How it works: You shop like any other day, EXCEPT that 5% of all sales at the two Whole Foods locations that day will go toward growing the WIC and SNAP (food stamp) programs at the 14th & U, Mount Pleasant, Bloomingdale and NoMa farmers’ markets during their 2012 season.

Learn more about the project here.

When I think about money and my childhood, I remember my parents talking about their credit card debt and being told at McDonalds that our family could not afford Happy Meals. I knew we didn’t have money for the extras like weekly trips to eat out, but it was only as a young adult that I understood just how little my parents were working with.

When I took a few classes at the local public high school, my Mom sent me to the school office to ask about Free and Reduced Lunch. I brought home the income requirements and found out that we were well within the limits for Free Lunch. Then, when my parents became pregnant with my little brother, we signed up for the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program.

Our family had just one income by choice — my father worked and my mother stayed home to raise and educate me and my siblings. Despite our economic situation, I have a lot of privilege — I have white skin, we were considered middle class because of my father’s job, and I received a fabulous education, among other things.

I’m deeply grateful for the food programs that helped stretch our budget. Thanks to the WIC program, Free Meals, and — as a recent college graduate — Food Stamps, I had a healthy, happy, parent-filled childhood, and the financial support to get started in a new city. It’s been four short years since I graduated from college and moved to DC, and I’m in a job that I love, doing good work and contributing to the tax base. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to share my privilege and help grow the investments that were made to get me where I am today.

Unfortunately, the support I received as a young adult is not guaranteed for all DC residents who need it. Funding has been cut for safety net programs like IMA Service Centers, where people apply for Food Stamps. At the same time, our income tax structure has stayed the same — the top tax bracket (8.5%) starts at $40,000/year. Save Our Safety Net and other groups are suggesting a better choice: the City Council should create a new tax bracket of 9.5% for income over $200,000. For less than the cost of a latte a day to most households in the top 5%, our city could bring in about $75 million in new revenue. If you agree that we need more investments in the safety net, take action by sending an email to Vince Gray today.

What kind of a safety net do you want to have, for yourself and your neighbors? What tax structure would help us make the public investments our city needs?

So on 10.10.10, 350 is organizing mass actions at the White House and the Washington Monument, designed to send messages to the White House and Congress, urging them to take the lead on stopping climate change.

Meanwhile, here in the District of Columbia, we are getting to work. Members of the DC Food For All are convening workdays at community garden sites across the city.

Then we’ll all join together at Bread for the City Northwest to celebrate with the Hip Hop Caucus, Roadside Organics, and Live Green. Local chefs preparing local food with local hip hop acts in the early afternoon, and a community potluck of sustainable food in the evening. Sneak previews of Bread for the City’s new facility, complete with green roof-top garden.

See the Kickstarter page for the Sustainable Food Block Party here. The event is free, but donations will go to help build Bread for the City’s new rooftop community garden.

With that announced, sign up for one of the events below!

Groundwork Anacostia invites you to the Mayfair Community Center (3744 1/2 Hayes Street N.E.), a new community garden site, where volunteers will help build build raised beds, lay soil, and learn about community gardening techniques and strategies. They need 15-20 volunteers to get down and dirty. The action will be from 9am-12pm, followed by rides back to Bread for the City NW for the Sustainable Food Block Party. Contact Dennis Chestnut of Groundwork Anacostia or email dcfoodforall@gmail.com.

The Farm at Walker Jones needs 5 to 10 volunteers to help building a new compost bin. Come see our 3/4 acre farm in the middle of the city, check out our composting system and our large worm farm. 9-noon on 10/10/10. The Farm at Walker Jones is located at the corner of NJ and K Streets NW. Contact sidraforman@gmail.com for more information.

The Virginia Avenue Park Community Garden (corner of L St & 9th St SE) invites you to a fall harvest gathering! From 12-4pm, bring friends and family to learn how-to plant your own food, care for it, and harvest it. Get gardening tips and tricks and try them out in our garden! Volunteers will be needed before and at the event, for planting, harvesting, and compost-turning. Before the event, volunteers can help make, print, and hand-out flyers. Email Karin Edgett and check out their Facebook Page.

There will also be a big bike tour, sponsored by WABA, of most of these sites and more! Email DCFoodForAll@gmail.com for more info. And stay tuned…

The Social Forum — which convened in Detroit just last month — “is a movement building process… [that] provides spaces to learn 
from each other’s experiences and struggles, share our analysis of the problems 
our communities face, build relationships, and align with our international 
brothers and sisters to strategize how to reclaim our world.” It’ll be another three years before the US Social Forum convenes again, but in the meantime the process of the Social Forum is ongoing — as people from different movements, backgrounds and regions continue to deliberate and act upon solutions to the 
economic and ecological crisis.

An essential component of this process are People’s Movement Assemblies (PMA). PMAs are gatherings of people (25, 250 or more) that come together to collectively identify community issues, discuss solutions, and commit to actions.

Before the USSF2010 in Detroit, the Greater DC Social Forum (organized largely by attendees of USSF2007  in Atlanta) convened a DC People’s Movement Assembly. The Greater DC Social Forum will now convene another DC-area People’s Movement Assembly on August 7th, at 11AM at Plymouth Congregational UCC (5301 N Capitol Street NE). Attendees of USSF2010 will share the experience and ideas that they brought back from Detroit — however, this event is open to anyone who wants to work towards a better greater DC. (You can RSVP on Facebook here.)

At the pre-Detroit People’s Movement Assembly here in DC, some attendees had conversations about food justice issues—but there was not yet a PMA group self-organized around the subject. Well I am pleased to report that the signs of food justice movements across the country are strong! The challenges we face are great, but so are our opportunities. (I previously blogged about food sovereignty in Detroit here.)  The USSF2010 Food Justice PMA assembled a diverse and exciting set of people, ideas, and proposals — consolidating it all into one statement to be shared with the broader Social Forum.

So, with hope that food justice/sovereignty will become an active thread of the Greater DC Social Forum process, I’m happy to share the Food Sovereignty People’s Movement Assembly resolution below. Let’s consider this document as we continue our conversation on August 7th and beyond.

Statement from the People’s Movement Assembly on Food Sovereignty, US Social Forum 2010

Over a half-century ago, Mahatma Gandhi led a multitude of Indians to the sea to make salt—in defiance of the British Empire’s monopoly on this resource critical to people’s diet. The action catalyzed the fragmented movement for Indian independence and was the beginning of the end for Britain’s rule over India. The act of “making salt” has since been repeated many times in many forms by people’s movements seeking liberation, justice and sovereignty: Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela, and the Zapatistas are just a few of the most prominent examples. Our food movement— one that spans the globe—seeks food sovereignty from the monopolies that dominate our food systems with the complicity of our governments. We are powerful, creative, committed and diverse. It is our time to make salt.

A movement for food sovereignty – the people’s democratic control of the food system, the right of all people to healthy, culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems - is building from every corner of the globe.

We find that our work to build a better food system in the Unites States is inextricably linked to the struggle for workers’ rights, immigrant’s rights, women’s rights, the fight to dismantle racism in our communities, and the struggle for sovereignty in indigenous communities. We find that in order to create a better food system, we must break up the corporate control of our seeds, land, water and natural resources.

Because at a time of record harvests and record profits we have over one billion hungry people on the planet; because poverty is the root cause of hunger; because the world’s oceans are being polluted and plundered, because industrial agriculture contributes one third of all greenhouse gas emissions, because increasing inequality, poverty, hunger, a global land grab, and environmental destruction are threatening the livelihoods of family farmers, farmworkers, fisherfolk, and marginalized communities worldwide; and because community based food systems and agroecological farming can cool the planet, build resilience to climate change, and eliminate poverty;

We therefore commit to re-building local food economies in our own communities, to dismantling structural racism, to democratizing land access, to building opportunities for the leadership of our youth, and to working towards food sovereignty in partnership with social movements around the world;

We call on others in the US to demand an end to the global land grab, to end both corporate and military land occupations, to demand fairer trade, aid and investment policies, land reform, and support for sustainable peasant and community agriculture and sustainable community fisheries;

We endorse actions that include: the liberation of land and water resources for the production of food and sustainable livelihoods; the creation of new structures for cooperative ownership of land and food production, processing and distribution; the integration of labor rights, immigrant’s rights and food justice; the valuing of women as primary food providers, and the denouncement of false solutions and false partnerships addressing climate change, hunger and economic development;

We demand a world in which everyone has control over their food and no one has to put food in their mouth that hurts people or the environment.
Organizations and individuals among us have therefore committed to the following actions:

• Launching a campaign for food sovereignty as a right of the people
• Growing and harvesting as much food as we possibly can everywhere
• Liberating land through reclaiming urban and rural spaces for the production of food for communities; demanding the use of public lands for food production
• Participating in a global campaign against land grabs, in which corporations and governments grab up the lands of communities
• Carrying forward the people’s agenda coming out of the Cochabamba climate summit — including popular education around food and climate justice and promoting sustainable agriculture as a solution to climate change
• Standing with the people of Haiti, Palestine, Honduras, and other countries whose food sovereignty is threatened by political, military, and/or corporate occupation
• Hosting collective meals in our communities as a way of connecting people across generations and cultural backgrounds and as a tool for dismantling racism in the food system
• Forging new models of collective control of land and waterways; assuring legal protection of the commons
• Building the leadership of the next generation; providing opportunities for urban and rural youth to have a future in food and farming
• Rejecting GMOs and other forms of the corporate takeover of our food systems
• Creatively and strategically working to dismantle the corporations who have hijacked the world’s food systems
• Affirming the sovereignty of indigenous peoples in North America and throughout the globe
• Committing our food movements in the US to be active participants in the global movement for food sovereignty and to work to stop our government and corporations from practices that undermine food sovereignty globally.
• Challenging US food and agricultural aid and development policy (e.g., Monsanto and USAID’s recent “donation” of seeds to Haiti)
• Working towards a people’s food and farm bill based on principles of food sovereignty
• Hosting community seed exchanges
• Engaging communities in popular education on GMOs and the role of corporations in our food system
• Engaging communities in popular education on community nutrition and public health
• Creating more community farmers markets that are accessible and affordable to all; affirming everyone’s right to food that is good, safe, healthy, and fair
• Helping everyone understand where their food comes from and who helped bring it to their table
• Highlighting the common struggles between farmers and farmworkers in the US and their counterparts throughout the world

See the official page for this document here. And join us on August 7th to discuss what comes next.

The workshop will start with a short film about seed saving, include a bit of an introduction about its history, and then go into a practical, hands-on workshop. If all goes well, you should be bringing some seeds home to plant in the future. If you already have experience with seed saving, come along as well. We’d love for you to share your expertise.

Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Time: 7-9 PM
Location: Emergence Community Arts Collective, 2nd floor, 733 Euclid Street NW, Washington DC

Please contact ecolocitydc@gmail.com for questions or visit our website at ecolocity.ning.com. We hope to see you there!

Local lettuce and berries for school lunch being prepared at CentroNIA

If you walked into a D.C. school cafeteria on June 3^rd 2010, you may have been surprised at what you saw on students’ trays!  Over 150 schools in DC featured fresh, locally-grown strawberries and salad greens as a part of their school lunches.  This was part of an event called Strawberries & Salad Greens, organized by the D.C. Farm to School Network and in partnership with participating schools and food service providers.  For a medley of pictures from the event in DCist, click here.

Breakfast on the line at Thurgood Marshall Academy – blueberry muffin and local strawberries!

About 40,000 students in all 8 wards of the District gobbled up juicy, red berries and bright green lettuce in their lunches.  Approximately 7,300 pounds of local strawberries and 2,400 pounds of greens were purchased and served for the event, contributing about $20,000 to our local food economy.  The produce was grown on farms in Virgina, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania (visit dcfarmtoschool.org/strawberries for more information about the local growers).

Westmoreland Berry Farm, which supplied berries for DCPS meals on June 3^rd

In addition to helping schools find sources of fresh, local produce, the D.C. Farm to School Network coordinated “Where Food Comes From” tables in 16 school cafeterias.  At these tables, volunteers and parents displayed plants, posters, pictures, and gardening tools.  As students enjoyed their meals, they were able to see, touch, and smell where their food came from!

Carl Rollins with Common Good City Farm shows a strawberry plant to a group of pre-K students at Simon Elementary School

In twelve schools, local chefs performed interactive cooking demonstrations using local strawberries and salad greens.  Kids were able to help professionals prepare recipes, taste samples, discuss the importance of eating fresh, local, healthy foods, and bring home recipes to try with their families.

Chef Oliver Friendly of Eat and Smile Foods makes home-made granola and local strawberry parfaits at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School

The D.C. Farm to School Network is a program of the Capital Area Food Bank that works to get more healthy, local foods into Washington, DC school meals.  Learn more at www.dcfarmtoschool.org.

Kacie Warner from the Washington Youth Garden prepares a strawberry arugula salad with students at Center City Public Charter School

This seems to be a sales tax, rather than an excise tax, because beverage bottles are not of uniform size and “The [Baltimore City] administration has insisted that the bottle tax — which would exempt milk, juice and two-liter containers, would not unduly burden on residents.”
Revenue from the DC soda tax is righteously targeted to towards helping mitigate the chronic health problems that increased sugar-sweetened beverage intake both causes and magnifies, particularly among its most vulnerable consumers: children living in low-income areas (for example, Wards 7 and 8).
Meanwhile our neighbors, in East Baltimore (socio-economically similar to Wards 7 and 8), express their support for the Baltimore City “bottle tax” as a way to save city services.

In Baltimore City, it is unclear if the revenue from these taxes would go towards helping consumers via social (city) services. In DC, however, it is clear (or much clearer) that the taxes would directly reach consumers by means of the DC Healthy Schools Act. This momentum needs to be seized. It was not in Baltimore City (interestingly, however, as the Baltimore City Council may end up re-considering the bottle tax). Today people are going to express their support for the soda tax to the DC City Council. But more rallying can always be done.
A May 19th Baltimore Sun article reports that the bottle tax in Baltimore City was ‘canned’ (pun intended, I think); and the Baltimore City Council would find new ways to address it’s substantial budget deficit.
Meanwhile, children and adults alike walk around in Baltimore and DC quenching their thirst amidst Maryland’s humid days. Heck, non-diet soda is cheap and better yet, it tastes good. But maybe one of the reasons it tastes so good is because our tastes are not used to eating vegetables and fruits? And one of the reasons this may be the case and why decreased vegetable and fruit and food consumption outside of the home has concurrently increased  is because to many it makes economic (and tasty!) sense.
As the pictures above convey, the soda and bottle taxes in DC and Baltimore City, respectively, also make sense. For it is not us who has consciously changed our tastes and food preferences, it’s the food environment that has changed our taste and food preferences. Thus, we must hold our society and environment responsible as a critical partner in helping to reclaim our diets and restore our health that have slowly and sub-consciously been taken from us.

And with that I leave you with some food for thought: did you know Baltimore City and Baltimore County used to have a beverage tax starting in 1989?

I wanted to let you know that the Kojo Namdi Show (WAMU 88.5) will be focusing on the growing Backyard Hen movement around the country tomorrow (Thursday) from 12:00 to 1:00. They will be interviewing Pat Foreman, the author of City Chicks, as well as an urban farmer from Brooklyn and myself. Let your friends know. It should be a good program. If you can’t listen to it live, you can always stream it online after the show.

In early June we’ll be setting up tables at a few farmers’ markets around the city to collect more petition signers. As a special treat, elementary school kids from 5 classes in Capitol Hill will be showing off their recently hatched chicks and talking about what they’ve learned by hatching and raising chicks. We’re looking for more volunteers to help man the tables for two hour shifts. Let me know if you want to participate and we’ll find a time and place that works for you.

Other good news on the chicken front is that we’re meeting with the Mayor’s Office next week to talk about how to move our legislative changes forward. We’ll let you know what comes out of that meeting.

Thanks,

Caryn

Email dcfoodforall@gmail.com for more information or to get involved!