Personal, Local, Global--You Are The Food System

These remarks were provided at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Menlo Park, California on Sunday, April 26th.

The only thing that endures over time is the "Law of the Farm." You must prepare the ground, plant the seed, cultivate, and water if you expect to reap the harvest. (Stephen R. Covey)

Food system change begins in our roots...

My childhood including running wild in the Michigan Woods as well playing in a toxic dump on the outskirts of Detroit. A unique aspect of my career is that I have been able to successfully integrate seemingly disparate environments and elements of my life experience and work, including social service, horticulture, food systems and art.

As I reflect back upon the patterns and relationships that have emerged from my life experience in diverse environments and communities, utilizing horticulture, and tinkering with the food system, I can see how deeply affected I was by my early childhood experiences, and the indelible effect it has had on my life.

Experience is the ultimate sculpture, and it has fundamentally shaped my views of how I can best serve while here on earth. I have been extremely fortunate to have career experiences that have combined social service with environmental regeneration, urban agriculture, and horticulture therapy.

Along the path of my social service career, I have managed to acquire skills and master level proficiency in horticulture and small-scale urban agriculture. These skills include cultural practices, equipment and tool use, plant materials, propagation, landscape design, irrigation systems, weed and soil management, and nursery/greenhouse production.

My career highlights in horticulture include having worked in the roles of gardener, landscaper, director of large scale urban agriculture and horticulture therapy programs, and now serving as the Executive Director of a garden based learning organization. Not surprisingly, I have developed a horticultural model for leadership that I believe is useful regardless of occupation.

My introduction to the world of gardening and horticulture came both from natural as well as nurturing experiences. There are certain childhood experiences I have had that held the quality of being prophetic, life shaping, and reflecting a kind of transcendental spiritual quality when I look back on them. These experiences have had a powerful impact on how I see and desire to interact with my environment, whether it be natural (nature) or un-natural (man-made, including organizational environments).

Becoming a gardener in my Mother's garden, in the neighborhood and fields...

I spent some my earlier years growing up in semi-rural Michigan, and was exposed from an early age to the "joys of home gardening." I say this with a mild degree of sardonic irony, because my earliest experiences of working in the garden included performing countless hours of menial, grueling, and relatively un-rewarding labor in the performance of tasks that included raking acres of leaves and burning them, mowing vast, wild, and weed infested lawn areas with primitive gas powered "push" mowers, clearing brush, fallen trees and limbs, pruning massive mid-western specimens of overgrown Lilac and Honeysuckle shrubs, while randomly grazing upon apple trees, cherries, grapes, rhubarb, and other food that grew seemingly throughout my childhood landscapes.

My dear departed mother was a nature lover and an avid gardener who couldn't wait to get seeds in the ground as soon as it thawed. She would refer to the garden in her poetry as one of her "places of refuge." Unfortunately, she was a single working parent of three children, and her passion for gardening was not matched by the availability of the countless "leisure time" hours the avocation requires to sustain garden productivity and to cultivate the sense of gardening as a "healing experience."

This fact is painfully imbedded in the memories I have, when at the behest of my mother's plea for help, my siblings and I would gloomily march out to the garden to assist my mother in pulling out the overgrown weeds that often frequented and quickly overcame my mother's gardens. For us, the garden was not a place of refuge, but a mini-garden-gulag, where we suffered as under-aged slave laborers. Only my mother's profound and infectious love of nature transcended the painfulness of this experience. Today, I still can't get enough gardening!

Looking back into our family histories, one is likely to find a personal family connection to the food system, sometimes with reverence and sometimes with hilarity. My grandmother, Winifred Coffin, was an Episcopalian woman of deep and heartfelt faith, and a pillar of Christ Church Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills Michigan. Her love of food and cooking for her family ran as deep as her faith, and when she cooked a meal, it was filled with love and care and ritual...every single morsel of food served on her dining table had a soul connection. My mother inherited my grandmothers' reverence for food as a delivery system for love and a healing substance for lifting the spirits of her loved ones.

How many of you here share similar memories of food being delivered to you with such love and connection to the spirit? Perhaps you can gather your thoughts about such memories, and share them with your children and friends. I believe that food system change benefits from knowing your own roots and remembering that food is about more than calories or commodities. These narratives are an essential starting point for food system change.

Some of you may be old enough to remember living during World War II. Others may recall recently that that a nationwide movement brought a petition forward that urged the White House to restore a tradition once known as the "Victory Garden". Victory Gardens were a strategy employed by the U.S. Military to help win the war by urging citizens to grow as much of their own food as possible so that mass produced agricultural crops could be diverted to the troops overseas. The population of the USA in 1940 was 132,500,000 million people, in round numbers. There were 16 million men and women in uniform during WWII. That was over 11% of the population and was a lot of mouths to feed. This fact required special measures and for every patriotic citizen to become involved in food production.

My grandmother and grandfather wanted to do their part to help win the war and participate in the Victory Garden movement, but all they could afford during these lean times of the war was to acquire a plow sans beast of burden. They brought home the plow to their home in an upscale neighborhood. My grandfather suggested that they strap the plow behind him and that he would pull the plow while serving as a human ox and my grandmother would then guide the contraption. This did not work very well and in the midst of this urban agriculture experiment, their efforts drew the attention of a cocktail party next door. Evidently not too concerned in what the high-society types might think, my grandmother suggested that they swap roles, and that she, being of stout Midwestern stock, would pull the plow while my grandfather guided the wobbly apparatus.  This seemed to work out but the image of my grandfather strapping a plow to my grandmother was an indelible one that earned my grandfather a neighborhood reputation as a louse of an urban-farmer who would strap his own wife to a plow just to grow a few measly vegetables.

I doubt there is much new that I am going to tell you today about the food system. The low down dirt of this story is that it is a topic that will ultimately require you to invest a little sweat equity, even if not serving as a human plow-boy or girl. Whether from a personal, local, or global perspective, you will surely recognize elements of my food system story that sound familiar. Maybe your grandfather didn't strap your grandmother to a plow, but I will venture to guess that you don't have to dig very far or deep into your personal or family history to find stories that will make the topic of food and the food system an intensely personal and relevant one. I believe that defining and sharing our personal narratives is an important place to begin before shifting to broader, less personal viewpoints on the local and global food system.

Starting a career in food system change...

Still in my teens, I was attending college in the Los Angeles. An opportunity presented itself and I entered into my first full time job in the social service field. I was hired by an interfaith organization to develop strategies for responding to inner-city hunger and malnutrition in the Los Angeles region. I had the extremely good fortune of being involved at the beginning phase of developing the "Hunger Organizing Team" (HOT), a federally funded project of the Southern California Council of Churches and the Interfaith Hunger Coalition.

Jimmy Carter was President and his administration was funding innovative responses to hunger and malnutrition in the inner cities of America. I began my work with HOT by researching existing innovative strategies for combating inner city hunger and malnutrition. I had the opportunity to travel around the United States, visiting some of the model alternative food programs and production sites. One of these sites included Common Ground. I added this new knowledge to my earlier life experiences in gardening.

The first phase of my work involved creating a "food self-sufficiency" team that was responsible for developing the first Certified Farmers Markets in low-income communities throughout the Los Angeles area. I worked with more than 150 community groups, churches, and government entities in low-income neighborhoods and together we organized the first seven successful Certified Farmer's Markets in Southern California.

Decades later, the first Certified Farmers' Market in Gardena is still going strong.  Back then, we advertised a 30-40% savings, thanks to cutting out the middlemen. Today, you are likely to pay a premium for fresh produce brought directly from the farm.  

After the process of organizing farmers markets was well underway, I was presented with the opportunity to develop additional strategies for creating food self-sufficiency with the development of an urban agriculture demonstration program.

The Urban Agriculture project included directing land access, developing and managing four urban agriculture demonstration sites, ranging from 1/6 to 11 acres, totaling 21 acres of land in cultivation at locations in low-income neighborhoods throughout the Los Angeles region. I acquired technical assistance, zoning variances, permits, and licenses, contracts, etc., building cooperative relationships with city, and county, and state officials. One site was under the power lines, another on a section of the yet un-built 105 Freeway, and another on a vacant lot.

I developed resources, solicited donations, and participated in an economic viability research team. I organized the first major urban agriculture conference in Los Angeles involving the co-sponsorship of five government agencies and The Trust for Public Land. I personally trained and supervised four "urban agriculture" workers and helped to develop a volunteer corps. I developed a mobile urban agriculture operation using a pickup, a trailer, a high-powered Italian "walking tractor," a sort of high-end rototiller, and other horticulture equipment that could be easily moved from site to site. I learned about what the ideal "vandal proof" urban crop list might look like; avoiding projectile-prone crops like tomatoes or watermelons, and selecting high value crops that require labor intensive harvesting, such as snow peas, sugar snap peas, and fresh herbs.

All this happened during my first full-time social service job! Amazingly, these types of solutions are still relevant today.

Local to global food system change...

Thirty years ago, there weren't many books on food system change. Frances Moore Lappe's book, Diet for a Small Planet, was an inspiration then, not because it contained great recipes (I laugh remembering the early years of my vegetarian life and some of the awful food I cooked) but because when you read it, you can get an inside view of a food system change culture that is still going strong. Diet for a Small Planet explained how the real food chain worked and that everything we ate affected some other life form-and the global food system. Lappe taught that we could eat and hurt the planet less, and save a few bucks because the meals were cheap.

Today, Bob Johansen, a founder of the Institute for the Future based in Palo Alto, talks about the food chain giving way to food webs. "Linear and mechanical procedures for distributing food are being replaced by cyclical, organic, flexible food webs.  Food webs are the complex, interlocking, and interdependent feeding relationships among plant and animal species." Over the next twenty years, the world's population will rise by about another two billion. Calorie demand will grow even faster, as diets in countries such as China increasingly shift to meat. In 1940, one calorie of energy produced 2.3 calories of food. Today, it takes 10 calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food at a commercial supermarket.

Once source I found estimated what the average American spends on food per day: $6.33. This includes $3.67 on food at home and $2.67 on food out of home. It does not appear that these statistics have been keeping up with the reality of our current food economy. What do think you spend on food per day? American households spend 42 percent more on food in 2006 than they did in 1990 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). The only decrease in expenditures from a list of 20 items was for reading material, down 24 percent. Maybe if we spent more time reading, we would understand the food system problem better!

In poor nations, food constitutes one-half or more of the total budget for the average family (World Bank). Low-income teenagers are almost three times more likely to be obese than teens from more affluent households. In a recent policy brief by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, persistent barriers to health were highlighted, including high numbers of neighborhood fast food restaurants, high sugary soda consumption and television viewing and low numbers of parks and other opportunities for physical activity. Among their recommendations, the authors urged city planners to consider zoning ordinances to regulate the number of fast-food restaurants while providing incentives to attract grocery and other stores that stock fresh fruits and vegetables.

Collective Roots has received funding to implement the Healthy Development Measurement Tool (HDMT), a participatory action research framework that allow us to gather information (numbers and narratives) on food, health, and other community health indicators, and use this information to inform the community, planning and health departments, and other stakeholders in ways that encourage action and changes in the built environment.

In San Mateo County, there are more than twice as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as supermarkets and produce vendors, as measured by the Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI).  The formula for calculating your community RFEI is

(# Fast Food Restaurants + # Convenience Stores)

(# Supermarkets + # Produce Stores + # Farmers Markets)

Applying this ratio to San Mateo County, there are 2.79 times as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as supermarkets and produce vendors. The ratio is much higher in communities like East Palo Alto.

Many communities are beginning to map their food system or foodshed as it is called. A great example of this has been implemented by food system leaders in San Francisco. Many low income communities suffer from being "food deserts". In East Palo Alto, the community spends an estimated $65,000,000 on food per year, yet for two decades, residents have had to travel 5 miles or more outside the community to access a supermarket or farmers' market. Alternatively, fast food in East Palo Alto is easy to find, with two McDonalds only a mile apart in a community that is only 2.5 square miles in size.

Collective Roots is addressing this disparity through providing healthy food access at schools and a community based farmers' market, soon to be re-opening for a second season.

East Palo Alto and Menlo Park now occupy land that was originally the home of Ohlone Indians. These earlier residents lived off the land peacefully, gathering nuts, berries and fish from both the ocean and the bay. Because of the abundance of food there was no need for them to practice agriculture. Just a few farms are left... in East Palo Alto we have Happy Quail Farm and in Menlo Park you have Webb Ranch for example. We must preserve our local agricultural history or our children will not know how their food is grown. According to the most recent census data, 14 people or .1 percent of the population in Menlo Park are occupying farming, fishing, and forestry occupations and in East Palo Alto, 29 people or .3 percent of the population are working farming, fishing, and forestry occupations.  

A great example of agricultural preservation efforts in urban areas is the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, a nonprofit organization based on one of the oldest and most diverse organic farms in southern California. The community based farm serves as an important community and education center and a national model for small scale and urban agriculture, hosting as many as 5000 people per year for tours, classes, festivals, and apprenticeships. Under Michael Ableman's leadership the farm was saved from development and preserved under one of the earliest and most unique active agricultural conservation easements of its type in the country.

Today East Palo and Menlo Park have come a long way since being small agricultural communities, which saw their heyday in the 1920s. Almost 100 years later, that spirit of self-reliance and a desire to farm the local landscape still survives on both sides of the U.S. 101...at Collective Roots based in East Palo Alto.

Collective Roots was founded in 2000 and the mission is to educate and engage youth and communities in food system change through sustainable programs that impact health, education, and the environment. Collective Roots achieves its mission through the innovative integration and implementation of three program areas: garden-based education, food systems change, and environmental action.   We rely on extensive collaboration and partnership to enable all aspects of our work, and we receive the support of hundreds of volunteers in order to achieve our goals and objectives.

We have developed a one acre organic garden at East Palo Alto Charter School that boasts an outdoor kitchen, a full sized greenhouse, a pond, two kinds of solar power, a giant green dome, the city's largest fruit orchard, and a vibrant soil profile that is invested with more than one hundred tons of what was "green waste". The garden, located on the edge of the baylands, provides "garden-based learning" for students K-8 five days per week, and has become a destination point for local school groups, university students, local corporations, and hundreds of volunteers from East Palo Alto and surrounding communities.

While still a small child, I was visiting with my Grandparents at their old New England farmhouse in the Berkshires of rural Massachusetts. I somehow managed to toddle off down through the pasture surrounding the farmhouse into the nearby woods and came into a golden-green meadow shimmering with tulips in full bloom. I climbed up onto a big boulder and watched with awe and respect while a herd of giant cows grazed through.  A luminescent light shown down through the treetops, and in this moment, I had my first conscious experience of the divine and radiant power of nature and creation, and the magic of this moment left an indelible impression on me for the rest of my life.

The children and families in East Palo Alto suffer from having little access to open space or to experience such moments of magic while in contact with nature - East Palo Alto providing only .5 acres of municipal open space per 1,000 residents-the worst in San Mateo County and 9.5 acres below the national standard which is 10 acres per 1,000 residents (National Recreation and Park Association).

Air pollution from the 101 and the 27,000 cars that pass through the community per day to the Dumbarton Bridge are considered to be factors in the fact that the community has a high asthma rate--14.2% of residents surveyed have asthma, twice the rate of asthma sufferers in San Mateo County on a whole (6.7%). East Palo Alto suffers from many health disparities including the fact that the city has the highest rates of children who are hospitalized due to asthma attacks.  

Collective Roots is expanding the number of school garden sites in East Palo Alto and I am pleased to announce that we will be opening a Center for Urban Agriculture this summer in one of the most densely populated part of the community. With the help of hundreds of volunteers and dozens of strong organizational partners, we are learning that food system change is within our reach, even in one of the lowest income communities in the bay area.

There are simple things that we can and must do to ensure our health and the health of the communities we live in.

Here are few examples of what can be done:

1. Increase the number of grocery stores, farmers' markets, and other healthy food vendors in neighborhoods that have limited access to fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods. There is no better place to start than in the schools. At East Palo Alto Charter School, we have switched food services to Revolution Foods, a company that prepares food for students daily from whole, fresh, organic, and locally sourced food.
2. Support innovative retail strategies to increase the availability of fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods in California neighborhoods. Recently, a whole valley of farmers from Capay Valley started a hybrid form of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in Palo Alto, now at two locations (IDEO and City Hall). We are working to bring this group of farmers to East Palo Alto as well.
3. Set reasonable limits on the number of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores in your community's neighborhoods. In what you might call a "no-brainer" study, a direct correlation between increased prevalence of fast-food and higher rates of obesity and diabetes is shown.
4. Utilize federal assistance programs, such as Food Stamps and WIC, to make fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods more affordable to low-income families. The current recession is affecting low-income residents in EPA most severely. In 2008, EPA's unemployment rate was already high at 9.4% compared to San Mateo County's unemployment rate of 2.6%. The near collapse of the economy in 2009 has accelerated the upward trend in unemployment that is expected to exceed 15% this year. EPA is also home to more than 75% of the County's mortgage foreclosures. One bright spot in this community is the Collective Roots' founding of a certified farmers' market in June of 2008, after nearly a year of stakeholder-led community action. Yet through the market's first season, thousands of food stamp participants were unable to use their benefits at the city's main source of fresh, local and healthy produce, and the County of San Mateo has a poor rate of food stamp outreach and utilization in general. Perhaps we should all be on food stamps - using an EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) card that tracks all of your food purchases and that rewards you for making healthy choices through earning healthy premiums, such as discounts at your local farmers market or supermarket on fruits and vegetables.
5. Require fast-food restaurants to provide consumers with nutritional information for all items on menus and menu boards.

Thirty or more years ago, I came across an amazing book called "How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons.  Locally, regionally, and globally we are facing a potentially devastating loss of agricultural fertility due to squandered resources, topsoil, agro-chemical abuse, water waste, and an extractive food system that is built upon pulling more out of the earth than we put back. Leading in food system change, Jeavons and Ecology Action sought a rational and scientific way to grow bountiful amounts of healthy food.

This research and the research of others has been available to us for decades. Collective Roots is making this kind of knowledge available to hundreds of youth each year - opening their minds and providing experiences where they can experience the magic of nature while growing fabulous, tasty vegetables with less water, less work, less weeding, and less money than you ever thought possible.

A leading force that affects the global food system change is the consumer. Educating young people and providing positive experiences that connect them to local, regional, and global food systems is essential. Childhood obesity and the encroaching onset of Diabetes Type II among younger and younger children are connected to chronic under-nutrition, an emerging form of hunger that has inspired the book "Stuffed and Starved" by Raj Patel.

San Mateo County has crafted the Blueprint for Prevention of Childhood Obesity: A Call to Action. We must respond to this call! According to the 2003 California Healthy Kids Survey, 71 percent of children in San Mateo County do not eat the recommended amount of vegetables per day, 48 percent do not eat the recommended amount of fruit, and 65 percent drink at least 1 serving of soda pop per day.

These challenges place heavy demands on food and public health systems and require a well-crafted response from local farmers and the global food industry. One leading reason we have a food crisis is not because of a shortage of food but because of poverty, both economic and intellectual. Now we face the double-burden of food systems being an important factor in climate change. The food problem has become a political problem that threatens global security.

Can we see this food crisis as an opportunity? New forms of partnerships are emerging. Silicon Green is a regional group of nonprofits with common green threads that is forming in Silicon Valley...looking at ways to work together and forge collaborative strategies for addressing the food system on a regional - two county scale. We have identified 5 common green nexus points:

1. food & nature
2. education & jobs
3. public & environmental health
4. science & technology
5. community & culture

We hope to apply the same entrepreneurial spirit that has created Silicon Valley to solving problems in our food system.

Is Urban Agriculture an effective tool / strategy for alleviating the affects of poverty and addressing food security-personally, locally, and globally? Or, Is Urban Agriculture merely a quaint vestige of history, destined for demise or to remain on the fringe of urban civilization as a recreational option?  It is up to all of us to answer these questions.

Urban agriculture makes it possible for us to change from our suits into jeans, to dig up a bit of lawn or asphalt, plant vegetable seeds or fruit trees, and then begin to ask the questions about our food system, environment, and about our urban behaviors and thinking patterns.

In order for urban agriculture to become and remain viable, a powerful multi-disciplinary matrix of community specifi and culturally relevant rationales, strategies, and technologies must be developed, refined, and integrated.  

Community and urban agriculture can provide building blocks for community development and food security, but not if they are marginalized as quaint expressions of neighborhood gardening.

Urban agriculture must be connected to mainstream movements involving health, education, environment, science, economy, etc., if it is to hold relevance.

Most important is the need for YOU to see yourself in a role, perhaps a lead role, in your own food system.

We all can play a role in changing our food system on a personal, local, and global level.