The Food and Nutrition Section announces this year's awardees:

Excellence in Dietary Guidance Award

Tracy A. Fox, MPH, RD

President, Food, Nutrition & Policy Consultants, LLC

Tracy Fox, president of Food, Nutrition & Policy Consultants, LLC, has over 20 years of experience working in the federal government and the private sector, and has extensive experience in federal nutrition policy and the legislative and regulatory process. Her clients include/have included federal, state and local agencies including the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, non-profit organizations including the Produce for Better Health Foundation, Action for Healthy Kids Foundation and the National Food Service Management Institute, public health departments and educational agencies, grocery store chains and public relations firms, where she provides advice and expertise on policy and nutrition initiatives. Areas of expertise include child nutrition and school health, federal/state and local nutrition policy, advocacy and government relations. She has presented and spoken at national, state and local venues across the country and is quoted and appears regularly in media outlets (print and TV) on subjects including school nutrition, children’s health, obesity, and nutrition policy. Prior to forming her consulting company Fox was with the Government Relations office of the American Dietetic Association in Washington, D.C. and with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the food and nutrition assistance arena. Fox serves on numerous boards and committees for organizations, including the Institute of Medicine School Foods Committee, the D.C. Dietetic Association, Society for Nutrition Education, National Cancer Institute, American Academy of Pediatrics, Montgomery County School Health Council and PTA and is a retired Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves. Fox received a Master of Public Health from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Science, cum laude, in the Coordinated Undergraduate Program in Dietetics at Hood College.

Mary C. Egan Award

Arnell Hinkle, RD, MPH, CHES

Executive Director, California Adolescent Nutrition and Fitness Program

Arnell Hinkle is the founding executive director of the California Adolescent Nutrition and Fitness (CANFit) Program. Hinkle has experience working directly with African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, Filipino, and American Indian low-income communities throughout California.  Her efforts to produce culturally appropriate nutrition and physical activity education training resources emphasizing youth leadership are nationally recognized, and she has provided training, technical assistance and consultation to community and after school organizations, and numerous local, state and national agencies including the 100 Black Men of America, Inc., South Dakota Lakota Sioux Diabetes Education Project, the Region 10, U.S. Bureau of Maternal and Child Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  She is a recipient of the 2003 Robert Woods Johnson Community Health Leader Award.  As a Eureka Communities Leadership Fellow, Hinkle worked with the Washington, D.C.-based policy group, Forum for Youth Investment, to examine how the youth development field can incorporate nutrition and physical activity standards into after-school programs. In 2005, Hinkle received the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio, Italy Study Center Fellowship in recognition of her experiences designing and implementing nutrition and physical activity programs for Asian American, Pacific Islander, Latino, and African American adolescents. Arnell is a registered dietitian, certified health education specialist, organic gardener, and former restaurant chef.

Catherine Cowell Award

Marion Standish, JD

Director, Disparities in Health Program, The California Endowment

Marion Standish joined The California Endowment with an extensive legal and philanthropic background.

As program director for The Endowment’s Disparities in Health program, she leads the foundation’s efforts to develop program initiatives to reduce health disparities. In that capacity Standish serves as lead officer on many of The Endowment’s major funding initiatives, including Healthy Eating Active Communities, supporting community coalitions to develop and implement policies and programs to reduce obesity; Community Action To Fight Asthma, focusing on reducing environmental triggers for asthma among school-aged children; and, The Partnership for the Public’s Health , a five year program designed to build strong, effective partnerships between local public health departments and the communities they serve. She also designed The Endowment’s partnership project with The Rockefeller Foundation, California Works for Better Health, a four year effort to build the capacity of community-based organizations to improve neighborhood health status through regional employment strategies.

Previously, Standish served as senior program officer for The California Endowment. In that capacity, she managed The Endowment’s San Francisco office and was responsible for overseeing the grant-making activities in the Bay Area. She conducted outreach to organizations to increase their awareness of funding opportunities, reviewed health-related grant proposals from community-based organizations, helped to develop programs to assist underserved communities and monitored a portfolio of foundation grants.

Prior to joining The Endowment, Standish was founder and director of California Food Policy Advocates (CFPA), a statewide nutrition and health research and advocacy organization focusing on access to nutritious food for low-income families. Before launching CFPA, she served as director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, a statewide advocacy organization focusing on health, education and labor issues facing farmworkers and the rural poor. She began her career as a staff attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance, a federally funded legal services program.

Standish serves on the board of directors of the Food Research and Action Center, the San Francisco Community Boards Program, and the Neighborhood Funders Group. She was recently appointed by California’s Chief Justice to the Judicial Council’s Legal Services Trust Fund Commission and by Mayor Gavin Newsom to San Francisco’s Children Youth and Families Commission. Marion received her J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law, and both her M.A. and undergraduate degrees from New York University.

Student Award

Diana S. Grigsby-Toussaint MPH, PhD Candidate, University of Illinois at Chicago

Abstract #161228

Diana S. Grigsby-Toussaint, MPH¹, Shannon N. Zenk, PhD², Susan J. Curry, PhD³, Michael Berbaum, PhD³, and Jonathan Fowler, BS⁴. (1) Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1603 W Taylor Street, Chicago, IL 60608, 617-388-7586, dgrigs1@uic.edu, (2) College of Nursing, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1747 W Roosevelt Rd, 845 S Damen Avenue, MC 802, Chicago, IL 60612, (3) Institute for Health Research and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1747 W. Roosevelt Road, Chicago, IL 60608, (4) Department of Biostatistics, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1603 W Taylor Street, Chicago, IL 60608

Background. There is growing interest in understanding contributions of the neighborhood retail food environment to dietary behaviors. In this presentation, we will describe food options (food availability, selection, quality and price) at retail food stores in five predominately African-American and Latino community areas in Southwest Chicago, and compare these food options by neighborhood (census block) racial/ethnic composition. The study was conducted in collaboration with the Illinois Prevention Research Center.

Methods. We developed a food store audit tool for use in African-American and Latino neighborhoods. Over a four-month period, one of two observers visited 172 retail food stores twice exactly 14 days apart. Observers documented the availability of healthy (e.g., corn tortilla) and less healthy (e.g., flour tortilla) food options, including the availability of 122 fresh, frozen, and canned fruits and vegetables. Observers also assessed prices of select food items, as well as the quality of select fresh fruit and vegetables.

Results. Initial findings regarding food availability indicate that across neighborhoods, most stores (86 percent) had canned fruits and vegetables, but only 37 percent provided fresh options. Stores were less likely to have healthier food options. For example, while 74 percent of stores sold white rice, only 11percent sold brown rice. Approximately 82 percent and 15 percent of stores carried whole milk and skim milk, respectively.

Conclusion. The results suggest that individual-level interventions may have limited success in improving dietary behaviors in racial/ethnic minority neighborhoods if the retail food environment is not addressed. Interventions are needed to increase healthy food options in these neighborhoods.