A guy named Edwin who went to school out West, fell in love with farming and then planted seeds in the forgotten soil of the urban food desert that is Birmingham, Alabama is an inspiring story. The fact that Edwin had the wherewithal to hire a teaching director and incorporate education into his farm validates the community-mindedness and life-changing intentions of this project. It is a noble project.

Today I met with a woman named Gay who had headed up food service at Middlebury’s local elementary school. She told me about the lessons she likes to do, and what helps the kids try new foods, and she had been working for ten years trying to help kids learn about healthy food and give kids the best she could in her lunches.

But she was getting tired. She was tired of watching her pay decline as her tenure increased and watching her assistants leave her for better-paying jobs. She was limited by money in a real way—she was not short in experience, creativity, expertise or motivation, and she gave it ten years and she’s losing all of that because she’s been at it for so long.

She described to me the fact that most of the kids in her school system start with her at kindergarten and have seven years with her. She sees it as a huge opportunity to give kids an education they need more than anything.

I was able to have a really meaningful conversation with her because I had been fully informed on this issue not three days before on our 5th day to NOFA-VT, Shelburne Farms and VT-FEED. She pointed to those groups as doing seriously fantastic work and she needed them to keep her in the game. Nonprofits are important in themselves for the work they do but the support they offer for policy reform and to workers on the ground is that much more vital.

I am now interested in how the business I’m involved with can speak for under-appreciated and under-funded and under-paid food service staff in public schools. School kitchens are where change can and will take place. It’s just about electing officials who are smart enough to give them the money.

Dr. Vandana Shiva spoke so directly, clearly and passionately. She was a refreshing voice and an extraordinarily effective speaker. Her approach of holistic thinking about world issues combines elements of the spiritual sanctity of our planet and its people with systems thinking essential to understanding complex ecological and economic systems. This synthesis is in itself holistic.

The understanding that nature is not “out there” but we are in it  accomplishes so quickly and elegantly a leap that the rest of the world needs to make—to conceptualize environmentalism as part of the human environment. This also has to do with circles. We ourselves are part of a circle that travels from nature to humans  whose uses of nature in themselves change that nature and the circle continues. The circle’s ultimate “destination”, where the loop closes, is that when life ends the human body remains a permanent member of the collection of matter that makes up our universe, and nothing more, no matter what we believe. We are points on a large circle, we travel in circles over our life time and we interrupt and take part in circles every day.

I loved thinking about circles and watching Dr. Shiva speak because there was a circle right on her forehead!! The bindi is a cosmetic tradition that spans immense amounts of time and has a vast diversity of cultural and spiritual significance. This speaks to the universality of circles and that holistic consciousness and systems thinking is the only way to make the world continue to turn in a circle, while it travels around the sun (a circle) in a circle. I did mention that we live on a circle, right?!

Look at our heads, our eyes, and consider the perfection and complexity of a circle, and you’re a more valuable citizen to this earth than you were before.

Wendell Berry’s short but captivating and richer-than-life painting of his character’s grandmother is the best of the best writing there is to read. But it speaks to themes larger than me. After reading I was stuck in the middle of this piece, between the food writing. The piece is bookended by pie but the meat is in the middle.

“. . . I am troubled with love for her, knowing how she was wrung all her life between her cherished resentments and fierce affections. A peculiar sorrow hovered about her, and not only for the inevitable losses and griefs of her years. . . She was haunted, I think, by the suspicion of a comedown always lurking behind best appearances.”

The pie goes into the oven, and all of a sudden we are tossed into this flash-back inside a flash-forward inside a flash-back and here we find this deep emptiness. She was “wrung” like a rag, there is too much subtext to this for me to handle or analyze, I can only react emotionally. This is what happens while the pie is baking?

I need to read Paradise Lost, I guess.  Something to do with the war, I don’t have the context for this. But I want to understand this woman. Mr. Berry tells us more than we can even puzzle out through his words. He speaks of a generation of people.

I would really love to learn more about the themes, history and symbolism at play here, but for the moment it is beyond me. I want to know what the “lostness of Paradise” is. It is a “prime fact of her world,” Berry shows it to us, but it is lost on me. That hurts.

All I can do for now is enjoy the pie at the end like everyone else. Wow. Delicious beyond words.

No, Schlosser is right, it’s not only about food—it’s about way more than that. But there is more to food than just food and as Holt-Gimenez says, the community food movement is inadvertently and inevitably opening the public sphere. But, as Holt-Gimenez goes on to say, the public sphere will not be returned to the public until structural injustices are discussed and brought to, for lack of a better word, justice.

Race has everything to do with this. Race has everything to do with the politics, history, current condition and future of our country and the world. If we needed a more shocking and irrefutable reminder of this, we got one in North Carolina. If we don’t take down the Confederate flag, if white privilege continues to go undiscussed and uncontested, there is no hope for food sovereignty, food justice or any iteration of our national or global food movements.

We are what we eat. This is what proponents of the food movement urge so strongly. Eat something better and we will be better for it. This is true. The fact remains that we must acknowledge that we eat what we are. As long as our politics, economics, justice system and national psyche is racist, so will be our food. These changes are not individual but systematic.

White people have the opportunity to use their individual privilege to buy themselves out of the structural issues of our food society. Buying organic carrots will usually help. So will growing your own. Your CSA share, fair-trade coffee and grass-fed beef will absolve you of any direct sin with respect to food, but the sin is complicit, it is original, born out of you and the system you exist in.

Eat the apple, escape from Lappé’s productivist garden of passive ignorance and complicity, acknowledge privilege and encounter race honestly. This is what white people must do to change the issues that plague our society’s poor, gerrymandered and profiled. Minority voices are angry and passionate because they are marginalized. The only thing white privilege has to fear is white privilege itself. This is what Anthea Butler urged us on Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” today. Until white people decide to take action on their own privilege, more churches and innocent people will be shot, without justice.

This has everything to do with food.

Pollan and Berry continually reference the “French Paradox” that some cultures (particularly European) manage to eat terribly by all nutritional accounts but are still skinnier, happier and healthier than Americans. As Pollan pointed out in our reading for last week, this is due primarily to their food culture and ingrained habits.

I have experienced my own personal morsel of French culture and I can validate these claims easily. French people eat modest portions, there is no such thing as seconds, and they take their time with their meals. The art of dinner conversation, family values and post and pre-meal games are all emphasised and circle around the ritual of eating. Snacking is infrequent and in general they pay far less attention to food on the whole than we do. So we can take what we want and try and learn from these cultures, but we must face our own identity as Mr. Schlosser does in Fast Food Nation. We can throw up our hands and say, “Why can’t we just be more like the French?! What’s their secret?!” But the real question is, “Why are we the way we are?”

We are a nation heavily franchised and monocultured. I love the word monoculture in this context because though it has agricultural significance it can also be read on the level of consumer culture and food culture. The strip-malling and franchising of almost every industry on the market is now stitched into the fabric of the American identity. Food is central to this. We truly are what we eat and everything we eat is the same. And we like it that way.

Back to the French. When I went to France for a month, I visited the Bayeux Tapestry, commissioned in the 1070’s, and the Notre Dame Cathedral, which began construction in 1163. The French culture is so old it has fermented like their wine into something that is so part of them they aren’t even aware. Their cultural tradition is so old it inhabits every moment of their lives and every instance of their interaction with the world. This is at once beneficial and limiting. The French may benefit from age-old dietary habits that work for them very well, but it makes them inherently uncreative and intolerant in some cases (I don’t want to generalize or insult!).

Compare this to our country. In my hometown of Beverly, MA, you can remnants of some of the oldest communities of Europeans on this land. I can walk to houses that were originally built in the 1630s. But on the scale of William the Conqueror and Gothic architecture, these houses are infantile. These cultural fabrics do not weave themselves and they take hundreds of years to take shape. American culture is infantile, and it is vulnerable. With no other historical cuisine to draw from hundreds of years of habits, we are forced to take the hamburger and suffer the consequences while the rest of the world admires our daring indulgence and individuality, originality.

Schlosser mentions the young children who were first marketed to by the fast food industry in evil, agressive fashion. America as a country is the small child who did not know better than the older, wiser and better established cultures. We will pay in heart disease, diabetes and growing income inequality and if the United States can make it much further, maybe develop and redefine a more productive and prosperous food culture. But until then, our earth and children suffer.

Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food highlights that although it seems so obvious, scientists have trouble pinpointing the “why” of the benefits of plant-based diets. Think about your five-year-old cousin who has that typical, exasperating habit of asking, “Why?” after everything you say.

“Eat your carrots, Jimmy.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re rich in antioxidants that help you battle carcinogens.”

“Why?”

“Because your body can’t just make Vitamin C by itself anymore!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the best decision for your own health and the health of the planet!”

“Why?!”

“BECAUSE IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”

We can answer this question as many ways as we want, but when pushed to our limit we will inevitably scream at this child in frustration because he knows the real answer. It may be buried under Wendell Berry’s “cultural amnesia” and social brainwashing, but somewhere in our reptilian minds we know that against all of our fat and sugar cravings we have an innate understanding that fruits and vegetables are just plain “good for us.”

This goes beyond USDA Food Pyramids and One-A-Day labels. It is a kind of “good for us” that we know intuitively but can’t prove with reductionism and nutritionism. There is something in nature that makes plant foods “more than the sum of their nutrient parts.” It is the “mystery” that Berry describes, the fact that we live “from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” I am not religious, but I too share the sense that something sublime is found in the goodness of plants that will never be explained by human intelligence. Human intuition needs to let us be humbled by this greater nature and feed it without question.

Carrots are “good for you” in Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food definition of the word “good.” Plants and vegetables are at once universal and adaptive to relativism—there are plant diets for every culture and society, while any plant from any sphere of the world is inherently “good” to another. Eating something because it is good for us and we know it is exercising the human right to pleasure that is being widely obscured in the United States by industrial food production and cultural eating habits.

I am comforted by these readings. There is hope. We, too, have power greater than the sum of our parts to know what is good for us, and we will always pursue pleasure. The challenge of our time is discerning real pleasure from what we are told is pleasure.