This is an opinion pages “Room for Debate” as the New York Times calls it. Included in this room for debate are multiple authors discussing many topics, or “debaters”. I will specifically look at Yael Lehmann’s piece because she discusses the topic of food availability which I believe has been something very relevant to our class discussions. Lehmann is executive director of “The Food Trust”, a nationally recognized non-profit organization who’s mission is to ensure everyone has access to affordable nutritious food as well as information to make the right decisions.
In this piece, Lehmann does not deny the importance of nutrition education. She realizes the importance for education but also recognizes that if healthy food is not available, people won’t eat it. She see’s this as a ‘common-sense conclusion’. A recent study in New York found that accessibility to supermarkets had a positive and consistent correlation to reduction in obesity.
Lehmann also mentions evidence from a Philadelphia school district in which they replaced junk food in vending machines with options such as 100% juice and healthy snacks. This allowed the students to use the nutritional education from the classroom and apply it to their own lives. “And the result? A documented 50 percent reduction in the incidence of children becoming overweight.”
Yael Lehmann makes a simple, but extremely logical and relevant argument in this piece.