A Community Food Assessment for Del Norte County and Adjacent Tribal Lands

The direct connection between a healthy community and healthy food makes it critical to understand the Del Norte and Adjacent Tribal Land’s food system. A food system includes all of the people and processes that are involved in taking food from seed to table. The quality, cost and availability of the foods in every community – at stores, schools and hospitals – are determined by the food system serving it.

This Community Food Assessment is a profile of Del Norte and Adjacent Tribal Land’s (DNATL) current food system and examines how it is serving the community. TheAssessment is a tool for many stakeholders – consumers, farmers, retailers, organizations and policy-makers. In particular, it can provide baseline information for the newly formed DNATL Community Food Council as they begin to work towards food system improvements.

The research was conducted by the California Center for Rural Policy (CCRP) as part of the California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative. For theAssessment, CCRP gathered existing data and spoke with key participants regarding the sectors of DNATL’s food system. It aims to share examples of the creative ways people are addressing food insecurity, increasing access to healthy foods and developing a more localized food system.

Provenance: Contributed to Sipnuuk Food Security Collection by Jennifer Sowerwine, Assistant Cooperative Extention Specialist at UC Berkeley, in association with her role as PI of the USDA AFRI Food Security Grant.