NEW Worcester Reports on Urban Ag and School Foodscapes!

Thanks to the hard work of students at Worcester Polytech Institute that participate in the Sustainable Food Systems Project Center we have two new great reports to share.

Students that write these reports spend a whole academic year doing research in the community on a topic that we identify with them and their professors.  Both groups of students this year produced high quality research that we will be able to utilize in our policy and programming work here in the city.

In the report titled Worcester Food Scape: An Analysis of Adolescent Food Choices, students Elena Banegas, Bethany Burke, Frank Gleason and Jennifer Zehnder spent a year working with a group of students at the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester while also analyzing the landscape around schools and bus stops.  To learn more about the attitudes of high school students towards fast food, they conducted focus groups and interviews.  To assess the impact of the foodscape on choices, they mapped food retail outlets in relation to schools and bus stops.  Student’s food choice in Worcester is complex and is influenced by advertisements, peer pressure, easy access to junk food, acculturation, and economic considerations.  View the full report.

A second group of students produced a report titled Mapping the Potential for Urban Agriculture in Worcester: A Land Inventory Assessment.   Students Jay Rigenback, Matthew Valcourt and Wenli Wang worked to identify and present the potential for urban agriculture in Worcester through the creation of a vacant, public land inventory.  They worked with local practitioners and stakeholders, analyzed successful examples from other cities, and utilized GIS software to create an inventory of all the vacant land owned by the City of Worcester.  The result is that Worcester contains 337 vacant or partially vacant parcels owned by a variety of different entities within city government. The students envisioned that this report could support the policy council’s and others efforts to make food production more viable in the city.  View the full report.