Menino was a city councilor when he helped Gus Schumacher, then the Massachusetts commissioner of food and agriculture, launch a program to help WIC recipients double the value of their food coupons if they spent them on fresh produce. Launched at the Roslindale farmer's market one Saturday in August 1986, the program, which became known as Bounty Bucks, gained traction not only across the state but eventually at the federal level. As the Double Value Coupon Program, it is active at 350 farmer’s markets nationwide in 21 states and Washington, D.C., and helped give rise to the “fruit and vegetable prescription program,” which pays doctors and nutritionists to help tailor healthier diets for overweight and obese patients and redeem “prescription” coupons for fresh produce at participating supermarkets and farmer’s markets. The mayor helped launch that, too, with Boston hospitals.

Before the term “food deserts” entered the lexicon, Menino was one of the country’s first mayors to work hard to attract supermarkets to low-income neighborhoods. In a talk at Tufts University on Food Day in 2011, he said he was proud to have opened 25 new supermarkets in Boston, particularly in areas full-service supermarkets hesitated to go. They didn’t always succeed. Three years ago Menino fought to keep Walmart out of Roxbury, by then a certified food desert, even though a locally owned supermarket he had worked hard to attract had pulled out for lack of business. He saw Walmart as a threat to local ownership and the ambitious redevelopment plans he had put into place, which are now coming to fruition. (And Walmart still isn’t in Boston.)

He did, however, favor the replacement of a failed Latino supermarket in Jamaica Plain by Whole Foods, despite the strong opposition of activist groups that claimed to represent poor and ethnic residents and that viewed its arrival as the last nail in the coffin of gentrification. Gentrification was well under way and had been for years--and the longtime urban pioneers who had moved to JP decades before in fact welcomed its arrival, as I told Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb in a conversation on Thursday at the Washington Ideas Forum just when the news broke of the mayor’s death. Menino used various city funds to shore up the Latino bodegas that remained in the neighborhood, which still has a strong Latino presence. Whole Foods didn’t create a local housing fund to offset rising rents its presence would cause, as activists had wanted; but it did keep its promise to stock a lot of Latino fruits and vegetables in the produce department of its relatively small—and constantly crowded—store.

The mayor’s support for local food went far beyond episodic and politically expedient gestures. He championed the creation of a 2.5-acre organic garden with its own CSA on the grounds of the city’s largest homeless shelter; actively supported fundraising for Boston’s first year-round indoor food market, which is finally breaking ground; cleared the way for parking spaces for 40 food trucks when the idea was first taking off, because he was tickled by food trucks and liked the food they sold; and, significantly, created a full-time position four years ago for a director of his Office of Food Initiatives, whose director, Edith Murnane, had worked on similar food-access and justice issues at Community Servings, a Jamaica Plain group (of which I’m a board member) that serves nearly 10,000 home-delivered meals a week to critically ill people in 18 communities. Menino’s successor, Marty Walsh, has kept the Office of Food Initiatives in place. That will be another part of the Menino legacy.