The following is an excerpt from my final project for HECUA's Environment and Agriculture: Sustainable Food Systems class I took this June.
I feel like I’m on the brink of something big and important. Everyone says it’s an exciting time to be in food systems. Am I “in food systems”? As long as I’m eating, I suppose I’m in the food system. But what am I supposed to be doing in food systems? What’s my work? Considering the state of the food system right now, I have my work cut out for me. But what does it look like?
Right now, it looks like bringing local food to schools. School lunch has captured my passion in a way that not much else has. The reasons for improving the quality of what we serve our children are clear and oft-repeated: we are feeding our most vulnerable population our worst food, teaching them to accept meat patties, reject overcooked vegetables, and enjoy industrial pizza. Eating habits are formed early in life and the longer people eat processed foods, the sicker they will be and the harder it will be to make a change.
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) intrigues me. Like the Food Stamp Program, it connected the need to dispose of the Depression-era dirt cheap commodity products with the need to avert malnutrition. Over the decades, it grew and spawned offshoots such as the School Breakfast Program, the Special Milk Program, and the Summer Food Service Program. Now it is an institution, a given, here to stay through the Great Recession.
Seventy years later and are we still filling empty bellies with dirt cheap commodities?
Any program that affects forty percent of children under eighteen seems like a program that needs careful management and foresight, first because 30.5 million children is a huge number and second because they are the future of our nation.
We are filling the empty bellies of a significant proportion of our future with dirt cheap commodities. That is not foresight. That is a recipe for disaster. This recipe will persist. The NSLP is here to stay and commodities are going to stick around like a bad cold.
I am painting a bleak picture with broad strokes, only because I want to inspire parents and farmers and students and policymakers to brighten the picture with regional color. I want to see small farmers thrive by growing native foods and selling them to schools so that students can thrive on them. The NSLP is positioned to accomplish both these goals. The NSLP provides a stable market for farmers, especially vulnerable farmers, and has an obligation to feed children nutritious food, especially vulnerable children. For this reason, we must carefully manage the NSLP to provide a stable market for more than just commodity farmers and to feed children more than just food whose nutrition labels have the right numbers.
Enter the question central to the E&A experience and pertinent to the NSLP issue. Why is it important to know where your food comes from? I have to admit that I did not have a ready answer. What does it matter that we visited Cedar Summit Creamery or that students know where their apples are from? But once I turned my mind to matter, the answers came flying in. I had learned all the answers, but they finally all collapsed gracefully together.
The popular question as it stands, I realized, is too narrow. Not just where, but who, how, why and when? Understanding the journey from seed or sperm to plant or animal to a meal on our plate allows us to evaluate the decisions made along way. We decide what is important in the journey, whether it’s the health of the land at the source, the human and animal rights involved, or the numbers on the price tag or nutrition panel.
Knowing your sources adds personal accountability to the transactions that take place. If Kent Solberg wants to continue to sell fresh milk, he has no choice but to keep his milking parlor squeaky clean. In contrast, if your hamburger from Beef Products, Inc. makes you sick, tracing the contamination would be a nightmare.
Knowing your sources connects you with the rhythms of farming, appreciate the gifts of the seasons, and understand that the vagaries of weather or the price of oil will have an impact on food availability and cost.
Where do we learn about the source of our food? Parents teach through action. Take your kids shopping and the source of food is the grocery store. Grow a garden and the source is dirt and air and water. Rely on school food service and the source is… unknown. Teaching children that their apples come from the orchard 50 miles away prepares them to ask where the oranges come from, who picked the pears, why Red Delicious tastes so inferior.
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