Tracie McMillan, Author at Tracie McMillan

More Markets, Better Health?

January 22, 2025April 16, 2007

City Limits Weekly • April 16, 2007

Harlem— New York City is eyeing a new target for promoting health among Gotham’s poor: supermarkets.

On Friday, the city’s food policy coordinator, Benjamin Thomases, sat in on a briefing about the nuts and bolts of bringing supermarkets into low-income neighborhoods. “We’re definitely looking at the issues of access to healthy food,” said Thomases, who said the city has been meeting with local food industry players, from biggies like Pathmark – whose extremely successful store on 125th Street in Harlem is generally considered a model project – down to the Washington Heights-based National Association of Bodega Owners, to discuss possible strategies.

Fancy Produce in Every Pot!

January 22, 2025April 2, 2007

Daily Intelligencer • April 2, 2007

The Alice Watersization of New York cuisine is continuing apace, and now it’s spreading to decidedly un-haute cuisine. Now that the budget is done, Albany leaders are finalizing a deal to give New York its first statewide Food Policy Council, charged with spreading the local-and-organic movement to corner bodegas and other places where lower-income New Yorkers shop. A Friday announcement by state Agriculture Commissioner Patrick Hooker explained that the new body will coordinate the mind-numbing minutiae involved in favorite sustainable-food efforts like getting New York State apples to the neighborhood deli and ensuring that community-supported agriculture-buying clubs are affordable to the poor.

Paying the Poor to Behave

January 22, 2025March 30, 2007

HuffingtonPost.com • March 30, 2007

Yesterday, New York City’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg unveiled specifics on the newest piece of his groundbreaking antipoverty initiative: Paying the poor for behaving well. From a press conference in hardscrabble Brownsville, Brooklyn, Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs explained that, come September, the city will be paying poor families for keeping doctor’s appointments and making sure their kids go to school. Funded with private foundation grants, these “conditional cash transfers” will, among other things, pay $25 for attending elementary school here, $300 for a good test score there; if a family collects every reward, they stand to net $5,000.

Seeking a Sympathetic Ear on Welfare in Washington

January 22, 2025March 26, 2007

City Limits • March 26, 2007

With stringent new work requirements for welfare recipients set to take full effect nationwide in October, local welfare officials are scrambling to help their allies in Washington take advantage of a Democratic Congress and get the feds to alter regulatory changes made when Republicans were the majority party.

Last spring, Congress overhauled Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the federal welfare program. Welfare program officials and advocates alike balked at statutory changes, arguing that they actually would thwart state efforts to get people into family-sustaining jobs.

Designed to Deliver Jobs, WeCARE Yields Criticism

January 22, 2025March 12, 2007

City Limits • March 12, 2007

The Bloomberg administration’s flagship welfare initiative came under attack last week, assailed by advocates for the poor who charged that the $200 million Wellness, Comprehensive Assessment, Rehabilitation and Employment (WeCARE) program is doing little to help the city’s indigent find work and is being left largely unmonitored by the city.

Launched in February 2005, the WeCARE program was heralded by city officials as a new era in welfare, breaking with what many saw as a punitive approach under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Intended to help welfare’s sick and disabled clients either find work or attain federal disability benefits, the program was designed to carefully assess – and try to fix – the problems keeping those clients from working.

Soothing Chicken Soup is Worth the Time

January 22, 2025February 16, 2007

MSNBC.com • Feb. 16, 2007

My first attempt at chicken soup ended in an explosion. I was nine, and making a Laura Ingalls-inspired effort to nurse my pneumonia-stricken father to health. In keeping with the pioneer theme, I had grabbed an old-fashioned ceramic pot out of my mother’s china cabinet. It shattered in about five minutes, having endured the highest heat setting possible on the electric stovetop.

This particular experience illustrates several rules to keep in mind before undertaking the creation of your very own chicken soup. Nostalgia may well work against you. Though the end product will be pretty, the process is not. And while the work stops short of being complicated, it nonetheless attains the label of “time-consuming.”

The Anxiety of Appetite

January 22, 2025January 23, 2007

Salon • Jan. 23, 2007

America’s food enthusiasts may find it hard to place the name Barry Glassner. He’s not a television chef, or a restaurant critic, or a diet guru. Indeed, the University of Southern California sociologist is known primarily for his best-selling 2000 book, “The Culture of Fear,” a dissection of the anxious underpinnings of the American psyche. It’s a subject that might seem to have little relevance to the dinner table, but Glassner begs to differ. If his latest book, “The Gospel of Food,” makes one thing plain, it’s that few topics generate more worry among Americans than our breakfasts, lunches and dinners.

City Lawyers Tell Supremes: No Pay Raise for Home Aides

January 22, 2025January 16, 2007

City Limits • Jan. 16, 2007

City lawyers are working to keep wages for home health workers low, City Limits has learned, even as their colleagues in city government discuss ways to help them move out of poverty. While the mayor’s high-profile Commission on Economic Opportunity recently announced it would be building a “career ladder” out of poverty for the lowest rung of health workers, city lawyers are fighting to keep home health aides from being entitled to minimum wage and overtime.

On Jan. 5, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Coke v. Long Island Care at Home, a five-year-old case seeking to bring home health aides under minimum wage and overtime laws. City lawyers said last week they plan to file an amicus curiae or “friend of the court” brief in support of maintaining the pay exemption before the case is heard this spring.

Perfect Grilled Cheese is Simple, Satisfying

January 22, 2025January 4, 2007

MSNBC.com • Jan. 4, 2007

It’s easy to overlook the grilled cheese as a culinary delight. Reminiscent of rainy childhood afternoons, and most typically prepared with highly processed ingredients, this hot sandwich can in fact yield an opportunity for fresh and delicious experimentation — even for the most cooking-averse grown ups.

“Put together properly, you can really experience the perfect bite,” says Nancy Silverton, whose famed Campanile made waves in L.A. with its sandwich nights — so much so that she went on publish “Nancy Silverton’s Sandwich Book.”

Mayor Gives a Lift Up the Job Ladder

January 22, 2025December 26, 2006

City Limits • Dec. 26, 2006

When Mayor Bloomberg announced the first steps to be taken in his new $150 million antipoverty initiative last week, he skimmed over what could be one of its most ambitious components: A set of “career ladder” programs designed to take low-wage, entry-level workers in growth industries and help set them on the track to better jobs and the middle class.

“What we want to do is target those sectors where the entry-level jobs may not be institutionally connected to the next step up the rung,” Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs said at the event, “and give [workers] the skill building that’s necessary in order to qualify for those high level, better paying positions.” Gibbs added that the city would likely be focusing its efforts on health care and food manufacturing, though the programs would not be made public for another month or two.