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I’ve talked about this often in my notes to you: The older I get, the more I notice how inspired I am by young folks. I sometimes see people complain that the youth of today don’t know what they’re doing—and I call bullshit.
Young people often know more than the rest of us about how to solve some of our most pressing environmental and agricultural and food issues. And I think it’s important to look for mentorship from young people; to seek out their viewpoints and learn from their actions. We also need to recognize that this kind of activism, this kind of advocacy, this kind of involvement and interest in our food and ag issues—it can and should start at an early age.
How early? As soon as kids can listen to stories! That’s why June Jo and Philip Lee launched the organization Readers to Eaters. They are doing extraordinary work to promote food stories for young people. June Jo Lee is a food ethnographer and her husband, Philip Lee, has worked in children’s book publishing for decades.
Their mission is to use storytelling to increase food literacy and make sure children know where food comes from, how it’s grown, who processes it, what’s happening along the food chain, why foods taste the way they do, what cultural traditions exist around food, what ingredients exist that they might not regularly see at home or in school, and more.
Their books tell the stories of food heroes like food truck chef Roy Choi, fermentation expert Sandor Katz, and even organizations like the Bread Lab at Washington State University, which is exploring the science of whole grains in breadmaking. Another book is called The Thing About Bees: A Love Letter, a letter from a father to his sons about the importance of pollinators.
Here in Maryland, where I live, as part of the state’s SNAP-Ed Eat Your Words campaign, June Jo and Phillip gave away free copies of their book Sylvia’s Spinach farmers markets and schools to help educate kids. They produce books in Spanish, too. They’re generous because they recognize the power of storytelling and information.
“We talk about food literacy as a way to create bridges for understanding people and cultures,” Philip Lee told Food Tank this week. “We approach food as a way to make new connections and care more about our world.”
I couldn’t agree more: Building these bridges is so urgent, especially now. We need more bridges, so we can support refugee populations coming to countries including the U.S. We need more bridges, so we’re not excluding people based on cultures or traditions around food. We need more bridges, so our young people can help build the sustainable, just food system we know is possible.
“A big part of food literacy is about bringing joy to eating, cooking, and growing food,” Philip continued.
I had the honor of sharing the stage with June Jo Lee at an event earlier this year. Her research focuses on how the Generation Z cohort uses food to connect with themselves as individuals and to connect with one another. June Jo’s research has found that Gen Z wants to see food choice in the context of larger systems—food as the centerpiece of learning about the world.
“Food is really returning back to us as our identity and an expression of who we are and who we want to become,” she told me.
And it’s important to remember that the conversation about young people and food is not just about children: Members of Gen Z, for example, are in college. Early on in the pandemic, college and university students suffered greatly, too, especially in terms of food access. At the height of the pandemic, some 60 percent of students reported they were less food-secure than pre-pandemic, which is shameful. And many students in the U.S. are forced to take out massive loans to pay for their degrees—another immense financial burden, on top of already struggling to afford food. It’s abhorrent.
Luckily, our good friends Suzanne Palmieri and Kathleen Merrigan at the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Arizona State University are focusing on this issue, and we’re hoping to partner with them over the next year to bring this topic to administrators and lawmakers who can bring real change.
There are easy policies that just make sense and would help college students more easily and affordably access food—policies like expanding SNAP, or food stamp, benefits for college students; offering campus kitchens where students can cook; and funding college pantries that are open for a variety of hours, so students can shop with dignity and no judgment when they need to. So stay tuned for some of the initiatives Food Tank and our partners have in store over the next year.
And again, be sure to check out Readers to Eaters. I think you’ll appreciate their work just as much as I do. (And if the holiday season crept up on you like it did for me—it’s almost mid-December already?!—food literacy is a perfect gift.) I want to hear more about how folks in your communities are working to help young people understand the food system, too, so share with me at danielle@foodtank.com.
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Photo courtesy of Katherine Hanlon, Unsplash
