Consider the tomato.

In the industrial farming system—the invisible machine that stocks the produce section in grocery stores nationwide—a tomato is often picked green and hard, originating an average of 1,500 miles away. It ripens not in the sun, but in the back of a dark 18-wheeler, rumbling down the interstate. By the time its journey ends atop a garden salad in Washington, DC, it is red, certainly. But it is tired.

By contrast, a tomato that’s plucked from the vine closer to its peak ripeness is juicier and richer in antioxidants, vitamin C, and potassium. “It’s simply more nutritious than one ripened in the back of a truck,” says Stacey Snelling, CAS/MS ’85, PhD ’90, health studies professor in the College of Arts and Sciences.

According to Snelling, less than 5 percent of the food consumed in the Washington region is grown locally. “We’re not trying to get rid of large-scale farms,” she says. “We’re just trying to shift the balance.”

For years, Snelling’s work focused on what happened once the tomato landed on a plate. She designed and evaluated nutrition programs. She worked with schools to encourage kids to opt for an apple over a bag of chips. She measured BMI and analyzed cafeteria waste. But eventually, she realized that teaching people what to eat was only addressing part of the problem. You can’t choose a local, sun-ripened tomato if it isn’t there. You can’t cook fresh vegetables if the only store in your neighborhood sells candy and cigarettes.

“We realized that focusing on consumption wasn’t enough,” Snelling says. “If you’re going to change a food system, you really have to go back to the beginning.”

That revelation prompted Snelling and her team at the Healthy Schools, Healthy Communities (HSHC) Lab to launch their most ambitious project yet: the Resilient Food System (RFS) program. Funded by a three-year, $2.8 million grant from health care company Novo Nordisk, the initiative seeks to strengthen local supply chains and improve access to nutritious food—particularly in DC’s Wards 7 and 8, majority Black communities east of the Anacostia River.

“We are committed to defeating chronic disease, and that means we must address the social drivers of health like food and nutrition as well as create innovative medicines to manage conditions,” says Apurva Patel, Novo Nordisk’s director of US social impact. “Professor Snelling’s work is transformative because the project is rebuilding the infrastructure that makes healthy food choices possible for all in DC.”

By reimagining the way food moves through the nation’s capital, it’s no longer just about the end consumer, Snelling says. It’s about the farmer, the soil, the truck driver, and the profound inequities that determine who gets the fresh tomato and who gets the empty calories.

This new venture marks a distinct pivot for Snelling’s community-based research. For 15 years, the HSHC Lab has been a fixture in DC Public Schools, evaluating the District’s Healthy Schools Act and training teachers. They found success there—improving nutritional knowledge and getting kids to try new vegetables—but the schoolhouse walls eventually felt too confining for the scale of the problem.

“Many programs focus on the consumer and consumption, which is important,” says Snelling. “However, systemic change must include the entire food system, starting with local production and distribution.”

The grant, awarded in September 2023, is an important step in that direction. It’s allowed Snelling to zoom out and take a more holistic approach to the food system—one that acknowledges a simple truth: Emphasizing local demand is the catalyst needed to expand local supply. A healthy eater needs a healthy farm, and a healthy farm needs a way to get its harvest to the city.

This isn’t just academic theory—in Wards 7 and 8, the stakes are life and death. Residents there face a life expectancy that is 10 to 11 years less than those in the wealthier Wards 2 and 3. In Wards 7 and 8, rates of diet-related chronic diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and obesity are two to four times higher. 

The work to create a more resilient food system began by going back to the source. “If we were working with teachers before because they are the ‘producers’ of knowledge,” Snelling explains, “then we’ve got to work with farmers, who are the producers of our food.”

They start with the soil.

Production 

The AU researchers didn’t just breeze onto farms with clipboards. They knew that in the tight-knit agricultural world, trust is currency. “Who do most farmers go to when they have questions?” asks Robin McClave, CAS/MS ’09, program director of the HSHC Lab. “Other farmers.”

So AU partnered with the sustainable farming organizations Future Harvest in Maryland and the Rodale Institute, headquartered in Pennsylvania. Together, they are supporting a cohort of local farmers across the DC area, helping them not just grow more food, but grow it better. Rodale, known for its advancements in organic agriculture, is helping farmers implement regenerative practices—techniques that heal the soil, sequester carbon, and prevent runoff during the DC area’s increasingly severe rainstorms.

It’s about resilience: A farm with healthy soil can withstand a flood better than one without. A region that grows its own food is less vulnerable when a global pandemic snaps supply chains.

Altogether, Snelling’s team reached 77 local farmers in fiscal year 2025, connecting them with technical assistance from the Rodale Institute. They also supported 18 growers in Future Harvest’s Beginner Farmer Training Program. Because the program prioritizes traditionally marginalized farmers, the cohort was diverse: 14 identified as women, one as nonbinary, and one as transgender.

The RFS program also injected capital directly into the field, awarding nearly $56,000 in agriculture infrastructure and equipment (AIE) mini-grants. Twelve farmers received funding to increase their efficiency and production yields, purchasing supplies ranging from worm castings to drip irrigation systems.

Gale Livingstone, owner of the 53-acre Deep Roots Farm in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, is one such recipient. For five years, Livingstone and her crew performed the arduous task of planting and harvesting potatoes by hand. An AIE grant allowed Livingstone—who is part of the 1.4 percent of Black farm owners in the United States—to purchase a mechanical harvester and planter. The upgrade has enabled Deep Roots to double its production.

“To be able to take this produce into Wards 7 and 8 and ensure that those individuals that live there have access—that’s what I wake up for every day,” says Livingstone.

Distribution 

If production is the start and consumption is the finish, distribution is the messy, tangled middle. It is, Snelling confesses, the unruliest snarl.

The challenge is scale. A small local farm might have a bumper crop of carrots—400 pounds of them—but no way to get them to a large institution like a school district. The schools want the carrots, but they need them washed, sliced, bagged, and ready for the cafeteria salad bar. 

“Farmers go into farming to grow food and nourish their communities,” says McClave, “not all the other stuff they’re now expected to do,” from running a CSA and an Instagram account to troubleshooting mobile payments and navigating SNAP benefits at the weekend market.

This is where Snelling sees the future: food hubs. The team is exploring the idea of a central aggregation point—a place where small farmers can drop off their carrots and kale to be washed, processed, and distributed at scale. It’s the missing infrastructure that could finally bridge the gap between the rural field and the urban cafeteria while also helping small growers achieve financial security.

Snelling recounts a visit to Airlie Center—AU’s property in Warrenton, Virginia, about an hour outside of DC—which is experimenting with this concept, freezing surplus broccoli so it doesn’t go to waste. “That’s why you need a food hub—so that nobody has to eat broccoli for two weeks straight,” she says with a smile. 

RFS funding for fiscal year 2025 helped DC nonprofit FreshFarm surge into Wards 7 and 8, distributing produce to 23 institutions—more than twice as many as the year prior. That increased distribution translated to a 26 percent jump in revenue for the region’s small- and mid-sized farmers, particularly Black and brown growers.

Meanwhile, DC Central Kitchen used its RFS grant to bolster local procurement. By sourcing more food from regional producers, the nonprofit increased sales to community partners by 8 percent. It also saw a 5 percent increase at its Healthy Corners stores, which provide fresh, affordable produce to underserved neighborhoods.

Snelling and HSHC Lab have conducted annual evaluations of the Healthy Corners program for the last nine years. Once the trucks are unloaded, however, attention turns to the final, critical link in the food system: the consumer.

Consumption 

Evaluation often lives in spreadsheets—but for Snelling’s researchers, the real insights wait on supermarket shelves.

In summer 2023, as part of a comprehensive “food landscape” study, 10 public health and data science students fanned out across DC, visiting 128 food retailers to measure shelf space devoted to processed and whole foods. Armed with tape measures, students quantified exactly what Washingtonians encounter when they shop for groceries.

The results were stark. “For every foot dedicated to healthy food, there were three feet of unhealthy food,” Snelling says. In corner stores, nutritious options were squeezed into even tighter margins.

The problem isn’t just what’s on the shelves—it’s where the shelves are located. According to a November 2025 report by DC Hunger Solutions, Wards 7 and 8 share just seven full-service grocery stores, while Ward 3 boasts 17. 

To bridge this gap, the RFS program funded two community-based organizations—the Metro AME Church and the Leadership Council for Healthy Communities—which, along with DC Central Kitchen, provided nearly 450,000 servings of nutritious food to roughly 16,600 Washingtonians in fiscal year 2025.

The grant also funded two cohorts of an eight-week nutrition education series at an affordable housing complex. After the course, 80 percent of participants—who received vouchers to a nearby farmers market—said they planned to consult nutrition labels, and 68 percent planned to eat more fruits and vegetables daily.

Now, the HSHC Lab is working to ensure these numbers signal lasting progress. 

Secured by a $300,000 grant from CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the lab is launching an initiative to bolster the resilience of the local food system. Working with 10 nonprofit grantees, the project relies on “convergence”—a multidisciplinary approach to solving food insecurity that combines social cohesion with collaboration. To track this effort, the HSHC Lab is building a data dashboard to align local metrics with DC Food Policy Council priorities and national goals. 

Engagement

This massive undertaking—spanning farms, trucks, and corner stores—reflects a deeper philosophy of how AU engages with its city. Snelling is adamant that her work is not “parachute research,” where academics drop in, extract data, and vanish. “We’re not doing this to people,” she says. “We’re doing this with people.”

That distinction is important, says Linda Aldoory, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

“The Resilient Food System program represents the future of academic inquiry—interdisciplinary, innovative, and profoundly human,” Aldoory says. “Stacey isn’t just teaching nutrition; she is engineering a more equitable infrastructure for our city. Her refusal to accept the status quo for residents in Wards 7 and 8 reminds us that the measure of our success isn’t just in papers published, but in the health and vitality of the community we serve.”

As the grant enters its next phase, the vision is clear. Snelling wants to see a DC where “local” isn’t just a buzzword for the wealthy—but the standard for the school lunch tray. She wants a system where farmers are paid fairly, soil is regenerated, and a mother in Ward 8 has the same access to a fresh, sun-ripened tomato as a college student in Ward 3.

It’s a massive systems engineering challenge disguised as a public health project. But Snelling is optimistic. She sees students energized by the work, farmers eager to innovate, and a university willing to get some mud on its boots.

“We still don’t know what we don’t know,” Snelling says. “But that’s the creation of knowledge—educating yourself and realizing there’s more to understand.”

The tomato on the vine is just the beginning. The real work is building the road that gets it to us, fresh and whole.