Before she shifted her attention to beets, Pamela Hess, SIS/BA ’89, was on the Pentagon beat, covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for UPI.
 
Her reporting often led her to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where injured servicemembers—many of them with what Hess calls “the signature visible injury of those wars, a lower-limb amputation”—were sent for recovery and rehabilitation. 
 
Three years later—after a stint as editor of a food magazine, where she wrote about the founding of Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture—Hess was recruited to become the nonprofit’s executive director. It was at one of Arcadia’s mobile markets that she noticed an unusual number of people missing limbs. 
 
“I assumed they were vets, but they weren’t,” she says. “They had diabetes.”
 
“In 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with an enemy that was trying very hard to blow up American bodies, there were about 2,000 amputations. And in any given year in the US there are 70,000 diabetic amputations simply because we cannot find the will or the way to provide healthy food that’s affordable, convenient, and ubiquitous.”
 
Today Hess’s team at Arcadia is working to build a more equitable and sustainable local food system. Arcadia’s mobile market serves eight locations a week from May to November, offering fresh produce grown on their suburban Virginia farm, meat and dairy products, bread, and honey. Since 2012, the rolling farm stand has sold more than $1.7 million worth of food at prices 30 to 50 percent less than other vendors. Arcadia also accepts and doubles the face value of SNAP, WIC, and other vouchers, allowing people to stretch their cabbage to buy more greens. 
 
“At any given time in DC, you are 14 times closer to food that contributes to chronic disease than to healthy food,” Hess says. “Good food is the foundation of human health.”
 
That’s why the former war correspondent is determined to keep up the good fight.