Wow I just went to the Friday morning session entitled “In Defense of Food: The Omnivore’s Solution”, (clearly a Michael Pollan thing), and I can truly say that I have been inspired. Speaking alongside Pollan were middle school students from New Orleans that have really made a difference in their school’s dining. These students are part of a group called Rethink that focuses on rebuilding the public schools of New Orleans. Recently they decided to focus on the food, or lack thereof, in their cafeterias. By talking to local food distributors, chefs, students, and administrators they have created a new dining system that is more sustainable and, equally importantly, tasty and will be included in all of the public schools in New Orleans. Changes that have been implemented include the removal of styrofoam trays in school cafeterias, the addition of garden space, and the installation of dishwashers and sinks in the cafeterias so that students can wash their hands before and after meals and so that they can begin to use reusable plates and silverware. Perhaps most important to them was the removal of the dreaded spork, which had been the only utensil available to students prior to the reforms. These students truly inspired me to go back to my own high school and try to get some changes made (something I will be doing as soon as I get home next week). Administrators have got to listen because pretty soon they will have no choice but to change school dining. Michael Pollan noted that next on the political agenda after healthcare will be school lunches, and even healthcare will bring up a ton of food issues since most of our “preventable chronic diseases” stem from our diets of junk “food”.
Another speaker was Lucy (I didn’t write down her last name). She is a high school student who participates in Rooted in Community, a national network of rural and urban youth (mostly lower-class youth of color) who are all interested in making a difference in agriculture. You can check out their site at rootedincommunity.org. Tim Garlarien (probably not his last name but I can’t read my scribbles) then mentioned how universities and colleges in the United States spend 4 billion dollars on feeding students each year. We need to reallocate that money to include spending on local and organic foods instead of fast food chains, a process that also must start in our country’s hospitals. A point that Tim and Michael Pollan both emphasized, however, was educating people, mostly students, about where food comes from, actually SHOWING them what it is exactly that we are eating, and giving them the power and tools necessary to plant their own food and make sustainable eating choices in their daily lives. As Pollan noted, if people are armed with knowledge about food, there is no need to tell them what to eat, they will make the right decisions on their own.
We must “decondition” ourselves from the junk that we are currently labeling food and eating, even if it is often the cheaper option. In America, counterintuitively (not a word but I’ll leave it), it is the poor that are part of this obesity epidemic. Pollan noted that a dollar at the grocery store buys much more chips, cookies, and soda than broccoli. It is also easier to swing through the drive through at McDonald’s than to take the time to go to the grocery store or local farmer’s market and prepare a real dinner each night. We need to take a leaf out of our ancestor’s books and start cooking again. In the words of one of the students from Rethink, “Nature won’t hurt you.” McDonalds and over-processed, chemical-infused, pseudo-foods, however, will.
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