From multiple streams to a torrent: A case study of food policymaking and innovations in New York during the COVID-19 emergency

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on urban and regional food systems. Local administrations worldwide have been challenged to design and implement policies to mitigate immediate food system disruptions while planning for longer-term equity and resilience. The fast pace and high degree of uncertainty of the pandemic have made systematic tracking and assessment of food system change and related policy responses arduous.

To address this gap, this paper applies the multilevel perspective on sociotechnical transitions and the multiple streams framework on policy change to 16 months of food policy (March 2020 through June 2021) during the New York State-issued COVID-19 state of emergency, comprising more than 300 food policies advanced by New York City and State legislators and administrators. Content analysis of these policies revealed the most salient policy areas during this period, the status of legislation, and key programs and budget allocations, as well as local food governance and the organizational spaces within which food policy operates.

The paper shows that food policy domains that gained prominence focused on support for food businesses and food workers and on ensuring and expanding food access through food security and nutrition policies. Most COVID-19 food policies were incremental and were limited to the duration of the emergency, yet the crisis allowed for enactment of novel policies that deviated from the common policy issues or the typical scale of changes proposed pre-pandemic. Taken together, and viewed through a multilevel and policy streams framework, the findings provide insight into the trajectory of food policymaking in New York during the pandemic and the areas that food justice activists, researchers, and policy makers should focus on as the COVID-19 pandemic is abated.

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on urban and regional food systems. Local administrations worldwide have been challenged to design and implement policies to mitigate immediate food system disruptions while planning for longer-term equity and resilience. The fast pace and high degree of uncertainty of the pandemic have made systematic tracking and assessment of food system change and related policy responses arduous.

Focusing on New York as a case study and using a conceptual lens grounded in the multiple streams theory (Kingdon & Stano, 1984; Kingdon, 2010) and the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions (Geels, 2002; Raven, 2006), this paper examines policymaking during the New York State-issued COVID-19 state of emergency. The research draws on 16 months of food policy (March 2020 through June 2021), comprising more than 300 food policies advanced by New York City and State legislators and administrators, and sheds light on the trajectory and nature of local food policymaking during the COVID-19 state of emergency.

In the densely populated New York City metropolitan region COVID-19 manifested as an abrupt and dramatic crisis prompted by high virus transmission rates. In New York State, it resulted in New York on PAUSE (Policies that Assure Uniform Safety for Everyone), comprising policies to close and restrict businesses and require social distancing to stop the spread of the virus. These caused abrupt income loss for the most vulnerable populations, leading to increased poverty, food insecurity, and hunger. Many workers in the hospitality and restaurant industry, who experienced low wages and precarious jobs before the pandemic, were laid off. Moreover, many restaurant owners had to close or go out of business due to limits on indoor dining.

To better understand the temporary and longer-term niche innovations in food policymaking which emerged in New York City and State during the crisis, the paper examines policymaking data through the following key questions: How has food policymaking during the pandemic manifested? Which food issues have been politically salient? How did food policy during the emergency compare to the previous decade and long-term food policy goals for the next decade? And, to what extent were the proposed food policies aimed at deeper food system transformation, outlasting the state of emergency? Before presenting the research methods used (Section 3) and the paper's key findings (Section 4), we briefly review existing literature on food policymaking during crises and the COVID-19 pandemic more specifically in Section 2.

The paper shows that food policy domains that gained prominence focused on support for food businesses and food workers and on ensuring and expanding food access through food security and nutrition policies. Most COVID-19 food policies, including some of the proposed or implemented innovative changes, were tied to the duration of the emergency, yet the crisis also allowed for enactment of novel policies that deviated from the common policy issues or the typical scale of changes proposed pre-pandemic. Taken together, and viewed through a multilevel and policy streams framework, the findings provide insight into the trajectory of food policymaking in New York during the pandemic and the areas that food justice activists, researchers, and policy makers should focus on as the COVID-19 pandemic is abated.

2. Literature review

2.1. Food policy and planning during crises

Urban crises, from weather events to epidemics and financial meltdowns, differ in causes but all involve the dramatic disruption of systems, routines, and economies. Crises can unfold slowly or acutely threaten public health and wellbeing, public safety, and the physical environment. Policymaking differs during crises as their uncertainty creates conflicts in measuring, diagnosing, and assessing them, and in reaching consensus about appropriate responses. Both cities and states play an important role in selecting and promoting certain problem framings and policy solutions and spurring or stifling food system innovation and resiliency through the legislative, programmatic, budget, or other decisions they make during a state of emergency or crisis.

At the federal level in the U.S., different frameworks have been established to guide emergency management and related policies during crises (e.g., Kreps, 1990; Lindell et al., 2006; McLoughlin, 1985; Rubin et al., 2012; Wilson & Oyola-Yemaiel, 2001). One is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) four-pronged approach of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery (e.g., FEMA, 1996). Additionally, over the years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has established its own set of tools and mechanisms to support farmers and rural communities during states of emergency or disasters (e.g., USDA Rural Development, 2021) and to guide the distribution of food during disasters (e.g., USDA FNS, 2021). While the term disaster commonly denotes a natural catastrophe (e.g., hurricane, earthquake) or a man-made hazard (e.g., toxic spills, terrorism), a state of emergency is different in that it is declared “when public health or the economic stability of a community is threatened and extraordinary measures of control may be needed” (FEMA, 2013). Without proper response, emergencies, and the disruptions they cause, can escalate, and turn into disasters, requiring emergency response beyond the capacity of local communities alone.

Some research has documented how the U.S. government has historically used food policy to respond to crises that exacerbate hunger and food insecurity (Seessel, 2003; USDA FNS, 2005; Richardson, 2005; Keith-Jennings & Rosenbaum, 2015; Shahin, 2017; Fleischhacker, 2021). Such responses have typically comprised waivers of eligibility criteria and increases in benefit amounts or other temporary changes to increase eligibility, enrollment, and benefit disbursement for federal food programs such as the USDA Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR), and others (Ibid.). Overall, food access policymaking during emergencies has led to increased federal funding flowing through state and city agencies that must assume the increased administrative burden of communicating new eligibility requirements, determining eligibility, documenting enrollment, and facilitating benefits disbursement. Most federally funded food programs require states to split the administrative costs of a program, which may hobble effective local response during times of expanded scale and increased need. A 2013 commentary suggests that crisis in Athens, Greece had “triggered notable changes in people's perceptions about care for others, consumption patterns and priorities” and that these changes create opportunities for economic crises to serve as a catalyst for food planning and food systems strengthening (Skordili, 2013).

2.2. Food policy responses during the COVID-19 pandemic

2.2.1. Key federal policies

An example of a major legislative provision enacted at the federal level in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak is the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (Public Law 116–127) which provided additional funding and flexibilities for food assistance programs. Federal emergency response has also included measures to cushion the pandemic impact on small businesses and the agricultural sector (e.g., see Johansson et al., 2021). Through combined funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) and the discretionary borrowing authority via the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), the USDA developed and implemented the Coronavirus Food Assistance Programs (CFAP 1, CFAP 2) (e.g., Hungerford et al., 2021; Orden, 2020; Schnepf, 2020; Schnepf & Monke, 2020).

The programs offered additional relief to the farm safety net programs already in place through the U.S. Farm Bill of 2018 (e.g., agricultural risk and price loss coverage programs and supplemental disaster programs) and focused on alleviating the financial burden US producers experienced due to the pandemic and related market disruptions. Other farmer-focused provisions include the EDA Economic Adjustment Assistance, the NOAA Fisheries Assistance, the Federal Crop Insurance Corporations, and the Farmers to Families Food Box Program (see FEMA, 2020).

Two federal programs geared toward the support of restaurant businesses and other food outlets heavily affected by the pandemic are the Small Business Administration's Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Researchers note that while the scale and amount of financial support provided through these programs to small businesses is unprecedented in the US, “funds flowed to minority communities later than to communities with lower minority shares” (Fairlie & Fossen, 2022). Further, research by Atkins et al. (2022) focusing on COVID-19 PPP loans indicated that “Black-owned businesses received loans that were approximately 50% lower than observationally similar White-owned businesses.” This literature, examining federal level emergency response, calls attention to the racial disparities and structural inequities in some emergency and disaster response funding structures, and the importance of informing such policies and programs through new data on implementation timeliness and the demographics of recipients.

2.2.2. Local and city specific policymaking

Urban food policy scholarship on city specific food policy responses to crises is much more limited than research on federal responses. One notable exception is the City of Baltimore's Food System Resilience Advisory Report (Biehl et al., 2017). Baltimore was one of the first U.S. cities to explicitly assess and plan for food systems resilience. The plan outlines specific actions that can limit disruptions and shorten recovery times in future crises. Additionally, the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and Extension services has funded research on the nexus of food policy and crises (e.g., Barrett & Sahn, 2001). Other important scholarship on local level food policy responses to crises comprises research focusing on school meal provisioning and urban school districts. During the pandemic, researchers documented how New York City Department of Education (McLoughlin, McCarthy, et al., 2020) and other jurisdictions across the US (e.g., see McLoughlin, Fleischhacker, et al., 2020; Kenney et al., 2021) implemented school food distribution, and the equity implications of existing policies and barriers to effective emergency response.

No prior studies have examined the full scope of food policymaking in New York during the declared emergency (March 2020–June 2021) nor document the full extent of relevant policymaking. However, academics and advocates in New York City have documented different aspects of the City's food policy response to the pandemic. Some have focused on food related impacts across various sectors (The Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center et al., 2020) while others have examined how federal and state legislation affected the city (Fraser et al., 2021) or spurred specific social innovations (Cohen, 2022). These studies showed that existing New York City food policies and programs were insufficient to address challenges of the scale that COVID-19 created (The Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center et al., 2020). Despite strong food standards, an active network of robust emergency food providers, and progressive health, education, and social service systems, the pandemic highlighted long-standing tensions between actions to forestall hunger and policies to ensure access to healthy food (Ibid.). The pandemic also highlighted the City's overreliance on emergency food supported by philanthropy and volunteerism (Sanders, 2020). Researchers noted the increased significance of administrative barriers to enrolling in federal food assistance programs as the number of people eligible and in need of such benefits grew (CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute & Hunger Free America, 2021).

2.2.3. International insights

Several studies from the global context documented the ways in which particular localities leveraged food policy during COVID-19 to progress broader food systems change (Blay-Palmer et al., 2021; Cattivelli, 2022; Cavallo & Olivieri, 2022; Cifuentes & Fiala, 2022). Other studies examined specific governance and systems structures that supported effective COVID-19 food policy response (Dekkinga et al., 2022; Fei et al., 2020). While some studies documented failures of place-based food policy responses to meet the needs of marginalized populations in particular contexts, such as women migrant workers in India (Azeez et al., 2021; Agarwal, 2021, Agarwal, 2022), others highlighted the ways in which specific food systems actors such as street vendors received unprecedented support by COVID-19 induced local food policies (Balbuena & Skinner, 2020; Chen, 2020).

Additionally, globally, and across the U.S., researchers developed several food policy databases to track newly enacted legislation at the city, state, national, and global level, including the Healthy Food Policy Project Policy Database (healthyfoodpolicyproject.org/policy-database), the UCONN Rudd Center Legislation Database (uconnruddcenter.org/legislation) and the International Food Policy Research Institute COVID-19 food trade policy tracker. Yet, no existing database fully captures New York City and State food policy legislation during the state of emergency, with some databases focusing only on state level policies and others on a limited subset of urban policies in the region.

2.3. New York's food system and lockdown disruptions

Then-New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo declared a state of emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 7, 2020 (Executive Order No. 202), followed by a declaration by the New York City mayor on March 12, 2020 (Emergency Executive Order No. 98) (see also Fig. 1 ). The State's declared state of emergency ended on June 24, 2021 (New York State, 2021a, New York State, 2021b, New York State, 2021c), whereas the City's state of emergency was extended several times, including through Executive Order No.311 in January 2023 which, pending further extensions, continues to be in effect at the time of writing.

Fig. 1.

Overview of emergency declarations issued due to the COVID-19 pandemic at the national level in the U.S. and in New York City and State since 2020.

On March 22, 2020, the New York Governor issued an executive order – New York State on PAUSE – which closed all on-site, non-essential businesses. Essential food businesses not affected by the closure included grocery stores, farmers markets, food banks, farms and agriculture businesses, and food processing and manufacturing operations. Restaurants were allowed to be open only for take-out or delivery. This important public health measure had a dramatic impact on the City and State's food economy. In December 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, employment in the “Food Services and Drinking Places” industries in New York State decreased by 43.4 % while employment in the “Full-Service Restaurants” sector was more than halved (55.3 % decrease) compared to December 2019 (New York State Department of Labor, 2020). Lower foot traffic (−43 % in February 2020, compared to pre-COVID-19) and the complete disappearance of seated dining in the period March–May 2020 due to the lockdown (e.g., see Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, Indicators of Progress Dashboard, www.nycindicators.com), meant lower consumer spending that decimated small business revenues.

Data on small business revenues in New York City (Opportunity Insights, Economic Tracker, www.tracktherecovery.org) indicates that in April 2020 these dropped by as much as 70 % and at the end of 2020 were still 53 % less compared to the beginning of the year. Some analysts estimate that about one third, or more than 70,000, of the city's small businesses may remain permanently closed and unable to bounce back and return to business post-COVID (Partnership for NYC, 2020). Many restaurants and food businesses were struggling to pay rent during the emergency. As many as 92 % of New York City restaurants could not pay their rent in full in December 2020 and 60 % of landlords had not waived rent for their tenants during the pandemic (The New York Hospitality Alliance, 2021).

2.4. Theories on food systems and policy change during crises: a multilevel perspective and policy windows

Different theories and frameworks have been advanced to describe how crises influence local policymaking (e.g., Downs, 1972; Grossman, 2012; Grossman, 2015; Higgs, 1987; Kingdon & Stano, 1984), the way in which emerging innovations in community and regional food systems governance have started to reconfigure mainstream urban policy and planning internationally (e.g., Ilieva, 2016; Ilieva & Hernandez, 2018; Morgan, 2013; Sonnino, 2009), and to help explain food policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic in urban regions worldwide. For instance, to assess the extent to which the public health and economic crisis caused by COVID-19 has led to a deeper transformation in the urban food system in Vienna, Austria, food policy scholars (e.g., Cifuentes & Fiala, 2022) have used a conceptual framework combining a food democracy framework (López Cifuentes & Gugerell, 2021) and the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions (e.g., Geels & Schot, 2007). Elsewhere, to examine the emergence of transformative food governance innovations in the metropolis of Cape Town, South Africa (Kroll & Adelle, 2022), researchers have used the multiple streams theory and the concept of “policy windows” (Kingdon & Stano, 1984) in tandem with a vital systems security lens (Collier & Lakoff, 2015), illustrating how government and civil society worked together to innovate and cushion the impacts of the lockdown.

To better discern the nature and transformative potential of the torrent of food policy changes and initiatives which took place during the COVID-19 emergency in New York, in this paper, we present and draw on two conceptual frameworks – the multi-level perspective on sociotechnical transitions (e.g., Geels, 2002; Raven, 2006) and the multiple streams theory of policy change (Kingdon & Stano, 1984). In the remainder of this section, we briefly present each framework and then use the frameworks in tandem in presenting the results of the analysis in Section 4.

2.4.1. The MLP and socio-technical niche innovations

The multi-level perspective (MLP) on socio-technical transitions is a conceptual framework grounded in the fields of science and technology studies and evolutionary economics and has been extensively used to explore the unfolding of past radical social and technological changes (e.g., Geels, 2002; Geels, 2006; van den Ende & Kemp, 1999). More recently, scholars in the emerging scientific domain of sustainability transitions have used the MLP as a conceptual lens to study urban sustainability transitions more specifically (e.g., Bulkeley et al., 2011; Hodson & Marvin, 2010) with some researchers applying it to urban food system innovations (e.g., Hargreaves et al., 2013; Hinrichs, 2014; Kirwan et al., 2013; Seyfang & Smith, 2007; Smith, 2006) and urban food policy specifically (e.g., Hosseinifarhangi et al., 2019; Ilieva, 2016; Mattioni et al., 2022).

Viewed through this conceptual lens, significant changes in complex socio-technical systems, such as the food system sustaining an urban region, occur as a result of the changes within and interactions between three different yet simultaneously existing levels of stability of the current system: niche, regime, and landscape (see also Fig. 2 ). Landscape pressures beyond the control of isolated local jurisdictions (e.g., extreme weather events due to climate change, public health crises like COVID-19, wars and acts of terrorism, global financial meltdowns, etc.) destabilize the mainstream regime of established policies, industries, infrastructures, consumer practices, scientific knowledge, and cultural norms and open a “window of opportunity” (Geels, 2011) for some niche innovations to emerge and become institutionalized in the mainstream regime, thus reconfiguring it.

Fig. 2.

A dynamic multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions.

Source: Adapted from Geels (2011).

A refinement of the framework by Raven (2006) further theorizes the relationship between niches and regimes and helps clarify why certain niche-regime relations are more conducive to innovations that are transformative than others. Depending on the different conditions of stability of the niche innovations and the dominant socio-technical regimes they seek to transform, innovators and advocates for change can find themselves in one of four possible scenarios: a “problem solver” scenario in which stable niches are able to modify an unstable regime (e.g., destabilized by a major crisis or disruption like the COVID-19 pandemic); a “promising technology” (or solution) scenario when both niche and regimes are stable; a “missed opportunities” scenario of unstable, fledgling niches unable to gain sufficient resources and support to modify an unstable regime; and, a “dead-end street” scenario of unstable niches in a stable regime (Fig. 3 ). Thus, the potential for growth and breakthrough in the system depends on which of the conditions and niche-regime relationships are at play.

Fig. 3.

Relation between regime and niche stability.

Source: Authors elaboration based on Raven (2006).

2.4.2. The MSF and policy windows enabling change

The multiple streams framework (MSF) views policymaking as resulting from the confluence of problems framed a particular way, policies and proposals for solutions, and a particular political milieu, or ideologies and public opinions, that coalesce in support for specific policy actions. Kingdon and Stano (1984) described how focusing events, such as crises, open a window of opportunity for policy entrepreneurs to connect the streams, taking advantage of supportive political environments to advance policies that at other times may not have been salient or perceived as feasible.

Streams of public policy problems emerge out political discourses and debates animated throughout policy networks (Kraft & Furlong, 2019) encompassing community-based organizations and activists, policy analysts, researchers, philanthropies, private sector experts, interest groups, legislators, and government officials, among others. The pace at which a problem emerges depends on the broader landscape in which it takes shape. Abrupt crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or a natural disaster, can accelerate the formulation and prioritization of certain problem formulations on the public policy agenda. Similarly, the policy solutions stream comprises ideas about what can be done about a certain problem and are developed within specialist communities composed of the individuals and organizations most concerned about the problem (Kraft & Furlong, 2019). Within this stream some solutions and innovations will be perceived as a “good fit” by decision-makers, while many will be unfeasible politically or administratively, still others will not be socially acceptable or technologically lacking. Finally, the political stream represents a “combination of the national mood, the elected officials active in the decision-making, and the interest groups active on all sides” (Hoefer, 2022, p.3).

More recently, the MSF was further refined (Kingdon, 2010) to explicitly acknowledge the complexity and non-linearity of policymaking processes and modifications. Because many public policy problems are complex and multi-layered, the root-cause of a problem and its possible solutions can be viewed differently by different decisionmakers. Further, the subjective problem definitions and perceptions of what framing should be prioritized (for instance, upstream policies focusing on income equality and immigration reform or downstream programs focusing on food assistance and emergency food networks) can change over time. In general, but especially during crises, the extremely limited time available makes conducting a comprehensive and systematic collection of all the necessary information on the problems, solutions, and their potential impacts highly impractical (e.g., see also Lindblom, 1989), and thus decisions on the best course of action are taken in circumstances of high uncertainty about the best solution that will fix the problem (Hoefer, 2022).

3. Methods

3.1. Data collection

Data collection for this paper encompasses the period from the Governor's declaration of a state of emergency (March 2020) to the end of the emergency (June 2021). We included proposed or enacted city and state legislation, such as city or state bills, budget proposals, resolutions, public hearings, press releases, government programs, government plans or strategies, and institutional changes such as the establishment of task forces or the appointment of public officials. Selected federal policies with bearing on New York's food system, such as food assistance provisions in the federal COVID-19 relief packages as well as federal legislation advanced by New York representatives in Congress, were also considered.

Data sources for the legislative documents include the New York City Council Legislative Research Center online database (https://legistar.council.nyc.gov), which tracks the city's legislative activity and provides the status of all introduced bills, laws, resolutions, and public hearings held by the Council and its Committees, the New York State Senate Bills and Laws online portal (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation), and the New York State Assembly Bill search platform (https://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/) (see also Fig. 4 ). Press releases were identified through city and state institutional websites. Budget data was obtained through legislative databases, city and state open data portals (https://publications.budget.ny.gov; https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us), third-party legislation trackers (e.g., https://trackbill.com, https://legiscan.com, http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us) and the authors' knowledge of specific food policies. Analysis of policies adopted by the nine Indian tribes in New York State (Cayuga Nation, Oneida Nation of New York, Onondaga Nation, Poospatuck or Unkechauge Nation, Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, Seneca Nation of Indians, Shinnecock Indian Nation, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, and Tuscarora Nation) were beyond the scope of the paper but we report on the extent to which legislation focused on Tribal communities.

Fig. 4.

Key components in the data collection and analysis process.

The dataset analyzed in this paper includes all bills related to at least one dimension of food policy introduced or enacted March 2020–June 2021. The food policy dimensions were selected based on prior research by the authors (e.g., see Freudenberg et al., 2018) and the goals in the City's February 2021 10-Year Food Policy Plan "Food Forward NYC" (NYC Mayor's Office of Food Policy, 2021) addressing food security, healthy nutrition, food labor, environmental sustainability, economic development, infrastructure, and food governance and democracy. We included legislation affecting the food supply chain, community engagement, and data and knowledge systems for the development and implementation of food policy. Broader policies not explicitly labeled as food policies but that influence the city's food sector, such as moratoriums on evictions for small businesses affected by the pandemic, were included and considered part of the city and state's pandemic response. However, upstream food policies (e.g., Cohen and Ilieva, 2021), such as those related to immigration, housing, transportation, or education policies that may affect food security or other aspects of the food system, were not included in our analysis.

3.2. Data analysis

We conducted content analysis (e.g., Elo & Kyngäs, 2008) of the policies, using both deductive and inductive coding techniques to capture different dimensions of the food policy trajectory in New York during the pandemic. The deductive component was guided by a structured analysis matrix comprising codes for the different domains of food policy noted in the section above (i.e., healthy nutrition and food security, food businesses and food workers, environmental sustainability, infrastructure and regional supply chains, and food governance) and whether the policy was explicitly COVID-19 related, as well as codes to capture specific features of the policy itself, such as whether legislation was introduced but not enacted, whether the proposed changes were temporary or permanent, and if such changes were incremental (consistent with existing food policies) or “breakthrough” (significantly different than previous policies), as indicated in Table 1 .

Table 1.

Defining incremental versus breakthrough food policies.

Type of policy	Working definition
Incremental	Policies that build on or expand prior rules, legislation, programs, budget allocations, with minor additions or modifications likely to keep the scale of policy impact unchanged.
Breakthrough	Policies that modify current rules, legislation, programs, or budget allocations by adding new dimensions to food policy (e.g., codifying ways to tackle a disaster emergency from a public health crisis) and/or significantly expand food policies existing prior to the pandemic in scope, scale, or population involved. Multiple incremental policies that collectively are transformative are considered breakthrough policies.

Following data coding, researchers developed descriptive statistics of the codes to gauge the incidence and distribution of the food policy dimensions of interest. Bills introduced in both chambers of the State legislature (Senate and Assembly) were considered only once. Budget laws and resolutions were considered as multiple policies as they always advanced multiple food policy goals by funding different city agencies and non-governmental organizations. The coding process was iterative and designed as a collaborative effort among the research team members. After the lead researcher examined the full evidence, the team convened in several collective sessions, refined the final coded sample through discussions of the convergent and different interpretations, and deliberated on the optimal strategy in those instances.

4. Results

A total of 315 policy provisions were identified through the structured food policy search during the COVID-19 state of emergency in New York State (March 2020–June 2021). Of these, 294 were bills (102 at the city level and 192 at the state level) and 21 were new programs, budget allocations, and government decisions made through other mechanisms. This ample body of public policy evidence provides insights into some of the features of the reconfiguration of New York's food policy regime during the emergency. As illustrated through the examples presented later in this section, this reconfiguration, albeit temporary for the most part, set the stage for some of the policy innovations that emerged to become institutionalized and gain support beyond the emergency phase of the pandemic.

4.1. The pandemic disrupts the food system regime and opens a policy window

The sudden and rapid outbreak of COVID-19 in New York, one of the epicenters of the pandemic in the U.S., dramatically shook and disrupted the food system regime that sustains New York City and its region, with devastating public health and economic impacts throughout the entire state. The violent landscape-level pressures due to the pandemic introduced a high degree of instability and uncertainty in the existing food system and policy regimes both at the city and state levels. Societal perceptions of the high-priority food policy problems to tackle first, the available solutions, and the options that are most politically feasible were also reshaped.

For one, due to the supply chain disruptions and economic downturn, food policy gained even further prominence and recognition as an essential public policy domain at the municipal and state levels of government. The media, government officials, civil society organizations, philanthropies, academic institutions, and both mainstream and start-up companies began placing the spotlight on food systems issues through their communications and activities daily. These discourses reverberated throughout all sectors of the food system regime, emphasizing the food access struggles that New Yorkers were facing as well as the vulnerabilities of food workers more specifically, which deepened significantly during the crisis. The terms “essential workers” and “heroes” became quickly normalized into the mainstream political discourses, acknowledging the vital importance of frontline workers, including food and agriculture workers, during the height of the pandemic.

As a result of the shock, a policy window opened and significantly amplified the stream of policy solutions centered on food workers and businesses as well as food insecure individuals and communities. The thematic analysis of the more than three hundred policy provisions examined for this paper revealed that two-thirds of food policy activity in New York City and State during the pandemic focused on providing support for food businesses and food workers (34 % of the legislative measures, see Fig. 5 ), and ensuring adequate food access (32 %) for communities in need. Most of these food policies were explicitly emergency-focused measures, which, however, propelled the institutionalization of several pre-pandemic policies already moving through the legislative process. In fact, if we isolated the COVID-19 related food policies from the rest, the two themes are even more pronounced. More than half of the policies focused on helping food businesses and food workers (56 %) cushion the impact of the pandemic and more than a third were concerned with ensuring adequate food access (35 %).

Fig. 5.

Thematic breakdown of New York City and State pandemic-specific food policies introduced during the state of emergency (March 2020–June 2021).

Within the domain of food businesses and food workers, the unstable food system regime – and reconfigured streams of food problem definitions, existing and new solutions, and politics – translated in policy responses especially prioritizing small businesses and protections for food delivery workers. In the domain of food access, policy solutions that were lifted through legislative and budget measures prioritized the equitable distribution of food in low income areas and populations and the expansion of government food benefits amounts and their access and utilization, including through promotion of online access and use of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits.

Time and the different effects the disruptions had on the population and the economy as the pandemic progressed, also shaped the types of food policy problems that were most acutely felt and addressed through public interventions. As shown in Fig. 6 , during the first few months of the state of emergency a larger share of measures focused on food security and nutrition and mitigating the impacts of the lockdown on food access, especially for the most vulnerable New Yorkers. As economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic started to progressively manifest with spikes in unemployment and business closures, legislative provisions and programs to support food businesses and food workers became a central concern for policymakers in late 2020 and early 2021.

Fig. 6.

Pandemic-focused and broader New York City and State food policies introduced during the COVID-19 state of emergency (March 2020–June 2021) by main thematic focus.

Note: The data for January 2021 reflects the beginning of the 2021–2022 legislative session at the State level, characterized by a higher legislative activity. Further, due to the large volume of old, re-introduced State bills, for representation purposes, these were not included in the January 2021 bar above, which shows only newly introduced bills, but were however included in the data analysis and findings.

Further, toward the end of the emergency, the realization and commitment to reducing food insecurity in the City and State in the longer term, while also ensuring greater protections for businesses and workers in the food sector, translated into policy proposals with a scope and reach beyond the emergency and the pandemic. Some of these measures also focused on creating organization and governance capacity to craft and oversee resiliency planning in the food chain that can help the region prepare in the instance of future crises and disasters. As the examples in the next section will illustrate, in the early weeks of the pandemic, some food governance adjustments had to be rapid and warranted a response quicker than the typical time to introduce and enact legislative provisions, and were advanced mostly through programmatic and organizational measures.

How the pandemic affected the multiple streams of problems, solutions, and politics (Kingdon & Stano, 1984), and New York residents' and policymakers' perceptions of the highest priority food policy issues, is discernable also by taking a look at the years of food policymaking prior to the COVID-19 pandemic vis-à-vis policymaking during the emergency. A comparative examination of existing research on the 2008–2018 decade of food policymaking in New York City (Freudenberg et al., 2018) and pandemic food policy in the 2000–2021 period sheds further light on how the public health and economic crises modified food policy at the city level. To juxtapose the key goals of food policymaking during the emergency with pre-pandemic food policy in the city, for this paper, researchers further coded the city-level food policies in the sample applying the themes used by Freudenberg et al. (2018) for their decade-based analysis. The results from our analysis further support the findings noted above and undescore a strong policy attention toward food workers' support – with a rise in the share of city food policies focused on this goal from 8 % to 17 % (see Fig. 7 ) and economic and community development – as well as food security measures, the latter comprising almost a third of all pandemic food policies.

Fig. 7.

New York City-only food policies, including but not limited to pandemic food policies, advanced during the COVID-19 state of emergency (2020–2021) and during the 2008–2018 decade of food policymaking in the City by key policy goal (Freudenberg et al., 2018).

During the emergency, healthy nutrition objectives were largely incorporated within food security and government nutrition assistance goals, hence the sizeable reduction of the share of these food policies in the overal stream of food policies compared to pre-pandemic times. Overall, in the 2020–2021 period, there were fewer healthy nutrition focused provisions and no stand-alone COVID-19 bills exclusively focused on reducing diet-related chronic diseases such as diabetes or obesity in New York City. Nevetheless, despite the smaller number of healthy nutrition-focused pandemic food policies, there were a few important programmatic novelties aimed at expanding healthy food access for low-income New Yorkers. The programmatic changes were enabled by federal funding made available to the City through the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) of the USDA. Specifically, thanks to a $5.5 million GusNIP grant, which the City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) annouced in March 2021 (NYC DOHMH, 2021), the City was able to expand its existing Health Bucks (active since 2005) and Get the Good Stuff (launched in 2019) programs. Both programs are designed to increase the purchasing power for healthy foods of low-income residents receiving monthly benefits through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The benefits were formerly known as “food stamps,” but have long transitioned to an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) system, similar to a credit card, and can be spent both at grocery stores as well as farmers markets (e.g., see Cohen & Ilieva, 2015) and mobile fruit and vegetable carts throughout the city.

Additionally, several months after the State-issued state of emergency was lifted, in early 2022, the newly-appointed New York City Mayor Eric Adams resumed action on healthy nutrition legislation through Executive Order 8, focusing on revising the City Agency Food Standards (NYC Office of the Mayor, 2022) (in effect from July 2023) and committing to Good Food Purchasing principles (MacKenzie, 2021), as well as Executive Order 9 mandating that only healthy foods be advertised on city property. In early 2022, New York City Council also enacted a local law (LL 2022/033), known as the "Sweet Truth Act," requiring added sugar notifications in chain restaurants, a bill originally introduced in 2019. Compared to the previous decade of food policy, environmental sustainability continued to be integral part of the city food policymaking, albeit representing a modest share of all food policies. Provisions mainly focused on food waste prevention by City agencies (LL 2021/057) and public schools (LL 2021/065), restricting single-use plastic beverage straws, stirrers and sticks (LL 2021/064), and restricting pesticide use by City agencies.

Finally, bills seeking to improve food governance and food democracy continued to be sparse during the emergency. Nonetheless, as with the healthy nutrition programs noted above, the food governance policies that were adopted in that period were few but significant. For instance, New York City Council passed seminal food planning legislation requiring the City to develop a long-term food policy plan (LL 2020/040) and establish a permanent office of food policy (LL 2020/041). Subsequently, in early 2021, the City released its first-ever 10-year food policy plan “Food Forward NYC: A 10-Year Food Policy Plan” accompanied by the first increase in city budget allocations for staff for the Mayor's Office of Food Policy allowing it to expand the number of full-time employees working for the office. These, alongside several other organizational innovations linked to the emergency but not codified into laws (see Section 4.2), helped the City deepen its food governance capacity and were further legitimized as a result of the policy window that opened during the emergency.

4.2. Promising solutions and niche innovations break through, but many are tied to the state of emergency and an unstable food system regime

The landscape-level disruptions (see Geels, 2002; Cifuentes & Fiala, 2022) caused by the COVID-19 pandemic greatly destabilized New York's food system regime causing the streams of existing and novel problem formulations, solutions, and political discourses (Hoefer, 2022; Kingdon & Stano, 1984) to coalesce in new ways, and temporarily opened a policy window for some policy ideas to break through, even if only for the duration of the emergency (Fig. 8 ). In fact, the high degree of instability and uncertainty injected by the pandemic in the political and infrastructural facets of New York's food system regime altogether accelerated the adoption of incremental solutions, the acceptance and support for existing but previously politically unfeasible solutions (i.e., promising solutions in a stable regime, see Raven, 2006), and the testing of some ad-hoc pandemic food policy innovations crafted as quick “problem solvers” (Raven, 2006) during the crisis. Among the latter were many of the governance and programmatic food policies, which were a key part of the City and State policy response to the COVID-19 emergency (see also Table 2 ) and often offered a more immediate action and relief than some of the purely legislative responses.

Fig. 8.

A diagram of the key policy areas where proposals for temporary modifications and innovations emerged during the crisis and the disruption of the sociotechnical regime, and which were codified into emergency-tied programs and laws thanks to the policy window that opened and the multiple streams alignment.

Table 2.

List of specific legislative, governance, budget, and programmatic measures put forward during the COVID-19 pandemic and which modified the current food policy regime, even if the modification was tied to the duration of the emergency. For a complete list, please see Appendix A in the supplementary materials provided with this paper.

4.2.1. Food governance

In the days immediately after the City and State emergency declarations at the beginning of March 2020, it became evident that the City and State's pre-pandemic food governance infrastructure, while constituting an important and valuable asset, needed more funding, staff, and cross-agency institutional support and coordination in order to be able to promptly and effectively respond to the crisis and meet unprecedented need in the wake of the pandemic and beyond. Local government officials thus both reorganized existing resources and staff functions as well as created new institutional spaces and leadership roles, specifically tailored to address the new magnitude of food access and food supply challenges posed by COVID-19 across the city and region.

4.2.1.1. A COVID-19 food czar and a strategic emergency food plan

Ten days after the City's first COVID-19 emergency executive order was signed, on March 22, 2020, the then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio designated a COVID-19 food team and appointed a COVID-19 Food Czar to lead it. This food governance innovation and newly devised emergency food policy leadership role was headed by New York Department of Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia who, together with the Mayor's Office of Food Policy (MOFP), was tasked to ensure food access citywide and safeguard the food security of New York's most vulnerable populations, including seniors and individuals in low-income communities.

Under the Food Czar leadership, in mid-April, the City released a comprehensive coronavirus response food system plan “Feeding New York” (City of New York, Office of the Mayor, 2020). Unlike previous municipal food policy reports, the plan was backed by $170 million in designated funding for its implementation. Of this amount, $50 million was set aside to create a food reserve and distribution infrastructure allowing the city to stock 18 million nonperishable meals. Additionally, through the plan, the City took steps to consolidate its emergency home food delivery initiative, launched at the end of March 2020, into a broader program called GetFoodNYC and which focused on seniors and homebound individuals who cannot access meals otherwise (see also Section 4.2.2).

4.2.1.2. A State-wide food supply resiliency working group

At the State level, legislators took steps to gather cross-sectoral food planning insight and strategize for long-term food supply resiliency solutions that can benefit the region and its businesses and communities beyond the pandemic. A food supply chain bill (A10607A/S8561, signed into law in December 2020) established a food supply working group with representatives from different parts of the food supply chain to guide decisions related to New York's food supply and food chain logistics due to COVID-19. Additionally, a related bill (A952/S1305, signed into law in February 2021) directed the State's Commissioners of Agriculture and Markets and Economic Development to work with the State's land grant university system to recommend improvements to the resiliency and self-reliance of New York's farm and food supply. The goal of both laws was to identify durable and effective solutions that help New York's food businesses and communities adjust to the transformed wholesale, retail, and consumer practices and markets in post-COVID times.

4.2.1.3. An advisory council to promote workers' psychological wellbeing

Also at the State level, legislators enacted bills (i.e., A10629/S08608-A) recognizing the collective trauma and mental health impact of the pandemic on frontline workers and the need for government to take steps to support them though new resources and services. Specifically, the State established a frontline workers trauma informed care advisory council with the mandate to offer evidence-based resources and learning opportunities to essential workers, including food service workers, who have been disproportionately exposed to trauma associated with COVID in the line of duty.

4.2.2. Food access and food security

The urgency to address rapidly rising levels of food insecurity — more than 1.5 million New Yorkers (up from 1.2 million pre-pandemic), including one in three children (City Harvest, 2020) — imposed the need for more rapid and agile forms of policymaking, not always possible through legislation as bills can take months to get enacted and take effect. Thus, as noted previously, the bulk of COVID-19 centered policies and innovative solutions aimed at promoting food access during the emergency were advanced not so much through legislation but through new programs, infrastructure, and services, and supported by budget reallocations and the reorganization of local administration and governance roles and spaces. Many of these provisions were put forward in late March and beginning of April 2020 and expanded, adjusted, and reflected in follow-up policies and initiatives in the subsequent months as the pandemic continued to unfold.

4.2.2.1. Ensuring the right to food for all

One innovative solution that New York City put forward during the pandemic was the COVID Food Response portfolio of programs and online portal. A centralized platform for COVID-19 emergency food distribution encompassed multiple services, including the GetFoodNYC Emergency Food Home Delivery (EFD) for homebound individuals who cannot afford grocery or meal delivery as well as information about how to access food pantries, grocery stores, farmers markets, and grab-and-go meals at public schools throughout the city. Additionally, New Yorkers in need could receive assistance through the platform to obtain the federally funded Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) benefits for public school children and food pantries could apply for City funding for emergency food distribution.

Besides the higher degree of centralization and coordination of the City's multiple emergency food and related services, one of the key breakthrough solutions which was introduced through the City's COVID Food Response was the Grab & Go Meal program (see also Table 2). The initiative was established early in the emergency by the City and its Department of Education (DOE) and ensured the right to food to all New Yorkers during the peak of the emergency. In fact, all New Yorkers – including public school children, their parents or guardians who were not previously eligible for such meals, as well as all adults in need regardless of their age and immigration status – could access three free meals per day through a network of more than 500 Community Food Hubs across the five boroughs (NYC Opportunity, 2021).

While temporary and linked to the pandemic, the Grab & Go Meal program helped reduce major preexisting barriers to food access for many New Yorkers otherwise not eligible for government assistance, bringing New York closer to advancing the universal right to food for all. In fact, the program arguably represents one of the more significant examples of transformative COVID-19 food policy the city set forth during the pandemic. The fact that it centers school children, and it is implemented through a partnership with DOE, is not accidental and rests on the City's prior pathbreaking policy from 2017 when it significantly transformed the municipal food system regime by establishing its Free School Lunch for All Program (e.g., see Watts et al., 2021). The program helped reduce stigma and increase food access by making school lunch available to all public school students regardless of the income of their families.

Additionally, besides reconfiguring part of the public school infrastructure, some emergency-focused “problem solver” policies advanced within the COVID Food Response program involved creatively repurposing other existing resources and businesses also disrupted due to COVID-19 outbreak and associated lockdowns. For instance, toward the end of March 2020, the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission – a city agency which licenses and regulates traditional taxies as well as app-based companies (e.g., Uber and Lyft) – began to recruit drivers for the emergency home food delivery program to reduce rising unemployment in a business sector heavily impacted by the pandemic. This strategy was also paralleled by initiatives from third-party companies such as Uber and Lyft which offered free rides to grocers for seniors and other New Yorkers.

The rise and institutionalization of niche innovations in the food policy milieu at the city level was mirrored, and in part fueled, by the alignment of multiple streams of problems, solutions, and politics across levels of government and decision-making happening at the state and federal levels of government. For instance, school food access in particular was further enhanced through state-level action in May 2020, when New York State administrators allocated $880 million in temporary food assistance for 2.1 million of New York's public school children previously receiving free and reduced-price school meals (New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, 2020). The funding was used to support the federally funded P-EBT program authorized by the Families First Act signed into law on March 18, 2020. Later, in June 2021, New York State announced that it would make an additional $2.2 billion in federal P-EBT assistance available to 2.5 million children enrolled in school lunch programs throughout the state, which, as mentioned above, since 2017, applies to all New York City public school students. A statewide campaign, advocating for the temporary universal school food access policies to become permanent, and ensure that all New York State children have access to free school meals beyond the emergency, is currently underway (Hunger Solutions New York, 2023; New York School Nutrition Association (NYSNA), 2022).

4.2.2.2. Redirecting federal funding to fortify and scale-up emergency food infrastructure

While some of the novel solutions to the food access challenges New York City faced during the emergency entailed a quick development and deployment of new programs, services, and partnerships with food distributors and community organizations, others required thinking strategically about the entire emergency food infrastructure and how to swiftly rearrange both resources and logistics to scale it up and meet rising need. The confluence of a heightened sense of urgency and a broad political and societal consensus that food security is among the top public policy problems the city had to address during the emergency provided a conducive setting for rethinking the role of some of the federal funding streams in advancing food policy goals. This led to a speedy and substantial pivot of resources which, because of the many top competing priorities the city has to tackle, would have been difficult to justify and advance before the pandemic.

At the end of June 2020, before the beginning of the City's new fiscal year on July 1, New York City Council adopted a Resolution (Res 1364-2020) to reallocate community development funding for fiscal year 2021 to better respond to the pandemic. Specifically, part of the reallocation were $50 million to the City's Human Resources Administration (HRA) for the establishment of the New York City COVID Food Reserve. The reserve was devised to prevent against food shortages and mitigate food supply chain disruptions due to the pandemic. Because, thankfully, the worst-case scenario of extreme food shortages did not manifest, the City transitioned the initial stock of emergency food into a new program called the Pandemic Food Reserve Emergency Distribution Program (P-FRED). The program provided food to hundreds of new and established food pantries and community organizations and, for the first time, placed the emphasis on providing fresh produce through the emergency food system, which has traditionally prioritized mostly shelf-stable goods.

Additionally, $375,000 was reallocated for the City's Food Pantry Services Program. Previously, at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, which occurred between the last week of March and first week of April 2020 (Thompson et al., 2020), the city allocated $25 million in additional funding for emergency food providers, including soup kitchens and food pantries, to ensure that they can distribute an estimated 19 million meals to New Yorkers in need (the funding ran out at the end of 2020). While the reallocation was temporary and was not renewed for fiscal year 2023 (NYC Mayor's Office of Operations, 2022), it did help support the large but under-resourced and fragmented network of emergency food providers throughout the city. Additional funding by the City including grants for equipment ($900,000) and technology upgrades ($600,000) further helped fortify the city's emergency food network under great pressure due to increased need as well as staff and supply shortages.

4.2.2.3. Centering essential workers in food policy

An expanded view of who the beneficiaries of public food access policies ought to be is yet another important outcome of the reconfigured and destabilized food policy and food system regimes due to the abrupt and sweeping outbreak of COVID-19. During the emergency, local food policymakers began to emphasize the importance of guaranteeing adequate food access for frontline workers working on the ground and witnessing firsthand some of the direst impacts of the pandemic in hospitals, social care institutions, farms and food processing plants, grocery stores, and many other maintenance and transportation occupations across multiple industry sectors. For instance, as part of its COVID-19 Emergency Relief Fund, in April 2020, New York City launched the Food for Heroes Program. The program was aimed at delivering hot meals to New York City's medical professionals and other essential workers, including those who came to the city from elsewhere and were staying in hotels (City of New York, Office of the Mayor, 2020). In August 2020, Food for Heroes was further expanded to include frontline sanitation workers and nursing home workers (NYC Office of the Mayor, 2020). While this hot meals delivery program for essential workers was tied to the emergency, it placed the spotlight on the role of government in guaranteeing reliable and timely access to quality meals for first responders, alongside vulnerable residents, during crises — an important lesson for long-term food policy and disaster preparedness plans in the region.

4.2.3. Food businesses and food workers

As noted in the introduction of the paper, the lockdowns and restrictions on business activities imposed by local authorities to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 disease in early 2020 strongly affected New York's local economy, including its many food businesses and food workers. To lessen the burden of these impacts during the emergency, New York City and State mobilized a series of downstream (i.e., focusing on the food sector specifically) and upstream (i.e., addressed at multiple sectors and industries, not limited to the food system alone, see also [Cohen & Ilieva, 2021]) legislative provisions and programs.

4.2.3.1. Coupling downstream with upstream policy solutions to rescue food businesses

For instance, to reduce some of the expenses incurred by restaurants, many, if not all, of which had to pivot to an online ordering and take-out/delivery mode of operation due to the COVID-19 indoor occupancy safety measures, New York City Council enacted a several local laws in 2020. The laws required that third-party food delivery services do not overcharge restaurants with certain fees during the emergency (i.e., Local Laws [LLs] 51, 52, 87, and 88 of 2020). While the measures were tied to the emergency, collectively, they represent a niche innovation in the urban food policy regime and set a precedent for how public policy can be leveraged to support local food economies through timely legislation. Considering New York City's vast network of more than 30,000 food service establishments, even small changes such as those of capping the fees imposed by third-party online ordering and delivery companies, in the aggregate, can have consequential effects.

To aid food and other businesses cushion the financial impacts of the pandemic, the City also put forward several broader, upstream legislative measures. These included laws that lowered or eliminated certain penalties for minor infractions done before and during the pandemic (LL 2021/080), introduced protections against the harassment of commercial tenants impacted by the pandemic – a practice now punishable by a civil penalty of $10,000–$50,000 (LL 2020/053) – and temporarily prohibited the enforcement of personal liability provisions of leases for commercial tenants (LL 2020/055). At the State level, legislators financed COVID-19 specific programs to support post-pandemic economic recovery in the state. One such program was the $800 million New York State COVID-19 Pandemic Small Business Recovery Grant Program (see also the Senate-Assembly Budget Bill of S2509/A3009 of 2021, Section VV) which offered grants to existing businesses with 100 employees or less and independent arts and cultural organizations which have experienced economic hardship due to the pandemic (New York State, 2021a, New York State, 2021b, New York State, 2021c).

4.2.3.2. Subsidizing food sector employment to limit long-term job loss

Workers employed in the food sector, especially those working for restaurants and other food service establishments, were among the hardest hit by the restaurants closures and lockdown measures. To limit the financial distress experienced by food workers employed in those businesses and mitigate permanent job losses, New York City and State policymakers put forward several new programs, legislative provisions, and expanded funding for those employers.

For instance, in June 2020, New York City established a $3 million Restaurant Revitalization Program, which provided up to $30,000 to select restaurants to pay unemployed or under-employed workers affected by the pandemic for six to twelve weeks (New York City Opportunity, 2020). Frontline workers, including food service and agriculture workers across the food chain, were also prioritized in some of the enacted pandemic-focused food laws and resolutions. In September 2020, the City enacted a local law (LL 2020/099) to protect displaced hotel service workers due to a sale or bankruptcy of their employer and mandate new employers to guarantee the workers' job and wage for a period of at least 90 days. Additionally, at the State level, policymakers instituted a $35 million Restaurant Return-to-Work Tax Credit Program (ESD New York State, 2021). The tax credit program provided restaurants that lost revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic with a tax credit of $5000 per new worker hired up-to $50,000 per business — to bring restaurant staff back-to-work throughout the state.

4.3. Niche-regime alignments propel some longer-term breakthrough solutions continuing beyond the emergency

While a large share of the “problem solver” food policy niche innovations were tied to the duration of the declared state of COVID-19 emergency, a few did become institutionalized beyond the most acute stages of the pandemic (Fig. 9 ). As noted previously, the public health and economic crisis catalyzed niche-regime alignments and the opening of policy windows for more policy alternatives to be tested in the domains of food governance, food access, and food businesses and food labor. However, as the food policy regime began to regain some of its stability in late 2021 and many of the pandemic pilot programs and regulatory waivers were phased out, migrating to the “promising solutions” quadrant (Raven, 2006) and left outside the mainstream regime, a handful of initiatives did acquire a more long-term “problem solver” status and were enlisted by government officials to tackle longstanding food policy issues in the region (for select examples see Table 3 ).

Fig. 9.

A diagram of the key policy areas where proposals for longer-term modifications and innovations emerged during the crisis and the disruption of the sociotechnical regime, and which were codified into programs and laws outlasting the emergency thanks to the policy window that opened and a sustained multiple streams alignment as the virus's spread and impact slowed down.

Table 3.

List of key legislative, governance, budget, and programmatic measures put forward during the COVID-19 pandemic and which modified the current food policy regime beyond the state of emergency. For a complete list, please see Appendix A in the supplementary materials provided with this paper.

4.3.1. Food governance

The food supply chain — from production to transportation, retail, consumption, and nutrients management — is an important urban system, yet policies and institutional spaces have long been bound by electoral cycles and the disparate priorities of specific administrations. This has limited the ability to advance long-term urban food system planning and systematically build resiliency to future crises through coordinated institutional, budget, legislative, and physical infrastructure policies.

4.3.1.1. Institutionalizing long-term food systems planning and “thinking like a region”

During the COVID-19 emergency, New York City took important steps to fill this gap by releasing two key food system planning documents — “Feeding New York,” which is the City's COVID-19 emergency food plan noted in the previous section, and a 10-year food policy plan, “Food Forward NYC,” charting key goals for the city through 2031 and strategies for their implementation and evaluation. “Food Forward NYC” was released in early 2021 and builds on New York City Council's “Growing Food Equity in NYC Agenda” released in 2019. The plan was mandated by a local law (LL 2020/040) and outlines five strategic areas for the development of future food policy in the domains of food access and food security, food economy and good jobs, supply chains and regional infrastructure, environmental sustainability, and food system knowledge and governance.

It is important to note that this precedent-setting long-term food systems plan was the outcome of a strong multiple streams alignment of problems, policies, and politics (Kingdon & Stano, 1984) which had already expanded support for urban food policy prior to the pandemic. Just a few months before the declared state of emergency, New York City Council had introduced a broader package of food policy legislative and budget recommendations, including two focusing on the establishment of a permanent office for food policy and a long-term food policy plan. Nevertheless, the fact that the City had to develop the plan during the pandemic, which was an unforeseen circumstance when legislators introduced the bill mandating it, made it an even more salient and high-priority policy endeavor. The unprecedented prominence which food issues gained on the municipal and state policy agendas during the emergency, thus, further legitimized this niche innovation and the need for municipal-level long-term comprehensive food systems planning. The livelihoods and the health and well-being of New Yorkers were now even more clearly seen as tightly interconnected with those of the communities, food supply businesses, and farmers grappling with the COVID virus and its impacts across the entire foodshed.

One additional dimension that changed in the stream of municipal policy problems was the perception of the scale at which long-term food systems planning had to be done as well as the constituencies who had to be involved to address food challenges across the supply chain. One of the known yet seldom prioritized lines of work within urban food policy prior to the pandemic was the regional approach food systems planning, or the ability of local administrators to “think regionally” (e.g., Clancy & Ruhf, 2010). In August 2020, the New York Department of City Planning launched a new working group – the NYC Regional Food Working Group (NYC Planning, 2022) – led by its regional planning unit in collaboration with the NYC Mayor's Office of Food Policy. The group has been focusing specifically on food systems planning issues and spotlighting food planning leaders from wider New York City metropolitan region spanning the tri-state area of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. At the time of writing, the working group is still active and planning activities for 2023.

4.3.2. Food access and food security

The economic recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the profound disruptions of businesses, supply chains, and livelihoods throughout the five boroughs and the entire state posed novel and greater challenges to food access and food security for New Yorkers, the response to which could not be left to the private sector alone. The crisis put an extraordinary strain on food assistance programs and emergency food organizations, which had to adapt to new social distancing and sanitation protocols to continue providing food to those in need. Keeping Kingdon's multiple streams framework in mind (Kingdon and Stano, 1984; see also Hoefer, 2022), the problem of food access had existed before the pandemic but became more salient because of the sharp and precipitous increase in hunger and food insecurity. Policies had existed too, but innovative modifications were put forward during the emergency and some new ones were developed too. Simultaneously, the political environment favored emergency food response to meet the needs of those New Yorkers newly faced with hunger and malnourishment. In fact, as previously shown in Section 4.1, food access policies were the second most prevalent domain of food policies put forward during the emergency.

4.3.2.1. Augmenting mainstream government assistance programs and their implementation

One set of policy modifications to expand food access, with effects beyond the emergency, pertain to the federally-funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). City and state measures included provisions to expand participation in the program for those that are eligible but not enrolled as well as to expand the types of foods and venues where low-income New Yorkers could utilize the benefits.

For instance, at the city level, one bill which was introduced by City Council in 2019 (Int 1659–2019) and signed into law during the pandemic is Local Law 39 of 2020. The law required the City to develop a plan to identify and enroll seniors eligible for SNAP. Older adults were among the groups most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., see Greenleaf et al., 2022) and also constitute one of the community groups under-enrolled in SNAP, especially in some city neighborhoods (e.g., see Cohen, 2019). At the state level, an important bill that gained traction during the emergency and was signed into law shortly after the State emergency restrictions were lifted is S64/A1524. The law established a statewide restaurant meals program that allows homeless, elderly, and disabled SNAP recipients to use their SNAP benefits for hot or prepared meals at grocery stores, delis, and restaurants. Hot meals were previously ineligible for purchase using SNAP benefits, but USDA allowed individual states to request permission to include such meals in their programs.

Further, in the context of lockdown and social distancing policies, the question where SNAP benefits could be used for grocery shopping became equally pressing. In 2019, New York State was the first US state where USDA launched its SNAP online purchasing pilot in partnership with Amazon, Walmart, and ShopRite. During the emergency, the State signed into law two additional bills (S8247A/A10673 and S878/A1262) which authorize the use of SNAP to purchase groceries online and require the administration to create a plan to maximize online purchasing options and work to add more retailers to the program in New York. Currently, there are 30 different retailers accepting SNAP online in New York State (FNS USDA, 2023). Nationwide, during the pandemic, the program was expanded exponentially (Jones, 2021) and is now active in nearly all 50 U.S. states.

4.3.2.2. Strengthening synergies between food sectors and policy problems for systemic solutions

During the emergency, New York State established a new program, Nourish New York, to strengthen synergies and connections in the regional foodshed between its emergency food providers, many of which are based in New York City, and New York's farmers – two groups heavily affected by the pandemic. The program was initially launched as a pilot and funded through $25 million in emergency funds for food banks allocated in the 2020–2021 State budget (Metzger, 2020). Based on need, close to half of this funding was earmarked for the New York City region (New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets, 2020). As the pandemic unfolded the program was expanded several times, including through $10 million in CARES Act funding in October 2020 and $50 million in the State 2021–2022 fiscal year budget in April 2021. Specifically, the program allowed food banks to use State funds to purchase products directly from New York producers and processors thus providing food insecure New Yorkers with fresh, nutritious food, while also supporting struggling farm businesses. The first two phases of program invested $35 million in the region and reached 1.3 million New York households, 4150 farms, and 5000 food distributors.

The success and progressive scaling up of this breakthrough policy led to its further institutionalization and extended its longevity beyond the COVID-19 emergency. In November 2021, a new state law (S4892A/A5781) made Nourish New York a permanent program and codified it into the State's Agriculture and Market law. Links between farmers and food banks had existed before the pandemic, however, by helping farmers to distribute surplus food through the state's vast emergency food supply network at wholesale prices, during the ten months before the bill was introduced in February 2021, the new Nourish New York program was an important COVID-19 food access response that increased the resiliency of the regional supply chain while also offering seasonal, fresh foods to urban consumers in need. The program was also complementary to the state “Excess Food Act” (A4398A/S4176), a state food access bill mandating that certain supermarkets donate excess food to food banks. The bill was introduced before the pandemic but signed into law during the emergency and introduced a new title to the State's environmental conservation law. This legislative measure requires supermarkets to make unsold food that has not spoiled available to food banks and other hunger relief organizations. The goal was to reduce food insecurity while also minimizing food waste and greenhouse emissions.

Another niche innovation in New York's food policy which outlasted the COVID-19 state of emergency and filled important gaps in the existing emergency food assistance system, was a pilot program prioritizing the needs of veterans and military families. Building on the success of Nourish New York, in June 2020, the State launched another pilot food access initiative by partnering with HelloFresh — the largest meal-kit provider in the United States — and the New York City Department of Veterans' Services to meet the needs of food insecure veterans and military families. Between June and September 2020, the program provided more than 65,000 meals to families in New York City and was later extended to provide more than 200,000 meals through the end of 2020 (New York State, 2020). An additional extension was announced in January 2021 to allow the program to continue operation through the second quarter of 2021 (New York State, 2021a, New York State, 2021b, New York State, 2021c). Community partners include The Campaign Against Hunger, an innovative food pantry, and the Black Veterans for Social Justice. In November 2022, the State announced an extension and continued support for the program through 2023 (New York State, 2022).

4.3.3. Food businesses and food workers

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a particularly severe impact on small and medium-sized food businesses, such as restaurants, cafes and farmers markets, many of which have been forced to close or significantly reduce their operations. Additionally, as noted previously, the emergency put an enormous strain on food workers, many of whom were deemed essential but faced increased risk of exposure to the virus due to close proximity with others, and lack of protective equipment. While most food policy innovations that emerged to aid both business and workers during at the height of the crisis were temporary, some did acquire a permanent status. What is more, the policy window that opened during this time of instability and a policy and food system regime conducive to path-breaking change allowed for some long-awaited policy breakthroughs to manifest.

4.3.3.1. Rethinking public space and outdoor community food environments

One example of a novel policy supporting food businesses which transcended the emergency is New York City's outdoor dining program. The program allowed restaurants to use parts of the city streets and sidewalks to facilitate social distancing while businesses continued to operate at reduced capacity. The New York City Council launched the program in July 2020 (LL 2020/077) and later amended the law to make the program permanent in November 2020 (LL 2020/114). This effectively reconfigured the city's public spaces and built environment beyond the crisis, making outdoor seating a normalized and ubiquitous part of New York City's outdoor community food environments.

Another breakthrough policy change for which food justice activists had long fought and advocated (e.g., see The Street Vendor Project by the Urban Justice Center), but for which progress before the pandemic had been slow, is the increase of the number of permits for street vendors in New York City. Street vendors are an integral part of the city's food environment, and many are operated by female vendors, more than half of whom are breadwinners for their families (The Street Vendor Project, 2019). The limited number of permits and arduous access to them have been a major source of stress and precariousness for those working in this lower-paying, high-risk industry (ibid.). Due to legislation passed in 1983, the total number of permits allowed was capped at 3000. Initial efforts to amend the law in 2017 failed but were later revived in 2018 when New York City Council introduction a new bill (Int 1116–2018) aimed at increasing the cap.

After about two and a half years moving through the legislative process, during the emergency the bill gained greater salience and was prioritized by policymakers and legislators who signed it into law (LL 2021/018) in early 2021. Besides adding more than 4000 new permits over a ten-year period (2022−2032), the law further institutionalized this breakthrough change through the establishment of new governance spaces such as the Office of Street Vendor Enforcement (OSVE), housed at the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), and the Street Vendor Advisory Board. The board has the mandate to review and evaluate all New York City and State laws and rules with bearing on mobile street vending in New York City. A first report and sixteen policy recommendations on how to best support street vending in the city were released in early 2022 (Street Vendor Advisory Board, 2022).

4.3.3.2. Improving working conditions and expanding protections for food workers

The alignment of multiple streams in food policymaking during the COVID-19 emergency also put into sharp focus the substandard working conditions and precariousness of app-based food delivery workers. As lockdown and social distancing measures took effect, online food delivery services and app-based companies such as GrubHub, UberEats, and Doordash, already on the rise in pre-pandemic times (Hirschberg et al., 2016; Li et al., 2020), exponentially expanded their operations and the number of workers working through them. To protect and support this growing but highly vulnerable community of food workers, in 2021, New York City Council introduced a six-bills package to address gaps and inadequacies in the current system.

Thanks to the bills, which were all signed into law that same year, app-based food delivery workers can now set limitations on the distance and route of delivery (LL 2021/118; LL 2021/114), have a minimum hourly pay rate (LL 2021/115, effective 1/1/2023), and receive information about their pay and payment at least once a week (LL 2021/116). Additionally, delivery app companies are required to provide the delivery workers a free insulated food delivery bag after 6 deliveries (LL 2021/113) and restaurants are required to grant food delivery workers better access to bathrooms when they pick up orders from them (LL 2021/117).

As online food ordering and delivery platforms boomed during the emergency, another related breakthrough policy change for which communities had extensively advocated in pre-pandemic times (e.g., see Lee, 2018a, Lee, 2018b), is the legalization (LL 2020/073) of electric bikes (or e-bikes) which are essential for many food delivery cyclists in the city. The bill was first introduced at the beginning of the 2018–2021 legislative session and, despite advocacy and activist efforts, had not been advanced until the pandemic. Lifting the ban on e-bikes is a consequential food equity policy as it centers working cyclists which are often Latino or Asian immigrants affected by the myriad of stressors and inadequacies related to the app-based food delivery occupations noted above. As Lee (2018b, p. 10) notes in his dissertation on the topic, food delivery workers are subjected to “intense time pressures by restaurants and customers, precarious tip-based livelihoods, an e-bike ban and broken windows policing, and unsafe streets designed for drivers.”

Two other key laws enacted during the emergency were “just cause” measures which protect against arbitrary fast food employee layoffs (LL 2021/001) and wrongful discharge (LL 2021/002). Prior research has shown that arbitrary terminations and sudden and significant reductions in working hours are common in the fast-food industry and that these practices have serious health repercussions for workers (cf. CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, 2020). Toward the end of the New York State declared COVID-19 emergency, state legislators also passed comprehensive public health labor protection measures, which included workers in the food sector, such as the NYS Health and Essential Rights Act (“NY HERO Act,” S1034-A/A2681-B) and requiring State agencies to create mandatory health and safety standards for employers to prevent airborne infectious diseases (like COVID-19) in the workplace, a law deemed to be the first of its kind in the US (NYIC, 2021; Stewart-Cousins, 2021).

4.4. Partial multiple streams alignments and fledgling niches: missed opportunities?

While the body of enacted City and State laws, and complementary public programs and services, provides insight into which food policy areas and strategies became prioritized and codified during the COVID-19 emergency, the makeup of proposed but not enacted legislation is equally instructive. In fact, these bills and fledgling policy innovations shed light on food policy issues deemed key by some legislators but that did not gain sufficient political traction to be codified into a law. A partial alignment of the multiple streams of food policy problems, solutions, and politics (Kingdon & Stano, 1984) made the progress on some proposed policy measures and changes to the mainstream regime much slower. Thus, despite some support, eventually these proposals transitioned to the quadrant of “missed opportunities” (Raven, 2006, see also Fig. 3). That is, the scenario whereby innovations fail to gain sufficient stability and support in order to become institutionalized thanks to the policy windows that open due to the de-stabilized mainstream socio-technical and political regime. Notably, several such bills and resolutions proposed breakthrough changes focused on upstream policy measures, with implications for food equity goals but not limited to the domain of food policy, involving tax breaks or income regulations, immigration reform, and expansion of opportunities for businesses owned by minority or women entrepreneurs (see also Table 4 ). While, in the short term of the state-level declared state of emergency several of them can be construed as “missed opportunities” for innovation (Raven, 2006), changes subsequent to when the state of emergency ended in the State indicate potential longer-term impact on the food policy regime for some (Fig. 10 ).

Table 4.

List of specific legislative, governance, budget, and programmatic measures put forward during the COVID-19 pandemic and which produced a partial or incomplete reconfiguration of the policy during the emergency. For a complete list, please see Appendix A in the supplementary materials provided with this paper.

Fig. 10.

A diagram of the key policy areas where proposals for modifications and innovations emerged during the crisis and the disruption of the sociotechnical regime, but which were only partially considered or were not codified into laws and longer-term responses.

4.4.1. Food access and food security

One important food access bill that was put forward by state legislators, but which despite the emergency kept staying in the early stages of the legislative process, focuses on promoting the food security and healthy nutrition of lower-income pregnant women and mothers of children aged 5 or younger. The bill (S8384; S4161; S1628) was introduced in the 2020–21, 2021–22, 2022–23, and 2022–24 legislative sessions and focuses on expanding access to healthy, affordable foods through the federal special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children (WIC). During a state of emergency due to a public health crisis (such as COVID-19), the modified policy would allow pregnant women and mothers enrolled in WIC to accumulate their unused WIC benefits (which, at present, expire at the end of every month), and it would increase the monthly dollar amount limit for fresh produce purchases by at least 60 %.

Women, especially low-income working mothers, are among the populations most heavily impacted by the pandemic (Albanesi & Kim, 2021) and, globally, the gender food gap had widened even further with an estimated 126.3 million more women than men who were hungry in 2021 worldwide (CARE, 2022). Thus, limited legislative and programmatic actions, including dedicated policies to reduce barriers to food access, signal a critical omission warranting future attention in pandemic food policymaking in New York City and State. The limited attention to gender equity in urban food policy is not unique to New York and a characteristic of the food system strategies of other cities (e.g., see Ilieva, 2017). Local administrators in New York are however already taking steps to move the needle on this critical yet overlooked food policy area. For instance, the New York City's 10-year Food Policy Plan from 2021 (see also Section 4.3.1), explicitly included a policy strategy to achieve its long-term food access goal centered on offering support for breast-feeding parents.

In addition, at the height of the emergency, one New York City Council Member sponsored a Resolution (Res. No. 1475) calling on the State to create a universal basic income program in place during the COVID-19 pandemic. This upstream measure, which was not adopted, had the potential to play a major role in mitigating the economic, and by extension the food security, repercussions of the State's PAUSE order and the public health crisis. Later, during the midterm election in 2022, New Yorkers overwhelmingly (81 %) voted in favor (Sundaram, 2022) of a ballot measure to change the NYC Charter and track and annually report the “true cost of living” in New York City – a key structural change proposed by the NYC Racial Justice Commission (NYC Racial Justice Commission, 2021). While focusing on reporting, the new measurement is consequential in that, unlike other government metrics, it excludes public assistance from the calculation while encompassing the cost of covering basic living necessities like “housing, child care, child and dependent expenses, food, transportation, healthcare, clothing, general hygiene products, cleaning products, household items, telephone service, and internet service” (ibid., p. 9).

4.4.2. Food businesses and food workers

Another proposed policy not signed into law is a bill (Int 2255-2021) mandating new reporting requirements on participation by minority and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) in City contracts for services during the COVID-19 state of emergency. The bill was introduced in April 2021 and filed at the end of the legislative session in December 2021. In May 2021, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio together with several local lawmakers called on New York State to pass key policies for the City and State's equitable economic recovery — the MWBE Opportunity Expansion Act (S6270/A7266) and community hiring proposal. The proposals sought to allow credits to businesses that have policies that lead to diverse workforces, double city agencies' discretionary threshold to $1 million, and require businesses working with the city to hire low-income individuals, including public housing residents and residents living and from impoverished communities, resulting in an estimated 200,000 jobs over the next five years (Parrott, 2021).

Nevertheless, while those specific legislative measures were not codified into law before the State emergency was lifted, they, together with the passing of the ballot measures put forward by the New York City Racial Justice Commission (NYC Racial Justice Commission, 2021), triggered further alignment of similar niche innovations in the making and catalyzed transformative change within the policy window that opened during the pandemic. In fact, a suite of City and State legislative actions which focused on prioritizing MWBE contracts were put forward in 2022. In October 2022, New York State Governor Hochul signed into law three bills focusing MWBEs including a bill (A10459/S9351) which increases the dollar threshold for MWBEs and allows New York City to award contracts up to $1 million to MWBEs without a formal competitive process, thus expanding the type of businesses that can do business with the City. Additionally, in early 2022, City legislators introduced three bills for consideration by the City Council to require an MWBE consultant for city projects that exceed $10 million (Int 0328-2022), institute letter grades for achieving agency participation goals (Int 0262-2022), and establish auditing requirements for MWBE procurement (Int 0835-2022).

Several other proposed upstream policy solutions emerged thanks to a partial policy streams alignment during the emergency, but, unlike the MWBE measures noted above, remained largely stalled and a “dead-end-street” innovation (Raven, 2006). Among these was the proposed City resolution calling on State legislators to pass measures exempting New York City businesses hit by the pandemic from the local sales tax (Res 1539-2021). As noted in the introduction section, in the first few months of the pandemic consumer spending fell and thousands of small businesses closed permanently between March and July 2020. Thus, an exemption of the local sales tax for the city would have alleviated some of the financial burden faced by food businesses during the crisis. While a complete waiver of the sales tax was not pursued, the State extended the due date for the sales tax returns and waived the penalty and interest for restaurants and other food service establishments in New York City which had to suspend indoor operations due to the State COVID-19 lockdown executive orders (New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, 2021).

Another proposed measure introduced during the pandemic, which did not make it into law (at least not into its original formulation), was a State Act (S8277B/A10414A) to institute a billionaire mark-to-market tax. Based on the wealth of New York-residing billionaires, researchers estimated that, if signed into law, the Act would have generated billions of dollars in additional revenue for the state in 2020 (e.g., see Gamage et al., 2020; Kallick & Shaende, 2020). The original bill aimed at directing the collected additional funds to a worker bailout fund to aid workers unable to access wage protection programs and unemployment benefits and who were affected by the economic crisis spurred by the COVID-19 emergency. More recently, in early 2023, New York legislators introduced a modified version of the bill (S1570), without the worker bailout component but citing the broader goal of narrowing the growing wealth inequality in the state, further exacerbated by the pandemic. The reintroduced legislation explicitly notes that the new tax would generate an estimated $23.3 billion in its first year and at least $1.2 billion annually thereafter.

Lastly, important measures to support immigrant food workers were also among the policy changes whose salience increased during the emergency but which, due to partial alignment of politics at multiple levels with the issues and proposed solutions, did not gain sufficient support during the COVID-19 emergency policy window. For instance, in September 2020, New York City legislators adopted a resolution (Res 1418-2020) demanding that the federal government pass legislation to protect the lawful immigration status of immigrant workers who had lost their job due to the pandemic. Immigrants not only constituted a critical part of New York and U.S.'s COVID-19 workforce (Moriarty, 2021) but also represent a substantial part of the food system workforce more broadly, with agricultural and food service workers being largely immigrant workers (e.g., in 2018 more than 60 % of New York City's restaurant workers were immigrants).

Further, to increase food access for immigrant New Yorkers, in August 2020, New York City introduced a resolution (Res 1399-2020) advocating that State legislators pass a bill (A10433/S5167) to allow State agencies, municipalities, and other local authorities to provide state or local public benefits to New Yorkers regardless of their immigration status. The resolution was not adopted, whereas the bill was introduced several times (e.g., A160 in 2023) and, at the time of writing, is still under consideration. Partial advancements on immigration policy were made also at the federal level. In March 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Dream and Promise Act (H.R.6) which, however, failed to move further through the legislative process. The act would have built a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers (i.e., young undocumented immigrants who came in the U.S. under the age of 16), Temporary Protected Status recipients (e.g., due to ongoing armed conflict or natural or public health disasters, including epidemics), and undocumented farmworkers.

5. Discussion

The findings from this paper show that even though a large share of New York's pandemic food policies were temporal and tied to the duration of the emergency, the severe disruption of the city and regional food regimes also allowed for some innovative, longer-term changes to be institutionalized. Some policy solutions that have for long been stalled were able to break through and influence mainstream policymaking, alongside others which were novel and spurred by the catastrophic impact of the pandemic on the health and economy of New York's communities. Taken together and viewed through a multilevel perspective on transitions and a multiple streams framework, the results offer insights into the areas that would benefit from sustained focus from food justice activists, researchers, and policy makers in the post-COVID-19 years.

Discerning between temporary and more durable transformations, as well as potential missed opportunities, resulting from food policymaking during emergencies and major system disruptions is valuable for future research and policy beyond New York alone. Learning from disasters, such as the public health and economic crises triggered by COVID-19, is an especially pressing need as dual or concurrent hazard crises are becoming more frequent (e.g., Fahy et al., 2019; Pedersen et al., 2012; Venvik et al., 2020) and compartmentalizing natural, economic, and public disaster response expertise becomes both unwise and counterproductive.

5.1. Research implications

The pandemic made it evident that ensuring equitable access to healthy, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food and meals is paramount during emergencies and beyond. COVID-19 acutely illustrated that access to nutritious food is not just an urgent need during crisis but also is an underlying risk factor and determinant of health disparities, disproportionately affecting those with high rates of diabetes and obesity (e.g., Abdi et al., 2020). Policy analysts and future research should focus on the trajectory of food access and nutrition policy and how the notion of food as a fundamental human right can be institutionalized through food policymaking at the City, State, Tribal, and Federal levels.

In New York City and State, the pandemic exacerbated existing high levels of malnourishment and disparities in food insecurity based on race, ethnicity, and nationality. Prior to the pandemic, levels of malnourishment and food insecurity prompted incremental, not radical policy change. By contrast, the pandemic was a shock that focused much more attention on vulnerabilities in the food system, enabling advocates to frame our understanding of the problem as requiring emergency responses. Aligned with Kingdon and Stano (1984) and Kingdon's (2010) multiple streams framework and the multilevel perspective on sociotechnical transitions (Geels, 2002; Raven, 2006), the landscape-level pressures due to the pandemic disrupted the mainstream policy regime and opened a window of opportunity for policy entrepreneurs in and outside government to advance a wide range of local policy solutions. The window also allowed policymakers to get relief from pre-existing institutional constraints (i.e., rules, practices, administrative restrictions) that, pre-COVID-19, would have made the type, magnitude, and speed of policy development and implementation impossible.

Policymaking during the COVID-19 emergency has also illustrated both the differences and areas of alignment between city and state food policy priorities and the merit for concerted actions focusing on legislative, programmatic, and budget measures in times of crises and uncertainty. The sample of legislative measures assessed in this paper revealed a greater emphasis on restaurants and food businesses at the city level compared to the state. Conversely, state legislators focused a higher proportion of proposed legislation on securing regional food infrastructure and supply chains as well as support for agricultural enterprises and farm workers. This divergence in emphasis is to be expected given the importance of farmers and agribusiness constituencies at the state level. Areas of alignment in legislative activity between city and state included a shared focus on food access and food security measures during the crisis, but also a fragmented attention to policies focusing on institutional change and food democracy. Future research can explain key barriers and opportunities for creating synergistic action between governors and mayors in times of crises and what concrete steps local food advocates and administrations can take to spur the cross-jurisdictional change needed.

While the food policy tracking analysis presented in this paper offers insights into several key dimensions of crisis-related and other food policy during the state of COVID-19 emergency, future research would benefit from evaluating the effectiveness of those policies. Recognizing and nurturing breakthrough policies (e.g., Rajagopalan & Rasheed, 1995; Schulman, 1975) with the potential to engender systemwide transformation in the food and agricultural system that supports city regions, rather than business-as-usual marginal modifications, is key to advancing resiliency and meaningful food systems planning at the local level. Thus, evaluating and considering the influence of legislative, programmatic, and institutional policies, alongside, capturing their focus, potential impact, temporality, and direction is equally important and essential in supporting local legislators and administrators as they craft immediate and longer-term food policies.

Besides the conditions for multiple streams alignment, how much time it took for each legislative measure or innovation to be not only proposed but also enacted and implemented is another dimension of the food policy regime reconfiguration which could be useful to examine through future research. Insights into it would point to ways in which crises affect both crises-focused and general food policy. To what extent the pandemic accelerated legislation and whether the acceleration, if any, affected all issue areas or just food system policy is a question that merits further exploration. Taking time into account this way is valuable as it would help inform how local governments and policy advocates can better respond in times of crises while also using the window of opportunity to advance transformative policies more quickly, especially in areas otherwise considered not sufficiently salient or not politically acceptable. Often, non-incremental policies that would otherwise continue to linger in the preliminary stages of the legislative processes, or not even get to be on the radar of policymakers, quickly gain traction and become normalized in times of crises due to temporarily disrupted mainstream systems and institutions.

5.2. Policy implications

The research presented in this paper points to several directions for future policy. First, it indicates that, at present, there is a momentum and an opportunity to continue to advance policies to support worker rights across the food chain. In New York and elsewhere (e.g., Dudek & Śpiewak, 2022; Larue, 2020; Lemieux et al., 2020; Luckstead et al., 2021), the pandemic has made it clear that food workers are essential workers and that insufficient prior attention to this domain of urban food policy (Freudenberg et al., 2018) is perilous and hampering the local administrations' ability to advance their vision of equitable regional food system and communities. Legislation offering more protections for fast-food workers passed during the pandemic, as well as all provisions and programs to support and protect food delivery workers, are steps in this direction and an opportunity to continue to build on and amplify these accomplishments through future policies, programs, and funding allocations.

Second, given the reduction in emphasis on stand-alone policies focusing on the prevention of diet-related diseases, such as obesity and diabetes during the pandemic, policymakers and policy advocates can examine how to ensure that this food policy goal stays high on the agenda during disasters and is codified into emergency legislation, long-term planning, and governance institutions and practices. Municipalities and other local governments have a strong policy focus on healthy nutrition policies which offers multiple policy strategies that could be reexamined in the aftermath of COVID-19 and further expanded or normalized. The connection between regional farmers and urban emergency food providers through farm-to-food bank programs is one breakthrough policy solution ensuring that emergency food access goes hand in hand with goals of fresh, healthy food access for those most impacted by the crisis. Additionally, a resilient school meal system is key to reducing health and nutrition disparities. During the pandemic, cities like New York demonstrated leadership by quickly establishing innovative initiatives such as the community food hubs and promoting Kosher, Halal, and vegetarian options (see also McLoughlin, Fleischhacker, et al., 2020). However, as other researchers have noted (Kenney et al., 2021; McLoughlin, McCarthy, et al., 2020), in planning for future emergencies, but also more common weekend and holiday closures, it is key to support urban school districts with adequate financial models and funding structure for school meals, systems that enable clear communication to families, and facilitate partnerships with antihunger organizations.

Third, environmental sustainability in the food system and multilevel food governance – two other less frequent legislative foci during the state of emergency – represent areas where heightened attention will be warranted in the post-COVID-19 period especially considering concurrent food system threats due to extreme weather events and climate change. Specifically, to achieve long-term food policy and planning goals, alongside preserving and building on the deepened food security and economic policies during the pandemic, policymakers could build on the institutional knowledge in each of these areas gained during the emergency. For instance, what can be done to optimize city-run and other government-funded emergency food distribution chains to minimize food waste during a disaster and what permanent infrastructure is needed to this end (e.g., cold storage, community food hubs) is an important question for future food policy. Streamlining and building on existing synergies between city and state and regional food governance practices and institutions is yet another critical area for future food policy. As the pandemic has illustrated, many of the challenges but also solutions to the crisis emerge when working across jurisdictional boundaries and taking a regional approach to food systems policy and planning (e.g., Clancy & Ruhf, 2010).

Fourth, many cities are homes to sizeable networks of urban farms and gardens providing multiple social and cultural benefits to their residents (e.g., Ilieva et al., 2022; Kirby et al., 2021). Many of these hyper-local community spaces repurposed their operations to adjust to the social distancing and stay-at-home orders and helped communities cushion the impact of the pandemic (e.g., see Schoen et al., 2021), including through donating food to emergency food providers such as food pantries and soup kitchens or the school food system. Some gardens, however, such as school gardens, had difficulty distributing their produce as public schools shifted to online learning models during most of 2020. Future food policy and policy advocacy could focus on explicitly supporting urban farms for their key role during disruptions of the main supply chains and social networks of cities. In New York City, for instance, this is being pursued by reviving previously stalled legislation (i.e., the bill requiring the City to establish a dedicated office of urban agriculture Int 1663–2019, introduced in August 2019) and instituting the Mayor's Office of Urban Agriculture in September 2022.

Fifth, besides food supply chain resiliency, legislation focusing on expanding access to online options for grocery shopping and meal delivery too constitutes a key food access policy with the potential of having consequential reverberations on food access infrastructure beyond the pandemic. Diversifying food access channels and ensuring that low income families have multiple options to safely access affordable healthy and nutritious food, including through online grocery shopping channels, is key to advancing food security and food equity (Cohen et al., 2020) and, when coupled with strategies to improve outreach and reduce the digital divide (Eruchalu et al., 2021) has the potential to advance transformative food policy beyond COVID-19.

Finally, future food policy should focus on how to develop resilient systems to track food metrics during a state of emergency. The disruptions caused by COVID-19 pandemic reduced local governments ability to measure and report on key food system indicators. For instance, due to the crisis, New York City 's 2020 annual food metrics report – required by Local Law 52 of 2011 – had to include partial data and focus on performance for the period between July 2019 and February 2020, making it not comparable to previous years (The City of New York, Mayor's Office of Food Policy, 2021). While government officials were still able to include a summary of the City's efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic between March and June 2020 in reflecting the year's food policy programs and accomplishments, future policy should focus on how to better support them – through funding, staff, infrastructure, community partnerships – to ensure consistent food policy monitoring even in the event of extreme and unpredictable circumstances. Prioritizing this goal in future food policy, alongside expanding current sets of indicators through the lens of the lessons learned during the crisis, would be key and strengthen government official's ability to lead in urban and regional food systems policy and planning.

5.3. Limitations

The research presented in this paper has several limitations which are, however, surmountable through supplementary research and some of the strategies for future studies summarized in the previous section. Specifically, in this paper, the analysis of New York's food policy response during the COVID-19 pandemic captures key quantitative and qualitative features of policy measures put forward by City and State administrators without, however, offering a systematic assessment of the policies in terms of their impact on the food system.

The distinction between enacted and proposed and temporary and longer-term breakthrough policies offers insight into the transformative potential of the policies advanced by local policymakers, but future research is needed to evaluate them on their merit in terms of implementation and influence on food system outcomes such as increased food equity, greater food security, reduced incidence of diet-related diseases, fairer labor practices, lower carbon emissions, more resilient local infrastructures and economies, and stronger institutions. Adding this analytical layer is key to inform future planning and decision making for the city-regional food system. Additionally, devising new research and primary data collection to document and learn from the pandemic response and emergency food measures through the lens of Tribal governments and organizations in the U.S. would be extremely valuable. At the federal level, after the New York State emergency was lifted, the USDA FNS issued Tribal Nation COVID-19 Waivers and Flexibilities (USDA FNS, 2021a), an additional funding of $3.5 million, and Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) flexibilities. The funding was provided to eight indigenous nations (all eligible proposals were funded) in the U.S. in November 2021 (USDA FNS, 2021b), but none of them included New York State tribes. Better understanding of the unique disparities and challenges experienced by Indigenous communities (e.g., Arrazola et al., 2020; Feeding America, 2021) and the place-based solutions they have developed in the face of acute hardship, would be vital in informing city, state, and Tribal policies for greater health equity in the post-pandemic times.

As with all cross-sectional time-bound policy studies, the findings of this paper too are limited by the temporal period chosen for the data collection and analysis. The research presented here captures policy activity within the period of declared state of emergency in New York State which occurred between March 2020 and June 2021. While this demarcation is justified and intentional, both the COVID-19 pandemic and local and national governments policy responses to it are ongoing. Devising longitudinal policy studies that can follow legislation for several years since the onset of the pandemic would allow to capture the city and regional policy responses to the pandemic more fully and account for its reverberations in the policy arena beyond the date when the emergency officially ended.

A further limitation of this paper results from the limited existing systematic research on the past decades of food policy in New York with prior scholarly contributions mostly focusing on New York City, and on different periods of times or issue areas. For instance, Freudenberg et al. (2018) offered a seminal comprehensive assessment of food policy in New York City in the period 2008–2018, whereas Kelly et al. (2016) focused specifically on obesity prevention policies in the city in the period 2002–2013, during the administration of former city Mayor Michael Bloomberg. These differences in prior research, and the fact that few if any consider New York City and State food policy in tandem, make it difficult to contextualize current policy streams in the larger and longer-term trajectory of food policy in the region.

Finally, 2019 was a particularly active year for food policy in the city – with the release of the City Council's Growing Food Equity in NYC Agenda (New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, 2019) and subsequent package of 14 bills and 2 resolutions introduced in the fall of 2019. This helps explain our finding of the higher share of pre-pandemic food policies passed during the emergency at the city level. These legislative measures were not captured by existing literature and multi-year policy studies covering the 2008–2018 decade of food policy in New York. Thus, in this paper, when contextualizing the city's pandemic food policy in the previous decade of food policy activity, researchers took those provisions into account mainly as part of the illustration of our findings but without doing new fundamental research reassessing quantitatively the prior decade (2009–2019) of city policy activity in each domain.

6. Conclusions

This paper examined 16 months of food policy activity during the New York State-issued state of emergency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, in effect from March 2020 through June 2021. Data comprised more than 300 different food policies advanced by New York City and State legislators and administrators. The content analysis helped identify several dimensions of the multiple streams of problem framings, policy solutions, and political ideologies advanced during this period which included but was not limited to COVID-19 specific food policies. It also pointed to the subset of policy changes and niche innovations that, thanks the policy window opened due to the pandemic, broke through and reconfigured the mainstream local food policy regime, either for the duration of the emergency or beyond it. The analysis also offered insights into some of the policy proposals that did not make it to affect the mainstream regime during the height of the crisis but which, in some instances, triggered changes and mobilized action after the state of emergency was lifted.

Food policy domains that gained prominence during the crisis were those focused on the local food economy, including support for food businesses and food workers, and on ensuring and expanding food access, including through food security and nutrition policies. Compared to previous decades of food policy activity, the marked emphasis on protections for food workers, recognized as essential workers and a critical part of the COVID-19 workforce, represents a novelty in the local food policy stream. It remains, however, unclear whether this long overdue expansion of urban food policy will continue and endure beyond the crisis or contract to pre-pandemic levels once the pandemic subsides.

Most of the breakthrough pandemic food policies examined were of temporary character and tied to the duration of the emergency, though some went through multiple iterations and became codified as permanent programs. Examples of these include the City's outdoor dining program, allowing restaurants to expand their seating areas using part of the streets, and the State's farm-to-food bank program Nourish New York, connecting farmers who have surplus produce with emergency food providers working to ensure healthy food access for food insecure New Yorkers.

Similarly, most policies were incremental in nature, however, the crisis also disrupted the mainstream sociotechnical regime (Geels, 2002, Geels, 2011) and presented a “policy window” (Kingdon, 2010; Kingdon & Stano, 1984) to advance several policies or issue areas that deviated from the issues or scale of changes and niche innovations (Raven, 2006) proposed in the pre-pandemic policy stream. These include the COVID-19 related permanent changes mentioned above as well as legislation and programs that were previously slow to expand or on hold, such as the increase in street food vendor permits, which were capped at 3000 in 1983, or the legalization of e-bikes which are extensively used by food delivery workers in the city and have not been permitted for years despite sustained advocacy on the issue (Lee, 2018a, Lee, 2018b).

While the New York State emergency restrictions were lifted in June 2021, at the time of writing, the COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing and government officials are hesitant to end their emergency declarations and the flexibilities for access to government benefits and resources they allow. Deepening research and policy strategies, and related allocated resources, that can help government officials to track and take stock of pandemic food policy which continues beyond the emergency, would be therefore key if cities are to use this knowledge to strengthen the resiliency of their food supply chains and communities. The trajectory of local food policy during the pandemic points to key areas that food justice activists, researchers, and policy makers in New York and in other urban regions would benefit from focusing on as our cities and communities continue to weather the COVID-19 public health and economic crises.

Institutional review board

The paper did not involve human subjects research and therefore was exempt from CUNY IRB review.

Funding

This paper is part of the project New York Food Policy Monitor 2.0 funded by the New York Community Trust (NYCT) [#7Z092-0001]. The CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute also provided support for this paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Rositsa T. Ilieva: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Project administration. Katherine Tomaino Fraser: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Nevin Cohen: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Overview of New York City and State Legislative Measures

Data availability

Data will be made available on request.