State Law Companion

This State Law Companion is designed to contextualize the local policies spotlighted in the Healthy Food Policy Project database in the broader state legislative landscape. It provides a snapshot of many types of state laws passed between January 1, 2015 and June 14, 2018 that address access to healthy food in some way. This summary is not an exhaustive or comprehensive summary of state legislation, but provides a sense of some of the trends in state law relating to access to healthy food.

The state laws included in this companion were found through the Rudd Center’s legislative database, and the full text of identified bills was accessed through the respective state legislature websites. The Rudd Center’s database captured 879 food-related bills proposed at the state level across the nation during the 3.5 year time period; of these, 92 were adopted. Of the bills which became law, those relating to breastfeeding, general food safety, and nutrition standards for food sold through the federal school meal programs (including farm-to-school related laws) were included in this analysis if they specifically referred to a goal or purpose of promoting access to healthier food for socially disadvantaged and marginalized populations. The Healthy Food Policy Project (HFPP) defines marginalized groups as “groups of people who systematically experience unfavorable social, economic, or political conditions based on their relative position in social hierarchies. Socially disadvantaged and marginalized groups often also experience a restricted ability to participate fully in society and enjoy the benefits of progress.” Resolutions and other non-binding bills were also excluded from this analysis. After these exclusions, 40 laws remained in our sample.