anamariazabala
Registered: September 2015
City/Town/Province: Bogota
Posts: 1
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Good, Clean and Fair Food
Ana María Zabala
Rochester School, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia
This project called Good, Clean and Fair Food has the objective of promoting a school community that is able to understand how our food choices affect the world around us in social, economical, environmental and health aspects.. Also, highlight the importance of sustainable agriculture; promote and support it through our food suppliers and education.
The principles are based on Slow Food’s manifesto for quality:
GOOD: quality, flavorsome and healthy food.
CLEAN: production that does not harm the environment.
FAIR: accessible prices for consumers and fair conditions and pay for producers.
I designed a booklet, which proposed a rainbow diet as a way to implement the concept of Good, Clean and Fair food in our daily lives. By including a variety of colors in our diet, we can ensure the enjoyment of a varied nutritional substances. The advice is to eat a rainbow everyday; a Good, Clean and Fair rainbow. Also, I included a sustainable and urban agriculture guide on how to grow a variety of edible colorful plants, and a rainbow recipe that rescues traditions.
I hosted a rainbow Eat-in with other students. An Eat-in is a call to the generation inheriting our food system; a communal dinner in which every attendee cooks something from scratch and shares it. Everyone chose a color of the rainbow and cooked something of the same color. We celebrated food and the value of the cultural and social bonds that thoughtful and healthy eating creates.
In December, I brought the local farmer’s market to school. This market is the first Earth Market in Colombia from Slow Food, an international, non profit, founded to counteract fast food and fast life. With this activity, I gave the opportunity to consumers to shake hands with the people who feed them. The booklets mentioned above were handed out to different members of the school community.
On “Family Day”, the School Environmental and Social Committee, received donations. As a symbolic thank you, donors could take compost made in our school, seedlings to start their own garden, or trees. Many of them felt motivated to start their own gardening project!
I did a Food is Free activity as well, which was about community building through sharing food grown in the school's garden with families that attended a christmas event. This challenges the paradigm of food as a mere product. Food entails several interconnections and interactions between human beings that conform communities. Therefore, food can be shared, for it is not only a commodity that we can acquire with capital.
I organized a student fieldtrip to an organic farm called Frutos Utopía by a network of farmers called Familia de la Tierra. This network of farmers received the award to “Innovation in the linking of sustainable agricultural practices with the market” given by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. We learnt about fertilization, soil, urban agriculture, the food system’s deficiencies and how to change it through our daily life choices. With the collaboration of food services, we took their organic, heirloom potatoes to the cafeteria.
I encouraged the involvement of students in gardening activities at school. I had conversations with the sustainability director, Jorge Quintero, in which we decided that the garden will be maintained only by students. I was given the opportunity by Mr. Quintero to define the sustainability guidelines for choosing the school’s food suppliers. Good, Clean and Fair were the criteria I chose.
Based on my experience with this project, I can say that engaging in activities such as the ones I explained above, I came to the realization that human beings respond to a message in the same way it is being delivered. If the message is negative, people will have a negative attitude towards it. Getting to that conclusion is incredibly useful, specially when one is trying to advocate for environmental and social justice.
In this endeavor, one should not focus its messages on the problems. Instead, one’s messages should be of solutions! Of course, the problems should be mentioned or else, these solutions would not make any sense. This project is a remarkably positive message because it is all about solutions every human being can implement in his/her daily life since it is about improving food choices in order to demand a more just and environmentally & socially responsible food system, which is the foundation of any society.
So, how is a community benefited by understanding the link between food & sustainable agriculture and a commitment to our country, our health and the environment? Eating is a pleasure shared by every human being! When people have Good, Clean and Fair Food, this pleasure only becomes more enjoyable. It even has a literal sense: nutritious and healthy food is richer in taste. Hence, being a systemic citizen becomes undeniably gratifying. That way, people are enthusiastic about making responsible choices for our environment and society, and I witnessed it when implementing the activities of this project.
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