Welcome. Shall we start? OK. Thanks for coming out today. We're going to talk about food, one of my favorite topics. I'm Bob Fung. I'm the director and the founder of Syvenergy. And we're cosponsoring this forum with Davis Media Access. The director of Davis Media Access is Autumn sitting over here. And they're helping us to record the video today, which will be made public on the internet. So if you have friends who weren't able to make it to the forum, then you could point them at the video. Syvenergy has two missions. One is pretty focused. We put on voter forums during election season. We put on a forum for the Davis City Council election in 2018 at the Davis Community Church. And we had a little bit of a food theme going. We had food after the forum, which is a bit unusual. And Ann, who was the moderator, asked two food questions. So we are on the food theme. The second mission of Syvenergy is civic engagement to increase the civic energy of citizens locally here in Davis. And when we heard about this possible forum, we said immediately that we would support it. So we think that food is an important part of the social fabric of any society. And we think it's important to discuss it. Davis Media Access, I just have a little bottom, like sitting behind me to read this little thing. Well, anyways, they're a media company that supports local non-commercial media, allows independent programs to be produced and shown in Davis. Let's see. We want to say that we did not sort of organize this forum. We're not providing any contents of energy in Davis Media Access. The four conveners of the Let's Talk About Food, that's Ann, Dima, Katherine, and Grace, will provide all the content for the forum. And we want to thank Diane Parrow, who's sitting over here, in the city of Davis for helping us to organize the forum. So Ann Evans is going to be the moderator. She's the former mayor of Davis. She is the co-founder of the Davis Co-op and the Davis Farmers Market. And she's author of the Davis Farmers Market Cookbook. Ann? Thank you, Bob. So great. It's like 7-10. That's official start time in Davis, right? So we can get going. We're here to talk about food. And here to really kick us off is our mayor, Brett Lee. I want to thank you all for coming and having a chance to listen to Brett and listen to really the contents of this report.  Dima and Katherine and I, for the last two years or so, we're talking about whether or not Davis ought to have a food policy council. And we went round and round and really argued with one another about the role of it, the efficiency, the effectiveness. And about eight months ago, we finally just decided, yes, it's probably what we need to get some of the initiatives that we were interested in food and agriculture, a waste reduction going in Davis. So we wrote some thoughts up on it. And we approached our fairly newly elected mayor, Brett Lee, with the thought of going forward with a mayoral initiative around the themes that you'll hear discussed tonight in food. And Brett immediately embraced it, saw the importance, both macro and the micro scale of it. And he took it to his city council of colleagues who also unanimously supported and had been talking about it and supported this concept. So with that, we were able to work with Diane Perot, which was very significant in helping us shape the steps that followed. And we'll go over those in a little bit. But I wanted to bring Brett up here and thank him for introducing the initiative and ask him to say a few words. So Brett. Thank you, Ann. And thank you for saying everything that I was about to say. I was gonna give a little bit of a history of meeting with Ann and Catherine and Dima. And so sometimes repetition is helpful for you to remember things. I think you get the general idea on this though. But there are a couple of key points that I really want to make sure you're aware of. The city of Davis, when I say the city of Davis, the community of Davis is what it is today because of people who have stepped forward to bring their knowledge and ideas forward and find like-minded other folks who are willing to work together to help sort of push those forward. And when Ann came forward and emailed me and I kind of read what Catherine and Dima had been working on, it's like, wow, this is wonderful. This is a great opportunity because Davis is really in the right spot to talk about how we distribute food, how we grow food, this whole changing way of how we view food, its production, its distribution, and its use. And when I say use, that's probably a cold way of saying how we like to enjoy our food in terms of eating it, right? And so I feel very fortunate to have this opportunity as sort of a new mayor to be able to help nudge this forward a little bit or perhaps open a door or two to help this gain some momentum and actually come to fruition. I can't do it without my colleagues and so I did bring it very early on to my council colleagues to make sure that we were all on board and all felt a piece of ownership of this because the ideas that you'll hear about tonight will need some city council support. And so we want to not get too far away from what's happening here because we want to step in at the right time and provide that city support. And before I go too far, I just wanna thank city staff for helping this event happen and also Davis Media Access and Civ Energy. Actually, Civ Energy and Davis Media Access are examples of those ideas of people stepping forward. Hey, I have this good idea and actually willing to do some work to make it happen. My apologies to Cool Davis. If my guess is you'll be quite happy with this comparison and my guess is the food policy group will be quite happy with this comparison as well but I haven't pre-checked it out with them. My guess is that this group that you see before you and in the room will create something very similar to Cool Davis and Cool Davis is an essential partner and actually much more than a partner. They really take the lead on the city's climate action plan, ideas for how are we going to be a sustainable community when it comes to climate change, greenhouse gas issues, things of that nature. They are much more than a partner but it is this idea of people stepping forward, coming together, moving things forward. And I imagine that this group, especially as you hear some of their proposals, will fill a similar role in this food and ag space. And just sort of enclosing with my opening remarks, I just want to thank you for coming out and let you know that myself and my council colleagues are very supportive of this effort and that's important because I think it's important that people know when you're putting in those hours, that time, that you do have the institutional support behind you because we actually want to see results and we're so thankful that Ann and team are going to make it so easy for us to have those results. But thank you. Great, thank you Brett, thank you very, very much. So what are we gonna do tonight? We have a process outline for the next 45 minutes or so. You all have green cards, three by five cards. You handed those? Okay, so you know at any time, write a question, you'll hand those in, we'll ask those for the second half. But the first half, we're going to go over sort of how we came about doing the report. You're gonna hear a summary of each of the four sections of the report. You're gonna hear an expert react, an expert sort of talk with you about, well I think it's missing this, I'd like to emphasize that, don't forget this. And then we have three, and I'll introduce the dais in a minute, three sort of super audience reactors who are gonna take a minute each or so and kind of give their thought on it. What, just how are they feeling about it? Each of them have a background in food sustainability and agriculture as well. So that's the format. And I wanna introduce then Dima Tamimi, who you've heard her name. She's the founder of Land and Ladle, nonprofit and giving garden, and really is responsible for all these beautiful graphics and layout that you see, expert marketer. Katherine Brinkley, who's the assistant professor in the College of Ag and Environmental Science at UC Davis, Department of Human Ecology, and brought a lot of, as everyone did, but a lot of the content to it. And then the experts, you have Bapu Vaitla, is that how you say Vaitla? Thank you. He's a fellow at the UN Foundation, a researcher at Harvard School of Public Health and visiting lecturer here at UC Davis on the politics of food systems. And he's worked on food security and nutrition policy programming for the last 15 years. Joy Cohen is the director of philanthropic engagement for the Yolo Food Bank. Now Bapu's gonna be the expert on sustainability. Joy is gonna address the section on security and access. The section on innovation and entrepreneurship, Andrew Waterhouse will address. He's a professor at UC Davis and the director of the Robert Mondavi Institute. And branding and narrative is the fourth section. Lauren Kaliski will address that. He's the chief bread officer for Upper Crest Baking Company. They have a new location if you haven't seen it next to the co-op. And he's on the board of directors also of Visit Yolo. For our reaction panel, we have Dan Kennedy. He's on the board of the Davis Farmers Market and you may have read his monthly columns in the Davis Enterprise on food that is grown locally and from sort of a consumer point of view. I guess she just recently wrote about water, right? Desmond Jolly is the retired director of the University of California's statewide small farm program and director of the small farm center. Katrina Oman is the director of the UC Davis Student Farm. And so that is our group on the dais that are gonna take us through the next 45 minutes. I want to also introduce somebody extremely important to the process and to provide a lot of the content and that's Grace Peary, who's a graduate student in community development at UC Davis. So she interned with the project. And with that, thanks to all the panel members and I will turn it over to Dima and Catherine who are gonna start us off at the beginning of each section and give us a summary. Okay. So to start with, I'm gonna be talking a little bit about the process, but before I, in terms of getting this to happen, before I do that, I just wanted to thank everyone for being here. I moved here about five years ago and the enthusiasm about food and how food can be a central piece for the city and for economic development has definitely been on the rise. So one thing I wanted to know is this is just the very beginning of the process. This is a draft report. We definitely want your feedback and we also would love for anybody who wants to be involved to sign up on the website that we have at the bottom of all the slides coming up so that if you are interested in being involved, we can reach out to you. So in terms of the process, as Anne mentioned, we met with Brett Lee and then after that we had a great meeting with Diane Parrow to figure out sort of who are the groups of people we needed to bring together to start drafting the first draft of this report and recommendation to the city on food and economic development. And in that meeting, we really wanted to make sure that we had representatives from a variety of groups who wanted to have students there. We wanted to have people from the farming community, businesses, advocacy groups, restaurant owners, academics. And so that was a big part of how we ended up figuring out who was going to come to three key meetings that we put on in November and December. The first meeting that we had was actually very much focused on us figuring out as a group what were all the assets that Davis already has. When we have so many amazing assets when it comes to food and agriculture, so we wanted to make sure that we compiled that list. And what came out of that meeting, what was interesting is we also ended up seeing that there was already very key opportunities that had risen up and we could see that there were sort of trends and buckets of opportunities. So by the second meeting, and actually just to note, on that first discussion, that was actually opened by Mayor Brett Lee. And we also had Council Member Lucas Freyrex and County Supervisor Don Saylor there to open up the meeting, which was very helpful. By the second meeting, we had already kind of figured out that they were these very key opportunity areas that had risen to the top. So during that meeting, we focused on opportunities and we actually dove a little bit deeper in that we broke out into areas where we could focus and then put actual action steps for each of the key areas that rose to the top. And those key areas actually ended up sticking and those are the key areas ended up in the report and that we're gonna be actually talking about today. At that meeting, that second meeting, Mayor Pro Tem Gloria Partita opened up that meeting and also Rani McNear provided some comments at the beginning and she's from the Davis Farmers Market. Also Andrea LePore, who is the owner of Solomon's Delicatessen, she's a local food entrepreneur, gave us a really amazing presentation and it's an inspiring story about what she's trying to build in Sacramento. It's a food incubator and kitchen space called Food Factory, which allowed us to sort of broaden our minds around what opportunities are available in Davis. By the third discussion, we had already at that point with two surveys come down to these four action areas. We agreed on those four action areas and then that third discussion was really about feasibility and how do we actually move forward. Diane Parro spoke at that meeting. We also had Dan Carson there, Council Member Dan Carson. And then lastly, we had Ken Hyatt, who's from the city of Woodland, talk about the Woodland Food Front Campaign, which is a campaign really focused on economic development around food and also a branding campaign. So that was really good for us to see sort of locally a city taking on food as an economic driver. And then the last sort of event that we had was actually in partnership with the Davis Futures Forum and for that event, we really wanted to bring an outside speaker with an outside perspective. So we brought in Paula Daniels, who is actually the founder of the LA Food Policy Council and she brought a really interesting perspective the policy changes around street food vending that they had successfully done in LA as well as their good food purchasing practices. So all of the content from those four events was compiled, Grace was amazing in bringing all that together and then together we brought that together into a report and we had now these four key action areas which we're gonna go through. But before we jump into the action areas, Catherine has some additional comments on the process. Sorry, being a faculty in community development process is all important to the product. And there have been over 340 food policy councils in North America since 2018. So we had a lot of case studies to learn from. In addition, I'm lucky enough to work with Dave Campbell and Gail Fienstra and they just published a report on California Food Policy Councils and how to do them the right way. So we had a lot of guidance in figuring out the process and thinking deeply about building on Davis' strengths as opposed to bringing to light any weaknesses Davis may have. So with that, we will now go into each of the priority action areas and kind of review the report for you and the report is available online. Do you want me to do this part? Okay, all right, I'm ready. All right, so the first priority action area is establishing Davis as a sustainable food testing lab leading in climate smart food practices. And Dima and I both have the pleasure of serving on the Downtown Planning Advisory Committee. So this is a theme that has come up earlier in thinking about the downtown plan, thinking about what to do with Davis, thinking about how to redevelop the downtown. And it was a theme that emerged again in our community conversation. So here, sustainable can be defined in many different ways. We're using the definition that we're responsibly using resources so that there's enough for future generations. And with that, this section really focuses on greenhouse gas emissions, which is the focus of the Climate Action Plan, as well as food waste. So if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. That's pretty shocking. It's the largest single source of waste in California. And this is a major area that has potential to not only decrease greenhouse gas emissions, but also a lot of food waste streams. Food can be repurposed. So we had the benefit of having students from the Food Recovery Network on campus who brought a lot of their know-how from collecting from the farmer's market, collecting from the many grocery stores and delivering it to the food bank and food cupboards. So there's a lot that can be done in Davis to augment this work, which would keep food from going into the landfill and would also help serve those who lack food access. So you will start to see that even though there are four priority action areas, they are interwoven in many cases. So some of the specific action steps for this action area include updating food waste ordinances, updating food elements in revisions of the climate action plan, which is due for revision, adopting zero food waste goals, focusing on institutional programming, which can be through the city. It can be in partnership with the county. It can be in partnership with the school district and encouraging public outreach. So many people don't know that they can easily donate. There's good Samaritan laws, so creating outreach to help foster that. And then there are some other action areas which deal with encouraging edible landscapes and gleaning, which is collecting food that hasn't been harvested the first go around. And these recommendations, excitingly, mirror a lot of the recommendations that the downtown plan has and might find their way into the general plan for Davis as well. So you'll start to see some synergies with the proposal that's in this report as well as many of the other planning action agendas around the city. And with that, I will hand it over to Dima for the... So actually, Ann, this is when we will bring the experts to have a reaction. So all right, Bapu. So your turn just to tell us what you think and what else we need to be doing here to really go deeper. So first I wanna commend you for all of your work, everyone who's involved. I know it's a lot of effort to convene people and sift through the literature and case studies. And I really think you've hit the high points as far as sustainability is concerned. So thank you for all of your work. As far as my observations on this, I wanna make three broad points that I hope will be useful. The first has to do with your language here about being carbon neutral as a goal in sustainability. I think that's a great choice if you're gonna have a vision for an overall guiding principle for sustainability. And the next step there is, I think, to develop metrics around that goal that will help you to evaluate how different intervention, the trade-offs between different interventions, sort of the costs, the feasibility of them, both logistically and politically, as compared to reductions in emissions or CO2. And the reason why I think carbon food system accounting is a good overarching framework for metrics is because it turns out that food waste, reducing food waste and converting to more plant-based diets are two of the most powerful ways to reduce CO2 of any intervention, of any change in any sector. They're very, very strong ways to draw down CO2. You've directly addressed the food waste issue in some of these action steps and you've also emphasized food education. And one of the other recommendations that I'll make is the linkage between food education and plant-based diets. But I think there's an implication there in food education that conversion of diets to a more sustainable model is also core to your overall vision. So what I think would be great to see is somewhere over the next six to nine months. And I know Cool Davis has probably done some of this carbon accounting. I know that there are professors at the university in the environmental science and policy in urban and regional planning departments who are very focused on this kind of carbon system accounting to take a look at the different action steps you have here and especially the priorities you have for 2019 and 2020 which are at the back of this document. And I get a sense of what are the costs and benefits associated with those in terms of practical dollars and cents and in terms of CO2. And there I think you have a kind of information base by which to say, okay, given the political and logistical feasibility and the cost-benefit calculations, this is where we're gonna put this amount of energy into driving forward. So I think that kind of formal carbon accounting would be very useful. The second recommendation or observation that I wanna make is around the way that you've framed the action steps around food waste which I think is great. And again, I think you've hit some of the main, the high points as far as best practices in cities and towns and countries worldwide, so that's great. What I think would be great to layer on top of this as well is to think about, some of these steps are about prevention, others are about diversion to places like the food bank. They can meaningfully use them. And others are about recycling to use as energy or in a form of compost. The order in which I laid those things out are I think the orders in which you would ideally deal with food waste. So prevention I think is the best overarching strategy and then followed by diversion and then followed by recycling in some sense. So that kind of triage, that kind of prioritization, it would be great to see that reflected in the decision-making process that happens over the next year. And I also think when you're talking about food, reducing food waste generally, just to sort of emphasize the point that prevention is perhaps the preferred way to start, is to think about the supply chain of food that's entering Davis. Right now restaurants have their own mechanisms for assessing the efficiency of their supply chain. And I think there's probably a lot of sharing of best practices that could happen between the restaurants themselves that could be facilitated by the city, which is probably a low-cost endeavor to say, okay well what's working actually to prevent overstocking of materials? How can we cut down on the supply end to make sure that the input of carbon, of food entering the city, being generated in the city, is as efficient as possible. So that kind of sharing of best practices of supply chain management is what I would love to see. Looks like I have a minute to go, so I'll close just with the food education part. And again, I really like your priorities. I would emphasize that a conversion to plant-based diets is really the strongest evidence-based link that we have between food system change and environmental sustainability. So I understand that we don't want to restrict choice and I'm not a vegetarian myself or I'm a bad vegetarian so bad that I can't really call myself one. But I will have to admit that the evidence is kind of overwhelming that plant-based diets have a profound, profound impact on food system sustainability. So when you think about education, when you think about these action steps, I would really think deeply about kind of a non-intrusive way and an educational way to show citizens here, to show restaurants the benefits of plant-based diets and then I would just tie that one last time to your other action priority areas. Clearly that's an issue of healthy diets but you might also feed into your branding and also into your food entrepreneurship is to kind of define Davis as a place where it's not just great restaurants but also there's this food sustainability plant-based diet angle to it as well. Thanks. Terrific, thank you very, very much. And so I'm just gonna turn over to our reactors and whoever would like to start first, go ahead, just any thoughts? Desmond? Yeah, I'd just like to observe that a lot of food waste occurs at the level of the farm. This proposal seems to point the finger to food waste at the level of consumption. Restaurants, other kind of food institutions but if the objective is to reduce food waste overall in the food system to impact climate change then you have to work with people who deliver information to farmers. And there's a lot of uncertainty around farming that have to do with the varieties they plant or the anticipate markets, the quality they think they can take to market and what do you do with the culls, the part you don't take to market. So it's not just at the level of the consumption sites, either the household or the restaurants or the hospital but it's also at the level of the farm and that's a huge one. Okay, thank you. Katrina? I just, I wanted to echo what Babu said earlier and just commend this whole group for pulling this together. I was really excited to see food waste addressed and also some of the emphasis on food recovery and especially this idea of reducing policy barriers for food sharing. I know there's a number of people within the community that are really interested in that and there's a lot of potential benefits that. I also was really happy to see grants identified as a source of funding to promote some of this work and I echo the sentiments around education. I think that Babu's point about emphasizing plant-based diets is a nice one but I think it'd be important to think about how to talk about that. And the last thing I just wanna say is that I was really excited to see the emphasis on supporting local and sustainable foods and I think that from talking with some farmers, I think there are some challenges for farmers to get into restaurants in the areas and I know some at least are interested in food hubs so it might be nice to include something like that in there and I probably went over a minute. Sorry about that.  Yeah, thank you. I'd like to take a broader look at all of this, includes this and more, which is how high can you go? We're talking about this initiative so have many other cities around the country and states and what's possible in Davis. I told Anne earlier, this is the sort of document I'd expect from a city of two million people. I mean the inclusions, the ideas and so forth but on the other hand we're a small town. What gives us credentials at a high level is three things, the university with its ag programs and wine programs, the farmer's market that by anybody's market, marker is one of the best in the whole country and the region. I spoke to Michael Pollan after he came out with his book and I said what's the best region in the country? He was not gonna go on the record with it but he said you got it and he said New York should be best in the second place after that. So that's what we have to work with which I throw that out there because how high can we go when we set visions and we ought to set visions that are pretty darn high. Great, thank you. Good, well I think we're ready to move to action priority number two. So priority number two is ensuring a healthy diet for all and this to speak to Dan's point is a high vision and it builds from and with a really bold initiative with the Yolo food bank which is to end hunger in the county so we often think of Davis as a very affluent city and by many markers it is but it's also the most food insecure city in the county and a large portion of the food insecure are students so about 44% of students at UC Davis are food insecure and this should be shocking because UC Davis is the number one agricultural university in the country so students can't perform well when they can't eat and there are choices that need to be made but there's also food insecure people who live in Davis who are not students and so this section of the report really seeks to weave together a lot of the economic development efforts to lift up the folks who aren't being lifted up and who struggle with federal initiatives that are continuously being removed. So you'll notice in the report that we mentioned something incredibly bold. We take it from Belo Horizonte, Brazil which is a city that decided in the 1990s it was gonna have a zero hunger policy. They dedicated 2% of the city budget to ending hunger. They used that budget for public procurement programs supporting local farmers and that food was delivered to public cafeterias where anyone can eat. You can provide a donation but anyone can eat there. The majority of the customers who eat there are low income or homeless. So this is an idea that Davis could take on. It's a big bold idea that would make a big bold statement and it's one for which we have a lot of partners who are already working in this area. So the specific action areas for this section really require deeper thought and so one of the big action areas is creating a council or a committee who can think about how such an effort might be funded, how that effort could be woven together with federal, state, local funding, grant funding and thinking about some of the newer models. So again, we had Paula Daniels who's a leading expert in food policy with LA who's founded Good Food LA and is also helping cities with public procurement. Davis would have the potential to be the sixth city on the list that has a good food public procurement stamp on it and then we also in our research uncovered many public kitchens that Davis already has. So six public kitchens in the city of Davis. Those are spaces that entrepreneurs could use but they're also spaces that might be able to be opened up so that lower cost food could be released into the city. So the next items here are exploring more grant opportunities for food rescue, for food access, for entrepreneurs, small scale entrepreneurs and building food capacity in that sense. We've already mentioned that UC Davis is working in this space. The county, Don Saylor is working on food access issues and so there are partnerships that can be had there for optimizing cleaning programs for food recovery logistics and then one of the last bullets is supporting low cost healthy food options and this I won't talk about right now but it spills over into legalizing street food vending for the city of Davis but also builds upon the public kitchens that the city has that could be utilized for entrepreneurial space and then also lower cost healthy food for food insecure. Okay, thank you. So Joy, your comments. Good evening. Well, first of all, I do wanna thank Mayor Brett Lee as well as Anne and Catherine and Dima really for recognizing the role food plays in economic development in general and that they've achieved this via the let's talk about food series and the preparation of this report. Food is a basic need and its importance to our wellbeing is universally understood. So making the connection between food and typical economic development initiatives such as industry and job creation, new business startups, branding and marketing and highlighting the link to the academic and research capabilities that are readily accessible here in Davis, it's a brilliant way to engage a broad cross section of the community and economic development conversations in the community. What I particularly applied, however, is their willingness to embrace the concept of ensuring access to a healthy diet for all in the process and in this report. Not only does it provide acknowledgement that poverty and food insecurity indeed are significant challenges here in Davis. In fact, and as Catherine noted, Davis has the highest rate of both poverty and food insecurity in Yolo County. But also that food-based economic development cannot be successfully implemented nor Davis as a community truly thrive without first addressing hunger and nutrition and how they relate to the health and wellness outcomes, educational outcomes, employment and housing outcomes and so many other measures of social mobility that impact the economy and the common good of all who reside in and do business in Davis. Furthermore, the inclusion of food and security in this report documents the need for civic and local government support for nonprofits such as Yolo Food Bank that are engaged in meeting the food security need of the county and of Davis. As Yolo County Chief Administrator Patrick Blacklock has stated publicly of Yolo Food Bank's critical role in the county's social safety net, there is no other entity capable of providing these essential services and programs he has said. Yolo Food Bank has a $10 million annual impact upon the social safety net of the county, yet the vast majority of annual funding comes thanks to the generosity of individual donors in Davis and throughout the county, just average people like you and me. The action steps in this report set in motion plans to alter that current reality in a positive way. In a city with nearly 30% poverty that is home to a university campus with 44% student food insecurity according to the recent Student Food Security Task Force study. The issue absolutely needs to be considered at the city and university policy and planning levels. And while food waste, rescue and diversion efforts can and do have an impact and are valued, there is no greater impact possible than that of sustainable funding for an entity such as Yolo Food Bank, an entity that sits at the hub of a network of growers, grocers, and other food donors as well as nearly 200 distribution partners. And that includes 70 non-profit organizations for whom food is critical to the execution of their own missions. They obtain food, the food that they need, for free actually from Yolo Food Bank other than a nominal 19 cents per pound shared maintenance fee.  These non-profits include many serving Davis, such as steak, Davis community meals and housing, Communicare, Empower Yolo, Meals on Wheels Yolo County, and at UC Davis, the Pantry, the Aggie Compass Basic Needs Center, and the Solano Park Family Housing Neighborhood on campus. In fact, Solano Park is served via very special collaboration with the Davis Farmers Market and Food Recovery Network at UC Davis. In total, there are 21 ongoing food distributions in the city of Davis, all propelled by Yolo Food Bank. And in fact, we're about two weeks away from moving into our new food distribution warehouse and operations facility in Woodland. And with that, there's a potential for even more food distribution in the city of Davis. The absolute most immediately beneficial suggestions in this report are those to build in financial support via ordinances related to sales in the city of various products, such as cannabis, as well as to explore collaborative grant opportunities, both with Yolo Food Bank and with our network, to enhance their capacity to fully embrace their partnerships with us and expand upon food innovation kitchen options in the city of Davis and throughout the county. As an agricultural institution, deepening UC Davis's engagement with the city and the Food Bank in research and innovative solutions to this challenge admits to agricultural bounty, also carries merit as an approach to addressing the underlying causes of hunger in our midst. Similarly, encouraging healthy menu options amongst vendors of affordable food choices in Davis and working with the Davis Joint Unified School District to ensure free and reduced price meal participation are important initiatives. Also finding the right way to extend Yolo Food Bank's popular Kids Farmers Market concept in the Davis School District also is a worthy goal. Through this interactive engaging program, children obtain produce, learn about it, come to understand its monetary value, receive nutritional facts, and experience the seat-to-plate journey of the food that they're obtaining and eating. Food insecurity is more than not enough food, it's not enough of the right foods, the foods that achieve and sustain good health. Davis is the ideal environment to combine economic development with other community attributes to create real innovation and impact that changes lives right here in Davis. I'm looking forward to working together with Davis community leaders toward this end. Thank you. Thank you, Joy. Do we have any reaction here, Desmond? There's a here from Joy Cohen. It says, all that's missing is the structure to organize and focus the assets. So for the next iterations after that, it would be great if you had the time and resources to draw a map of the organizations that are now engaged with food distribution to the insecure, and perhaps describe briefly the various roles they play and some proposal as to how the coordination might work, the mechanism whereby these various agencies could be coordinated to have a smoother functioning distribution to the food insecure, the structure and organization and management of that process. Great. Desmond got to that quote before I did. Go ahead. Because I had circled it as well.  Within the last week, have you personally dealt with anybody who doesn't have enough to eat? My guess is for most of us probably not, and if you did, you did something about it. You probably asked them over, well, come on over, if you're in somebody that you knew, you said, well, come on over to my house. The will is there. Look at the people around the room, but this takes us back. I'm trying to take it to an emotional people level, but the structure, okay, how do I do something about that? I know I've had the experience, I go to a lot of farms to write my column. I've had the experience of going to a place that had rows and rows of tomatoes. It wasn't economical to pick them and bringing boxes from the co-op and spending an afternoon picking them and bringing them to the Olo Food Bank. Because there's no structure, and I keep thinking, couldn't we just have a structure where people were so moved? I know university students and others would jump on that. Thanks, Katerina. Yeah, I just want to add, I was really excited to see that one of the first bullet points was to include food security in the city's updated policies and planning documents, and embedding that throughout the city's policy, I think is going to be key. I also agree that continued financial support for existing programs and new programs is a great thing. And then the other two things, I think, yeah, I guess the other two things that I just want to mention is having, from what I understand with the students that I've spoken with, sometimes the issues are access to a kitchen, so community kitchens are amazing. Sometimes the issue is time and not having time to prepare a meal, so ready-made, low-cost, healthy options, I think are going to be really important in identifying ways, either through food recovery programs like the Food Recovery Network is doing throughout the city could be great. And then the last thing I just want to mention is considering representation as the city moves forward with this specific topic and ensuring that the people who are in the room, guiding either the policy or the planning within the city actually represent the people who are most impacted by this. Often we know those are people who aren't necessarily the people sitting in this room right now, so just ensuring that there's representation, specifically, especially with this topic, I think is important. Thank you. I just want to say welcome to all of you. If you want to take a seat, there's plenty of seats, do feel free, we'll just take a quick second and you won't be disturbing the people if you wish. Okay, then we're getting ready for priority action area number three, make Davis a leading center for food entrepreneurship and innovation. Okay, thanks Anne. So this action area is actually somewhat too pronged. It's about embracing both the technical and science-based innovations around food and agriculture that are coming out of the university, but also embracing small scale and creative food entrepreneurs that are innovating in their own ways. Much of the reason why we saw, this actually came up quite a lot in our other conversations and I think one of the reasons why it came up so much is that we have such perfect assets. We have all the ingredients for this. From UC Davis is the number one in the nation for agriculture with 15 departments in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. We have 35 research centers and institutes focused on food systems and 7,000 plus UC Davis students enrolled in food focused degree programs. And so we have a really great opportunity to keep that talent in this area, keep that pipeline that's coming out of the university if we can create a space for them or the incentives for them to stay and start their businesses, whether that's Ag Tech, Food Tech or creative food businesses in this area. In terms of Ag Tech and Food Tech, it is a very big growing space and definitely an economic space that we should be thinking about. So just last year, $10.1 billion was invested into Agra Food Tech solutions, many of them around sustainable Ag and food solutions. In addition to those, the assets I mentioned that are very valuable for those in the Ag Tech Food Tech space, we have lots of great assets also for food entrepreneurs in the more creative food business space. UC Davis is food science program, UC ANR is a wonderful asset, UC Serup is another asset and our proximity to farmland is a really perfect ingredient for entrepreneurs to be able to get local food to create their food options and also I think it could tie in very nicely to gleaning and if you're a food entrepreneur you may wanna go out and glean and then use that produce to create interesting products. But one of the things that we know we noted is that we need to make it easier for people to enter the food economy. So entrepreneurs, to do that for entrepreneurs we need to work on some of the policies around supporting home cooks and mobile vending and other pathways that allow people to start businesses and food that is less capital intensive of going straight into the restaurant space. And this would allow for a lot of people who are not able to currently participate in the food economy to do so. That includes women, people of color, immigrant communities where that kind of capital may not be at their disposal. And the last thing around sort of the economics of this is that we know that food businesses also bring a lot of economic generation for the city. So when we looked at some numbers around downtown this was actually through our work on D-PAC, food and dining in the downtown area contributes 55% of downtown taxable sales. And that was in 2017 and that was up from 39% in 2008. So while we see some sectors in retail going downward food is going up, people wanna gather around food. And so that's an area that the city could really invest in since it is an economic growth area. So I'm gonna jump into the action steps and I'm actually gonna pass it off to Catherine in a little bit. But on the fostering of thriving business environment some of the things we talked about was developing a grant program for foods. In some ways we do that around arts. Let's do it around food as well. We wanna invest in a support and ticketing system that's online that makes it easier for food businesses to get all their permitting because right now it requires a lot of going in to talk to staff. We wanted to also have focused economic development efforts on attracting developers who want to create commercial kitchen spaces, work on sort of innovation centers. Also interest in a culinary pathway program. I'm supposed to go faster at DJUSD. And then one last thing that I wanna just quickly meant is providing more support for the home cook effort in Davis and work with Yolo County to push that through. All right, so I'm gonna round that up by talking specifically about street food vending. Together with Councilman Lucas-Ferriks we authored an op-ed in 2016 about legalizing street food vending in Davis. Currently you can operate but you have to move every 10 minutes. New state legislation happened in 2018, SB 946. And that legislation states that regulating street food vending can only be done for public health reasons, which means that the current ordinance that Davis has is not in compliance with state regulation and it needs to be changed. And it would be a wonderful thing if it were changed because Davis is culturally diverse. We have an international population and street food is often very much a part of a normal meal planning for a lot of folks. In addition, street food vending offers new business opportunities for existing brick and mortar. So Rajas Tandori and Zuma Poke, who has provided food in the back, they both have pop-up stands at the food market. In addition, offering street food vending would increase tax revenues for the city and it could supply students with lower cost healthy food options. So for all of these reasons, in addition to now this need to become compliant with state regulation, it's time for Davis to do something about its street food vending. So this is a priority action area, which is something that council could act on immediately if they wanted to. And we have included in the back of this report about 20 pages worth of model municipal ordinance pertaining to street food vending. This ordinance comes from Sacramento, but it was based off of a review of all of California's 485 city street food vending ordinances and 58 county ordinances. So this would be, this is top of the line if Davis wanted to adopt it. All right, thank you very much. And so Andy Waterhouse is gonna give our comments on sustainability. Entrepreneurship, sorry. Entrepreneurship, yes. I wanna echo the prior comments that I wanna thank the organizers here for putting this together. I remember when we first moved for me to work at the university, we had to make a decision where we were gonna buy a house and there were lower cost options just down the road. And I remember my wife saying, well, we wanna live in Davis because people care about it here. And I think this is an example of the community caring about its future. And I really wanna commend all of you for being interested in working on this and coming here tonight. So I have some specific comments about action priority area number three. And I think I'm gonna go back to Dima's comments on that this is really two areas. And in a way, I don't know whether you wanna rewrite it enough to create two different areas, but I think there's sort of the retail restaurant innovation area. And in my mind, that's very different from sort of research-based food, agritech innovation. So I don't know whether I wanna consider that much of a change to the report, but I see those as very different spheres of activity. Perhaps because I come from the university. Now, as far as the agri-food tech innovation, there's definitely opportunities, lots of opportunities to work with the university. In fact, I mean, you're well aware that we have the food loss and waste collaborative. And I'm sure that Ned Spang is gonna be very interested in working with any group in the city that wants to undertake this effort. But I think there's other areas where there can be really concrete collaborations between a group in the city and the university. Although I have to admit that doesn't happen very often. But I can certainly help. But the point is that there are lots of opportunities and I think the university has not taken full advantage of that. There are something like 30 to 50 centers on campus that deal somewhat with food. There really isn't a center that deals with food innovation like being discussed here. There is at one food innovation center, but it really focuses on large food companies. And really when we talk about the innovation we're talking about here, there's an opportunity there to get a group of faculty on campus to really take on a new initiative, which would change the landscape. In addition, I think the, and this is really pushing the envelope on the university, because right now we have a food science program. It's very strong technically. We also have the Graduate School of Management, which is a great business school. We don't really have a food innovation program for students. And really we want those kind of students to come into the sphere here in Davis. So that's a push, universities slow to change in those ways, but I think that that would be very exciting to get some change in that direction to get a degree program focused, say, on food and food innovation. Okay, so those are the three points I wanted to make. So I'll stop there. Okay, great. Thank you. Very, very, very interesting. Do we have some reaction to that? No? Desmond's past scene. Katerina? I'll react. I will. You get Desmond's minute. Go ahead. I guess the two things I want to say, I was really excited to hear the emphasis on food bending. And I think there's a lot of different reasons that you expressed really nicely on why that would be really valuable for Davis and the surrounding community. I agree that there's a lot of more opportunities for UC Davis to partner with Davis, I think, around these topics. And then it's just one bullet point, but I'm just gonna give a shout out to it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna give a shout out to it, but the Davis Joint Unified School District Culinary Pathway Program, I thought that was a really neat idea. And a really nice way to link into the community college system potentially and the greater region. So I just thought that was nice. I want to get pointed about something. There's a mention of developing a grant program to help new creative food businesses get started. Those are businesses and that gets touchy for government money to be involved there. Government easing the way with economic development and ordinances and such and partnerships and innovation is, that's great. But what went through my mind is to the extent we're looking for money from the government of Davis, I think of the people who are not in this room and maybe some of you who are in the same moment knowing about cutbacks in yard waste pickup and pothole pressures and all the rest of it. And so when we leave here with this energy, people like the mayor and members of the city council are hearing all of that as well. And I think to look to the city for financial support if we're leaning that way should be very careful in what we're trying to do to create businesses. Okay. I will make a quick one at this point. I used to read competitive grants for the United States Department of Agriculture and they have a program called a Small Business Innovation Grant program. I read probably 100 grant proposals for that program. And it's a phase that you apply for a phase one grant and the phase two grant, the commercialization grant. But you can, entrepreneurs can make proposals to the U.S. Department of Agriculture through that program. It's not guaranteed, maybe you have a one in 50 shot of getting a grant, but that's one opportunity. Thank you. All right. So we'll move on to priority action area number four, establishing a cohesive food brand and narrative. And this is really the last section in between you and a little nice snack being provided and some get up and move around time. So hang in there. Okay. Dima? Yeah, and so this is last but also the shortest probably, at least from what I'll be saying. So branding and narrative for the city of Davis came up quite a lot throughout all of our conversations. There is definitely an opportunity for the city to consider investing in this space. We've seen that other cities are taking on food as a primary part of their branding and that's drawing in tourism. We actually, through the D-Pack and looking at some of the downtown stats, our downtown is not bringing in people for tourism. It is primarily serving just the community that's here but it could be an economic driver if we enabled A, create a food business to be in the space but also we had some branding and marketing to drive people to come and visit Davis for food. One thing that we learned during the process is that the Yolo Visitors Bureau is also doing some work on branding primarily for the whole Yolo County in order to bring tourism to Yolo and so we feel like Davis should have its own separate brand but should probably tie into that overall brand for Yolo. The action areas that we came up with were that we definitely need to create a brand narrative but one of the key areas that we thought would be important is actually hiring a branding and marketing agency. So this is something that we learned that the city of Woodland did do for their Woodland Food Front project. Developing a tagline, something that everybody can just remember when they think about Davis and we did want to consider sustainable food and maybe not necessarily the word sustainable but that being something that would go through the brand narrative. One other thing that came up actually quite a lot was designing a billboard and having a billboard on the I-80. So we have 150,000 daily travelers on the I-80. We do have other cities near us who do have billboards so this could be a really good opportunity once we have that brand and narrative to actually attract those people coming through on the I-80 and one other thing that came up is attracting food entrepreneurs and restaurants through not necessarily a large outreach but trying to attract entrepreneurs and restaurants and establishing Davis as a food-friendly town, so a food-friendly business town. So one idea there is to put some of the economic development and giving incentives or working to bring in and support creative and innovative food businesses so that then our brand is telling a story that aligns with what we're offering. And then lastly, an area that also came up quite a bit was having world-class events. A nice event that has been brought up and you guys are probably learning about it later today. Dustin over there in the back is working on a rice festival. This could be a signature event that the city could perhaps support that would really draw people in and rice makes a lot of sense for our region. It could also celebrate a lot of the international community that we have here since rice is such a significant part of many people's diets. So that was, we talked about perhaps the city sort of focusing on some signature events even putting up an RFP for people to submit some of these large signature events and supporting things like the rice festival. We also thought a small grants program for creative food programming could be another avenue not necessarily at the scale of a large international festival but even smaller food events that could gather people. And lastly, this came up actually from the very beginning to the end was the city designating a food event venue, a space where you could demo good food, sustainable food practices, where you could do education, where you could bring in creative businesses and that could be either a city owned space or a space that the city would help support to bring about. And that is it. Okay, great, thank you Dima. And Lauren Kalisky is gonna give us more remarks on this. Lauren. Thank you. So just as everybody else did, I'm gonna also thank the organizers, Dima and Catherine and Anne and Grace. This is a fabulous series of discussions and a fabulous initiative and I'm really thrilled to be having this conversation in Davis now. I think that it's about time. It's kind of been my soapbox issue for the past several years. So I'm gonna talk about branding and give my reactions. So first I actually wanna talk about myself because branding is about identity and my identity, I feel somehow parallels that of Davis a little bit. Many of you know my story a little bit just because my mother who is the bread lady at the Davis Farmers Market likes to talk about her children and likes to talk in general. But I grew up in Davis. I moved away when I was 18 and lived away for most of my adult life. I went to college in Boston and then lived in Paris for a number of years. I worked in marketing and technology and entrepreneurship. I lived in San Francisco also for a number of years and then moved back to Paris. I lived in Paris for a grand total of about 14 years. And then in 2013 I came back to California with my family, my wife and kids and moved to Berkeley for a couple years and then Davis in 2015. And around that time was when things were really starting to take off with this region in terms of food branding. I mean we had the most amazing branding campaign I've seen around food in Sacramento with what they've done branding themselves as America's Farm to Fort Capital. That branding campaign has really captured the imagination of people in Sacramento and throughout the region and it's been a tremendous success. And the food front campaign as well in Woodland is another successful example. So I came back to Davis. I got involved with my family's business. And when I came back to Davis, Davis was really a very different place from when I had left it. When I was a kid, Davis was really kind of a sleepy small town. And today we're really a bustling little city. We have parking problems and we have housing shortages and we have some homelessness and we've got some crime and we've got a little bit of grit now. So that's interesting and different. It's not all bad. We've got a pretty vibrant downtown I feel in a lot of ways with a lot of locally owned businesses. We've got great schools. We've got some first rate cultural venues like the Mundavi Center and the Shrem Museum. And Davis has changed a lot. It's quite obvious. I don't want to leave like I did when I was 17 and 18. But what's important about the identity of Davis I think is what's really kind of remained the same over the past 30 years of, well, more than that of my experience but I was gone for 30 years before coming back. And that identity of Davis, understanding who we are and what's remained the same. So branding is all about this idea of identity. It's about competitive differentiation. Branding is something that dates back to the Egyptians actually according to Wikipedia. Livestock branding, the Egyptians started that to identify the animal's owner and differentiate livestock and that's a practice that continues today. In the context of business branding there's also about identity and competitive differentiation.  It's about telling a story. And in business it matters because you're trying to sell something, right? And in the context of what we're talking about today we're talking about economic development in Davis, food and economic development. So we're really trying to sell Davis as a food place. So what hasn't changed much in the past 30 years? Davis is still a very proudly quirky city. We believe in things like bikes and solar homes and toad tunnels and we've got diverse perspectives and strong opinions and all kinds of things like that. The problem with branding in Davis is also that. It's that those strong opinions and the fact that economic development itself is often a contested issue. So if you're against economic development or specific economic development initiatives it's hard to get behind a branding effort to differentiate yourself from the competition and sell what you might have to sell because you probably don't care. But a well done branding campaign can really transcend that and I would say that what we need in Davis is a branding campaign that really does transcend the issues that we're discussing here today because as Davis and I think we'll all agree that growth and economic development are inevitable whether it comes from food or anything else. And a branding campaign is gonna help us control and maintain that identity as we grow, as Davis develops. So I think there's lots of great ideas and action steps, specific action steps in the branding section of this report. I agree we need to attract more food entrepreneurs. I think a billboard on the highway is a great idea. I think the Rice Festival is gonna be our world class event and I'm super excited about that. But the most important action step for me is really hiring a branding agency because I think that that's gonna help us articulate and maintain who we are. It's gonna help us maintain our culture and our values as we grow as a city. That's what I have to say. Thank you very, very much. Some reactions? Dan's passing Desmond. Yeah, I'm sure I'm in the minority but I lean towards a county brand, Yolo County, some kind of where we spread the opportunities and the cost and the management and all of that, taste of Yolo or something like that and it would embrace Woodland and Winters and all the other parts of the county. We're often viewed as an isolationist kind of city, elitist and if you take the Rice Festival you're doing, we don't grow rice in Davis. Laugh, we don't grow rice in Davis. We don't go hard on anything here. We grow it in Yolo County. Apricots, almonds and walnuts and the like. Tomatoes we used to grow, we used to even grow sugar beets. So I think I particularly bias more towards a county type brand, the people who sell at your market, Randy, they're from all over. The other thing I want to leave with us, if you could get some notion of the kind of resources that these plans would take, at least the ones you prioritize, the personnel that it might entail, the organizational support and then the money. You have to pay staff and all these grants we're talking about, all those grants cost money. So if the city adopts this, then the city has to figure out what it can afford, what it will take in terms of directing, redirecting personnel and how much they want to put up for the grants and so forth and so on, whether they get that money. So there's no where in the project proposal here that it speaks to resources. It's a good aspirational document. It's a great big vision, but everything costs money. I think Dan mentioned it earlier. And if you're not, Mr. Trump, who just can spend, trillion dollar tax cut here and there, it's not real money, but it will be real money locally. So resources and what the different, what will a big festival cost? Who will manage it? Who will direct it? What about the advertising for it? What about people who will direct the traffic and all that? They all cost, so. Okay, good points. Thank you. Katrina? I think the only point I was gonna make and maybe if a good marketing agent was hired, it would happen maybe it wouldn't happen, but just making sure that if with a branding direction, just to make sure it really captures what's happening as opposed to what we wish were happening. So that's my one comment about that. In Sacramento, if I may add the fame that they've achieved with their brand that originated with two chefs and with the Convention of Visitor Bureau, one of the people there. That was the driving energy of those three people. And they went to the scale of having connections to the White House. Gentlemen, his last name I forget, but his name is Sam on Obama's staff even came out here and had a dinner and talked about it. So they got these blessings on your endeavor. I wonder if we couldn't get those sorts of things at least at the state level. But as a final asterisk, what we don't have here are the corporate sources. There's a lot of places you could go to. You could go to Roseville, for example. And if you were doing something like this, the way that city functions, you could bring corporate money to the table. But we don't have the corporations here that are headquartered or have a history of getting involved in that manner. Right, important to note. Okay, so that wraps up our four areas. And I wanna thank the panel. They'll be back right after we take a break. Just quickly, where do we go from here? We're gonna be making any changes due to these questions that you will have and get your cards ready.  We'll be getting that report into Diane Parrow, March 22nd. No? Yes, we will. And so that's so that it can come up during the April budget negotiations for the council and so on. But the council and Diane will determine what the timing is on how they discuss it and so on. And then I wanna just review quickly what the priority action items are. Yes, for 2019, Deema has it up there and leave us with this. So we would hope that in 2019, there's 10 more months that we can bring City of Davis into compliance with the street food vending ordinance to establish a working relationship with some sort of organization that acts as some sort of food policy council or something of that nature. And to really take a look at the, realistically at branding if we can get going with that and then explore investment and zoning for food and agriculture, innovation and entrepreneurship center to be located in Davis. There's that idea has come up consistently throughout the report, whether it's co-located with a farmer's marketer in some other area but really a center for food. And then finally, well, exploring the good food center. So, January 2020, we've asked that the council take a look at whether or not they'd be willing to hold a public forum on how far they've come in those 10 months and I'll leave it with that. You're free to enjoy some food brought to us by several different local businesses. Take 15 minutes or so and then we'll convene here. Okay, we're gonna start the question and answer period now. Kind of the driver on the small business innovation research program. Out of the small businesses. Thank you, thank you. We're gonna start the question and answer period now. We have a lot of questions. We're gonna go to 9.20. There's gonna be a lot of questions that we can't answer tonight. And we're gonna take the questions that are, the remaining questions and put them up on some energy and we're gonna hope that the panel will be answering the questions on the internet. So you could go to Syvenergy in a couple of days and hopefully all the answers will be up. So, each person will have two minutes to respond to the question. Right, or one, I mean just do, I think we wanna respond but keep it brief but whoever would like to respond is fine. So more than 50% of our households are in multi-family housing. What does the report say about community gardens, requiring space for people to be able to grow their own food? Or what should it say about that? I can take that. Well, we do have it in the establishing, Davis is a sustainable food city and that's also part of the downtown plan in terms of edible landscaping but augmenting community gardens and connecting them with the rest of the food infrastructure including food access and micro entrepreneurs is part of the picture. It could be built out further so we welcome you to sign up whoever gave that comment and provide some other ideas that you think ought to be in the final version of the report. Okay, anybody else? No, so Central Park is arguably the most underutilized resource in the city but the downtown plan is looking to de-emphasize it even more. Shouldn't this be reversed and Central Park used more? Anybody's welcome to comment. Yes. Take it again. One of the things that emerged during the conversation was the bike museum as a space that is loved as a piece of our city's identity but maybe isn't visited that often unless you need to use its very well-kept bathrooms and so that kept being floated as a space that could be turned into a public kitchen, a food entrepreneurial space and that very much builds on the thriving farmers market on Wednesdays and Saturdays which is the heart of the city of Davis and has been acknowledged as the heart in the downtown plan as well so I don't think we're de-emphasizing Central Park in this. I don't think that was the... So I think the comment specifically said that the downtown plan was de-emphasizing the farmers market and I am on the D-Pack. I would love to talk. Well, the Central Park, not the farmers market. Sorry, the Central Park. I actually, we were presented with two different plans just in our very last meeting and I think that there's still quite a lot of discussion about what that plan looked like and one of the things that did come up was that Central Park, for some, some who commented, should be more of a spot where we would see more activity. I definitely think that in the comments that came during a lot of the D-Pack, discussions, Central Park and the farmers market came up as a centerpiece for the city. I think it was very much brought up as an important place to center around. So it would be good to whoever wrote that comment. I'd love to talk to you afterwards to understand sort of why you thought that. Okay, what specific strategies for growing money for school food related programs into more effective comprehensive education for families? Rise, which is the recycling as simply elementary, composting school gardens and farm to school. Any suggestions, you wanna talk at all about how the school district is mentioned in the report or? Well, so one of the things that was brought up, I don't know that it covers everything that was in that question, but one of the things we did talk about was a culinary pathway program and I think that could be a very interesting program for DGA, USDA to support. Davis Farm to School has already been working in this space with the co-op to try and do some education in the younger grades but really that should be a holistic program that goes all the way through high school and then could go into community colleges or into UC Davis or other universities. So hopefully that addresses part of that. Okay, what is the mechanism for the Food Policy Council to engage with the existing retail food economy? I.e. grocery, restaurant and value added vendors and the comments of the report has very little to say about local agriculture, what role do or should local food producers play here? So the first part is what's the mechanism for the Food Policy Council to engage with the existing food economy? In other words, how will maybe representatives from grocery stores, restaurants and value added vendors be brought into the Food Policy Council? We had representation from grocery stores, vendors, food retail as part of the process initially and I think we would want to continue that going forward. The process benefited a lot from having the owners of Nugget involved, the owners of small businesses, the owners of new businesses. I think in the research on Food Policy Council so this is a 2018 study by Johns Hopkins that looked at 341 Food Policy Councils, about 71% of them operate at the local level, the city level and the most common format is a nonprofit. So even though the Food Policy Council itself is a nonprofit, it often has board representatives from industry partners, from commercial partners who can help with these public private sponsorships for events, which I think is gonna be crucial to moving a lot of things around because as Desmond pointed out, we can't over-reli on the city for funding. The effort has to sustain itself moving forward. Right, did you wanna comment on that at all, Lauren? As a local business person who was involved? I could say that from my perspective, the two things that come to mind that have been the most influential to our business in terms of progressive food policy, if you will, had nothing to do with government or the city of Davis. It had to do with working with KP Organic and FarmFresh to you and having to go through all of our ingredients and audit the sourcing of ingredients and then wanting to have a booth at the Whole Earth Festival and having to take a close look at our packaging and rethink a lot of the packaging to do away with plastic. Okay, that's great. So Anne, can I just make one other comment? So one thing that I do think that a Food Policy Council can help with is a little bit along the lines of what Katie was saying was making these connections and synergies happen. So if we're working on trying to get more entrepreneurs to do interesting things with food waste and create value-added products, working with our grocery stores to create programs where they're actually giving them shelf space because they're local products coming from our area, perhaps through programs around using food waste, I think that could be very valuable if the organization were to just help make those connections happen so that you see those kind of products actually showing up in these grocery stores. All right, great. Desmond? Yeah, that's kind of what I was going to say that we should recognize and highlight and lift up the word you use. Places like the Davis Food Cooperative and the Nugget Market because they have really developed and grown value-added products and other products using fresh produce from our local area. And they're pioneers, innovators in this city and we should not dismiss them in favor of new people. Right, and so along those lines, there's a question. How about getting Nugget behind this as a corporate sponsor? And Nugget was involved in the discussions. Do you want to comment on that at all? Well, Nugget and Co-op were both very involved. Okay. So what are some of the implications for growth and economic productivity of legalizing home-based cooks in Davis? Can you read it one more time? So this is about home-based cooks and there's new legislation around home-based cooks and we know that that's sort of a county area and we're in the report asking for the city to work with the county to help make that extra possible. What are some of the implications for growth and economic productivity of legalizing this? In other words, how will home-based cooks, if there are more of them and it is legal, how are they gonna contribute to growth and economic productivity? And it's open to anybody. Oh good, go Andy. Well, I think an important point is if you're trying to improve food access that home-based cooks actually generally have fairly affordable prices and it also allows folks who don't have a large amount of resources to invest actually start to get into the economy. So I think it opens doors in terms of allowing a different group of folks to actually participate in the economy. So I think it's very important from that perspective. And I'll add also that there have been some entrepreneurial, there's some startups, there was a startup and I forget the name in Sacramento that I'm not sure lasted very long, but liberalizing a little bit the home-based cook laws and making it easier for people to do that will open the door for things like the Airbnb for food, where people can, or the Uber for food, if you will, where it's kind of a collaborative economy thing and people could potentially create these marketplaces and make a living or augment their living from that type of business. A little pop-up restaurants all around them, for example. So along those lines, will the city of Davis express its support for AB626, the Micro Enterprise Home Kitchens Act? So we might wanna include that in the report in some way. So it actually is in the report that we would like the city to support it and if it actually comes down to the county, so if it's a financial burden or if there's other hurdles, we would like at least the city and also this food policy council to figure out ways to get past those hurdles. And before you ask the next question, there was a question that was asked that didn't really get answered. Yeah, let me get the back of that. I think it was basically like how does agriculture or the surrounding. The report has very little to say about local agriculture. What role should our local food producers play here? Thank you. Yeah, and I was gonna pass it, cause I'm sure this came up in some of the discussions and I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. So some of the local producers wanted to sell their items from a truck or something like that and that's currently not possible. So it would support our smaller scale local producers if we legalized street food vending. But we also, I mean we were really inspired, a lot of people were really inspired by Paula Daniels and the institutional purchasing program which would allow the city or encourage the school district more broadly and I know the university currently has programs like this right now to say, anytime we have a catering event, we're going to source from local farms, from local restaurants, not from larger chains and that creates this feedback cycle. So we have Shermaine Hardesty who's in the audience right now who studies local farm communities and these direct marketing effects and how those add. I don't wanna get it wrong, Shermaine. But did you, so through opening up other forms of direct marketing through street food vending and also supporting public purchasing agreements, this would help that local economic ripple effect churn in Davis and the county more broadly. And I'll also add that it's encouraging local restaurants to buy produce from the farmer's market from vendors at the farmer's market and from local farms. This is something that happens. We go to the central Sacramento farmer's market under the highway at X street every Sunday and there's a lot of Sacramento restaurants that will buy their produce at the farmer's market. You see chefs walking around there all the time and that doesn't happen in Davis because I don't know why there's restaurant tours are not necessarily doing that as much and then there's another interesting initiative in Marin, the Agricultural Institute of Marin has partnered with a company that does an app called What's Good that's connecting vendors at their markets to not just retail consumers but wholesale buyers at restaurants and other types of organizations. Okay, so here's one on food security. It says why is food security not a priority should be a number one priority. What is more important? I just wanna say that the one, two, three and four are not in order of importance but maybe does anybody else wanna expand on that? The four meant to mutually support one another. Well yeah, I never interpreted that as it was the second priority. I assumed it was number one but I mean, I was just me. You know, I do think all of these priorities do work in tandem with one another. Obviously there was a lot about food waste reduction and diversion that connects very closely with the interest that we have. Anything involving the agricultural community obviously has a great relationship to what we do. I will take just a moment to clarify something that came up in the reactions about structure. So I wanted to be really clear. We have a structure right now that produces 21 food distributions throughout Davis on an ongoing basis. The structure that I was referring to and that I think this report can hopefully help spark is the kind of structure that really addresses some of the underlying causes for food insecurity here in Davis and on campus. And getting to the various, the research, the intellect and then yes, the physical capabilities that an entity like the food bank brings how to bring those together to create the structure that gets down to the bottom of the issues. Okay, why don't we take one last question? Can I just a follow up to that? Sure, please. I mean, is it possible to just change the order of the first two? Yeah. Sure, be cool. Possible. It's a draft. This is addressed to Catherine and Andrew. Although I still think we should have a comment that they're not in order of priority. How can we build better formal partnerships between UC Davis administration and the city to build steps for food waste and composting as well as education and sustainability and carbon neutrality and bring and longterm planning? So how can we build that better formal partnership between UC Davis administration and the city in these areas? So anybody can answer but it's addressed to Andy and Catherine. I'm just an assistant professor who doesn't yet have tenure. So I'm gonna give this to Andy. Yeah. So glad. Well, we don't have enough time this evening to go over the intricacies of, suffice it to say if we have advocates on both sides, we'll figure it out. It is unusual to have these kinds of collaborations and I mentioned that in my comments. So it's not, we don't have a template for that. So it won't be just a slam dunk but where there's a will, there's a way and I think there's certainly an interest if we look at the existing food loss and waste collaborative. I think there's lots of different research projects going on and many of the students involved I'm sure would be thrilled to work with a partner in Davis. So it can happen. So I just wanted to address that one of the things that we put in the report was actually very much related to connecting what's happening on the campus with the city and treating the city like a sustainable food lab where the city could even put out a competition where students get to have an internship working on programs around food waste and recovery. I think there's such an opportunity for that that could just calling it a competition or calling it a program where all the great work and research that's happening in food waste especially with the food waste collaborative would bleed into the city as a sort of a more formal program. Okay, well I wanna thank all the panelists. I wanna thank you all for being here. Thanks to Mayor Brett Lee who had to leave but Gloria Partida was here also for attending. The food was provided by KP Organic, Upper Crest Bakery, Davis Food Co-op and Zuma Poke and Lush Ice. Delicious and the Cali Rice Fest team has a little party favor for you as you leave I think on your way out. So you stay up to date with the report's progress. There are about seven questions and comments that didn't get addressed. They will go on the website, the Civ Energy website and be addressed. Other questions can be addressed to that website but please stay tuned there. And I wanna thank the City of Davis really for providing this space to Civ Energy, Davis Media Alliance for really making it possible and to our panelists, thank you all. I think Bob might have closing remarks. Bob, do you? Okay, all right thank you all very, very much for being here. Appreciate it. Thank you.