Meet the Local Food Leaders

The idea of “being a Food Leader” can be a bit abstract and confusing. It is definitely different from being a Food Entrepreneur, which is a leader who takes the initiative to create something that does not currently exist in their society. Being a Food Leader is more diverse, it is something everyone can be.

How to become one? Well… You don’t have to “startup” your own food project–even though that would be really awesome! Food leaders first focus on their relationship with food, make changes as they feel needed, then share and learn with others their experience. It requires is one understand why we eat the way we do and then have the motivation to make improved food decisions everyday. Every bite, every dollar, every hour has an impact on our food system.

Now don’t get me wrong, we need entrepreneurs and change makers greatly in society. Many of them begin the dialog, ask the initial question (Why doesn’t UT have an academic program to study food?!)… But not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Great teams are full of leaders with unique and individual skill sets.

Being a Food Leader doesn’t mean you have to make all of the decisions, but you will to have to understand how you play an important role in changing the food system. So begin to ask yourself, why do I eat the way I do? Am I ok with that? Why? Why not?

These were some of the questions UT Food Studies Alumni Alejandra and I decided to ask some of the Local Food Leaders at the 2012 Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance (FARFA) Conference. We wanted to understand what do “Food Leaders” do and more importantly why. So, we created a short video for you, the next generation of food leaders, to help inspire your food studies and projects. Share it with your friends, teachers, mentors, co-workers and everyone who loves food, because we can all become Food Leaders simply by beginning to use food as a lens to understand ourselves and the world around us.

Great thanks to all the Food Leaders that participated in the video and sharing their story.

Jerry Cunningham, Proprietor of Coyote Creek Organic Feed Mill
Alexandra Maria Landeros, Writer and Editor for Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance
Nick Latham, Founder of My Country Co-op
Brandi Clark, President of Austin EcoNetwork
Marla Camp, Publisher of Edible Austin
Ronda Rutledge, Executive Director of the Sustainable Food Center
Michael Olson, Author of Food Chain Radio and MetroFarm.com
Patty Lovera, Assistant Director of Food & Water Watch
Dustin Fedako, CEO of East Austin Compost Peddlers
Aurora Porter, Marketing & Communications for Vital Farms
Scott Price, Consultant for Slow Money Austin and SRP Consulting
Kathryn Hutchison, Marketing for Greenling.com & VP Austin Food Blogger Alliance
Judith McGeary, Executive Director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance
Pamela Walker, Author of Growing Good Things to Eat-Texas A&M
Kelsey Coto, President of Food Studies at The University of Texas at Austin
Ellen, Blogger/Educator for The Homegrown Revival
Heather Frambach, Outreach Manager for HOPE Farmers Market
Evan Driscoll, Farm Hand at Green Gate Farms
Jessie Griffiths’, Chef/Owner of Dai Due Supper Club

Special thanks to Edible Austin, Slow Food Austin, Greenling, UT Food Studies and Alejandra Spector for sponsorship and support producing this video.

Video Produced by Daniel “Asiago” Heron

How to prepare a Food Entrepreneur

Reflecting on the success of the Food Studies Project (FSP), I am happy to call ourselves “Food Entrepreneurs”. Less than year ago, I did not have a real understanding of what the word “entrepreneur” meant. Then, at the beginning of the Spring 2012 semester, I caught myself in front of a panel of judges at the Dell Social Innovation Challenge pitch stating that I am a “social entrepreneur” for food.

We, the undergraduate students, initiated some really neat programs and resources with no financial support. We did it because we are passionate about improving the world’s relationship with food. Some of us want to create businesses, some want to educate, and others want to simply share the joy of food. In my mind, all of these students taking the initiative to create websites, food carts, magazines and journals, food tours, gardens, and campaigns, are Food Entrepreneurs. As a graduating senior, my role now in Food Studies is to inspire these students to act and create their own amazing food projects and help them connect with others in UT Food Community.

So what does it take to innovate as a Food Entrepreneur?

To make a Food Entrepreneur, you first will have to learn how to deal with ambiguity. Things change so quickly and it can be scary navigating an unknown path. You must be willing to commit to the cause and be flexible to change because creating something new brings unpredictable results. The key is to be curious about the complexity of your project and never fear the unknown; make it your mission to enjoy the journey of learning and applying your studies. Prepare yourself for change because when you can move beyond your bias and old thought process, you will find a bounty of opportunities and connections.

1) STUDENT PASSION:

We have to sacrifice for belief in the outcome. UT students can become the next generation of food entrepreneurs. We must have intensity for things that matter: health, culture… College seems to promote individualism over collaboration, which is great for self-drive, but it is a flaw to believe we can tackle everything alone. We must unite all the food initiatives on campus and share our knowledge about food. Food Studies is interdependent. We connect and share ideas, help motivate and support each other to actively engage. Together we can beneficially impact our world food system.

2) ACTIVITY ENGAGEMENT:

Get involved. We all have different understandings of food, so it is difficult to appeal to all students’ tastes, but whatever your food studies interests are in, whether it is engineering, health, government, or the arts, we all must learn about the world we have created around food in order to improve the way we eat. Food Studies is the space for food leaders to come together to EAT, LEARN, and DISCUSS about our relationship with food and the world we have created around it. We must set big goals and build a community to challenge each other’s conceptions, share our food studies projects, and research. We are the immediate future; the time to act is now.

3) SUSTAINING MOMENTUM:

Food Studies receives wonderful fan mail from both professors and students. It is really rewarding to hear a freshmen mention that our Educated Eater program arose their consciousness about the relationship they have with food. Watching students engage in discussion about food systems, expanding their conceptions about food, and sharing their food culture has been such a rewarding experience. It was undergraduate students that started connecting the dots and built the foundations of an interdisciplinary food studies program at UT; we, the students, will create the demand for food studies at the University of Texas at Austin. However, faculty & staff have the power to create the actual academics, and it is their responsibility to keep the student voice involved in the conversation and decision-making. We are the next generation of food leaders; it is important to provide us with professional opportunities to apply our food studies and create the education we want.

As Student Food Entrepreneurs, our passion comes from our studies, our experience comes from actively improving initiatives on and around campus. In the Food Studies Project’s case, we have created the foundations of a food studies program at UT and helped bring together the UT Food Community. The project has led us to a new path full of opportunities to improve our food systems. Several of graduating seniors of FSP and I have introduced our new venture, The Food Lab. The Food Lab is a non-profit organization that will develop and support innovative businesses focused on reinventing our global food system. Meanwhile, we will continue to sustain the momentum of Food Studies at UT Austin. In order to tackle world food challenges, I believe college students are the first stage of the incubating solutions. They are the immediate future… full of passion and desire to change the world. Investing into their food education will produce new and improved attitudes towards food and make for the best Food Entrepreneurs.

Eucharist Adventure

Born and raised Catholic, I was always fascinated with the Eucharist wafers that my family and I ate every Sunday at church. My adventure started one year at summer camp when I was ten, when a priest gave me a tupperware container full of the little round chips of unleavened bread and advised me to “snack on them if you get hungry”. I remember feeling uncomfortable since I was always told to treat the little wafers as the body of Christ. Roman Catholicism teaches “transubstantiation” meaning that the bread and wine served at Catholic Mass are transformed into the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ. Most other Christian identities believe that the bread and wine is a metaphorical representation of Jesus, like at my Grandma’s church where I got grape juice and crackers.

As I watched people lining up to receive the communion of flavorless wafers and sweet wine, I started to ask to myself, “How are these unleavened alter breads made? Where do they come from?” Just like so many other food writers and journalists have been doing tracking down the production of corn or the hamburger, I wanted to take a journey to learn about these wafers that Catholics eat all the time. With a little bit of Internet research, here is what I found out on my Eucharist Adventure:

Little girl, not old enough to receive yet, being bless in communion line. From: media.vcstar.com

Educated Eater

Dear UT Community,

During my undergraduate years at UT, I have completely transformed my relationship with food. I have become an Educated Eater, a student who has been exposed to a diverse understanding of food and eating. I was introduced to many new foods, learned about the real cost of food, studied a little bit of nutrition, started cooking, and even took several courses about food. One summer I had the wonderful opportunity to study international nutrition and food culture in Southeast Asia, another time in Brazil where I ate rice and watered down beans with my impoverished host family. All of my studies at UT and abroad have had a food focus.

After three years, I reminisce on the adventure I have had educating myself about food in college and reflecting on my personal journey of deciding what to eat.

I remember having to travel by foot or bus with my empty backpack to purchase just enough food to hold me over for the school week. I remember my first semester eating all alone in the school cafeteria. My parents were no longer around to buy food for me, so I had to learn how to hunt down free food events around campus.

Everything I could fit into my backpack for the week

Now, as I walk around campus, I see so many students trying figure out their own food studies. Some are learning about the economics of food. Why hundreds of students line up on Gregory Plaza receive a free Wendy’s hamburger or download a Google App to get a free meal. Some are receiving a lecture about college culture as they come to class at eight in the morning to find Red Bull energy drinks taped to the bottom of their desks, and random pizza/soda drive-bys as young cheerleaders jump out vans and shove products into your hands. Some students even get an introduction to the politics of food as with the student organization that brought a cupcake truck onto campus to fundraise and now faces a violation of the Institutional Rules (Section 13-205 Solicitation).

College students have to make many new complex decisions about what to eat, but I don’t see many programs teaching them how or why we eat. Longhorns are always talking about food. So why doesn’t UT have a food-focused program that students can use to discuss food and relate it to their studies?  

Kitchen Pimpin’ Obesity

The Lonestar State has the highest percentage of overweight adult males at 75.5%, only second to Alabama’s 75.9%. There are plenty of attempts to educate the population on how to eat — nutritional charts and dietary recommendations, for instance — but these are not solutions. The majority of us know that we need to consume more vegetables, but we are less compliant to do so because we don’t enjoy being told what to eat (maybe more so what NOT to eat). Our diet is really a personal relationship with food. We need personalized methods to improve our individual ways of eating. Instead of a massive health campaign telling people to eat healthier and exercise more, a more impacting solution would be to create a healthier environment that empowers people to learn and care for themselves. In other words: get cookin’. In particular, get young males like myself into kitchens to cook for our family and friends.
I got the idea from Coolio’s recent (and amazing) cookbook, Cookin’ with Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price. The former multi-platinum rapper grew up poor with little knowledge about food, stating that he had the skill of making something out of nothing. He learned how to cook, probably something unique amongst the male youth of his childhood community. What is cool about Cookin’ with Coolio, is that it empowers young men to build confidence, take control of their health, and potentially prevent obesity by learning how to successfully cook real food at home on a tight budget. By presenting his personal story as a living example, Coolio shares his recipes and cooking techniques so that people in lower-income situations can utilize their resources to become successful “Kitchen Pimps”. Taken at face value, this cookbook might seem like a comical sales gimmick, but Cookin’ with Coolio is a masterpiece for public health and could benefit thousands suffering from malnutrition and obesity.

Click the photo to check out his cooking show!

How does Kitchen Pimpin’ prevent obesity?
Cookin’ with Coolio helped me realize that home cooking is more than a luxury; it is an approach to solving the obesity epidemic. There are many people that are too reliant on fake industrial foods, and “[Coolio] want[s] people to know that just because you’re poor, you don’t have to eat fast food every day.” Eating healthy food is more complicated when you are in a difficult economic situation. Some people insist that we need to eat only vegetables grown locally and spend a lot more for our food. Coolio argues that is not necessary for most: “Whole Foods and Gelson’s have a lot of great stuff, but [normal grocery stores] have everything you need to make haute cuisine at home.” Kitchen Pimpin’ and learning the art of “The Ghetto Gourmet” brings awareness to the more realistic problem and solution in our national obesity epidemic that people need to learn more about food and how to cook at home. Instead of focusing all of our attention on paying more for ethical foods (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), we should educate the population about food and create the environments and resources needed to get people cooking.

Student Innovation

As promised in my last post, the time has arrived for the Food Studies Project to fly. Our destination is to lay the foundations of a Food Studies Institute. In order to get started, we took a leap. It was scary, at first, because gravity is always trying to pull us back to the ground. But falling is part of learning how to fly. We, at the Food Studies Project, believe that we can defy gravity with supporting winds, leading us to great heights.

Original Logo for FSP. Created By Asiago

Since launching the Food Studies Project (FSP) in September 2011, our UT Community has really become excited to see where this project will go.  The FSP’s interdisciplinary approach to the study of food has been well received by students both from the sciences and the arts. Most have agreed that the complexity of food in modern day society warrants a multidisciplinary program that balances the interests and concerns about food.

Orientating ours minds to make our program fly requires focus not only on the technical side (administration, venture capital, faculty), but on the beauty of our project as well. A Food Studies program should focus on the behavioral and social sciences that will compliment a variety of academic fields. In other Food Studies programs across the nation, there seems to be a division between a foodie and foodist. I believe that UT should bring a variety of disciplines to the table for students to get a taste of all the aspects and understandings of food. Let’s mix both love for food and the concerns that accompany it into a program that will discuss and create new ideas. Hopefully, with the right balance, we will find our wings.

Welcome to the Food Studies Project

Hello, I’m Asiago, lead organizer for The Food Studies Project. My last name is “Heron” named in honor of the Great Blue Heron. I am told by people during my time at UT Austin that I have an inspiring personal story to tell. I would like to share an abridged version of my story, give thanks for the education I have received, and invite you all to come fly with me this winter. I have always had an interest in food, probably because I was pulled out of elementary school when I was seven years old, and spent most of life at home eating and watching the Food Network. Sadly though, I did not learn much about food or cooking sitting in front of the television. I just ended up eating more. It got to the point that I had to eat something every time I sat down to watch TV. By the time I was 13, I was already an obese teen who spent his days playing games, only pausing to go steal cigarettes and food, which I called “Game Fuel”, at my neighborhood market. My life was wasting away because I never left the nest, never built the courage to take that first leap. I started learning how to fly when I decided to go back to school at the age of 20. I started a new life thanks to junior college. At the time, I could not imagine that taking a Spanish class would not only guide me to UT Austin but also teach me how to fly around the world.

source: wikipedia.org

Education helped me think differently about food, and it naturally changed my unhealthy ways. Studying foreign cultures and languages brought me awareness about the importance and meaning of food. Meanwhile, my concern grew for the future of food throughout the world. My first couple of years at UT, I did not know I had this food focus in my studies. It wasn’t until I came upon Dr. Rebecca Torres’ course “Farming, Food, and Global Hunger” that I realized I had always had great interests and concerns with food in all of my classes.

Eating Pizza in Brazil

My first Food Studies paper has been published in the 2010-2011 issue of Portal, the yearly academic publication from the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies. It is a simple account of my recent study abroad experience in Brazil. It is so interesting how eating pizza with my host family made me aware of so many social issues in their society and lives. This, is how I study food.

Eating Pizza in Brazil: poverty and other social issues

The entire world eats Pizza, or something that resembles it, such as seafood pizza in Japan or the pizza with fruit Brazilians eat here in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. At LLI- LAS, my concentration is officially Portuguese, but my true focus lies in food studies. Normally, a student like myself, who is interested in learning about pizza, would probably focus on the food itself: the toppings, the sauces, or the crust. However, in my studies, I learn about larger social issues through my personal experiences and interest in food. I am currently studying abroad in Brazil and have had the honor of living with an amazing host family of four: father, mother, and two sons, ages 22 and 16. The other night on the way home from an event, we decided to get a pizza for dinner. I did not realize how different the whole process was going to be from the “American” way of getting a pizza. The experience revealed many social and economic issues related to poverty. The following story about eating pizza with my new Brazilian family reveals a deeper social context, beyond gastronomy, in the way pizza is obtained, received, and consumed. Enjoy.

Foodist, Not Foodie

The Food Studies movement is comprised of what I call, “Foodists”. While speaking with people joining the movement, some began to ask, “What do you mean by the term Foodist?” And, how is it different than other Foodie organizations and projects?

Foodies and Foodists have been defined differently by different people across the inter-webs, but the way I use “Foodist” is to focus on the suffix IST. In College, I am a Latin Americanist, in particular a Brazilianist. I also study food. Hence then, I am a Foodist! I wish I could official say that I am a Food Studies Major but that degree doesn’t exsist at our University… yet!

But there is an even more important significance for the IST suffix in Foodist. A Foodist is a foodie that has taken the additional step of actively engaging in the food movement to create positive change and benefit all people’s foodways. Many people at UT are foodists and they don’t even know it. The nutrition major realizing that there is a lot more to public nutrition than just the science of the GI system. The student org that teaches about the meaning of food. The professor that creates a course and pushes through the bureaucracy to get it available for students to learn.

My definition of Foodist came from being a Liberal Arts student. Liberal Arts majors sometimes ask themselves what we are going to do with our majors? Why are they important?

We are artists. We care for world and it’s inhabitants. As a Latin American Studies major at UT, I grew to care for people from a very different culture from mine. Studying abroad in their culture was my realization of the importance of food. Although their foodways were quite different from those of many Estadounidenses, it was what allowed me to connect with them as humans. An artist creates beauty, shares stories, and cares… We learn to care and love not just ourselves but to live for others.

You might say, “but that still doesn’t say what you are going to do with your life!”

Technical skills (math, sciences, laws, etc) are important. They are how you do things, but they are not why you do things. The best innovations and change come from people motivated to act outside of what they are paid or required to do. Sure, one will be more economically secure for stronger technical skills, but will you be able to answer why you do what you do? I love food. My why is to make sure that all malnourished people’s, both abroad and in the States, have not just enough food to eat but that it is the correct foods for their health. “How to do that?” and “What technical skills I need?” are questions that I will answer as I go.

Foodies and Foodists both are considered in my mind as caring artists but the difference is that the Food Studies movement is connecting people that care enough about food that it has lead them to act. The activists of food, so to speak. So, stop and ask yourself, “Is my care for good food for me, my circle of friends, or for others?” Don’t we want food security/sovereignty for all humanity?

Food Studies needs people from all colleges and majors to be part of the movement because our different fields of study and ways of understanding food can make a positive change in this world. That is what we are suppose to be doing at UT, no? What Starts Here Changes the World. If you consider yourself a foodie, I challenge you to take on the responsibly of being a Foodist. Food can be enjoyable for everyone if we just act.

Together we are setting an example for Universities around the Nation to bring back a food focus into our academic lives.

Eat up life.

Food Sovereignty in Bolivia

Two weeks before the Fall 2011 semester started, I had the honor of being part of a Food First delegation in Bolivia with the amazing new project Food Sovereignty Tours.

It is hard to summarize all the new information that was presented to me by Bolivian locals and from the wonderful professionals–now friends–that I met on the trip. Being the youngster on the trip, I did not feel ready to engage in the subject of Food Sovereignty and Climate Change. Even though I did not have much of a background in many of the discussion topics, it did not take an expert to see the shocking reality of the world food system in Bolivia. How the Global North uses beautiful counties like Bolivia in the Global South to aid their own food security. How food is no longer a human right but a commodity used to control populations and benefit certain wealthy nations. As an undergraduate in college, we read a lot about the injustices and unfair issues throughout the world, but lack the reality of experiencing it. I wish my school would had some sort of Study Abroad Program like this. Wake up tours. I wasn’t able to get a scholarship or university credit for the tour (I funded it with the rest of my emergency savings and donations from a few professors who believe in my future) yet it was worth it because I went in with just an interest in food security and left a food activist.