The past year reminds us once again that, every step forward can be accompanied by steps backward which forced us to often take food policy “victories” with a grain of salt. To help Food Policy Monitor readers take stock of the past year, we identify our staff choices for the Top 10 positive and negative food events in 2018, defined as events that had an important impact on urban food environments in New York City or elsewhere.

In the days of vinyl, songs on the b-side got little air play and never made the charts, even though they often were as good as – or sometimes better than -- the hits. As we reviewed New York City’s 2018 Food Metrics Report, released in December by the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, we identified a number of “b-side food metrics” that would enrich our understanding of the food system. Yet these are rarely given proper air time, and as a result are often overlooked by advocates. Because these already collected and public data are sometimes hard to find, not aggregated and organized as food metrics, , they remain hidden in plain sight. In the examples that follow, we illustrate the value of these data sources in answering important policy questions for each of the Food Metrics Report’s four topical areas.