Aug 26, 2026 · 46 min · 8 segments
Lowest bidder wins. That's the rule for public food purchases in New York. It's why school cafeterias and public institutions end up buying processed food from big out-of-state corporations instead of…
Jess Gilbert-OverlandGuest
Dejia JamesHost
Della MillerGuest
Well, thank you both for being here once again, and I would love to just start with, I think we do have to go back to Good Food, the bill, at first, um, which also was on the community agenda years ago.
And so, and like we know, doing advocacy sometimes takes years and years and years of work, um, unfortunately.
And you guys have been at it since 2018, I think I heard at the press conference earlier, which now is eons ago.
But I would love for you to talk about the level set of Good Food, um, the bill, the, the coalition, the work that you all were doing, and then we can kind of get into the plank a little bit later.
if you could explain the work that you've been doing around the Good Food bill in New York and what that is.
And so we launched in 2018 with this beautiful idea of saying, okay, our public institutions, like Buffalo Public Schools, for example, spend millions and millions of dollars on food every year, and Buffalo Public Schools spends over $13 million on school food every year.
What if that money, instead of flowing out of states to large corporations, feeding our communities unhealthy and highly processed foods, what if that money stayed local and went to farmers, producers, suppliers that not only were based in Western New York or were local and feeding our students and our communities healthy food, but also paid their workers well-
... practiced growing practices that were good for the environment, treated their animals humanely, that type of thing.
And what if we used these public food dollars as a lever to foster racial justice in our communities specifically? And so that's how we were launched, was with these goals in mind, and then we quickly ran into state procurement law, which mandates that our public institutions with a few very, um, a few exceptions, but not very many, purchase the cheapest food option, or what's called the lowest responsible bidder.
And so we really couldn't implement values-based food purchasing locally because of this state procurement law.
Well, thank you both for being here once again, and I would love to just start with, I think we do have to go back to Good Food, the bill, at first, um, which also was on the community agenda years ago.
And so, and like we know, doing advocacy sometimes takes years and years and years of work, um, unfortunately.
And you guys have been at it since 2018, I think I heard at the press conference earlier, which now is eons ago.
But I would love for you to talk about the level set of Good Food, um, the bill, the, the coalition, the work that you all were doing, and then we can kind of get into the plank a little bit later.
if you could explain the work that you've been doing around the Good Food bill in New York and what that is.
And so we launched in 2018 with this beautiful idea of saying, okay, our public institutions, like Buffalo Public Schools, for example, spend millions and millions of dollars on food every year, and Buffalo Public Schools spends over $13 million on school food every year.
What if that money, instead of flowing out of states to large corporations, feeding our communities unhealthy and highly processed foods, what if that money stayed local and went to farmers, producers, suppliers that not only were based in Western New York or were local and feeding our students and our communities healthy food, but also paid their workers well-
... practiced growing practices that were good for the environment, treated their animals humanely, that type of thing.
And what if we used these public food dollars as a lever to foster racial justice in our communities specifically? And so that's how we were launched, was with these goals in mind, and then we quickly ran into state procurement law, which mandates that our public institutions with a few very, um, a few exceptions, but not very many, purchase the cheapest food option, or what's called the lowest responsible bidder.
And so we really couldn't implement values-based food purchasing locally because of this state procurement law.
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