond what you have control over.
If this increased food insecurity is deeply systemic and largely out of our control, what are we supposed to do?
Sadoff: We do need to, as a community, and as a society, recognize how important this problem is, because it can have really long term consequences in terms of our health and educational outcomes and so this is a moment where we really need to step up and take seriously food assistance, at a time when its being cut at the federal level.
The solution proposed and being carried out by Moss and Project New Village, is something called Food Sovereignty.
From urban farming to community engagement, Project New Village’s mission is to spark resident-led action that strengthens neighborhoods, improves fresh food access, and advances health equity.
Under the influential direction of Moss, the organization strives to create healthy neighborhoods that support and contribute to the health of its community members, starting with Southeastern San Diego.
Moss: What we’ve seen as we are here working every day, that many people don’t know how to cook and that many people rely a lot on fast food so we are encouraging people like in this time of crisis drop the processed food, eat more food that may go raw, eat more food that you can grow or you know who grew it. There is more nutritional value there, its more accessible to us, but we have some choice there. We’re encouraging people to really take a leadership role in our diet by what it is we eat and the choices we make. I think, we think, that we really want to get people to recognize the power, if you will, of food sovereignty that is having control over what you make and making the neighborhood food system a viable system that we can all count on.
3-months after the federal government shutdown ended in November 2025, I went to the main office of Project New Village, in the heart of Southeastern San Diego. I sat down with Moss to hear a little bit more about the organization, her outlook on food insecurity, and get some updates on what she’s seen in the community.
Clark: What has the experience, both of you and Project New Village, been since that first government shut down a few months ago? And has the mission, or firsthand experience changed at all?
Moss: We’re seeing more people that want to help, the generosity of people who grow food is a wonderful thing. It just feels good to grow food and distribute food alongside of your neighbors. That’s what feels best to me, the social nature of growing the food, and knowing where it comes from, and sharing it with our neighbors. The philanthropic community has provided some help. Since we started this interview some time ago, there’s been several organizations that have come together and put funding together, and we’ve been lucky to be able to get some of that funding. On our mobile farmer’s market, we can now offer more subsidies, because we got funding to do so to support that. We have something that we call golden groceries. It’s a veggie box that we prepare once a week from hyper local. Well, 750 of those now this year, we can give to people who are on any types of subsidy, because of the snap, things that were with the snap program at the federal level, the local people got together and said, How can we help? And now we have 750 bags of groceries we can give out every week. The only qualifying question for us is, do you get any type of subsidy from the government, be that Section 8 housing, Snap, WIC, Medicare, Medi-Cal, sorry. If you’re eligible for any of those, you’re eligible for this program. We want to keep it simple and a dignified process for people who need the food.
Clark: What, in your view, makes food access so important? And why have you personally dedicated so much of your career to it?
Moss: Food is essential to a quality life. Better the food, right, the better your health and outcome can be. And the opposite of that, with no access to good food, you perish. Right? It’s not something that’s optional. It’s something that we need to have for a better quality life. I do what I do in the neighborhoods of Southeastern San Diego, ’cause I live here. It’s my neighborhood. I work with my neighbors, and we, like everybody else on the planet, need to have good food and access to it.
Clark: In your experience, what makes San Diego, especially southeastern San Diego, such an important location in need of a service, like a community garden, or the services that you guys provide?
Moss: We use the term food apartheid, and no, it doesn’t exist everywhere. It exists in those neighborhoods, particularly that have been historically under served. So clearly, that’s the case here, and there are other places, or spots in San Diego, not everywhere. And you can almost bet it’s where people who are poorer, if you will, and mostly in places where there are people of color, where we live. It’s not an accident that this happens. These are the same neighborhoods that are plagued with other types of disparities. So when I look at the landscape of southeastern San Diego, I can tell where once there were grocery stores, just because of the architecture of buildings, they no longer exist. We don’t have quality grocery stores. We have a few chain grocery stores. We have very few access to, I want to say, local, organic kinds of food, and sometimes the prices are through the roof. So, one of the things we’re proposing is, we can grow our own food and eat it together, and that’s what we’re about doing in the good food district in southeastern San Diego.
Clark: And if you could identify it, what is the impact of eating fresh fruits and vegetables that are grown in your own backyard or your neighborhood?
Moss: One is with your pocketbook, you save money, and in a time where everything seems to be going up, food is essential. You have to eat, so there’s a savings there from an economic point of view. And in Southeastern San Diego, we have more than our fair share of people who have hypertension, diabetes. These are things that are related to your nutritional intake, and we can do better if we grow our own food. We know what we put into the food, so we know the quality of the food that we’re eating, versus other ways you have access to food, you might not know what you’re eating, who grew it, or what’s in it, or what it grew in. So, it’s better, from my point of view, that you grow your own food or at least know who grew it. And in San Diego, we’re lucky because we have more farms than any place in the United States. in terms of small farms. So we can do better.
Clark: You said that you had seen growth in your numbers in terms of volunteers, people wanting to help out. How has that changed or how has that impacted what you all are able to do here? Have you been able to do more with those numbers?
Moss: So not so much more, but have a greater variety and be more culturally appropriate, if you will. Some of the things that you get from regular farmers might be different than what people grow in their backyard. We have one grouping of people. They have a different standard. For example, there are some people that don’t eat green tomatoes, so they don’t make those available. But in our neighborhoods, in backyards, we grow tomatoes, and we fry them up when they’re green.
Clark: Right.
Moss: So more culturally appropriate types of offerings that we can have at our truck.
Clark: What information are you using to base a need off of? Are you looking for families, individuals served?
Moss: We have what we call the Good Food District. It’s a place making effort that looks at southeastern San Diego and some of the neighborhoods that are contiguous, like National City and Lemon Grove. And it’s within that area that we’ll serve anybody that comes to the truck. We try to put a subsidy together for those who need it, but this is the freshest of food. We usually get everything on Mondays and Tuesdays, and then our markets are on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and some pickup markets on the weekend. And I can say people can try our golden groceries. It’s available. We have 25 meals per week. And some people pay, so we reserve their space for them, then we make the rest of them available to those who might need subsidies, but 25, we try to distribute every week. And that’s done right here at this office, and people can come on Wednesdays between 1:00 and 4:00. See what we have.
Rising grocery prices and increasing levels of food insecurity are driven by systems far beyond our control, like income inequality and changes in federal and local policy.
Food sovereignty and organizations like Project New Village remind us that power doesn’t only live in policies, it can live in our neighborhoods, our gardens, our kitchens, and our choices.
The major question isn’t whether food insecurity is real or not. The question is how we are going to respond to it. And the answer starts right here – in our communities.
For more information on Project New Village and their food distribution initiatives and events, visit ProjectNewVillage.org
For help with food assistance or finding free food distribution sites near you, visit feedingsandiego.org or sandiegofoodbank.org.
For assistance with accessing health, community, or social services, call 211 or visit 211sandiego.org.
Olivia Clark, Voice & Viewpoint