A Delicious Revolution
“I want to see the day when every child is getting every meal for free and their families can join them for supper … healthy, delicious, locally sourced and with no plastic covering!”
- Jennifer LeBarre
Photography: Tom Tomkinson / The Battery
The Battery Powered community turned out for Expert Night on Childhood Nutrition to hear Alice Waters, Jennifer LeBarre, Tracey Patterson, Dana Fields-Johnson and Earl Lui discuss what it will take to nourish Bay Area children so they thrive at school and beyond. Starting out the night, 15 year-old student poet, Samuel Getachew, amazed and inspired us with a spoken word performance of his original poem, Sweet Water. It was a haunting portrayal of the impact of pernicious beverage advertising that targets underserved communities, and the impact when this is coupled with lack of access to clean water.
“I saw a picture once,
Of a black boy picking cotton with one hand and a Pepsi in the other,
Heard a little girl in Flint asked her momma if the soda got lead in it too,
Drank a Coke and thought to herself,
‘The water brown too so what’s the difference,
This here taste better anyway.”
So how is it that food insecurity and obesity live side by side? And how do we “overcome fast food indoctrination” as Alice Waters says? This is what we learned.
Zip Codes Matter
Earl Lui of the California Wellness Foundation opened with the sobering reality that childhood hunger is on the rise and that there are vast inequities in our food system, reflective of larger societal inequities. Fresh, healthy food is largely inaccessible to underserved communities, creating food deserts, where no food outlets exist, and food swamps, neighborhoods where only poor quality, low-nutrient food is available. This creates the paradox of food insecurity side by side with obesity and diabetes.
And it’s not just food access that hits these zip codes hard. Dana Fields-Johnson of the Prevention Institute shared that poor health outcomes, from obesity to heart disease, diabetes to teenage pregnancy, all congregate around the same zip codes.
She rejected the frame of “personal responsibility”, so often used in the U.S., as misleading and inadequate. These neighborhoods don’t have access to supermarkets, are subject to aggressive marketing of unhealthy but cheap products, and lack safe streets and parks in which to play and exercise. “Every parent wants to make a good choice for their child. But the choices you make depend on the choices that are available to you,” Dana noted.
“As big soda floods our neighborhoods with billboards,
Watch how they fill our television screens,
Watch as we rush to pay for our poison,
Come hell or high water they were gonna watch us kill ourselves slowly,
Watch, as we held our lives in one hand and a soda can in the other,
And watch, as we made a decision that had already been made for us.”
-Samuel Getachew, Sweet Water
Photography: Tom Tomkinson / The Battery
Cafeteria as a Learning Center
“Public education is one of the last truly democratic institutions,” Alice Waters said. “Every child goes to school.” So it’s natural that schools could become a hub for feeding hungry kids, teaching them about food and establishing healthy eating habits. But why is it that school is free and the books and supplies are free, but the meals at school are not free, Jennifer LeBarre of Oakland Unified School District asked.
Jennifer heralded the opportunity to realize the full potential of the National School Lunch Program. “If we maximize what the National School Lunch Program can be, it will be hard for them to take it away from us,” Jennifer said. Innovative school districts -- including our own in the Bay Area -- are doing just that by finding ways to increase healthy, locally sourced food that benefits students and local economies. Districts’ buying power is an important lever. Districts are “the largest restaurant chain in your city,” said Jennifer, and can use their food procurement dollars to influence vendors, especially if they work collectively. Smaller local farmers are also looking to partner with schools. Alice chimed in: “It’s a myth that buying directly from farmers is necessarily more complex or more expensive. Fast food culture is feeding us this myth.”
Photography: Tom Tomkinson / The Battery
Alice highlighted the power of another aspect of the school food system: treating lunch as an academic subject and bringing math, science and humanities lessons into the garden and kitchen. “I saw this was a transformational experience: putting your hands in the earth, growing something you can eat, offering it to others.” And by doing this, kids are more open to trying new things. “If they grow it, and cook it, they all eat it -- it doesn’t matter what ‘it’ is.” She calls it “six weeks to kale!”
Policy Matters
The USDA oversees nearly every program that deals with food in our country, including school meals and SNAP (formerly Food Stamps). Under the current Administration, the critical role of Under Secretary for the Food & Nutrition Department remains unfilled. Tracey Patterson of California Food Policy Advocates asked the audience, what does this say about how the Administration values this work?
With the federal Farm Bill up for reauthorization this year, Tracey warned the audience about the myth of fraud that might be used to justify cuts in SNAP, a program that has been proven to keep people out of poverty and reduce food insecurity, with one of the lowest rates of fraud in any federal program. SNAP and other entitlement programs are under attack and sometimes in veiled ways. Transitioning an entitlement program, like SNAP, to a block grant doesn’t sound so bad, but it means when money from the grant runs out, the program stops, even if food insecurity rises, say in a recession.
But California can set the pace for the rest of the country with a higher bar. Dana shared that our state is an incubator for what can happen. For example, California recently passed a bill that will bring meals to all students attending high poverty schools. This means 2000 schools will become hunger-free and able to serve their students without the stigma associated with being a recipient of a free school meal.
Photography: Tom Tomkinson / The Battery
How Can We Make a Difference?
All held tremendous hope for what is possible. And we can all be part of the solution.
- Advocate for better policy, said Tracey. You can sign up for Advocacy Alerts from California Food Policy Advocates here.
- And don’t just look at your own neighborhood, urged Dana. Advocate on behalf of the underserved communities around you.
- Reach out to help your local school district nutrition services team, but reject the defeatist mindset. Understand the context and the challenges they face.
- Take a risk, said Alice. Big institutions are reluctant to walk away from income generated from sponsorships from fast food, soda and big agriculture companies. Reject these partnerships in your own company and say, “We are not going to buy it.”
And of course, be sure to join us for Organization Night on February 26th where you will hear from our 12 finalists all working on solutions.
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