The TED Prize

Yesterday my sister excitedly told me to check out the newly announced TED prize wish: Jamie Oliver, the chef, has asked:

“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.”

(The TED Prize winner gets $100,000 and a wish to change the world which TED and anyone can help fulfill.) The reason she was particularly excited was that only the previous night my mother and I had been having another impassioned discussion revisiting one of our pet wishes, approximately the same: that more people learn how to cook and eat healthy, vegetarian food, particularly vegetables and legumes. My mother and I were concerned about health, but also about the environmental and ethical implications of a diet high in meat and processed food. While Jamie wasn't particularly advocating vegetarianism, and it is possible to eat vegetarian and still eat too much fat, sugar, salt, and processed food, it is true that a diet which is high in legumes, whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables is necessarily going to have both fewer poison calories and less meat. That's better for health, better for the planet, and more compassionate. So this is a train I can happily get on. (Skip down to my first contribution: local and national resources you can support and use.) I just watched Jamie give his TED talk, it's pretty good:




He focuses on the United States partially because we are exporting our way of life, and he believes that if we make the U-Turn the world will follow. He outlines the extent to which our collective diet is poisoning us and draining us of resources. He notes how three pillars of modern American culture (Main Street, The Home, & Schools) all systematically promote this poisonous diet. His wish is that we take a similarly three-pronged approach to change society: lobbying supermarkets for better information and governments for better regulation, teaching each other to cook and reviving the culture of cooking in the home, and teaching our children about vegetables and cooking in schools.

As a former teacher I cannot agree strongly enough. Teenagers love talking about--and eating--food but most American teenagers--even the relatively prosperous, eco-aware, gourmand ones I was teaching---do not know how to cook. As a chemistry teacher I noticed that the students who knew how to cook had an immediate leg up on chemistry, a deeply helpful extra reservoir of experience and intuition to draw upon when building mental models. So just as a science educator I advocated cooking education. (I feel that gardening is a similarly vital foundation for life sciences education. I was really gratified by the successes of the gardening program, a previous incarnation of which I had worked on as a student, and have been particularly inspired by news of my former students delving into urban farming since then.) But the lack of cooking education also concerned me because I realized many students were going to go away to college without the skills to cook for themselves, and that just didn't seem right--it really felt to me like we were failing them in some crucial way. It's far too easy to load up on processed foods that are high in fat, sugar, salt and starch (Tater Tots! aiee) in cafeterias, setting up cravings that will haunt them for the rest of their life.

I had learned how to cook as soon as I could reach all the controls and my mom thought it was safe to teach me. She taught me to cook with confidence and a flair for improv, reading cookbooks for inspiration, not marching orders. Her funny mnemonics and cheerful fixing of my little errors are some of my favorite memories of being a teenager, and we still trade recipes we've made up. Watching Jamie's video, I am almost gut punched by the notion that generations of Americans have lost out on the deeply meaningful experience of learning to cook from their parents and guardians as teenagers. To me it's almost the essence of growing up. Every child should have the joy of one day cooking and feeding their parents a tasty dinner.

In terms of addressing the direction of Main Street, we can start with Jamie's petition (I've added a badge to the More Fantasticness sidebar.) Besides creating a movement building organization, Jamie made a really good point about supporting existing projects. So I thought I'd highlight some I either knew or have found, mostly local to the Oakland/Berkeley part of the Bay Area. You'll notice there's a lot of gardening mixed up with the food education below. That's because some of the best healthy-food curricula has a gardening component, and because in my experience just a little bit of contact with vegetable gardening or garden fresh produce automatically creates an appreciation for healthier meals.

Resources:

East Bay Projects

West Oakland didn't have access to fresh produce, so its residents started a cooperative grocery store, Mandela Foods. Another source of fresh produce for West Oakland's kids is the nonprofit City Slicker Farms. The Oakland Unified School District has a Garden Council that community members can get involved with to support garden-based food curriculum, and the City of Oakland has a community gardening program. Bay Localize is supporting a rooftop garden at E.C. Reems Academy of Technology and Arts in East Oakland. Helen Krayenhoff's 2010 Calendar (still 88% useful!) supports Oakland school garden programs. OUSD may have more healthy food options in its future with help from the Community Alliance with Family Farmers and the national groups Farm to School Network & School Food Focus, according to the website Oakland North. Berkeley's Ecology Center has community and school garden programs you can get involved with, and Farmer's Markets you can shop at. (There are also great farmer's markets you can shop at in Oakland & Contra Costa.) and I'm not sure what's the status of Berkeley's School Lunch Initiative, since it's first grant from the Chez Panisse Foundation apparently ran out last year (SFGate article), but I'll try to find out. UC Davis works with Alameda County to support garden-based nutrition. There's also Urban Youth Harvest in Oakland, which rescues delicious garden fruit from a rotten fate.

National Organizations

Nationally (besides ">CAFF, Farm to School Networks & School Food Focus noted above) you can support Growing Power Inc, whose founder, Will Allen, won a MacArthur Genius prize in 2008 for his vision of urban food renewal.

In my humble opinion, the easiest way to educate yourself about our crazy food system is to read about it. The godfather of food system writing is Berkeley's own Michael Pollan, who has many books on the subject. There's also Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. You can watch Supersize Me on Hulu for free. I haven't had a chance to read Raj Patel's Food Rebellions, but it looks interesting.

Cookbooks, etc.
Some of my favorite cookbooks are:
Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamuna Devi
Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking

Cooking from An Italian Garden
Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special
Everyday Greens: Homecooking from the Celebrated Vegetarian Restaurant

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
and more recently
The Complete Tassajara Cookbook
and the wonderful Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. Bittman is really great and if you haven't watched his hilarious NYTimes blog and video series Bitten/The Minimalist, you haven't lived. (Try mashed potatoes with greens or the sweet potato salad.)

Make Your Own Post Like This! Make Your Own Contribution!

If you're not in the East Bay and don't know where to start, you could probably construct a post for your own blog with links just like mine above with a little searching and calling around--try starting with farmer's markets, local university gardening extensions and local science education centers. Spread the information around to your community network and solicit support for the community groups doing the heavy lifting! Have casual dinner parties and deliberately healthy potlucks. (Spring is coming! Which means, picnics!) Spend some time with a kid who wants to learn how to cook showing them the kitchen ropes. Share recipes and patronize healthy restaurants. I for one will try to volunteer more with local organizations and share more recipes, both virtually on this blog and, more vitally, by feeding my friends. I think this is potentially the easiest TED wish I've ever thought of contributing to, and I hope you will too. (Contact TED here.) Please also send me information about any organizations you think I should update the post with.

Coolio

I cannot leave you without including the best cooking video ever: Coolio makes delicious spinach:

Bon Appetit!