Winston-Salem City Council brainstorms ways to address food insecurity

The city of Winston-Salem is brainstorming ways to reduce food insecurity in underserved areas. 

Food deserts, or low-income areas where grocery stores are more than a mile away, exist in all but one of Winston-Salem’s wards. The city’s Hispanic community is particularly impacted – Second Harvest Food Bank served more Latinos last year than any other demographic. 

That’s according to the annual Food Resilience report presented at Tuesday’s council meeting. 

Staffers spent the last year studying ways to address the crisis. Shaleen Miller, the director of the city’s sustainability department, says they surveyed over 300 community members about barriers to food access.

“There is still a concern for having the means to purchase food, and there was a lot of concerns about the price of food," Miller said. "Another thing that showed up was the distance to get to food.”

Potential solutions included subsidizing online grocery delivery, setting up mobile grocery trucks, and assessing the public transit system’s bag policy – customers are currently only allowed to bring four bags on the bus. 

No actions were taken on Tuesday, but council members said the discussion would continue at future meetings.