Prof: As you guys know, this is the last lecture.
We've got the final exam on Wednesday, a fact that probably
wasn't lost on most of you.
We're going to finish up today by talking about success
stories.
We'll talk about how a lot of the principles that we talked
about in the class have been put into action in real world
settings by some very inspired people,
and they're quite interesting stories.
Before I do that, I just wanted to remind you
again about the final exam on Wednesday.
I hope you didn't have to use up too much of your time over
the break studying for the exam, and I hope you all had a very
nice Thanksgiving break, but the exam is on Wednesday.
Let us know if you have any questions about that and also
for those of you who have your OpEds published,
please send them to me.
A bunch of you have already done that and it's really nice
to see these OpEds published all around the world:
some community newspapers, some larger places,
some internet websites, and the like.
It's very nice because it's a great way for you to learn that
you really do have a voice in these matters if you care to
exercise it, and that it's a very good
exercise learning how to take what could be a pretty
complicated argument and distilling it into a relatively
small space that an OpEd requires.
I'm not surprised by your success at having them
published, but I'm very delighted to hear that they have
been.
Again, please continue to send them to me.
If you're inclined, if you feel like you've got a
good point to make in your OpEd, and you felt that there was
some reason to do it just beyond the assignment from the class,
if you don't hear back from a publication after awhile it
usually means that they're not going to publish it.
It's perfectly fine to call them to find out,
or just to go ahead and send it to someplace else,
and so keep sending if you're devoted to having it published,
and I hope you would be.
Then continue to submit it to other places until you find
someplace that will publish it.
Don't get discouraged if the first place you send it doesn't
publish it.
One thing I'd like to do before we move onto the content of the
class is to thank the teaching fellows.
These folks have done a tremendous amount of work over
the course of the class, have graded and graded and
graded, worked with you guys, fielded emails,
phone calls and the like, have been one of the best
groups of teaching fellows that I've ever had for this class,
so let's please give them a big hand.
As I did in the beginning of the class, don't forget that
they're going to be grading your final exams, so maybe you should
give them another hand.
There you go.
All right, so let's talk about changing the food environment.
Now we've talked about a lot of reasons for changing the food
environment and there are--they break down into three broad
categories.
Depending on which category you pick as the most important,
you start finding groups that are interested,
scholars who are interested in it, and governments that are
interested in it.
They basically fall into three categories.
We've talked, during the class,
about health reasons, the impetus for changing things
from a health point of view and you see some of them listed over
there: healthcare costs, obesity, hunger,
and the like.
Then there's a group of people around the world who care deeply
about changing the food environment for these reasons.
There are also of course environmental reasons that we've
talked about during class and there's another group of people
who care deeply about these.
And then of course there are people who care about these
things for social justice reasons,
and believe that the food environment should be changed
just because it's the right thing to do.
There are constituencies in each of these categories,
and one of the problems is that they don't very often talk to
each other.
A course like this, for example,
where we really try to bring this all together is pretty
unusual around the country.
It's unusual because people tend to focus in one category or
another, and not cross the boundaries of those.
It's my belief that by crossing the boundaries and bringing
these perspectives together, you have a lot more reason for
doing things, a lot more ammunition for
making change, and a lot more people could be
on the team if they all came together.
Let's talk about what it takes to make change.
If we're going to give--I'm going to give you some examples
of people who have created real change.
People who have had impact, people who have changed the way
the world thinks about food, have done programs where
there's really been a significant impact and the like.
If you look at the common denominators across these people
and their approaches, there are certain things that
tend to fall together.
If we start off with whatever the end product is,
some program, some initiative,
some public policy that's had impact,
there are a variety of things that I think converge into
making this happen and some have to do with the people,
some have to do with the process they follow and the
like.
First on the people front, it seems to me that what's
common to these things is a good idea to begin with,
of course that has to be in place.
Lots of people have good ideas and nothing ever happens with
them, so what really makes a
difference to some extent is the personality of the individual
who is driving for the change.
That has to do with their passion and of course their
personality characteristics.
Those dovetail with these things you see on the right,
people's ability to frame a message in a constructive way.
That is, create an argument that defends the change that
they think needs to be made, and an argument that's
persuasive, compelling, it draws people in rather than
turns them away, etc.
That framing becomes very important, and I'll give you
some examples of that today.
Next is the diplomacy of course.
You can kind of the bull in the china shop, rant and rave about
how bad things are, but very often that doesn't get
things done.
A diplomatic approach where you bring people into the team,
encourage others to join the whole cause can really make a
big difference and some people have been very good at that.
Deputizing is another thing we talk about at The Rudd Center.
This is the ability of an individual or an institution to
get people who ordinarily wouldn't be interested in the
topic interested in the topic, and then bring in their
professional expertise or their personal passion to the issue,
and that makes a lot of difference.
If you think about the hunger and obesity areas,
for example, now there are some economists
paying attention to it, there are lawyers paying
attention to it, political scientists.
Some of these people are the ones who came and spoke to the
class, so you've seen and heard from them.
Well, the fact that they got deputized into the cause,
the fact that these were all people who used to pay attention
to other issues but now are paying attention to food issues
can really help a lot because they have new perspectives,
new ideas, victories they've won in other arenas that can now
be applied here.
So that deputizing that some people have a real knack for is
very important in this.
Then finally, organization and science can be
part of it.
If you're organized you can--or you have people work with you
who are organized, you can really pull off a lot,
and that just means you're more effective.
Then the science can be very important ammunition for making
public policy changes.
The science--there is very often--public policy is not
connected enough with science and that's a problem,
but in the right context, the right piece of science at
the right time, can make a big difference in
the debate about an issue.
Science can be quite important if it gets communicated and if
it's connected out there with the real world changes.
The question is, who creates change and how does
it happen?
I'm going to give you several examples of people,
one of whom is this person right here whose name is Alice
Waters.
Now you've probably--you've seen--we've mentioned her before
in class and she gets mentioned here and there in the readings.
She's a very interesting person and I'll come back and tell you
more about her later.
She's a well known chef, an author of a number of
books--I'll show you some of those,
owner of a restaurant in Berkeley, California called Chez
Panisse, and is an activist who's pushed
very hard for bringing local food to people,
better foods in schools, and the like.
We'll start off with the premise that she's been an
effective person.
She's been in the newspapers, documentaries have been done
about her, and she's had a big impact on the national,
even international scene.
She's considered by many to be a visionary, inspirational
person, so what is it about her?
What is it about her that's made her effective in this
context?
We'll talk about that and then talk about how the ideas get put
into play, and how one can make change and go about doing that.
Now it's interesting of course to think back about how much the
food environment has changed.
For those of you who are interested, we have something
called a food timeline, or the evolution of food on The
Rudd Center website.
If you go to our main website which is yaleruddcenter.org and
scroll down to the bottom of the home page,
which is what this is, you'll see this evolution of
eating at the bottom and it's a timeline.
You can scroll across the little things and it goes way
back in food history and tells clever little stories about when
this started, or when this was invented,
and who the players were and things like that.
It's really a very interesting thing to read.
As we've talked about before, the food environment has
changed unbelievably in a short period of time.
In the course of human evolution, a life as short as
mine is not very many years, but if I go--I've told you
stories about what my life was like as a child and the food
environment at that point.
Almost no marketing at all except for Saturday morning
commercial television ads for sugared cereals,
Coke and Pepsi bottles, an eight ounce or six and a
half ounce servings, the like;
it was really, really very much different.
It's interesting to go back a little bit in history,
and I wanted to do just a little bit of that again to give
you some sense of how much things have changed.
There are some people that are interesting figures and kind of
became pioneers in some ways.
I'm going to make the point that in some ways we're going
back to our roots in thinking about changing the food
environment.
This is an interesting man named Sylvester Graham,
lived in the 1840s.
He was a Presbyterian minister, stumped along the eastern
seaboard and became prominent because of that.
He preached on vegetarianism and not many people were talking
about being vegetarian at that point,
but he believed in it, and he developed a coarse fiber
food that you guys will know as graham crackers.
The purpose of the graham cracker, at that point,
wasn't to put marshmallows and chocolate on it,
but it was to have fiber and other nutrients packed together
in food that was healthy.
In some ways, it was sort an early version of
an energy bar or something like that, but was a much healthier
food then other things have become today.
Now another contemporary of his that happened,
was this gentleman here, and here's the history that he
had and you'll recognize his name in just a minute.
In the state of Michigan there was the Adventist Church--was
established in 1854, shortly after that it changed
names to The Seventh Day Adventist Church.
The church established a health retreat, a sanitarium for people
who had things like nervous exhaustion, fatigue,
just weren't very healthy.
They would come to this health retreat to recuperate and this
was--it was called The Western Health Reform Institute and it
was led by the gentleman that you see pictured here.
They focused on healthy diet, it was in a small place to
begin with, and you'll see the picture in
just a minute, and then a larger place as it
grew in prominence that you see on the right;
people walking around in formation, they're getting
physical activity.
You talk about healthy diet, natural foods,
and physical activity it starts to sound like the prescription
that we believe in today for remedy of a lot of the world's
chronic diseases.
This was the original place where it began,
a very small place.
It was called The Old San, short for sanitarium and the--a
person who was a frequent visitor there and a lecturer,
was Abraham Lincoln.
It grew in size from that little place to a much bigger
place, and then a much bigger place
after that, and became a very prominent
institution in the United States.
The location of this was Battle Creek, Michigan and,
as you may imagine, the name of the person,
the physician who ran this was John Harvey Kellogg.
Now the history of the cereals that he developed was
interesting.
The cereals he developed--cereal wasn't really
a product or it wasn't really considered a food,
until Kellogg came around and started thinking about grains as
something people should be eating more of,
and something that could be eaten in a healthful way.
He developed combinations of grains and doing different
things with grains and then the cereal was invented at that
point.
Then some funny things happened, like at one point they
were playing around with grains, there was a fire,
and from that came corn flakes.
There are accidental discoveries but other things
that were more intentional that had helped form the shape of the
cereal world.
There was another gentlemen who entered in 1891,
The Old San, suffering himself from nervous
exhaustion.
He decided that there was a business opportunity here,
that Kellogg had a good idea, and so he decided to go into
business himself.
His name was C.W. Post and then Post cereals were born from
that.
Now the interesting little--so Post Toasties was the original
corn flake that Post made, and then Grape Nuts goes way
back to the early 1900s and was one of the original products
that the Post Company developed.
There is just a little aside, an interesting history,
is C.W. Post had one child, her name was Marjorie
Meriwether Post.
She married a banker, the fellow you see pictured
here, E.F. Hutton and so they became quite a powerhouse family
as you might imagine.
If you look at these two gentlemen,
Post on the left and Kellogg on the right,
and think about what they stood for: the original corn flakes,
Grape Nuts, mixed grains, healthy foods,
exercise, back to nature, locally grown things for the
most, you wonder what they would
think if they looked at their own products today and they got
to see things like this.
The Post and the Kellogg companies are quick to boast
about the history and about the prominence of these people,
and how they got started with cereals and healthy foods and
things like that, not sort of realizing the irony
that these two people would probably be appalled if they saw
what was being sold today under their names.
It's also interesting is we talk about today's diet,
the vegetarianism that Graham preached,
the grains, the exercise, all these sort of things that
these other guys stood for, we're right back to some of
those same values again, so it's an interesting return
to our past, if you will.
The modern food environment has come a long way and I'm going to
show you a cute little clip from You Tube that doesn't have much
to do with Post or Kellogg but I just thought was cute.
As you hear this it will seem redundant in about the middle,
but if you listen to the end it gets cute .
I don't know what that had to do with anything but I thought
it was cute.
I know it has to do with this: the food environment has
changed a lot from the early days.
What should happen now?
If we want to think about changing things where should we
go, what should we do, and what might be done?
Well one way--I'm going to give you two possible ways of
thinking about it.
One is to think about power, and the other is to think about
top-down versus bottom-up change, and then they connect
with each other.
If you think about the power to make change in the food
environment you can create a grid that looks like this where
you can cross power with impact, and look at things that are
high and low in power or positive or negative in impact.
Then you can take various things that have been done and
place them somewhere in this grid,
so basically everything we've talked about in the class,
from the U.N.
Development--Millennium Development goals to even the
most local program like some of the things that were discussed
here in class, everything could be placed in
the grid here as having positive of negative impact,
or having high or low power to really create change.
Let's just put some dots, hypothetical dots in this as
symbols of where things might fall.
Let's take a dot over here, something that would have a
positive impact but low power.
When you heard about the local sustainable food projects,
for example, those have high local impact
but nothing really is happening nationally because of some
program that might be occurring here in New Haven,
it could potentially but it's not yet,
it's really a locally focused impact and a very positive one
but low power on the national or global scene and so that would
fall in that quadrant.
You could take something like food advertising and put it over
here having a negative impact on health and well being and being
very high in power.
We could think of all the different things we've talked
about and populate this grid with various things that fall
into different quadrants.
If you want to make change--so this would be the status quo,
this is where things might be right now--if you want to make
change there are a couple of ways that one might proceed.
One way would be to work down here and that's to find the
things that are having a negative impact and try to
change the situation by moving the dots over here.
You're taking the things that are having a negative impact and
making them less powerful.
A perfect example of that would be efforts to reduce the amount
of food advertising that children are responding to.
It's still going to be there, but if you reduce the amount of
it, or put limits on the type of
it, you'd be giving it less power,
so that would be moving the dots from one part to another.
Now we talked about a number of things that would fall into that
category already.
The other way to do it, would be to focus up here in
this quadrant.
To take things that are positive but low in power and
try to move those dots over here, and so you end up with
higher power with those programs.
You take something local and make it spread,
make it more prominent, create a national law or a
state law that puts it into place in more localities would
be examples of that.
The people that we're going to talk about today are people that
are doing just this sort of thing.
You're taking things that started small,
started with an idea but they're making them more
powerful, more prominent and bigger.
That's one key to making social change and that's one area where
the people that we're going to talk about work.
Those--moving things from the bottom left to the right is
really a top-down approach for the most.
You need government to be involved, you need laws,
regulations, litigation perhaps,
those sorts of things.
That really is a top-down approach that might work like
this: where you get federal action or state action,
usually in the forms of laws or regulations,
those things percolate down here to the individual.
So you start at the top and you hope to create things that
affect the lives and the behavior of individuals.
Now you can also look at what happens in between,
which is local action that affects the individual,
so these two things percolate down to local actions,
which in turn affect the individual, which sometimes
happens.
Of course sometimes global action might create this sort of
a thing.
Now it's startlingly apparent how seldom this happens with the
United States--that last line that gets put in.
Where the rest of the world takes the lead,
they come up with creative ingenious ways of solving
problems, and we don't listen.
The perfect example of the American arrogance has to do
with the environment, America not signing the Kyoto
Treaty, and things that a lot of you
guys know about.
Now my own politics are showing through here,
but why do I feel that way?
Well I travel a lot around the world,
and when I go to various countries,
and we talked about food, nutrition issues very often the
people from other countries just say when will the U.S.
ever catch up?
When will they ever stop getting in the way of global
advances of these sorts of things?
Once in a while in the U.S., the global action will affect
what we do, but not enough, but sometimes it does happen.
This would be a top-down approach.
An example of that would be menu labeling,
which is a very prominent issue out there now,
as we've talked about in class a number of times.
Putting calories or other nutrition information on menus
at restaurants, or on menu boards,
and the drive in windows at fast food restaurants--now this
is being fought out a lot across the country in the federal arena
with several people in the House and Senate introducing
legislation on menu labeling; the food industry introducing
its own weaker legislation as an act of preemption;
things happening at state and local levels around the country.
Why is this important?
Well more and more people are eating out, so now over half the
American food dollar gets spent eating outside the home.
As you can see from this revenue chart,
the amount of money that gets spent on restaurants is
absolutely enormous.
The restaurant industry is very effectively organized into a
group called The National Restaurant Association that has
considerable lobbying muscle and fights these menu labeling laws
and has since their inception.
The rationale has a number of pieces, and you can see them
listed right there.
Most of these would fall under the category of common sense,
but these have to do with the frame of how you would approach
the menu labeling law.
Let's talk about inspirational people in this picture and we
can talk about a top-down approach.
There are some people that have made this possible.
There is some frames of the issue that have made this
possible, and then there's some science that's made this
possible.
We'll walk through this quickly as an example of top-down
approach; I want to talk more today about
the bottom-up approach.
Now we talked before in the class about legal optimal
defaults, and in the case of New York City there is now an
optimal default for menu labeling.
In New York City, the restaurants are required to
put-- the chain restaurants, not all restaurants yet,
but chain restaurants are required to put calories on the
menu.
That was made possible by Thomas Frieden,
the Commissioner of Health in New York who I mentioned before,
who is a very determined, passionate committed
commissioner of health, more effective on these issues
than really anybody else in the country has been so far.
He's supported by Michael Bloomberg,
who's a very public health oriented Mayor,
and you put these two together, you've got some passion,
and some commitment, and some power,
and that's allowed this to happen in New York City,
but not without a fight.
The restaurant industry sued New York City two different
times, ultimately lost, and so now menu labeling is in
effect.
There are different ways to frame the issue.
Now they have--the health commissioner there and the
people working with him, and the advocacy community,
have had to go out and convince the public that this is a good
idea.
You have arguments to convince people that it's a good idea,
and the frame has a really a very important thing.
There are two different ways this issue has been framed,
one more prominent then the other, but in my mind the less
prominent one perhaps is the ultimate winning argument here.
One is health of course.
People are eating out at restaurants,
they don't eat very well when they eat at restaurants,
they don't know what's in the food they deserve to know,
a pretty clear argument logic chain right there.
That's the most prominent argument that gets made.
The risk in pursuing this argument?
It's a very good one, and depending on what the
science shows it could be a very good frame.
But, as we know from science, several predictable things are
going to happen.
The science on an issue will be mixed.
You have some studies that will say that it's good,
some studies will suggest that it's not good;
that's just the nature of science.
It'll take a long time to work this out;
the proponents will seize on the positive science,
the opponents will seize on the negative science.
In the minds of the public, it kind of gets put into this
mash that ultimately may not make much sense to people.
The science could help this argument or it could weaken the
argument depending on what the science shows.
One thing you can almost guarantee,
is that the food industry will support scientists that are
friendly to the food industry to do their own set of studies,
and one can pretty much guess in advance what those studies
will show.
That will muddy up the waters even more.
A second frame is that people just have a right to the
information.
This is a frame that's very hard for the industry to refute.
That argument, I think, can be very important.
Here, for example, up in that doorway there and
the doorway there, you see exit signs;
there's another one there.
Probably nobody has ever done a study to suggest that lives are
saved in the event of a fire with exit signs posted in bright
red letters; but you have a right to have
that information there just in case it's helpful.
Just in case it might save your lives you have the right to have
the information there.
You're all wearing clothing that has tags on it,
that's all part of somebody sometime pushing the government
to have tags on clothing.
Why?
Nobody's ever done a study to show that you're better off
because you have tags on your clothing;
that you're going to live longer, you're going to save
money, you're going to make wiser choices.
But you want it there and you'd probably be upset if it got
taken away.
Why?
Because it's your right to know what's in the clothing,
so that would be an example.
Even on a pillow you see this sort of thing;
even if you gargle with Listerine there's a label that
will tell you what's in it.
Of course there is the precedent with food,
food labels.
Packaged foods tell you what's there.
My guess is that there would be complete consumer outrage if
those labels got taken away.
Nobody's done a study, a convincing set of studies at
least, to show that consumers are better off because of those
labels.
There's some research but not a lot.
But it's the right to know, and don't we have the same
right to know what's on restaurant labels?
That's a pretty compelling argument, and as I said,
harder to refute then the scientific one,
which will probably end up mixed.
But there is some science on this issue.
Science is very interesting, so for example,
one argument is that--that the industry makes is that the
industry provides information to people anyway.
You may see, if you go into a McDonald's
outside of New York where the restaurant--where the menu
labeling isn't required little pamphlets sitting somewhere,
maybe a poster on the wall, and so they--or it's on a
website, so they say we don't need to
put it on the menu, people can get it anyway,
and we make it available.
Well, our very own Christina Roberto,
one of your teaching fellows, did a very interesting study in
some places, fast food places around New
Haven to find out how many people actually access that
information.
It turns out to be about 1 in 1,000.
Yes they make it available, but people aren't using it;
it's not having any impact on consumer choices.
Another bit of information is that consumers don't want the
information; the industry has made this
argument.
People really don't want it, they don't care to have it,
they're out to enjoy themselves, and they don't want
their experience spoiled by knowing how many calories are in
the food.
But the polls show that that's really not the case;
people really do want the information.
There are a series of studies on this,
in fact, a very, very nicely done study that
Christina has just completed and submitted for publication,
showing the impact on what consumers choose to eat,
if they have the calorie information available or not.
Without going into the details of the study,
because it's not yet published, it makes a big difference.
The science is supported in this case and you combine that
with the argument that people have the right to know,
you've got a pretty strong reason for doing menu labeling
legislation, and that's a top-down approach.
That would be government intervening federally or in a
statewide or local, like in New York,
to make a difference and that is an example of top-down.
If you're interested in this particular topic,
we've done a report on this at The Rudd Center,
and you can get to it from our website.
We've also published a paper that I think was in the
readings, although I can't exactly remember;
the paper on menu labeling legislation laws.
Now let's talk more about the local innovation approach.
Let's talk about bottom-up kind of approach.
It starts with the individual; an individual in an area,
a legislator, a person, a parent;
anybody in the population can become an agent of change if
they have the right characteristics and a good idea
behind them.
The local innovation approach starts with the individual.
Usually that person gets other people on a team and they form
some kind of a group, may give it a name may not,
but these people then work to create local change by doing
these things: where they try to get public
opinion to change and that allows institutions to change.
So parents who band together to try to get better foods in
schools would be an example of this.
That would all start with an individual, then other people
join the team, and then you get an
institutional change.
Then when these things happen, at some point you hope the
government gets involved, and does something systematic
so that parents may get together in a given school,
change things in the schools, but then you hope the local
government might get involved and create change in the whole
school system.
That's what's happened in Berkeley, California with a
program I'm going to talk about in a minute.
Then of course, an individual,
an inspired individual even by themselves can make a
difference.
This is one of the reasons why I've asked you guys to write
OpEds, because it's a way to show that you really can make a
difference.
Now why is local action so important?
If you're looking at changing things on the--let's say for the
whole country, why can't we just have the
federal government make laws?
Then the job is done, you've got everything taken
care of, and in one fell swoop you get change.
You don't have to worry about all kinds of things happening
locally, which would involve thousands
and thousands of communities, or at the very least fifty
different states.
Well here are some of the reasons.
Federal government tends to be much more affected by business
interests then state and local governments,
and therefore, the federal government can be
very slow to react on some of these fronts.
In the tobacco arena, which has been a major public
health victory, only half the people smoke now
that did several decades ago; that was totally done at local
and state levels with taxes, clean indoor air acts and
things like that.
The federal government has still done very little to deal
with the smoking problem.
These other reasons, as you can see,
are very important as well; that lots of times,
local ingenuity makes a difference.
Industry can't fight all these local fires and so--and you get
things spreading; something happens in one
community, the community next door hears about it,
they do it, and you get this positive contagion that goes on.
That can be very, very important.
Also, of course, if people are doing these
things in their own communities they own change.
They feel like they created it, they owned it,
they developed it, and that's a very powerful
impetus for things to keep going once they've become initiated.
There are lots of examples of local action.
You've heard about some of them from the guest lecturers,
you've read about a lot of them in the readings,
and you've seen examples of these.
I'm just going to go over a couple quickly and then a few in
more detail in this context.
One example is community gardens, so this is the corner
of 25^(th) Street and Dickinson in Northeast Philadelphia.
You can see from the surrounding neighborhoods that
it's not the wealthiest area.
The area where this community garden now exists was probably
burned-down houses or abandoned houses that got torn down,
and the green space got created.
This would be an example of a local victory that's occurred,
in this case in Philadelphia.
That's one thing that can be done locally.
Community supported agriculture is another example.
Now we haven't talked about this specifically,
but I think Jen McTiernan eluded to this when she talked
about CitySeed, but CSA is where you buy a
share of a farm.
Now, it might only cost you ten dollars a week for the growing
period or something like that, but then you own that little
tiny share of the farm.
Then each week you get money--you get--not money,
but you get food from the farm.
It's a way where the farmer gets money in advance,
the farmer then has a steady income, knows much to grow,
people get locally grown fresh food;
the cost of your share goes down if you go and spend some
time working on the farm.
These CSA's are really spreading around the country.
There are number of them that exist around the New Haven area
so that's another example of local victories.
There's a--the guide here on community supported agriculture
if you're interested, and I've given the websites for
the various things down there.
Let's use some specific examples of local action and
talk about both the people and their ideas.
The Yale Sustainable Food Project is one,
but of course you've heard about that already,
and this was founded by Melina who you heard from as a guest
lecturer.
Josh Viertel who was here for a number of years co-running The
Sustainable Food Project with Melina,
but got recruited to be the President of Slow Food USA and
has left the New Haven area.
CitySeed, you heard from Jennifer McTiernan about that;
so those are examples of local people making a difference.
The Edible Schoolyard, I'm about to talk to you about,
and that's with Alice Waters.
I'm going to talk about Jaime Oliver, the chef from Britain,
who Marlene Schwartz talked about briefly in her lecture.
Then I'm going to talk about a program called The Sustainable
South Bronx, and the woman who runs that is Majora Carter.
In each case, in each of these bullet points
here, what you see are inspired,
committed, passionate, effective people
and that's what's made those programs possible.
Now let's talk about some of them.
Again, you've heard about The Sustainable Food Project and
CitySeed already, so I won't talk about those in
any more detail; but those are examples right in
our own backyard that have been very effective,
and have become models for action outside the New Haven
area.
Let's loop back to Alice Waters.
I mentioned she's a chef, an author, owner of a
restaurant, etc.
Alice went to France when she was young,
studied to be a chef, came back to the United States
and founded what may have been the first sustainable,
locally-grown oriented healthy food restaurant in the United
States in Berkeley, California called Chez Panisse,
and then she did many things after that.
Here's a picture of Chez Panisse, if you're in Berkeley
it's a fabulous place to eat.
I've been there a number of times and it's really very good.
Alice has written a number of books as a chef,
so she's written Chez Panisse Fruit,
Chez Panisse Vegetables, but a variety of other things.
Her most recent book is this, The Art of Simple Food,
which is very interesting and well done.
So she's been quite effective as an author,
but perhaps what she's best known for is this project in
Berkeley called The Edible Schoolyard.
This used to be a paved parking lot behind a middle school,
The Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley,
California.
Alice, some years ago, had this very inspired idea
that you're now seeing more around the country primarily
because of her, which is to create a garden
food experience for the students right there in the schoolyard.
She convinced the school officials to tear up the parking
lot.
She got money from people in the community to help support
this, tore up the parking lot and planted this sustainable
garden right behind the school.
Now you can't really see so much from this,
but you'll see from some other pictures that this Martin Luther
King Middle School is a mixed race,
mixed social class middle school in Berkeley,
so it's not sort of upper crust Berkeley by any means.
This community garden becomes a place,
not only for students, but for people in the
community, so families come and walk
through the garden in the early evening just to enjoy themselves
and the kids in the school work in the garden a lot,
and it becomes part of their day-to-day experience.
Foods from the garden go into the cafeteria;
some kids help work with the foods in the cafeteria.
When the kids are doing poetry readings for an English class
they'll go in the garden and do it.
When the kids are learning elementary genetics,
they'll learn plant genetics and go in the garden to do it.
The afterschool programs take place in the garden.
So it really has become integrated into the life of the
school.
Not just one little club or something like this doing it,
but lots of kids in the schools doing it.
The garden has lots of different varieties of fruits
and vegetables, and plants, edible flowers and
things, they have chickens in there,
they have a few other kinds of animals,
and it really is a very interesting place.
Alice's vision of this was to make food a part of the learning
environment; the point was kids are exposed
to a toxic learning environment with food in most schools,
and this was a way to turn it around.
It's a very interesting place.
If you ever have an opportunity to be out in Berkeley and you
can visit this, you can't help but be
impressed--I couldn't help but be impressed when I visited
there.
I mean these kids are out there locked onto these plants;
they're just completely passionate about it,
and committed to it.
These are some kids who grew up in families where all they ate
was processed fast type food.
They're then bringing vegetables and fruits home with
their parents with a little sheet on how to prepare them.
It really presumably, although it hasn't been tested
thoroughly enough yet, has had a big impact on the
lives of some of these families.
You can just see from these pictures, but again,
as you see it in person it's really pretty amazing how--what
kind of affect this program has.
Then there are programs where younger kids come into the
sustainable garden, and learn how to deal with the
fruits and vegetables.
You see pictures like this that are really very touching and
there's a lot of this kind of stuff around.
I remember going there once in the late afternoon when the kids
from an afterschool program were there,
and what they had done is they gone out the garden and picked
something--I forget maybe zucchini or something,
and they sliced it up and then baked it in the oven,
and they were going to have it as a snack.
I've never seen kids so well behaved, so engaged with what
they were doing--it was really quite amazing.
So this inspirational person Alice, really helped turn the
environment of this school around.
This picture that you see on the right is pretty typical of--
that's the main table in the building they have that's off of
the Edible Schoolyard, and that's pretty similar to
what I saw when I was there: those kids smiling and laughing
and really enjoying themselves and really pretty inspired.
Here's another picture of Alice with the kids from the garden
and all the vegetables and things like that.
The concept here, and here's a quote from Alice,
it's a little hard to read in the back it says,
"Right there in the middle of every school day,
lie time and energy already devoted to the feeding of
children.
We have the power to turn that daily school lunch from an
afterthought into a joyous education,
a way of caring for our health, our environment,
and our community."
I wish Alice Waters had been in the area and we could have had
her come in to guest lecture, because she's this sort of
dynamic person who has this infectious way of getting people
excited about these ideas.
You hear her and you just can't help believing,
oh my God, this is exactly what ought to be done.
She has the power, the passion,
and the ideas, but she's had persistence as
well.
This one school did this in Berkeley,
she then convinced other schools in Berkeley to do the
same thing, and then got the Berkeley
Unified School District to create these gardens system-wide
in other schools.
That was an example of one person, local change,
and then the government gets involved and institutionalizes
the change.
If you'd like to read about this, there are some books that
have come out just recently on this, just a few weeks ago
actually.
The website for tracking those down is listed on the slide you
see there.
This is very impressive, and it's an example of one
person making a real difference.
Her power, her ideas, her persistence,
her organizational ability, all those sort of things I
showed on the one slide have come together,
and that's been very effective.
Another thing she did, which was to get national
officials interested in this, and as part of The Smithsonian
Folk Life Festival, that happened several years ago
on the mall grounds in Washington,
D.C., there were a lot of things occurring.
You can't see it very well, but over here in the bottom
right hand corner is a sustainable garden that Alice
help put together as part of this folk life festival.
She got the people that did The Yale Sustainable Food Garden,
Josh and Melina to come down and help coordinate and then
plant it.
Then what she did was she had this garden, had a tent,
and had a table there.
Then she invited people from Congress to come and take part
in a sustainable lunch to get them interested in school lunch
programs around the country.
She had a lunch, she invited me and I took part
in this with these people and a few others,
sitting around a table eating foods that had come right from
that sustainable garden.
She made the point to these individuals that this is
important and needs to be done for kids nationwide,
and these folks listened.
In fact, Hilary Clinton has followed up with some
legislative initiatives herself; Tom Harkin is a real champion
on these issues; and there were several other
legislators as well there who I think heard the message and got
inspired by this.
The way this table was set up and the way the event was done
was so nice.
I had my camera with me, I took a few pictures of sort
of things like this, and you just got this sense
from being there that there is this beauty,
majesty, joy of food that Alice talked about in that quote,
that should be shared with our children.
That should be done in the schoolyard,
it should be done in the cafeteria,
it should be done in our educational system,
and that might help change people's opinions,
attitudes and behavior with respect to food.
Here was another example of just a little thing from the
table that just created this kind of beautiful atmosphere
that was very touching.
Back to the Edible Schoolyard, this is the building that they
built off the schoolyard where the kids take part.
It's of course made possible by the inspiration of one person.
One person can really make a difference.
Now, that's one example.
Okay, the next example is Jamie Oliver,
and as Marlene mentioned in her lecture,
Jamie Oliver is a chef, a prominent chef,
has a national TV show in Britain, and is very popular.
He went by the title of Naked Chef,
and it had nothing to do with what he was wearing,
it was all about foods that were in their more natural form,
and weren't covered by lots of other things.
He got very interested in school lunches around Britain.
In addition to his show he started looking into the school
lunch programs and was pretty appalled by what he saw.
He became a very prominent advocate in Britain for better
school lunches.
There are pictures of him liked this looking at these sorts of
mysterious things that were part of the school lunch program,
and railing about the poor nutrition and how it was hurting
kids, and how it was costing a lot of
money along the way.
He did several very visible events.
As you can see these are kids in a lunch line but they're in
the middle of London here, they're not actually in a
school, where he served healthier foods to kids and
showed quite visually how kids would eat these foods if they
were made in an appealing way.
He finally got the ear of Tony Blair and other prominent
people, and basically embarrassed the
government by doing television show after television show
railing on about how bad the food was.
The British Government then stepped in and changed the
school foods in a pretty important way.
Again, this was the vision of one person, so that's made
possible by the inspiration of one person, in this case Jamie
Oliver.
Here's a person who made national change,
not so much by creating local action but making it visible on
national television--and in this case embarrassing the
government.
A different approach than Alice Waters took, but a very
effective one.
You have these two people who started out as chefs,
becoming appalled by what kids were being served in schools.
They shared a passion for the health and well-being of
children, and one made a big difference in the U.S.,
and another in the UK.
Another example that I'd like to share has to do with this
program called The Sustainable South Bronx.
Now this is a very interesting and inspired program that is run
by a woman named Majora Carter.
Now The Sustainable South Bronx, and here is a picture of
Majora Carter here, she I think has a Master's
Degree in public health but I'm not sure,
but graduated at some point from Columbia University and
really wanted to do something in her home area of the south
Bronx.
Those of you who are from that part of the world will know that
the south Bronx has a reputation for being a very run-down,
dangerous, poverty stricken part of New York City.
Movies have been made about it, documentaries,
etc., and so these sort of pictures are kind of the
stereotype of what people thought the south Bronx should
be.
If there was ever a place, if you wanted to find the
toughest, hardest place to make change or
to do something more sustainable,
the south Bronx probably would have been at about the top of
that list but Majora Carter took it on.
By herself in the beginning, and then others joined the
effort, she got city government
involved, and now The Sustainable South Bronx is an
award winning program that has international visibility.
They still have a lot to do, but they've made some good
progress as well.
You can go to their website, which is sustainable
south--it's ssbx.com, and that's listed on one of the
previous slides.
You can scroll through the information but it's very
impressive.
I know a number of you have been in touch with me about
places to go do summer internships, to do volunteer
work and things like that.
I don't know if the Sustainable South Bronx has those sorts of
things available, but boy if they do it would be
a really very interesting place to work and a lot of good things
happen in the context of The Sustainable South Bronx.
One of the things that they talk about are urban heat
islands.
If you do a temperature plot--and this is one that just
has hypothetical Y axis there--and you look at
temperatures in various places, you see a spike in temperatures
at the same time of the year in urban places,
and it's pretty evident why this happens.
You have things like the asphalt, the rooftops,
and things that absorb heat, so there's very little greenery
in these areas to help cool things down to provide shade and
also to just not absorb that heat and then keep the
temperature high.
These urban heat islands create climate issues for the people
who live there makes it less pleasant to live in in the
summer, but also makes it just
generally more inhospitable.
One thing The Sustainable South Bronx has done to try to solve
this problem is to focus on rooftop gardens.
In the south Bronx there, there are a number of rooftop
gardens that have gone into place.
You take something that you might see on the left,
and transform it to the kind of thing you see on the right.
Some people have taken aerial pictures of parts of the south
Bronx before and after The Sustainable South Bronx came in,
and what you used to see is just a constant slate of black,
if you will, and now what you see are-- is
the landscaped peppered by green rooftops.
Not enough of them yet, but more and more of them
happening all the time.
Of course you can see multiple benefits to doing something like
this, not only the urban heat island
problem, but of course getting people
involved with growing their food,
you have a little more locally grown food,
you get people out, families out doing things
together, etc., and again,
you might see this kind of a thing on a rooftop.
When you talk to the people who work in The Sustainable South
Bronx Project, and hear them discuss how this
kind of experience can transform people,
especially children, it's really pretty impressive.
Now they have vision in the south Bronx, and some of this
has come true.
To take something like this, and transform it into something
like this.
They will take something like this, a common streetscape in
New York City and create something like this.
Now in order to make this happen you need commitment,
you need the support of government,
because of course there's zoning issues and all sorts of
city agencies have to be involved;
and you need money to do them.
It takes an inspired person to get people together to invest in
this, and that's what Majora Carter has been able to do.
You see photographs like this where people are out in canoes
and kayaks with not a very appealing background,
but if that factory is abandoned--I don't know that it
is, but if it is,
and it gets torn down and be replaced with park areas,
you've got a lot more livable landscape.
One of the things they did originally was to create a
schematic for Hunt's Point and create a riverside park there.
Now they're trying to put that into place.
They've talked about the South Bronx Greenway,
and have created a map for where it can go now and where
it's likely to go in the future.
Of course you can imagine in an area like this how challenging
that would be to create a greenway trail type thing,
but they're working very hard on it and having some success.
There's some very interesting and creative things that they've
talked about.
First, they brought people together in order to argue for
justice.
Remember when the first slides I showed: reasons to make change
in the environment, you've got health,
you've got the environment, and you've got social justice.
Well, here these people are tapping into two of those frames
really, well all three if you will,
but there's the health of our children is being threatened,
you've got a social justice issue going on here,
and then of course the environment's involved there.
When people band together like this they can become a powerful
force; so this would be an example of
deputizing people into a cause.
Another thing that they talked about doing there was to take
the Sheridan Expressway, which was an underutilized
expressway in New York, and decommissioning it,
so shutting it down, tearing parts of it down,
reconnecting neighborhoods that previously had been divided by
this expressway, and use it to create park
space, open space and green space for people.
Now that's a pretty bold idea, isn't it?
Decommissioning a whole freeway, tearing some of it down
and using it for things, but that's what they're working
to accomplish as part of The Sustainable South Bronx,
so very impressive.
Here's another picture of Majora Carter.
The picture's a little dim but I think the second person from
the left is Mayor Bloomberg, and a number of other officials
there who are breaking ground for one of the projects as part
of The Sustainable South Bronx.
So another example of somebody making a real difference;
again, made possible by the inspiration of one person.
You've seen these examples; you've seen The Yale
Sustainable Food Program, CitySeed, the Alice Waters,
the Edible Schoolyard, Jaime Oliver,
and now The Sustainable South Bronx.
All examples of projects that have become nationally famous,
internationally known, have become examples for other
people making change--all made possible by one person.
None of those people is different than you.
Now some of you will be passionate about this food issue
and others won't.
But for those who are you really can make a difference.
This shows that you can create change from the top-down;
you can work with institutions, with government to try to
create changes.
You can work from the bottom-up or from the grass roots up in
order to create change and both are necessary.
Real social change happens when these two things are happening
in sync, and then they meet in the middle.
It's almost like when the railroads were built in the
U.S., they started from the east,
built toward the Midwest, started from the west,
built toward the Midwest, and then they met up.
That's similar to what's happening now with the food
arena.
You see many examples of action that have happened at both the
national level and at local levels that are making a big
difference.
Both are important, both can be effective,
both have to come together to do this.
There are some challenges to making these local changes,
and you can see some of them listed here.
They tend to rely on precarious funding, and they all need a
more reliable source of funding.
They tend to be understaffed because they don't have enough
funding, and therefore, have to rely on volunteers.
Now thankfully, there's a large group of very
committed volunteers who work on these things,
and those people can make a big difference.
The third bullet point there: they tend not to connect with
science, and then that connects with a
fourth bullet point: is they just don't tend to get
evaluated very well.
They look good, they appear to be having a
positive impact; but without a thorough
evaluation you don't really know.
That's why connecting science with some of these existing
programs is, I think, a very, very good thing to do.
Then another limitation is that in each of these community
programs, they tend to do a lot of things
altogether and you don't really know what--in that constellation
of activities works, and is having most impact.
The beauty of science is to be able to disengage,
disentangle rather, a variety of things and see
what might be most effective.
One very important role scientists can play in this
whole picture is to help evaluate the impact of these
local programs.
Now, I'm going to show you a series of about five slides with
a ton of things that are going to be resources for you to refer
back to in the future if you wish.
I've collected a variety of websites that I thought would be
helpful for you guys to see if you'd like to pursue any of
these topics.
As you can see, there are some things about
CitySeed up there; The Food Trust is a very active
group in Philadelphia.
If any of you are from the Philadelphia area,
or would be there in the summer and could volunteer or do some
even paid work with The Food Trust that would be a terrific
place, because they're doing a variety
of programs in Philadelphia.
Websites for The Edible Schoolyard, Sustainable South
Bronx, and then a variety of other places as well.
The Leopold Center is interesting.
It's at Iowa State University and was one of the early centers
for sustainable agriculture.
It's named after a very inspired person named Aldo
Leopold who graduated from Yale.
Not as an undergraduate, I believe,
but in the School of Forestry, an environmental scientist,
and was known as one of the first pioneers to deal with
sustainable agriculture.
Then you see some other things here that are interesting and
around the country having to do with sustainability,
healthy food in the community, and the like.
There are a variety of other resources that are available.
Looking at nutrition advocacy and child marketing,
the things in the New Haven area that I mentioned before,
all resources if you'd like to follow up on those;
things that are dealing with obesity, public health and
advocacy, hunger and food security.
Then a variety of places that deal with food and
sustainability.
Again, not expecting any of you to go to these websites,
but if you're especially interested and you'd like to get
more information, they're all there.
Let's go back to our original slide and look at what has to be
done.
If you look at the people that I talked about,
so Alice Waters today, Jaime Oliver,
and Majora Carter--all effective people that made a
difference.
All these things came into place.
Unfortunately, science is really the last part
of the picture, and I think it's now being
brought to bear on these sorts of things.
It would be nice if science got involved in this process
earlier, but all these other things have
happened and that's what's made these things possible.
I'd like to end with two quotes, one from Gandhi and one
from Margaret Mead, to talk about what it takes to
make a difference.
Before I do that I'd like just to summarize to some extent what
the whole semester has been about,
and what my aim was in bringing this course to you guys.
One was to sort of show that the world of food is incredibly
interesting, complex, and it has economic,
political ramifications.
Biology is a player, psychology is a player;
all these things come into play whenever somebody makes a
decision about what to eat.
One person reaches for one food; another person reaches for
another food; why?
What's going on?
Well, I hope you have some appreciation for the breadth of
factors that addressed those issues.
I hope you also have some appreciation for food victories
and food failures.
On the food victories part we've helped address the world's
hunger problem, but not totally.
One of the failures is that hunger still exists with many,
many millions of people affected.
Obesity is a food failure; food insecurity is a food
failure; the fact that some people in
the United States don't have enough to eat or don't have
access to the right foods is a food failure.
There's a lot we have to do, but there have been some
successes.
Most people in our country and around the world in fact,
don't make a connection between the food they eat and the
environment that they're exposed to.
That's why we had such a heavy focus here on the impact of
modern food production on water resources,
fossil fuel depletion, biodiversity--all those sorts
of things.
My guess, although I don't really know this to be the case,
is that the public is rapidly becoming aware of these things.
People are becoming more aware of and concerned about the
energy costs and the climate change costs of the food choices
they make.
I think this is going to present a big problem for the
food industry that they're not wise to yet.
Now they may be thinking about it, but I haven't seen much
evidence that there's anything going on.
We talked about the concept of food miles.
My guess is that more and more consumers are going to be
concerned about food miles, looking at where their food
comes from.
As this happens and the food industry hasn't adjusted to
delivering more local food, they're going to have a
commercial problem on their hands,
but again that's just my prediction.
We've talked about heavily influenced people are by the
food environment, by the environment they're
exposed to.
Food marketing is a big issue, especially directed at kids.
Brian Wansink talked about the number of factors in our
environment, size of plates,
the shape of glasses, how big the portions are people
are served having a big influence on what they eat.
Marlene Schwartz talked about the food in schools;
Rogan Kersch talked about the variety of political things that
affect food.
It's amazing how broad this area is and how many factors are
influencing what people eat.
I also hope that you come away with the appreciation of how
important these things are to health and human well-being.
The vast numbers--I mean everybody is affected by food,
of course, but vast, vast numbers of people are
affected by the food failures that we discussed.
In order to address these things, we need vision,
commitment, we need political change, economic change,
corporate change, government change.
All these things have to happen.
You guys are going to be in a position to change it;
every one of you will be able to change it one way or another,
if you choose to do it.
Some of you will end up in law, law is a big player here;
some of you will end up in government;
some in science; some in a variety of things.
Each of these areas has a way to contribute to this as you've
seen during the class.
If you look at me, a person with a background in
psychology and public health, and then the other speakers who
come along, what kind of backgrounds did
they have?
Rogan Kersch in political science;
Derek Yach from PepsiCo was an epidemiologist to begin with and
a physician; Stephen Teret, a lawyer;
all these people are having a big impact.
Brian Wansink, a person with a background in
business and marketing, all these people are having an
impact, so there's something that can
be done from a lot of different perspectives angling in on this
one thing, which has impacted change.
You guys, if you choose to, can make a big difference.
I hope these two quotes that I'm going to leave you with
today inspire you as they do me.
One is this, this is a quote from Gandhi
that talks about a series of steps that occur as a country
might be approaching political freedom,
and he talks about what the enemies do who are fighting
freedom and he says this, "That the first step is
first they ignore, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, and then you win."
Now the interesting thing about that is--now we're talking about
food, and that doesn't seem so
important compared to the freedom of a whole country like
India in this case, but these same steps apply.
You first talk about what--how the food industry and the people
in government who favor the food industry responded when all
these concerns first started getting raised,
there was no threat so they ignored it in the beginning.
Then there was the laughing, the lampooning and things like
that.
I have a whole series of things I could show you,
where I've been lampooned in various publications,
editorial in The Wall Street Journal,
a variety of places like that, that have sort of laughed at
the whole thing in the beginning.
Then, the threat became apparent.
Then the people who were favoring the status quo and not
wanting change felt like they had to fight.
That's the stage we're in now, and to some extent some of the
victories are starting to occur.
The moral here is keep going.
If you feel you're right and you're passionate about a topic,
whatever it happens to be and whatever position you embrace on
this, keep at it, keep at it,
and then keep at it some more because you might be plodding
through some of these stages.
Then the last quote that I'll give you is from Margaret Mead,
a famous sociologist who talked about whether one person or a
small group can make a difference and she says,
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world;
indeed, it's the only thing that ever does."
Good luck with the final on Wednesday;
we'll see you guys then.