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The Blue Scholars are a two-man hip hop group from Seattle, Washington who have been singing and rapping since 2002. This summer, their new video was about their favorite Asian grocery store, Fou Lee. The song is a loving homage to Seattle, a city steeped in Asian American food, both by necessity and by choice. 

Pioneering Asian American markets like Uwajimaya’s and yes, Fou Lee, have been serving fresh, affordable and culturally diverse foods to Seattleites for almost a century. When First Lady Michelle Obama announced the Healthy Food Financing Initiative to increase food access in urban areas, she failed to mention the key role of Asian American markets. They deserve at least the same tax benefits and laudatory statements as Wal-Mart and Walgreens. In the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, Asian American produce and ethnic markets are sometimes the only purveyors of fresh, affordable food that remain in inner-city neighborhoods.

Inner-city food and ethnic markets have a complicated history. During the Los Angeles riots of 1992, mainstream media focused on inter-ethnic...

New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman has been applying much his energy to the world of food politics of late, and on a recent trip to the American Southwest he payed Food and Community Fellow Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard, her colleagues and the young farmers of La Semilla Food Center a visit.

La Semilla (meaning “the seed”), where Wiggins-Reinhard acts as Farm Fresh Director, is an organization based in the Paso del Norte region of Texas and New Mexico. It’s an organization that does it all--from community building to recovery of cultural traditions, from youth education to food policy solutions.

Bittman, who writes about his visit in his latest post for the Times,  spoke with three of the young women who have been working with La Semilla. There, he “found an inspiring sense of self-determination, an insistence that for a community and a region to change it must become more self-sufficient.” As is true in many parts of the modern world, the challenge of regional self-sufficiency less one of invention than of rediscovery; Bittman notes that, for all the apparently...

By Greg Asbed and Sean Sellers

Originally published in The Nation and NPR.

This past summer, the Econo Lodge off Interstate 75 in Tifton, Georgia, where we and other watermelon harvesters from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) have stayed on and off since 1997, was eerily quiet. Gone were the sweat-soaked shoes piled outside motel rooms, and gone were the workers hanging out during their evening downtime, chatting casually or talking to their families on pay-as-you-go cellphones. In their place, a phone card salesman at the hotel's front desk told anyone who would listen that his sales had dropped by at least 50 percent this year.

It was mid-June, and we were in town for the watermelon harvest, but we might as well have walked into a ghost town, thanks to Georgia's recently signed Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act, otherwise known as House Bill 87. And thanks to HB 87, a copycat law of Arizona's infamous SB 1070, millions of pounds of watermelons were left to rot in the fields this summer—along with peaches, blackberries and cucumbers—as many of the most dependable and experienced farmworkers steered clear of Georgia and headed north for friendlier states, prompting an epic farm labor...

Capitalism has been somewhat discredited lately. The unregulated hand of the market, it seems, leads not to a richer society but one with vast income disparities and a growing class of workers without much hope for the future.

But as Connecticut-based nonprofit Wholesome Wave proves, basic capitalist incentives can still be a force for good. In a survey released today, Wholesome Wave showed that offering incentives to buy fruits and vegetables helps low-income families eat better and farmers in need.

Wholesome Wave, an organization I have long watched with interest, offers double-your-money coupons to those eligible for food stamps, now called SNAP, when they buy fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers market. The idea is to encourage more healthful eating through incentives, rather than cracking down on those with limited incomes through controversial taxes on junk food or regulations on what they are permitted to buy with their government dollars.

The results are outstanding. Eighty-seven percent of consumers that received Wholesome Wave’s Double Voucher coupons said it increased or greatly increased their consumption of fruits and vegetables and more than 90 percent agreed that the fresh produce they bought made a big difference in their family’s diet. Additionally, 73 percent said they would not have gone to a farmers market had the incentive not been in place.

This is good...