An Awesome Author Visit

An Awesome Author Visit

For a bona fide book geek like your humble reviewer, very few
thrills can top real life author visits. My sustainability class was
very fortunate this week because Dr. Miriam Nelson came to UMaine to
talk to us. After giving a lecture, she was gracious enough to stay
for a spur-of-the-moment small group discussion.
Dr. Nelson is the author of a series of health and fitness books
for strong women. (Note to self--over Christmas break read and review
at least one!) She has accomplished a great deal more than seems (at
least to me) humanly possible. (She is also one of the nicest people
you could hope to meet.) She currently is the director of the
Sustainability Institute and deputy chief sustainability officer at
University of New Hampshire.
Dr. Nelson's talk, The Sustainable Plate, was based on her
serving on the 2010 and 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee for
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She gave insight
(some of which was quite scary) into the procedures that agency uses
and the thwarted attempt to get sustainability into the 2015 guidelines.
The concept of food security centers around people having
sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. Sustainability adds a mandate
for stewardship. Food must be produced in ways that allow for best
practices decades and centuries in the future. This will require
current far-from-best practices to be scrutinized and changed a lot.
Current unsustainable food production practices are responsible for
80% of deforestation, 70% of fresh water use, and 30% of greenhouse
gases. They are also the greatest cause of biodiversity loss. This
is not exactly something to be proud of.
Including sustainability in the guidelines would have would have
been a good way because of the sheer volume of people who participate
in school lunches, WIC, and SNAP. For awhile it looked like this
could actually happen. Eighty percent of public comment was
favorable. There was an unprecedented amount of press coverage.
Campaigns like My Plate, My Planet were popular. Then food industry
people (I suspect many were from the industry that would have a beef
with cutting down on red meat consumption) began discrediting
scientists, questioning science, and defecting issues. So they won out.
Dr. Nelson believes that food has become too cheap. We do not
value it. We pay nowhere near the cost of producing it. Rather than a
food utopia, this has created a race to the bottom and a rapidly
widening gap between haves and have nots. The cost cutting side has
led to many dubious, unsafe, and very unsustainable practices.
Perhaps the cruelest cost is the human one. The hands on laborers--
migrant farmers, butchers on speeded up cutting-up-huge-animals lines,
waitpeople, cashiers--are too often underpaid and made to endure
hazardous working conditions. Wholesome food is more expensive than
expensive stuff. How can a parent who can barely afford a generic box
of macaroni and cheese to feed the family give a child an apple? Food
deserts are legion and in many more places than one would suspect.
Veazie, where I reside, is, for the most part, a prosperous
municipality. Food establishments consist of a Tradewinds convenience
store, a pricey restaurant, and a gluten free bakery. For people
without cars, feeding a family would require multiple lengthy weekly
trips involving bus transfers and pedestrian unfriendly destinations--
daunting enough for able bodied, solo travellers, never mind those
with wheelchairs, walkers, or several young children.
There were three things in particular that I found inspiring in
what Dr. Nelson had to say.
The first was that, unlike so many people who preach to the
relatively privileged choir (Buy from farmers' markets), she takes all
the people, including many most of us don't think about, into
consideration. Front line food workers must have decent pay and safe
working conditions. All people must have a liveable wage that gives
them and their families food security.
The second was that we must acknowledge the complexity of humans
(including ourselves) in regard to food. We rely on and value
cultural customs. We operate on emotion as well as cognition. (Oreos
are nutritional disasters, but I enjoy them because they elicit warm
memories of sharing them with my children). Not acknowledging this
complexity limits our ability to understand and communicate with
others with differing perspectives.
The third was that sustainability will be challenging, but not
impossible to achieve. Dr. Nelson gave us some examples of how some
universities are doing some amazing work to meet high sustainablity
standards. There is so much the rest of us can learn from them.
Making our food system sustainable is one of the most important
challenges of the 21st century. I urge you, dear readers, to join me
in doing our part. Let's all be food warriors!
On a personal note, I am loving being back in school. I believe with
all my heart, now that my wonderful children are on their own, this is
where I belong. I have a lot to learn and a lot to offer.
A great big shout out goes out to all who are working to make our
plates and world more sustainable.
jules hathaway


Sent from my iPod