Monkey Monday: coming up for air edition 14 December 2009 8:08 am
Posted by Tracy in : events,fangirl,geekery,health at every size,Marion Nestle,news,nyc,politics,school,sustainability,video,work,writing , trackbackHey, so it’s finals week from now until my last paper is due on the 23rd (which is an awful deadline and I sincerely hope to be done before then) and in the meantime I’ve been a big slacker which is why I haven’t posted and blah blah blah excuses excuses. Last week was ten thousand kinds of awesome, though.
On Monday morning, I went to an awesome event at The New School, celebrating the NYC FRESH initiative, which had not yet officially passed City Council, although it did on Wednesday. FRESH is Food Retail Expansion to Support Health, and it’s a mix of zoning and tax incentives for full-service grocery stores in certain underserved neighborhoods (Northern Manhattan, the South Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens). Not only must the stores devote a certain amount of square footage to fresh produce and other whole foods, they are required to accept EBT and WIC (which is really only common sense if they’re actually going to serve the lower-income communities that food retailers often avoid) and publically, transparently commit to good labor practices, so that people who work at those stores can afford to shop there. So awesome. And totally appropriate to my final paper for Marion Nestle’s Food Sociology (food and social movements) class this term — my new working title is “When Social Movements Converge: Health, Environmental, Labor, Economic, and Food Justice Advocates and the NYC FRESH Initiative.”
Also there were speeches by Dan “Blue Hill” Barber and NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who announced FoodWorks New York, a new long-term food policy project for the city. You can read the New York Times coverage of the event or just watch her speech, here:
I was sitting a bit to the left of this camera’s viewpoint, but darn near this close.
Also I finally met Bob Lewis of the New York State Department of Agriculture (sadly, I don’t think the video includes the part of the speech where Speaker Quinn called him “the Energizer Bunny” of New York state food politics) and Barry Dinerstein of City Planning. (I’ve seen both other NYC food politics events, but I must be getting to feel at home in this crowd, because I’m not usually this schmoozy.) In general, I policy wonk fangirled all over the place, which was super-exciting and fun. Afterwards, I spent some time catching up with a classmate I hadn’t hung out with for months, went to yoga, and basically bounced through the day, right into Dr. Nestle’s sociology class, where I told everybody all about how FRESH is a great example of positive change produced by social movements rallying together under the banner of Good Food for All (as I told Twitter, I “BARELY managed not to bust out singing ‘Solidarity Forever.’”) And that was my Monday.
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On Wednesday night, I came out to my Food Policy class as an obesity panic skeptic, and apparently made a not-entirely-incoherent case for food policy based on Health At Every Size instead of scaremongering about fat, which lets junk food manufacturers claim social responsibility for coming out with low-fat, low-sugar, low-calorie, or just smaller-packaged versions of their crappy products. I barely remember a thing I said: it was at the very end of class, we were super-pressed for time, I was pretty much insane with nerves, and so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t try to draw any diagrams on the board, but yeah. Eek. Also I wasn’t feeling the healthiest (sore throaty, blah blah) but I powered through.
All things considered, I actually felt pretty good about it, even for the bit when I couldn’t get to sleep in the early hours of Thursday morning for trying to play it over again in my mind a million times. And now I’m still really proud of myself for speaking a truth I believe to a classroom full of people who’d heard at least half a dozen presentations that used “obesity” synonymously with “poor health.” I do remember saying that if we could stop using the word “obesity” and substitute “diet-related disease” then I’d be on board with pretty much all the proposals I’d heard that day. And I may never forget that I got a little bit of applause at the end of my speech — confused applause, but applause nonetheless. Phew. So now I just gotta finish the policy portfolio to goes with all those brave words I can’t remember.
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Oh! And I almost forgot. The other awesome thing I did on Wednesday, before class, and a most welcome distraction from freaking out about giving my presentation, was go to the Manhattan Borough President’s office and get briefed on taking notes on the policy breakout sessions at Saturday’s NYC Food and Climate Change Summit. Which was a fantastic event that deserves a whole post of its own, maybe several. Short summary is: it was the big, bad sequel to last year’s The Politics of Food conference at Columbia (official website and awesome reading list here). Looking over my notes and materials from the 2008 conference, and the “Food in the Public Interest” report that came out of it in February 2009, I can’t help but be amused that I went to the breakout session on “Finding Healthy Food: Supermarkets, Farmers Markets, CSA’s, and Food Deserts.” This sociology paper of mine has been a long time brewing in my brain. And now I must go back to writing it.
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http://www.sizediversityandhealth.org/ Deb Lemire
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Betty
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http://www.tracyfood.com TracyFood
