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Ora Kemp

Ora Kemp

Senior Policy Advisor at the NYC Mayor's Office of Food Policy and Castanea Fellow, advancing equitable food policy and food sovereignty in New York City.

Sep 23, 2026

23:36
How can procurement move more plants onto plates while making sure that the food is delicious, as Maggie said, culturally relevant, beautiful, sparks curiosity?
23:49
Yeah, I'll bring it back to something that Maggie noted around this idea of sharing.
23:54
We have an incredibly diverse and talented workforce within our kitchens across city agencies, and creating the mechanisms and routes for them to also be able to propose new recipes, trial new recipes.
24:07
and share new recipes with each other has created a really great opportunity for us to explore how cultural foods can be represented on our plate while also amplifying the amount of nutrient rich foods that we're serving.
24:20
And that is through fruits and vegetables, beans, legumes, pulses, looking at the diversification of our food In a way that we're really encouraging a lot of that is how we're leveraging things like our procurement.
24:31
So looking at the opportunity for things like blended products.
24:34
What is the potential for us to have a burger that's 50% mushrooms and 50% beef? So if someone is interested in still being able to have an item with meat proteins, how can we ensure that we're getting as many vegetables onto that plate as possible while introducing people to foods that they might not have normally tried in the past? And I think a lot of it is exposure.
28:51
And when we're talking about what needs to change, you know, from freezer space to, you know, improved cold chains and grocery stores and for public institutions, how do we make fruits and vegetables easier to get, whether they're fresh or frozen, but especially frozen?

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