Today's INSPIRATION: Meals with Dignity out of Homelessness

This Sunday morning I awoke at 6:00 am. Yes, it was early. But not that bad, considering that by 9:00 I'd done a good deed for the week and already felt like I'd made something of my day. I hopped on my bike, rode about a mile south of my house to Uptown, and cooked breakfast for the homeless.

We're not talking soup-kitchen style volunteering, though. Oh no. Far better! This was at the Inspiration Cafe. I've long volunteered here, since the days I was 16 and seeking community service hours in high school. At the time, Inspiration was run out of a basement, a shoe-string budget, and was serving about 30 people. It was still a big step up from their roots, in 1989, serving meals out of a red wagon. These days, it is a vibrant non-profit, which continues doing great work. They have a full open-to-the-public restaurant, culinary training courses for its clients, catering, and are even selling aprons and locally-roasted fair-trade organic coffee over the internet.

The basic idea: the homeless/mentally ill/ unemployed/ recovering substance abusers deserve dignity. Getting out of these tough situations is not just about getting free meals, as most soup kitchens or shelters would have it. Instead, Inspiration thinks about it as a question of developing healthy human interactions, by being treated with respect and dignity. Giving people contact with case workers, and offering free food to people who have a commitment to improving their conditions, is a great way to start. When you throw a little job training, life-skills training, and case-worker support into the picture, things start to change, bit by bit.

This morning made me think a lot about the power of food - especially in restaurant settings. It helped me think about some of the basic components of dignity in those situations- that you can send something back if you're dissatisfied, you are entitled to be particular about how you want your eggs, and to be able to have blueberries in your fruit salad and whole-grain fresh bread even if the food is free, and you're unemployed or homeless. I was reminded that getting better at treating yourself with respect and getting treated with respect by other people is probably one of the biggest ways to 'do something good.' The acts of dining and of cooking are essential to how it begins - you draw people in with food - and through the simple act of doing something both simple and creative, get a hook which seems to work pretty well at making situations better for people.

Special thanks to Willy, Dan, and my dad Stan for all the smiles and jokes as we scrambled eggs, cooked the bacon, and made those hash browns!

They said it better (in 1995)

I just discovered a pretty fantastic little online resource for issues relating to urban greening, intentional living, all-things-sustainable... In Context (a quarterly journal of humane, sustainable culture) - they have a whole issue (from 1995, but still totally relevant) which includes an interview with David Orr, writings of Wes Jackson, a piece on worms treating sewage, CSA's, food systems, living machines, waste - to - food... the issue is well worth reading. Check it out.

On the margins of the food crisis

There is an interesting piece out that makes me think a lot about our food case study in Langa, Cape Town that I just ran across. Bushmeat should be included in how we think about food security issues, it argues. Check it out.
The point is made that bushmeat stocks are running low, and are directly related to biodiversity questions. And it calls on us to consider how meat consumption in cities is also persisting in illegality and un-monitored food systems.

Also, thanks to Jody for this fact sheet on the health benefits of urban agriculture which I just read. Good stuff there too, courtesy of the folks at www.foodsecurity.org.

More later. For now, I'm off for my second round of raspberry picking in this gorgeous New Hampshire setting from which I am blogging!

A Food Security Look at Northeast IL

This past week the New York Times featured a story on buying shares of local farms, highlighting Erewon farm and mentioning Angelic Organics right here in Chicagoland (the latter of which is owned by my pal, Farmer John).

To many of us, supporting local farmers is nothing new - we call it CSA's (community supported agriculture). Here in the midwest, CSA's are a good and growing business, the story said. It also quoted the price for average farm vegetable shares as between $300 and $900 a season. In my experience, this is a fair estimate. But it's unfortunate that it's so damn expensive, and we should talk about what makes it that way. And what the larger social effects are.

Buying CSA shares, in my opinion, should be something we all can afford, right? Shouldn't the price of locally grown vegetables be cheaper, in most parts of the nation, than those shipped or trucked from afar? Intuition says yes, but practice says no. The fact of the matter is the poor still eat cheap, junky fast food and shop at bodegas without many healthy and environmentally friendly options, while the wealthier among us pat ourselves on the back about eating organic and keeping family farms alive in the US.

The folks talking most about these inequities call this issue food security (the Wikipedia entry really is comprehensive and very straightforward). The Canadians have a pretty good scholarly overview about it here.

A study came out this past week about food security, especially relating to questions of access - right here in Northeastern Illinois. It's a very comprehensive piece of work, with great maps, and some very nice mix qualitative and quantitative analytical methods. Check it out.

What reports like this tell us, that is really news worthy, is that things like food co-ops, farmer's markets, and community-supported agriculture should be more actively pursued, but they're only part of the story. We also need to get people's transportation to and from supermarkets to improve. And to improve supermarkets' stocks themselves. And work with under-served communities, in this case especially African-American communities and suburban communities. And to help strengthen food banks and depositories' quantity and quality of offerings. Plus, people need to develop the basic skills of budgeting for food and meal-planning to add more stability to their families' nutritional health. These are some big shifts, and with a lot less sex-appeal than talking about buying shares from our local farmers. But they are crucial changes we need to make in order to not just have quality food access be only for the wealthy. These shifts speak to the larger systematic changes we need to do a better job of making food a part of how we think about justice, equity and the environment.