FOOD: A Basic Issue For Everyone

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The Community Food Security Movement
A Report by Christine Ahn

Junk Food or Just Food? Feeding Our Children
As Ahmadi says, the community food security movement is about organizing, and the community doesn't stop at the school gates.

In 1997, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District became the first to stock fresh produce from a farmers' market in the salad bars of all its nine schools. Over 700 school districts across America now participate in farm-to-school programs, and the trend is spreading to universities and other public institutions, including the Connecticut Department of Corrections.

Since 1999, the Berkeley Unified School District has purchased from local farmers to feed its 10,000 students. Berkeley also serves fresh food in its cafeterias through school gardens, such as the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School's Edible Schoolyard, founded by Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters.

In Los Angeles, the organizing efforts of students, parents, and teachers resulted in a ban on sales of soda and junk food in cafeterias and student stores throughout the school district. Other districts are considering such a ban. This organizing is in response to an estimate that one-third of our nation's 23,000 public schools sell fast food to students, often because tight food budgets lead administrators to resort to cheap, highly processed food.

In Los Angeles--which serves fast food to its students--75 percent of students participate in the USDA's National School Lunch Program, which reimburses L.A. schools approximately $33 million per year, thereby subsidizing the sale of fast food to children.

Since school breakfast and lunch are often the only meals low income children get all day, the impact on the health of poor students is potentially disastrous. As fifteen-year-old Rosa Villar, a Los Angeles high school student, put it, "If schools are responsible for teaching kids to say no to drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, then why don't they tell kids to say no to fast food?"

Clearly, change is needed on a large scale, including at the level of the National School Lunch Program. Groups within the movement have successfully pressed for national legislation, such as the Community Food Security Act of the 1996 Farm Bill, authorizing $16 million in USDA-funded grants over seven years to support projects that provide fresher, more nutritious food in poor neighborhoods and help communities meet their own food needs.

School Lunch

Advocates succeeded in doubling this amount in the 2002 Farm Bill. They are now pressing for federal funds to assist schools with the extra costs of purchasing directly from local farmers and for transit programs and distribution centers to improve food access in both urban and rural low income communities.

The Way Forward
Organizing around food is often a catalyst for addressing broader social and economic justice issues, such as access to affordable housing and public transportation. The proliferation of local food projects, farmers' markets, CSAs, farm-to-school programs, and progressive public policies aimed at both supplying wholesome food to all and stemming the loss of family farms should restore hope that, as Andy Fisher says, "another food system is possible."

These stories do not just describe isolated pockets of change. The fusing of the community food security and justice movement with the movement challenging globalization and corporate hegemony could spell the beginning of the end of the industrial food system.

Christine Ahn is Program Coordinator at Food First.

© Christine Ahn. All rights reserved.

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