Food Justice Americorp VISTAs shaking up the hallowed halls of 100 Witherspoon
PHP is blessed to host four Anti-Hunger Empowerment Corps VISTA volunteers this year. They have each contributed to this Food Justice E-news. Learn even more about each of the VISTAs and the program here.
Celebrate World Fair Trade Day!
Rachel graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in Agricultural Economics. She is passionate about sustainability and food.
 World Fair Trade Day is this Saturday, May 12. Fair trade provides economic opportunities for farmers, ensures transparency and accountability, and includes standards on gender equity, child labor, working conditions, and caring for the environment. Here are a few ways to get involved on Saturday and beyond:
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Deconstructing Food Justice
Jonathan Krigger is a native of Louisville and recently graduated with a degree in Political Science from the University of Louisville, but deep down he is a philosopher.
 From a practical and personal standpoint, what does it mean to engage in “Food Justice” work? In what sense is this idea “Justice” used? Are we personally acting from the perspective of our theology, our middle class ethic, our privilege, our sincere desperation or from some other place? I ask these questions to you earnestly. We each come from somewhere and where we come from dictates our encounters with others. We are each guided and blinded by our perspectives, in the same way that saving our poor “little brown brothers” at once tasted of nobility and foulness in the moment of its speaking. If you, as a reader, approach this from some moral obligation you feel compelled to fulfill, this is legitimate. If, for you, this work touches on some pure altruism or serves as a visible badge of liberal humanism, this too is legitimate because it is your own lived reality. No matter where you are coming from, it is necessary to seek out ourselves. How does your perspective guide your relation to the recipients of your Justice? What is true for you? When our particular core truths enter into dialogue, we are made naked and sincere in our work. This is foundational work. This cannot remain invisible if we are to speak together of justice and justice work.
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Before coming to PHP, Laura Stricklen did congregation-based community organizing in Dayton OH after graduating from Wooster College. She majored in Sociology and Religious Studies.
 As my seedlings become darling little adolescents with so much potential for producing a bountiful harvest, it is hard to face the global reality that--even in the face of such abundance--roughly one third of the food produced worldwide for human production is lost or wasted. But instead of getting lost in the numbers or bemoaning the failures of humanity, one next step requires us to ask what are we going to do about it?
For those of you who answered “find a way to rescue perfectly good food from the clutches of our waste management system” (which I’m sure was probably about 95% of you dear readers out there…), the USDA has created a toolkit to demystify the process of creating a successful gleaning network to collect excess produce from farms, farmers’ markets, and gardens and reduce the amount of food that we waste.
Contact me if you wish to talk about starting up gleaning in your town.
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A Food Justice tour of Louisville
After two years in Ghana serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Arianna King worked with multiple species at the Flying Goat Farm in Maine, her home state. Ari is the National Food Security Coordinator and is available to consult with you about your plans to bring justice to your church and community.
 A few weeks ago the National Slow Food Congress convened in Louisville to talk food at their biennial conference. The 150 participants came from all over the country to slow things down for a few days and discuss the praxis of slow sustainable food systems. The program included opening remarks from Mayor Greg Fischer who spoke of the progress of his “Healthy Hometown” initiative and encouraged others to join in the fight.
The highlight of the conference, however, was a much needed Food Justice tour of Louisville, planned and facilitated by volunteers at New Roots Inc., a PHP grantee. On the tour, Slow Food Congress participants boarded a TARC Bus and took the time to visit a few neighborhood projects working to increase access of fresh local produce in areas of the city where groceries stores are scarce and fresh produce is unheard of.
One of these stops included a visit to the Redeemer Lutheran Church in the Shawnee neighborhood, located in the west end of Louisville, a known food desert. Shawnee Fresh Stop organizers work tirelessly to perpetuate a healing conversation about the “food apartheid” in Louisville as well as offering local produce in a communal setting to neighborhood residents. Former PHP VISTA, Blain Snipstal referred to the bounty of a Fresh Stop produce share as, “the best CSA in the city”, and because it is priced on a sliding scale, it is accessible to anyone interested in eating healthy.
 Fresh Stop director Karyn Moskowitz, organizer Nathaniel Spencer and VISTA Arianna King spoke to the Slow Food Congress on the Food Justice tour about the importance of making slow, healthy, sustainably grown food available to ALL individuals, through the process of cultivating community leaders and educating community members about the importance of healthy eating.
The Shawnee Fresh Stop is in its second season and has already recruited several new leaders from the community to organize this season’s events through a popular education dialog called the Shawnee Food Justice Class. The class is designed to build leaders and motivated community members to start Fresh Stops throughout Louisville. It is people empowerment programs like the Shawnee Food Justice Class that will be sowing the seeds of justice even deeper into the Louisville food system for years to come. It was a pleasure and an honor to share the Food Justice work being done with such a large group of individuals interested in the current issues with our food systems.
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More Food Justice news. . . next month an update on the fate of the Farm Bill
Justice for workers in the food chain
A fair deal for California’s farm workers
Civil Eats - April 10, 2012
 ...a growing “domestic fair trade” movement aims to formally recognize and reward farms that are working to address social justice. The Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) has developed a set of fair labor guidelines under the Food Justice Certified label, which was born out of dissatisfaction with the US National Organic Program’s failure to address workers’ dignity and rights... While more than 70 Canadian farms are Food Justice Certified, only eight in the United States have received certification. There is now a burgeoning effort to bring the label to California, with Santa Cruz County-based strawberry grower Swanton Berry Farm among those leading the way. Read more.
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Getting a schooling in urban agriculture
New Orleans school cultivates a generation of forward-thinking farmers
Grist - April 9, 2012
 I met Nat Turner, a former New York City public-school teacher, in New Orleans in November, 2010 surrounded by mountains of compost, beautiful vegetables and many volunteers and budding farmers. Nat moved to New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward on Thanksgiving Day, 2008. He didn’t know anything about gardening — “I could barely keep a cactus alive” — but he had a vision to start an urban farm that would be a vehicle for educating and empowering the neighborhood’s youth. He’d been making service trips to the Big Easy with students, but he wanted an opportunity to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, into the city’s revitalization. Read more.
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