Slow Food, Meet Hip-Hop

By Slow Food USA Youth Programs Intern Reece Trevor

This week, a New York community garden is played host to an impressive combination: community organizing, hip-hop music, and an important message about healthy and sustainable food.  The Grassroots Artists’ Movement—G.A.ME, to those in the know—kicked off its first annual Go Green Hip-Hop Tour last Wednesday. G.A.ME’s mission is an innovative one. It uses the powerful medium of hip-hop music to increase awareness of and promote action on various socioeconomic issues in the black and Latino communities. When the organization first began in 2001, its focus was on providing a safety net and network for rap artists themselves, but it’s expanded significantly in recent years. Lawrence James, G.A.ME’s former director, presents his organization as a hybrid of a labor union and community organizing non-profit. James emphasizes hip-hop artists’ leadership potential, saying that G.A.ME works with “artists who are trying to educate and organize others so that, hopefully, our whole community can be reached.”

Here’s where the Go Green campaign comes in. G.A.ME’s leadership was quick to recognize that dozens of African-American and Latino communities nationwide face massive challenges when it comes to sustaining a diet that’s good, clean, and fair. The key to overcoming these challenges, they say, is to raise awareness. To that end, G.A.ME partnered with a half-dozen local hip-hop artists, not to mention groups ranging from the Bronx-based GreenThumb to Slow Food USA.

Surrounded by Green Thumb Garden’s apple trees and beds of organic greens, these artists eloquently explained the personal, societal, and environmental importance of slow food as the event’s organizers distributed literature and spoke with passersby about how to eat well in an urban environment. As one of Green Thumb’s gardeners put it as she gestured to a box of composting worms, “I’ve been working with plants all my life—we’re trying to make sure more people can say that.”

Upcoming Go Green Tour Events:
Thursday, June 25, 6-9 p.m.: Baltimore, John Eager Howard Recreation Center.
Friday, June 26, 6-10 p.m.: Boston, Blackstone Community Center.
Saturday, June 27, 12-4 p.m.: New York, 167th St. bet. Gerard and Cromwell Avenues.
Sunday, June 28,: Richmond, details TBD.

For more information, visit G.A.ME’s website.

 

Summer Youth Food Conferences

This summer Real Food Challenge and Student/Farmworker Alliance are offering leadership training for young activists, passionate about creating a just and sustainable food system. The trainings enable students and other young people to make connections, learn from one another, and grow the movement.

During the summer months, Real Food Challenge will provide 3 training sessions geared toward students who are already working, or wish to work, on improving their school’s food purchasing practices.  The training workshops include:  Real Food Midwest in Ames, IA from July 11 – 14; Real Food West Coast in Santa Cruz, CA from August 13 – 17, and Real Food Northwest in Boston, MA from August 20 – 23.  Check here for more information and how to register.

This fall, in Immokalee, Florida from September 10 – 13, Student/Farmworker Alliance will host its 5th annual training weekend, known as Encuentro.   Students and youth from across the country will come together to reflect on the accomplishments of the Campaign for Fair Food and strategize about ways to advance the organization.  Follow this link for more information and how to register.

Take advantage of these opportunities to meet other young people who are working on their campuses to create change while also engaging the staff and organizers of each of these awesome organizations!

 

Out of the Library and Onto the Farm

School’s out, internship season is upon us, and many liberal arts college students are spending the next few months on small farms as interns. In her New York Times article, “Many Summer Internships are Going Organic”, Kim Severson explores the remarkably high interest in summer farm work among them.

Students from Barnard, Kenyon, Macalester and many other colleges and universities across the country will put down their books, take a break from the internet, and pick up hoes and shears.  Severson believes for these young people “…farm life is a way to act on a growing enthusiasm for locally raised foods, increased concern over food safety and the environmental impact of agriculture.”

Fortunately for gung-ho students, since 2003, there has been a significant increase in the numbers of small sustainable farms in the U.S.  More farms equal more internships!  This year, according to Katherine Adam, the woman in charge of the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, funded by the USDA, 1,400 farms needed interns, practically three times the number from two years ago.

If you haven’t secured your summer plans, check out this site or contact farms of interest directly, to find out where you can get your hands dirty, and participate in the growing youth food movement.

 

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Banned Book?

By Slow Food USA Intern Melissa Rosenberg

Earlier this month, on this blog, we addressed the Agribusiness pressure directed at staff and administration at Virginia Tech, a land grant institution.  This week it came to the attention of the food community that another possible incident of corporate interference at a land grant institution had taken place; this time at Washington State University.

A university committee had selected Michael Pollan’s best-selling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a critique of agribusiness, for the Common Reading Program designed for incoming freshmen.  But, after the committee purchased 4,000 copies, the original decision to include the book in the reading program was reversed.  In fact, the reading program was discontinued altogether, allegedly due to financial constraints.

An alternative explanation expressed by a WSU professor, quoted anonymously in The Chronicle of Higher Education, is that the book was pulled “because of the politics of the agricultural industry.”  He also said that the university president, Elson Floyd “decided that this was not a battle he wanted to wage.”

Upon learning of the curriculum changes at WSU, Food Democracy Now! sent out an email alert urging people to show their support for reinstatement of the reading program.  Within hours, President Floyd’s office was flooded with calls.

Thanks to a generous contribution from food safety lawyer, Bill Marler, a WSU alum, the university will distribute Pollan’s book to freshmen in the fall.  Marler will pay the full cost of the Common Reading Program and a visit by Michael Pollan to the university.

 

Fair Food Across Borders Goes on Tour

Chiapas Media Project (CMP)/Promedios, an award-winning U.S. and Mexican partnership, enables marginalized indigenous communities in Southern Mexico to create their own media. This past spring, CMP introduced an advocacy campaign entitled Fair Food Across Borders (FFAB). The goal of the campaign is to expose the human rights abuses suffered by migrant agricultural workers in Mexican agribusiness camps.

The highlight of the effort is the new CMP/Promedios video, Paying the Price: Migrant Workers in the Toxic Fields of Sinaloa. The video investigates the impoverished lives of migrant farmworkers from the town of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. This past spring the FFAB campaign visited campuses across the country including Rutgers University, Ithaca College, New York University, University of New Mexico and University of Oklahoma, among others. In the fall of this year, the FFAB seeks campus sponsors to host presentations given by National Campaign Coordinator, Melody Gonzalez, which include a screening of Paying the Price and a discussion about the role of agribusiness and internal migration in Mexico, NAFTA, farmworker conditions in the U.S., and corporate consumer responsibility.

Invite FFAB to your campus this Fall!