Photo: US-mayors-and-Italian-counterparts-US-Pavilion-Milan-Expo

US and Italian mayors meet to improve food policy

20 July 2015

by Jonathan Andrews

The US Conference of Mayors (USCM) and the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) during meetings held over two days in Turin and Milan.

Within the US Pavilion at the Milan Expo, which includes a focus on food, mayors from five US cities and five Italian cities exchanged best practices, ideas and how their role as mayors can help to shape a healthy and sustainable food environment.

“We have a food policy taskforce inside the USCM and we are finding this issue more and more within the top three concerns of our organisation,” Tom Cochran, CEO and Executive Director of USCM told Cities Today. “When we heard about the Milan Expo, it was a natural fit to be here.”

Mick Cornett, Mayor of Oklahoma City and Vice President of USCM, shared his own personal experience of losing 18 kilograms over 40 weeks, in 2006, to help set his city an example. He then launched a campaign to help citizens lose 1 million pounds (450 tonnes) after finding out his city had been ranked one of the most obese in the nation.

“On New Year’s Eve of 2007 I stood in front of the elephants in the zoo to tell the city to lose 1 million pounds,” he said. “We asked citizens to list their goal weight on our website. Fifty-one thousand people signed up and we lost 1 million pounds by January 2012.”

He added: “America has tried to evolve into a food policy of quicker and faster, and I think to some extent this is too quick and too fast. We are trying to engage our citizenry to eat locally sourced foods.”

To boost locally sourced produce the cities presented their ideas from urban food farms to improving conditions to assist locally grown produce by working with suppliers, distributors and customers. This included the West Louisville FoodPort in Kentucky, to be opened in 2016.

“One of the things we are trying to do in the US is undo some of this large food production and distribution that has in some cases resulted in less healthy cities,” Greg Fischer, Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky, told Cities Today. “The Italians with their Mediterranean diet and the way they produce food around their cities is effective. We are trying to recreate what we had in our cities 50 years ago.”

Piero Fassino, Mayor of Turin and President of ANCI, echoed the comments from US mayors of how a city needs to possess a strong link between food and identity.

“This is cultural heritage,” he said. “Citizens no longer express a wish and desire to eat and drink well, they now demand this as a right. Mad cow disease [that broke out across Europe in the 1990s] made citizens not only to wish to eat healthy, but the right. As mayors we have institutional and political responsibilities to ensure this right.”

The MoU establishes a cross-cultural exchange between local municipalities in the US and Italy to explore and share best practices not only on food but transport, culture and tourism, innovations, mobility and other ways of achieving healthier cities and citizens in both countries. Italian mayors will be invited to Washington DC next year for a further round of meetings.

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