Keynote Speech: Northeast Real Food Summit 2007

Anim Steel, Director of National Programs, spoke at the Real Food Summit at Yale University.  This meeting was the first one in the Northeast and it was sponsored by The Food Project, Yale Sustainable Food Project and Brown’s Sustainable Food Initiative.

This speech was a keynote address at the November conference.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

My main job is to talk about The Real Food Challenge, the national campaign that this conference is associated with…and I’m going to do that.  

But I want to start by putting it in context…to share with you what I think the deep meaning of it and of our gathering is. I want to build on what Josh has already done and try to situate us historically—how what we are doing fits into a long view of the past and future.

What came to mind when I thought about how to do this was a mental journey—a journey that would take us through three doors…three doors separated by time and space.  Each of these three doors represents a different insight into our work.

I'll admit up front that I am going to be making some links that are new for me…that are pushing the envelope of my own thoughts and maybe yours as well.  I hope you will receive it in the spirit of pushing the kind of conversation and debate that Josh called for.
 

First door

For the first door, I am going to try to describe it in a way that will allow you to really picture it…to feel, as much as possible, like you are standing right in front of it.  So feel free to close your eyes.

Imagine that you are in room.  It’s about 30 x 30 feet.  The floor is stone; the walls and ceiling are a mix of stone and cement and they are a little damp, although it is hard to see any of that because the room is absolutely dark…pitch black except for the light that comes in from a low arched doorway in one wall…in whose frame is silhouetted an iron gate.

If you face the doorway long enough and your eyes adjust, you can see a narrow stretch of beach and the blue and grey of the ocean beyond.

This is the Door of No Return.  It is the last part of Africa you would pass through if you were a slave being led from the Elmina Fort [in modern Ghana] to a waiting ship.  

I stood in front of this door last summer when I was visiting my family in Ghana.  It was the second time I was there.  The first time I visited it, more than 10 years ago, I remember being filled—haunted, really--with the awareness of suffering.  Millions of human beings passed through that doorway on their way to either a wretched death or a brutal life in the New World.

This last time, back in July, I still felt heavy with the presence of suffering.  But I had another feeling—another awareness, shaped by my experience at The Food Project.  It was the recognition that the engine behind this suffering was agriculture.  Or to be more specific--  a particular kind of agriculture; not the agriculture you practice on your college farm or what we do at The Food Project.   This is the agriculture of greed on a global scale: slaves passing through this door were headed for plantations stretching from Buenos Aires to Baltimore.  where they harvested vast mono-crops of sugar for British tea, rice for the West Indies, and cotton for the textile mills right here in New England.  

We know, as Josh said, that our modern food system was born in the last 60 years or so, when we get chemical pesticides and refrigerated trucks, etc.  But if you want to point to the place where our modern food system was conceived, you might just point to this very spot, this door. Because in this spot, you have the purest expression of the worst values that underpin our system.  It’s a value system which:
-    Which holds profit above people
-    Which separates food from community; and makes it a commodity
-    Which treats land as just another lever in a machine to make money

I should be clear: the modern food system may also have some values which we might embrace: a premium on abundance, for instance.  Human beings have worked hard to create abundance for as long as we have practiced agriculture.  But there’s no denying—especially in light of today’s panel when the “bottom line” came up so frequently—that the three values I mentioned, along with their negative impacts, are core to our system.

So when we look through this Door, we are not looking out at the story of one people—the African Diaspora—we’re looking out at all of our stories…at how the world as we know it came to be. This door represents what’s we’re up against: a massive food system and global economy 500 years in the making—with all that it has given us and all that, tragically, it has taken away.

The Second Door

The second door is a wooden door outside a printer’s shop in London.  It’s also a real door: at 2 George Yard.  If you were standing outside of it in one morning in 1787, you would have seen 12 men, mostly Quakers, go inside for a meeting.  That meeting was the beginning of the British Anti-Slavery Society, and the very first citizen’s campaign of its kind.  In about 40 years this movement managed to do what would have been unthinkable to most people at the time: abolish slavery in all of the British Empire.

I won’t say much more about it, because there’s an excellent book on the subject that I recommend to everyone: Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empires Slaves by Adam Hochshild. [One of the many great things about it is that it tells the story not just from the point of view of British abolitionists but also of the slaves themselves who fought for their own freedom.]So just two points:

First: In light of the CIW presentation tomorrow, it is interesting to note that the first human rights movement in history was also a food campaign (with the boycott of slave-produced sugar).  And, as I imagine we will hear more about tomorrow, the current food movement is also a human rights campaign.

Second: There is nothing purely new. This anti-slavery campaign set the model for what we are attempting to do. All of the techniques of modern campaigns (petitions, book tours, boycotts, etc) were invented here. We all drink from wells we didn’t dig and walk on roads that others have paved. This summit itself is built on the work that many other people and organizations, such as Equal Exchange and Slow Food, have done.

This second door represents [something that could be cliché  if it weren’t so demonstrably true:] [the incredible, hopeful, and demonstrable truth] the possibility that a small group of committed people can, in fact, change the world.

The Third Door
 
The third door is the one that all of us passed through this evening to come into this room.  This door represents the possibility that this very group of people here in this room can, in fact, change the world.

How can we say that?  

• We can start with our spending power—or the spending power of the institutions that we represent.  Add up all of the food budgets at our schools, then add in the budgets of all the other colleges and universities in the country.  That’s over $4 billion.  What if we could direct all of that toward small, local farmers, to organic food, to fairly traded products and humanely raised meat?

• Let’s answer the question by looking at just one of the thousand+ plus food items a school has to purchase: coffee. [Something very few of you consume, but still…]  There are 25 million coffee farmers in the world, most in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, mostly poor, small scale farmers.  If 25 million coffee producers received a fair enough price for their goods that they could afford to send their children to school…or build clinics in their towns.

• So there’s lots of ways to think about potential.  I’ll name just one more: 17 million people are enrolled in higher education in the U.S.  What if all of those people--future parents, doctors, teachers, CEOs, Navy officers, filmmakers, voters—had the chance to work on a college farm?  Or simply graduated knowing that eating is an agricultural act..that their food choices matter….to farmers, to the climate, to the soil?

When you think about these possibilities, it’s hard NOT to come to the conclusion that students are uniquely positioned to affect change—both in terms of dollars and in terms of the consciousness of the nation.  

So there’s not much question about potential.  The real question is, how do we actually live up to that potential.  How do we go from the incredible, pioneering work that you all are doing to large-scale change?  Exactly how is it that we can become more than the sum of our parts?  What will it take?

That’s the question behind the creation of Real Food Challenge.  What will it take?

We’ve mentioned many things already: gatherings like this, sharing resources and strategies, debate.  So I won’t go into those.  But I will mention a couple other things.
Systems thinking and clear goals…

1. System-thinking.   If we take a 30,000 foot view of college food—looking at all the cafeterias—we can see that students are the only group that isn’t organized at a systems level.  Everyone else is.  The food service companies certainly are: Sodexho, Aramark, Bon Appetit and anyone else  that supplies food to campuses think about it as one market or industry.  College presidents and administrators regularly talk to their peers and compare themselves to other institutions.  Dining services directors belong to a trade association.  [I used to work in college admissions…you might be surprised to learn how much we collaborated with other schools]  Students—for understandable reasons—tend to focus just on their campus, their particular issue, and their relatively short time frame. But if students really want their interests represented, we’ve got to develop a systems consciousness.  And I think that’s starting with this gathering.
    
2. Clear Goals:  Along with that, I submit to you that it will take clearer goals—in specific, a well-articulated collective goal. To make change over the long term, it helps to have a target.  To keep our eyes on the prize, we’ve actually got to know what the prize is.  I think the people at the Campus Climate Challenge have already figured this out.  Let me offer one way we can think about that:

Take the $4 billion system we are a part of.  In a given time period, say 10 years, how much of that $4 billion do you think we could shift away from the mainstream system toward local, organic, fair? Towards real food?  10 percent? 20 percent? 25?  25% would be $1 billion.  I don’t know myself, but that is one of the things we need to figure out.  For the time being, in the grant proposals we are writing, we are choosing to describe our 10 year goal as 20 percent of the total budget. Why 20 percent? There’s a number of reasons, but one is that 20 percent represents a point at which you have gotten beyond the early adopters (in marketing terms)…you need to get to 20 percent if you are hoping to ever get to a tipping point.

So far this is conversation has been among a group of people who have happened to see each other often at conferences and other gatherings.  In April, we formed a Design Team.  That group includes: The Food Project, CSSC, Slow Food, CFSC, ISU, USFT. Brown, Yale.  John Turenne.  UNH.  Many people are here and you should know who they are so that you can ask questions.  [Please raise your hands]

I’ve told you where the conversation started, but probably the most important thing I should say is that it shouldn’t end there.  That’s not enough.  Because if it is to succeed, it has to be co-created by all of us.  There is no other way.  In the Northeast, we have a special opportunity to lead the way.  There is no other region besides California that is meeting in this way.

Last thing I was to say about Real Food Challenge is about meaning of words “real food.”  It was chosen for a reason.  There is a reason that it’s not called the Local Food Challenge or the Fair Food Challenge or even the Slow Food Challenge.  Real Food, like the real food challenge itself, is not meant to replace all the efforts that already exist.  It’s meant to provide them—us—a common ground for dialogue and collective action.

To conclude, I want to re-visit something I said earlier and close the loop.  I claimed the we here in this room have the potential to change the world.  To make plain the logic behind this: students are uniquely positioned to affect the food system, which itself affects so much in this world.  I see this campaign as part of a generational battle to take the best of what we’ve inherited and to change the worst.

Through our efforts, I believe we are creating a world that balances:
It’s a world that balances:
-profit and people
-local and global
-progress and tradition.

What’s more, we will foster a social culture that reflects our agriculture:
 -where diversity is strength
-where young and old work together
-where both interdependence and self-reliance are valued

At heart, these are the things we stand for.  It’s helpful to know that while our movement is young, its roots are old—they stem from the deepest truths of nature and the best aspects of human nature.

I’ve talked a lot about doors.  It’s my belief that if we take up the challenge in front of us, and are creative and committed enough in working together…Someday, 10 years from now…20 years, perhaps 50 or even 500 years from now, other people will point to that door and say that what those people did—then and there—what they did mattered.