On Monday, September 29, UVA’s Architecture School will be hosting a visit from Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty and former director the Hartford Food System, one of the nation’s oldest organizations dedicated to fighting hunger and improving nutrition on a grassroots level.

In his book, Winne’s exploration starts in the 1960s and shows how communities since that time have responded to malnutrition with a large number of strategies and methods, including farmers’ markets and community gardens.

“Perhaps one of the most frustrating and perplexing features of the food gap is a certain relativistic quality that has wormed its way into our food system over the past ten years,” Winne writes. “Just as lower-income groups make some small gains in closing the food gap by, say, having access to new food stores in city neighborhoods or benefiting from a marginal improvement in the Food Stamp Program, higher-income groups leap ahead with an increase in their purchase of organic and locally produced food….The gap never decreases and indeed…often increases.”

Winne’s 5pm lecture, in room 153 of the Architecture School at the University of Virginia, is free and open to the public. It will be followed by a reception and book signing. Parking is available in the Culbreth Road Garage.