For years, advocates have tried—and have failed—to garner support for a top-down national food policy. But what might have seemed possible during the Obama years—the President

sometimes signaled

he might take food system reform seriously, and Michelle Obama’s efforts to combat childhood obesity are well-known—now seems increasingly farfetched. In last year’s bruisingly divisive election season, food barely registered as an issue, overlooked almost entirely by both candidates and the electorate. In contrast to President Trump’s other cabinet picks, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue generated little controversy, and was confirmed almost without comment. Given America’s current fractured political reality, sweeping food reform would today seem to be a nonstarter.

Which may be why some towns and counties have given up waiting for top-down solutions to save them. Instead, a new, radical food justice notion is taking root: Communities are taking charge of their own fates through “food policy councils,” locally created and controlled civic organizations that are taking responsibility for the health, safety, and reliability of their regional food systems. So far, this largely unrecognized phenomenon has found success where national policy has failed to materialize.

“We really feel people at the local level can make things happen,” says Jeff Usher, senior program officer with the non-profit Kansas Health Foundation, which has funded more than 20 new Kansas food policy councils with a goal of establishing 40 total by 2020. “It’s a trickle-up theory.”

There is no one definition of a food policy council, says Anne Palmer, Food Communities and Public Health program director at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future—an academic center launched 22 years ago to track and support food policy councils—and a research associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society. Each council reflects its local community with its own structure, mission and definition of success. Town-based food policy councils may unite within a county, across regions, a state or even multiple states to work toward common goals, which are established by un-mandated consensus. At least a third of them have no government involvement at all, while others have government charters and are embedded within a political system. It all depends on what the people in that locale decide works for them.

That flexibility may be the secret to their popularity and, eventually, to their transformative power.