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Food Quality

"Unity. Community. Movement."

Submitted by Kyle Schafer on Mon, 02/28/2011 - 12:58
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On Friday night, the youth leading the Real Food Challenge’s Northeast Food and Justice summit stood up in front of hundreds of people and kicked off an incredible weekend with a simple theme. In between giant icebreakers, stretches, step lessons and poetry performances, the youth leaders had everyone in the room repeat the theme aloud over and over again. 

“Unity. Community. Movement.”
 
Days later those three words are still resonating. They are three words that describe the conference perfectly and simply, and what strikes me most is that the word “food” doesn’t count among them. 
 
Yes, over the three days we talked a whole lot about food. But anyone expecting a conference full of a new generation of snobby “foodies” who only want high-quality food for themselves would have been sorely out of place. This conference was about changing the world for everyone by creating a food system that works for everyone – from farmworkers and dining workers who deserve a fair wage to high school students who deserve a healthy meal. It was about food, sure, but at its core it was about a whole lot more than that. 
 
Honestly I felt honored just to be part of it. In the Stir It Up workshop, “Worker Leadership in the Fight for Sustainable Food,” worker leaders from UNITE HERE Local 35 at Yale talked about their own struggle to keep good food in their dining halls. Many years ago, to protest fresh baked goods being replaced with packaged ones, the Yale dining workers held a taste test in the middle of campus. They won. Much more recently, when Yale started an expansive sustainable food program, the workers figured out how to make it practical for them too. The program couldn’t work without their input. I could barely keep track of all the hands up from workshop participants wanting to understand the worker perspective and remarkably eager for advice on how to involve workers in sustainable food projects at their own school. In other workshops we attended that day, such as ones put on by Slow Food USA, the Student/Farmworker Alliance and the Food Chain Workers Alliance, the energy seemed just as high. 
 
On the third and final day, the conference closed by recognizing the love that went into the meals prepared for us over the weekend and by talking about youth in the Civil Rights movement who also changed our world. I think to most of the people in the room, those weren’t two different topics. I don’t know if the food movement is the next big movement that will radically change our society, but after this weekend, I feel like it could be.

 

Chime in... where do you want to see change in food service?

Submitted by Hannah Caruso on Mon, 08/23/2010 - 14:07
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Pink Slime

Submitted by Kyle Schafer on Mon, 01/25/2010 - 13:44
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Just a quick thought: if Compass really wants to kick-start its new flexitiarian initiative, it might want to share this recent article about a filler (referred to by one USDA microbiologist as “pink slime”) that its producer, Beef Products, Inc., reports is used in a majority of the hamburgers sold nationwide. Check it out:

 
 
 
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