food activist

How does food connect to social justice? And what does that have to do with school lunch? This episodes looks at the connection between hunger, school lunch and food justice. Krystal Oriadha is the Senior Director of Programs and Policy for the National Farm to School Network, and served on President Barack Obama's Presidential campaign. She shares the harrowing personal stories that drove her to commit her life to social justice.             

Increasing your knowledge about food is an act of Kale Raising. What we eat affects our health, the planet and our economy. What would happen if we knew the impacts of the food we eat on our planet and on our health. Would you make a different choice if you knew? In this episode, we talk with Ken Myska, a chef who worked in elite restaurants around the country, until he woke up along his culinary career path. That awakening caused a critical shift in the way he works with food, and led to his new journey as a CheFarmer.

Raising Kale’s premier episode starts in the kitchen. Cooking is a radical act in today’s fast food world. In fact, we have two generations of Americans who do not know how to cook from scratch. If we want to improve the health of Americans, we need to learn to cook again. For the large percentage of Americans who are still learning to cook, food blogs have become as popular as ever, with over two million to choose from online. Elise Bauer is one of the most successful food bloggers in the world. In 2003 she started Simply Recipes, a site that today has thousands of recipes and more than 8 million visitors a month.

We start our food system journey looking in depth at one of the worlds most popular food blogs and learn how you can create change and raise kale in your own kitchen.

Kale Raiser: /kāl/ /ˈrāzər/ noun. A person who gets in good trouble, using food as a tool. 

Host Amber Stott speaks with Kale Raisers across the country. In Season One, we learn what a Chefarmer is, how to use breadfruit to build resilience, and how a recipe for oxtail stew turned into one of the biggest websites around!  One Kale Raiser took her experiences as a Black youth in Texas to fuel a career of raising kale. Today, she’s pressuring the federal school lunch program to create racial justice. We also talk to a guy who develops seeds for a living. He shares his mad science experiments with purple peas. His formal, lab-tested methodology for determining taste profiles? “Yuck” and “Yum”! 

Do you plant seeds? Raise kids to eat healthy? Read food labels? Eat your vegetables? Then chances are, you’re a kale raiser, too! 

What does a food activist do? To answer the question, you need to look no further than Anna Lappé. She is the founder and director of Real Food Media, a collaborative initiative that catalyzes creative storytelling and media about food, farming, and sustainability. “We work with partners across the country to really elevate the solutions that we find out there that are really transforming the food system toward greater sustainability and equity, and then we help people understand what are the real impacts that we have to worry about it, about our current foods just don't why we need such transformation” she says.

In this episode, she discusses why the food choices that are good for your body are also good for the planet, why consumer demand for meat is constructed, and why cooking a good meal at home is a good idea.

I’m not so sure that food activism in the digital age is that much different than food activism at any other time. You know, I think we know how to make transformative change. And one of the best ways to do that is through organizing and through working in one’s own community and scaling that up. So that doesn’t really change that much in the digital age. I would say one of the ways in which activism is influenced by the digital age is unfortunately how this new era has really unleashed a phenomenon of evermore fake news of the proliferation of misinformation, and of the challenges of getting our story out. -- Anna Lappe´

Some of the food activists we are interviewing on this podcast are looking to tech and apps for solutions to hunger and food insecurity. Anna is looking to education and policy changes - but in ways that may surprise you. Extended show notes at http://futurefood.fm. Follow our journey on Instagram.