Forever Young

Photo © Jan Mangan, Bioneers

Michael Pollan joins young food culture change-makers Gerardo Marin of Farm Fresh Choice, Maya Salsedo of Rooted in Community , Tim Galarneau of Real Food Challenge and youth from Rethink New Orleans Schools: an eclectic group of young activists showing schools and universities the way to embrace a bolder vision of youth’s relationship to food, and who are changing institutional buying practices to support healthy, local foods in schools, while developing student dignity and leadership.  

• “Youth are inspired to use food as an access point to deepen the discussion of inequities, injustices and fairness and the youth’s role in reclaiming all of that, reclaiming fresh, natural, organic as something of the past, as ancient.” ~ Gerardo Marin 
• Rethink New Orleans implemented a student driven process that resulted in making 12 recommendations for school lunches for the New Orleans school system that compelled school administrators to listen and make changes. Rethinker Jada Cooper says, “Food is an important part of what makes us us.”
• “Students want a bolder vision. It is the value of that vision that starts to drive young people, the value of justice, of ecological connections in their environment and the intersections that tie into the environmental justice element.” ~ Tim Galarneau 
• “My experiences as a young woman of color have positioned me to work best to fight the intersection of class and gender, and race and ethnicity and food access that keeps everybody oppressed. As soon as we can liberate that intersection, that point that holds the entire web of oppression together, what will we have?” ~ Maya Selsedo 

• 

  Photo © Jan Mangan, Bioneers

  “Through food you make connections across classes, across species; it is one of the great connective tissues in our world. Food also acquaints us with all other systems that effect us, that rule us. As you explore Sedesco, as you explore the rules of school lunch program you learn how the system works and it’s often not a pretty picture. I don't know if we all realize just how bad it is. We are feeding our children surpluses that agribusiness just wants to get rid of. We are treating our children as a disposal for an agricultural system that producing too much lousy meat, too much corn, too much processed food. Right now there’s too much pork because with swine flu a lot of people stopped eating pork. So the pork producers convinced the government to cough up a couple of hundred million dollars to buy excess pork to keep the prices up. And what are they going to do with that excess pork? They are just going to shove it down this disposal and feed it to our kids. For us to treat our kids as a disposal system is absolutely shameful.” ~ Michael Pollan

Take a look at The Precautionary Principle: Golden Rule for the New Millennium