Alyssah Hall
The effort to develop a plan to help Riverside residents live healthier and longer lives by 2030 continues as The Blue Zones Project Riverside focuses on different ways to address policies that will improve food systems in the region.
In February, The Blue Zones Project hosted the Food Systems Policy Summit within the GROW Conference, an annual conference that focuses on local food systems. The Food Systems Policy Summit welcomed stakeholders and community leaders who provided critical feedback to help determine top policy priorities for their food systems policy during the next five years.
Blue Zones is a term created by Blue Zones founder, a National Geographic Explorer and journalist Dan Buettner, during an exploratory project he led in 2004 in search of human longevity and a higher quality of life in old age.
Buettner and his team of scientists and demographers traveled the world in search of these Blue Zone communities. After speaking to many centenarians and analyzing demographic data, they found five regions that “stood out for their extraordinary longevity and vitality,” according to the project.
The five original Blue Zones are known to be: Ikaria, Greece, Loma Linda, California, Sardinia, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, and Nicoya, Costa Rica.
“Nearly three years ago, our public health system in Riverside County started to see patients with high rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high rates of depression, and they started asking bold questions: What if we could sow the seeds of health instead of trying to heal people only after they become ill? What if Riverside County could be the healthiest county in the nation? And, what would it take for everybody, everywhere in Riverside County, to thrive, where we are planted, to live better and longer?’” asked Erin Edwards, a former council member in Riverside and executive director of Blue Zones Project Riverside.
The city of Riverside, RUHS Public Health, the County of Riverside, Molina Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, the Inland Empire Health Plan, the IEHP foundation, and Eisenhower Health are all sponsors of the Blue Zones Project Riverside and identified the Blue Zones Community Transformation Model, now Blue ZonesProject Riverside is a fully funded five year project, according to Edwards.
Riverside’s Blue Zones community transformation work is organized in three pillars: people, policy, and places.
“Other communities who have done this work with the Blue Zones model, they’ve seen [a] decrease in obesity, decrease in smoking rates, an increase in community pride, an increase in tourism in the city, millions of dollars leveraged in grants for the city, and people were living better longer,” Edwards said.
The Blue Zones portion of the summit was divided into three sessions, each focused on different ways to address food system policies and how to implement recommendations published in The Blue Zones Project Riverside discovery report, authored by a national food systems team of experts, is filled with recommendations to enhance Riverside’s local food system.
In the first session, attendees were introduced to national food policy expert for Blue Zones, Maggie Adamek, PhD, who shared her team’s recommendations for the community of Riverside. Adamek shared Blue Zones Food Systems Goals which included building food skills, making healthy food accessible and affordable for everyone, increasing healthy food environments, growing long-term community health and growing the local food supply.
In session number two, food experts, farmers, growers and others were told to collaborate in small groups to prioritize the recommended policies.
“We really are here to learn from all of you and to hear your stories, and to reflect those stories and those hopes and your articulation of the challenges and needs into a compelling portrait of your community’s food system. That sounds right. So we’ll start today with sharing it, and then along the way, we do provide advisory support to all of you,” Adamek said in her first session.
“We buy food at restaurants, whether they’re drive-thrus or sit-down places. And also, many of us get food at hunger relief programs. So, it’s one of the major channels or supply chains into a community of food. And in any US community, there’s a lot of folks who are getting food from the hunger relief system,” Adamek said.
Blue Zones also looks at the infrastructure of what they call community food assets, things such as farmers markets, community gardens, food hubs, and small urban farms, according to Adamek.
“The Green Belt is a terrific example of that, a staggering, awesome example that I share in communities all the time, of an infrastructural decision that was made a long time ago that continues to yield benefits and is a core part of the identity of the city of Riverside,” Adamek said.
In the third and final session of the summit, attendees were asked to help the Blue Zones team synthesize the information from the small groups in a large group work session to find shared ideas and coalesce around ideas for change.
The Blue Zones project will continue to focus on their three pillars and continue to host events and gather input from the community and stakeholders.