Without the ability to conceive of more than one possible way that things might stand in the world, why ask a question?
—Paul Harris, Harvard child psychologist and author
Children in my 4th grade class in rural Texas searched through my big curly hair looking for horns (assuming that as a Jew, I am of Satan); the kids in the school cafeteria would go into vomit-mimicking hysterics seeing my yaprakas and chickpeas as dog food...[1]
Thirty-five years later, I was living in the outskirts of Detroit, converting a school bus to our new home, my then six-year-old son, Zazu came home from school in tears. Not because the kids teased him about being Black (he was lighter skinned than most if not all his classmates) or about being Jewish (he passed, invisible in that realm), but because I had given him sweet potatoes with peppers and turkey for his school lunch.
Seven years later, Zazu’s tears have transformed into anger and embarrassment. This time, the catalyst-culprit is millet with sprouted mung beans[2]. From the hyper urban to the hyper rural, food politics in public schools remain the same: Chemically-processed, nutritionally-deficient, and GMO food substitutes take center stage.
When I approached possible sponsors and collaborators—including the local school principals, our independent bookstore, and the food-waste solutions/ produce-gleaning organization, I repeatedly received resistance to going public with the roots of the actual problem. Nobody would associate themselves with what they deemed “anti-corporation bias.” Everybody felt too uncomfortable, perhaps even fearful, about my emphasis on how Monsanto and Nestle are strategically undermining our children’s bodily and ultimately mental well-being.
I encountered much school board, governmental, institutional, and individual resistance in allowing open discussion on food-justice/ food-security issues. I encountered tremendous fear about holding corporations accountable. This is not a partisan issue. This is not about demonizing choices or creating binaries around good and evil. Not only are concerned parents and activists faced with the challenge of overcoming school district omission of the overwhelming majority of GMO and pesticide-laced ingredients in school meals, we are silenced because our investigative approach to understanding and making public the complexity of the problem is deemed too confrontational.
Why does contestation imply divisiveness; why does testing rickety bridges imply potential divisiveness? The commonplace liberal and conservative anathema for confrontation diminishes healthy debate. Asking questions is equated with pointing fingers, blaming, and spewing negativity. Asking questions is seen as disruption, an attempt to break down our community. Why, when you question something, is it assumed that you are the “anti” of the thing you are questioning?[3] However, I persist in the vein of neurologist Ken Heilman who claims, divergent thinking is “actually a form of asking questions.”
We can and should focus on “drumming up delight for the benefits of connecting to how food grows, being on farms, cooking for each other, and enjoying the taste of a perfectly ripe peach from the orchard…making change through celebration.”[4] However, if we do not address the entangled roots of these converging crises, we will always be administering band-aids—no matter how celebratory and delightful. Again and again, protecting establishment-status quo and convenience-culture continues to take precedence over children’s physical and psychological well-being.
In my attempt to address convenience-culture-entrenched school boards and local institutions, I wrote the following:
We are Local Food Now, a cooperative of North Fork Valley[5] farmers, ranchers, teachers, students, and community members. Located in the fertile valley of Paonia, Colorado, we offer nutritional education to help prevent disease and support the health of our growing young people. Currently, much of our children's food doesn't come from the earth. Why? What is going on behind the scenes in the laboratories where “food” is manufactured? In the last decade, diabetes, obesity, allergies, and cancer rates have skyrocketed among young adults. Reminiscent of Bread & Puppet political theater, our Foodshed by creatively/ theatrically confronts this crisis by supporting hard-working farmers—our neighbors and local producers who offer us delicious, nutritious abundance.
How can we support the initiative of Colorado's Blueprint to End Hunger—specifically what they encourage in their promotional video material? They claim: "Districts can use state funds to purchase local ingredients from Colorado ranchers and farmers." “Scratch-cooking” ingredients in school meals should primarily come from local bakers, farmers and ranchers. We are a bridge between farmers, schools, and school-district mandates. As consumers become more food-safety literate, we attempt to implement state-mandated labeling laws. Because of our agricultural affluence, our North Fork Valley is the perfect community to develop this awareness and take collective action.
In addition to encouraging school districts to work with local producers, our foodshed offers “Edible Education:” educational programs that include community theater, direct-action opportunities, and parent-child/ teacher-student/ administrative-faculty & staff food-literacy workshops. Using humor, play, and investigative journalism, “Edible Education” subjects include: how to decipher food labels, challenging agribusiness that relies on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and intergenerational local-food production. Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard is the model we use to build a thriving healthy-food community.
We are committed to taking socio-political risks to show the problem as well as the “solution.”[6] Our community theater "edutainment" program focuses on generating positive relationships among schools, students, parents, the school board, and local farmers and ranchers (individual, small producers). The "health heroes" (Rachel Carson and Vandana Shiva as the narrators) and "illness villains" (distilled into Nestle & Monsanto) are created by regional and national writers, visual artists, and craft-workers—represented by paintings from Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural, climate-justice book and knitted figures made by members of our Fibershed.
See “Edible Education” video that also a three-foot mask puppet representing the idea of monoculture of the mind (Shiva’s phrase describing the poison cartel of agribusiness).
Click on the image to enlarge.
“Edible Education” is a response to interwoven crises—a three-fold strategy focusing on our body, mind, and community: 1) facilitating hands-on mentorships with local farmers, bakers, ranchers; 2) co-producing grassroots outdoor theater that addresses the intersection of food supply chain, food justice, and food security; 3) recording and producing videos of the mentorships and theater.
We help support the health of our growing young people and help prevent disease. Middle-school age kids hopefully feel empowered to care for their bodies and earth by 1) learning about food supply chains directly from their food producers; 2) learning how to creatively document, perform, and publicly represent this embodied knowledge through community theater and video production. Working with the land and elders, understanding the dangers of corporate agribusiness, and creating art that presents these relationships is the goal of our creative food-security curriculum.
This project offers an unusual intersectional opportunity to share multicultural ways of learning. It accesses multiple intelligences (kinesthetic, auditory, visual, memory, and verb learning), putting theory into practice. The integration of body, mind, and community is essential for the physical and psychological well-being of growing young people. Our project bridges these social realms through several approaches.
For example, integral to our theater and recording practice, we utilize the new field of “Hip-Hop History.” A combination of spoken word, rap, and poetry slams that uses catchy beats and rhymes, Hip-Hop History/Flocabulary presents serious social issues through a humorous, playful, creative lens. Rhythm, rhyme, and melody teach and engage students of all backgrounds and help them remember facts[7].
In an age of immediate gratification in which people of all ages “GOOGLE” every question and expect immediate answers—where “googling” is now a socially-sanctioned verb, using rhythm and rhyming disrupts this status-quo information vacuum. Using rhythm and rhyming is an incredibly motivating learning tool. Parody and parable are central to their education as youth discover their relationships to our community, and in this case, the Food and Drug Administration, genetically modified organisms, and other forms of governmental and corporate influence on our food system. These tools bring serious ideas, social issues, and history to life. They represent the tremendous importance of storytelling that can lead to individual and collective action. Studies in developmental neurology tell us one significant way teachers can encourage embodied knowledge is through music and poetry. This is the kind of healthy technology we hope to promote.
We help build community relationships by supporting local food producers and then sharing those experiences within a broader educational action-theater-based curriculum. We video record both collaborative work in the fields and the mini-theater production, and then co-edit and produce that footage to share with our extended Delta County community. Focusing on underserved youth, we hope that the edited videos weave (from techne, the root of technology) the fabric of community to not only educate intergenerational audiences but to encourage other nearby communities to initiate similar food-theater programs in the field and on stage. Once we have gained support across the county, we can propose specific and efficient school meal changes to the school board and get them onboard with our commitment to healthy food for our kids. Healthy food infrastructures and healthy technologies lead to healthy bodies and curious minds.
The Christian-based, normalized fear of asking and receiving questions is another reason why the taken-for-granted term “Judeo-Christian” is so offensively inaccurate. See my article on Embodied Sacred Activism.
[5] Paonia, Hotchkiss, and Crawford have four middle schools and one high school serving almost 4600 students. Valley Organic Growers Association and Delta County Livestock are integral to 250,000 acres dedicated to agriculture (13,000 farms-90% of which are operated by families/individuals)
Updated edition, 2024, with Foreword by Vandana Shiva
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
