A Year of School Lunch

Posted: January 15th, 2010 | Author: Jacques de B | Filed under: society | Tags: food, obesity, school food, systems change, youth | 5 Comments » At the time we thought nothing of it, school lunch was supposed to be terrible. Most kids just bought a honey-bun from the vending machine anyways, and maybe some fries. Hardly anyone ever went for the Full Monty unless they were serving the bbq rib sandwich-the mystery meat molded into a vaguely rib-like form was delicious if only because of the tangy sauce that was probably loaded with sugar. Looking back it all seems a little suspect though, why should childhood and adolescence, the time of your life when you need the most nutritious diet, be in fact the opportunity for federally sanctioned malnutrition? A recent article examines evidence that school lunch on average is probably of lower quality than pet food. How has this situation been allowed to continue for so long, and wherefore comes the odd cultural inertia that hews against the implementation of a sane exit strategy? Is there some sort of conspiracy at play here? Is the USDA being run by a cabal of intransigent space lizards with ties to the Illuminati ? The mind reels.

So apropos of the gathering storm around our school lunch cafeterias, and in the great tradition of documentarian Morgan Spurlock and his seminal Super Size Me, an anonymous blogger/school teacher known only as Mrs. Q, has pulled out a machete to sharpen the debate with the appropriately named blog: “Fed Up: School Lunch Project”.  As of the time of posting, she is only 9 days into a year of eating nothing but school lunches, but already her blog is attracting some critical attention.  It’s not hard to see why her tack is so deadly effective-the prospect of voluntarily consuming what our children have no other choice but to-only serves to highlight what we already know: that American school lunch is at large both completely unappetizing and severely lacking in basic nutritional value. Aside from the deadpan and oddly amusing daily commentary of Mrs. Q, the collected imagery of the wilting and oily food offerings crammed unceremoniously onto a small Styrofoam tray are perhaps the greatest testament to just how bad the situation has remained.  Nothing like actually being presented with direct physical evidence. Checkmate Caitlin Flanagan.

So lets hope Mrs. Q survives the year without suffering some serious health repercussions. And furthermore, lets hope her project attracts some much needed attention to one of our most critical public-health issues. If we are going to leave the next generation with an enormous sovereign debt, depleted resource base, rising sea-levels, and the prospect of chronic under-employment, the least we can do is give them a school lunch that’s better than pet food. I mean come on. The Lateral Hippogriff approves !

Fed Up: School Lunch Project

---

Dustup on the Urban Prairie

Posted: January 5th, 2010 | Author: Jacques de B | Filed under: hybrid, social entrepreneurship, society | Tags: Detroit, Hantz Farms, localism, social entrepreneur, social innovation, systems change, urban farming | 5 Comments »

One of the greater ironies of the early 21st century might be that Detroit, oft considered the poster-child for post-industrial blight and decay, may well end up as a cutting edge example of how Urban America can best respond to the difficult realities of the emerging post-abundance paradigm. Recently, a growing chorus of voices has begun to sketch the outlines for the metamorphosis of Detroit into a shimmering “Urban Prairie”, a thriving agrarian hub rising from the denuded ruins of the once proud industrial mega-city. Detroit, with over 103,000 vacant lots, clearly is a prime candidate for urban agriculture, although the most ambitious plan for sparking this renewal, a working commercial farm in the heart of the city proposed by former financial guru John Hantz, has raised several issues that illustrate the difficulties of implementing any wide-scale systems change.

The subject of a flurry of recent articles, Hantz Farms aims to eventually convert over 5,000 acres of now deserted land into a fecund expanse of organic crops, all to be consumed within the local foodshed. Although many local leaders are encouraged by the prospect of new farm-labor jobs in Detroit, several community activists have taken issue with the structural inequities that they perceive as emblematic of such large-scale ventures. The project clearly offers some public benefit in the form of economic activity and community re-development, but many feel that private enterprise by its very nature ends up exploiting community members rather than offering opportunities for empowerment. One vocal critic speaking at the Food & Society Conference in San Jose lat April went so far as to describe the Hantz proposal as nothing more than a “plantation” amidst several hundred thousand poor and challenged urban residents.

It’s an understatement to say that the future will hold some serious challenges as we shift into a lower energy world, and the responses that we enact will often represent compromises based on pragmatic realities rather than Utopian “solutions” that promise to continue the status quo into infinity. Within this new headspace, we need to have the ability to see past the public-private dichotomy, and start realizing that what we perceive as polar opposites are in fact two sides of the same coin. Absolutist ideology provides grist for extremist politicians on both sides of the aisle, but the real world works in much more subtle and nuanced ways. Systems change exhibits emergent characteristics that do not follow the rules and expectations of previous cognitive models, and we must adapt our understanding of these new conditions to form a clear vision of how the transitions can be best managed.  There is always a danger that power will be abused, but bereft of an organizing entity of some sort, it would be impossible for any type of collaborative effort to be realized. This threat exists in all forms of political organization past, present, and future.

I think we have to realize that although Hantz Farms will probably not please everyone or make good on all of its promises, it nevertheless represents a positive step towards acknowledging our predicament and crafting a creative solution to deal with the future pro-actively rather than re-actively. As a high profile experimental model, it will doubtless serve as a test case that will flush out land use and zoning and tax issues and create new legal precedents for the re-allotment of public and private spaces that will be immensely valuable. Urban farms of the future hopefully will likely be heterogeneously imagined, as communal co-operatives, individual micro-farms, private entities, and everything in between. There is no quick fix to anything, but if we are able to think beyond the wall of our previous psychological investments, it might be possible to craft a new consensus reality in which a sane a sober path through the rapidly changing world can be found.

---