“Find a way.”
— 64-year-old Diana Nyad’s mantra during her record-breaking swim from Cuba to Florida, without a shark cage, on September 2, 2013
My mom kept a sketch of my father’s heart on a piece of scrap paper taped to the inside of a kitchen cabinet. His cardiologist drew it to explain what my father’s heart disease looked like, how his six-foot-four body was reacting to it, and what his impending heart surgery was to achieve.
By that time in his life, his mid-60s, my father was overweight, with high blood pressure and blocked arteries due to too much food, too much stress, and not enough exercise. The sketch showed how my father’s body had creatively built a circumnavigation system to deliver blood and oxygen around the blockages in his heart. The slow, inefficient system was an energy drain, but his body made it work for a while, with Western medicine’s help.
Despite its damaged state, my father’s body made detours and relied on them.
That is what’s happening with our food system today. The heart of our system is sick, but we have created alternative systems to get people their food. And so we have an entirely separate distribution system that began as emergency food banks and is now a thin and thinning thread of food security for 40 million people. We have a federal food and farm bill and policies that make real food more expensive while subsidizing raw materials like corn, soy, and rapeseed that are turned into processed food by adding sugar, salt, fat, preservatives, and so on. Our farm bill calls whole fresh food “specialty crops.” Those crops include tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, apples, and greens. It has become legal and profitable to ship chickens raised and slaughtered in the United States to China, where the meat is processed and then sent back to America as food. We allow U.S. citizens, including children, to labor unprotected in fields, planting and harvesting food that they themselves cannot eat because they cannot afford it. The 2014 poverty line for a family of four, defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is $23,850 — and the average farmworker family of four makes just $17,500 (see Who Grows Our Food?). At the same time, the local food movement, which strives to create more resilient, just, fair, and equitable systems of food production, distribution, and consumption within identified regions, remains stuck, perceived and tagged as “elitist.”
In a fable attributed to the Cherokee, an elder describes to his grandson a terrible fight going on inside him, a fight between two wolves. One is evil: he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good: he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, the elder tells his grandson.
The boy wants to know which wolf will win.
The one you feed, the old man says, simply.
U.S. chicken goes to China and back again. Crazy!
Which system are we feeding? We have a choice. There is a daily balancing act in the struggle to meet human needs. People on a large scale must have food, but thinking only on that large scale has led to an emphasis on quantity over quality. In the contrails of the Green Revolution, we are feeding seven billion people on our planet. And we are balancing an outsized, industrialized, corporate consolidation of food production and processing that ultimately wreaks havoc on public health, the environment, and livelihoods with small-scale production and locally focused economically sustainable growth, processing, and distribution of whole, fresh foods. Creating access to healthy foods for everyone, so that we can escape the downward spiral of an inefficient and unjust food system, requires action and forward thinking. Like my father’s heart, our food system has reached a crisis point, and we need to make it healthy again.
There is great hope for our food system because people like you are taking action, in real time, in culturally appropriate ways, where you live, in a variety of sectors — from public health to education, in government agencies and arts organizations, and so many other fields and places. We’re peeking out of our individual silos to collaborate and share information. The richness in, say, a farm to school program, illustrates the many, varied, creative, and innovative ways communities are making transformative, positive change. We’re thinking about our children, about what kind of education we can provide, so they may be wise, critical thinkers, as they inherit a complex, unbalanced national and international economy and food system.
This book is a glean. The materials in it are gathered from the vibrant community of activists of all stripes working to bring us better food.
Gleaning is a relationship in two acts. The first act is that of the farmer who consciously leaves food in his or her field. The second act is that of the harvesters who collect that food for themselves or those less fortunate or able so that they may be nurtured and fed. Each act does not exist without the other in any meaningful way. If for whatever reason a farmer leaves edible food in a field to rot, that may be considered wasteful, negligent, or maybe just bad luck. And if a person goes into a farmer’s field to pick without permission, it’s stealing. Gleaning is a two-act play of generosity, perhaps even a commandment, if you take the Bible or the Torah literally. Both parties are complicit: the farmer in leaving the food, the gleaner in culminating the first act by harvesting what’s there.
In this book, the first act comes from grassroots programs, nonprofits, government initiatives, interfaith organizations, businesses, and individuals, all of which have purposefully created information about how to get healthy foods to more people. Time and money — investments from philanthropists, foundations, and our own tax dollars — have been spent researching agriculture, growing food, building structures, and educating people.
The second act belongs to you and me. There is a wealth of information out there for gleaners like us to harvest. Some of it is hiding in plain sight; some
of it is buried. This knowledge is vast, the experience deep, and the mandate is to share it. When we work in our own food communities, we can use the existing collective knowledge and apply it in practical, individual ways in our neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools. We can use it to affect zoning laws, regulatory agencies, and national policies. We can use it for our own children as well as for various groups: veterans, farmers, ranchers, fishermen.
You will not find in this book equations to determine the perfect size for a school garden or the exact number of shovels, hoes, and rakes it takes to build one. There’s no single blueprint that a town or city can download when it builds its urban gardens, aquaponic greenhouses, or vertical farms. But among these pages you will find resources that will allow you to dig deeper.
I want to offer something practical on every page of this book. Something inspiring. Each chapter includes a variety of actions, labeled “You Can Do This,” that you can take to improve your community’s food. Interspersed with these are gleanings from the big world of community action. You’ll find tool kits, snippets of advice, and essays that can get you started or inspire you to dig deeper, whoever you are, whatever your skill set. Maybe school food or food education is your passion. Or perhaps you’ll be inspired to talk at a place of worship, a Boys & Girls Club, or a community center about your garden, your farm, or your community supported agriculture (CSA) group — sharing with others what fresh, healthy food means to you. Maybe you will serve on a committee or a board and rewrite policies that impact the health of your community. You might screen a film, tell a story, or figure out how to get the day-olds from a restaurant to people who need them. Or perhaps you’ll build a humane slaughterhouse. You may even just cook dinner tonight instead of going out to eat. Whatever you do, it will be something to behold.
“It’s time for us to elevate the conversation about the food system to solutions.”
Start small. Do something big.
Invite farmers or fishermen to dinner. Ask questions about what they need. Listen, take notes, then figure out how to support them.
Get fresh, local food in your school’s cafeteria, even if it’s just one thing. Even if that one thing is simply parsley as a garnish, it’s a start.
Screen a film about food, whether the genre is politics, pleasure, documentary, or art. Show it to your friends, at your YMCA, or in your community center. See what fires it ignites, and use it to start the dialogue and inform your next moves.
Dig a community compost. You’ll turn waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer.
Build a community garden, be it on a roof, in a park, at a school, or in an abandoned lot. Help people grow their own food.
Celebrate a “day.” There’s Food Day, Earth Day, World Food Day, and more (though April 17, National Cheese Ball Day, may not be the message you’re going for).
Find out what your community needs to promote, develop, and support local food entrepreneurs. Community kitchens come in many forms.
Make a home-cooked meal with fresh, seasonal local food. Feed your taste buds. Eat with family members or friends.
Start a home kitchen garden. Start small with something you love, like basil, tomatoes, or green beans. Or try something different, like grains, shoots, or roots.
Grow food that comes from your ancestral roots. What did your grandmother eat? Taioba, jiló, kohlrabi, calabaza, water spinach, Florida butter beans, Turkey hard red winter wheat?
Teach a whole foods cooking class. Offer it at your food pantry, hospital, church, synagogue, mosque, school library, or local cooking supply store.
Improve your booster club’s food, be it at baseball, football, hockey, field hockey, soccer, or basketball games. Your family, friends, and fans will eat a better burger and hot dog if you offer it to them.
Snub the sodas and sports drinks. Water is the new in. Tweak the beverage lineup and take a pass on plastic bottles.
Design a “local food miles” sticker campaign at your local grocer. It’s good marketing and geography all rolled into cool signage.
Host an open house on your farm. Invite your neighbors, customers, and health agents to see how you grow, what you grow, and why you grow.
Launch a Harvest of the Month program at your local school. Foster local, seasonal, and healthy eating.
Start an apprentice program for farmers. There’s no better way to pass on firsthand knowledge and to get boots-on-the-ground experience.
Drive-in fresh. Organize a farmers’ market at a rest stop on the highway.
Build something mobile. Farmers’ markets and slaughterhouses are on the move.
Introduce yourself to your state’s department of agriculture. Invite its members to tour your farms and cafeterias.
Say no to marketing junk food to kids at school. Dump the cereal box and soda bottle cap “incentives,” “rewards,” and “giveaways” in the name of education.
Get chocolate and strawberry milks out of the kids’ reach at school, and quick! They do not come from cows. They come from lots of sugar, artificial flavoring, and coloring.
Build a garden with and for elders.
Start a sustainable book club or a community read. Read, discuss, share ideas, and eat well while you do it.
Have some land? Lease it to a farmer.
Start a food recovery program.
Become a language interpreter for the local food bank, mobile farmers’ market, or a farm to school program; Spanish, Chinese, French, Vietnamese, and Tagalog speakers sought.
Build a school garden. It’ll survive the summer. And yes, you can let kids eat the food you grow, no matter what they tell you.
Revive indigenous food cultures with indigenous languages.
Donate time, money, stuff, spirit.
Learn what your town or city ordinances are so that if they get in the way of developing strong local food systems, you can change them if necessary.
Show off your cows. Walk them down Main Street. People will come from miles around to see your crazy, beautiful parade.
Give voice. Tell your story or tell others’ stories.
Write letters about why local food is important to you. Send them to your representatives and newspaper editors. Tag them to a news or cultural event, an election cycle, or a book review.
Grow your legacy at your college. Build a food garden on campus for classes to come.
Transform your school’s cafeteria into a place you’d want to eat in. Relax the lunch period. Get rid of the paper and the plastic. Paint a mural.
Take a food safety course. Once you have your food safety certification, you have options about where and how you work with food.
Host a meet and greet between farmers and fishermen, chefs and restaurants.
Seek more, learn more.
Connect your food and arts communities. Find the poets, potters, photographers, and painters. Host a workshop, a slam, a fund-raiser. Make art about food.
Start a garden for veterans. Welcome them home. Grow peace.
Take a field trip to a community kitchen, a cannery, an ice cream factory, a living history museum, a slaughterhouse. See where food comes from and how it is made.
Start a “grow-out,” a program that encourages farmers and chefs to work together with heirloom vegetables and heritage breed animals specific and significant to a given region.
Help migrant farmworker children who have virtually no access to healthy foods, including the very fruits and vegetables they plant, tend, and harvest, to break out of this disgraceful cycle.
Advocate for genetically modified organism (GMO) labeling. It’s your right to know what’s in the food you’re eating and feeding to your loved ones. Initiate a campaign.
Cook with one fresh, local ingredient today.
Change what you can see. We all see food through our own particular lens. Whether your perspective is from the kitchen, the land, the sea, or the fork, affect what you know.
Host a public speaker. Call in the experts to inspire.
Involve a youth group such as the Boys & Girls Club or the Scouts. Start by convincing the group’s leaders to change the vending machine offerings in their facilities from junk food to healthy snacks.
Start a food forest on public lands, or plant just one fruit tree outside a public building. Food for all.
Build an online food co-op.
Run for public office: a planning board, board of selectmen, school board, or board of health. Be politically active.
Register to vote, and vote.
Follow the money. State and federal agencies, nonprofits, and foundations can provide funds for underserved and high-risk communities to build healthy food systems.
Resist being fooled (or bought) by the greenwashing of corporate industrial agriculture and processed food lobbying groups while you’re following the money.
Raise money for a good food nonprofit that reflects your passion and beliefs.
Reinvent food distribution for local markets and local economies. There are new routes to make, new routes to take.
Think size-appropriate. Think scalable. If outsized regulations are barriers to small-scale food and agriculture enterprises, change them.
Host a zero-waste potluck featuring fresh seasonal food.
Save seeds.
Start a public seed library.
Brainstorm and identify all barriers great and small to your project. Figure out your strengths and the weaknesses in those barriers. Be smart and strategic.
Grow heirloom. Raise heritage.
Ask for heirloom vegetables. Ask for heritage meats.
Organize a local food festival.
Revive home economics classes.
Be an active, participating, positive board member. Build ethical and civil nonprofits.
Become a beekeeper. Healthy pollinators are essential to growing food everywhere.
Start a cooking club.
Raise healthy fish and grow fresh food in an aquaponic greenhouse. Aquaponics is by definition organic and, compared with other ways of raising food, requires less land, water, and energy when you do it right.
Be outspoken. Take action. No one else can do it for you.
Start a gleaning program. Connect gleaned food to schools, food pantries, jails, and hospitals.
Teach medical students how to cook.
Build a just, equitable, and fair food system for everyone. Start with the basic founding principles.
Make a farm map. Direct people to where and when fresh seasonal food can be bought direct from the farmer.
Draw constellations. Every farm, ranch, fishery, school, hospital, farmers’ market, grocer, and restaurant is a star. Learn all the stars in your sky, and connect them in new ways to build a more resilient good food system.
Wage peace, grow food. Turn guns into farm tools.
Spin the roulette wheel of school food reform all you want, but the house always wins. The game is rigged. Put your money where it’s going to land: with the cafeteria staff. Support them with training and finances, and you will have reform.
Ask about that wellness policy at your school. Did you know you had one? How is it really going?
Find out who is in charge of the food in the cafeterias, whether it’s at school, at a hospital, or at a workplace. Once you know who controls what, then you can do something about it.
Campaign to raise the minimum wage and support good food education.
Campaign to tax the food and sugary drinks that make people sick, in order to subsidize whole, good food and good food education.
Start ’em young. Initiate a farm to school program at a preschool.