A food revolution in Berkeley: fighting malnutrition and disease, teaching ecological literacy, and giving hope to family farmers begins with kids growing their own food - Center for Ecoliteracy Food Systems Project

Whole Earth, Spring, 2002 by Michael K. Stone

In Berkeley, the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) is cooking up a revolution. The recipe includes food, nutrition, parents, students, organic farmers, urban gardeners, and school district and city policies. In just three years, CEL's Food Systems Project (FSP) has served as a catalyst to coalesce and organize a coalition to:

* create the nation's first districtwide school food policy;

* establish gardens on every campus;

* develop a city food policy;

* "reinvent" the school district's food service;

* inspire a curriculum integrating classrooms with hands-on gardening and cooking instruction;

* help lead a successful campaign--83 percent "yes" votes--for a bond measure that will fund school kitchen and cafeteria construction.

This revolution has generated national publicity. After passage of the school food policy, says Erica Peng, then FSP's garden coordinator, "CNN, CBS, they all descended on us. Did they know we were only one office with three people?"

CEL's achievements are noteworthy enough to be featured in Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe's Hope's Edge (see page 36) as one of the good news stories they discovered in their worldwide search for projects that give hope.

What the CNN stories and the Lappes didn't describe is the years of groundwork that preceded the accomplishments, and the strategies tried and lessons learned: How can people affect complex systems like food and schools? Is the FSP an "only in Berkeley" story? Can it teach others wanting to create change in their towns and cities?

Says Zenobia Barlow, CEL's executive director, "There is a false assumption that you can just walk in and start changing systems. Instead, you need first to weave the web of relationships. You have to work from the school to the district; from the classroom teacher to the school board. The FSP's successes can be traced to the fact that we were able to build our understanding of the dynamics of living systems--the importance of time, relationships, and multiple levels of scale--into the project from the start."

CEL was founded in 1995 by physicist Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life), Zenobia Barlow, and philanthropist and businessman Peter Buckley, as a successor to the Elmwood Institute, an ecological think tank and international network of scholars and activists applying ecological, whole-systems principles to business and education.

CEL (which focuses on K-12 education) may be unusual among foundations (1) in the degree to which its grant giving, programs, and day-to-day operations inhere in a clear set of fundamentals, all of them manifestations of whole-systems approaches. Chief among them are "solving for pattern," "ecological literacy," and what CEL calls "the Four Societies Process."

SOLVING FOR PATTERN

Farmer/poet/philosopher Wendell Berry coined "solving for pattern" to distinguish "solutions" that worsen the problems they are intended to solve from solutions that "cause a ramifying series of solutions." A bad solution solves for a single purpose. It acts destructively on the patterns that contain it. A good solution addresses the interlocking pattern in which it is embedded. "Unless the people solving parts of the problem are having conversations with each other," says Zenobia, "the work they do won't last."

Take some seemingly disparate facts: The percentage of overweight children and youth in the US has doubled in the past thirty years. The federal school lunch program provides school districts with just $2 for a free lunch for the poorest children. Diabetes rates are expected to double in the next twenty years. Food service workers are often the lowest paid and least respected on campus. Tons of uneaten school lunches are trucked to landfills every day. Ninety-one percent of children ages 6 to 11 are not eating recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. Eighty-five percent of at-risk American farms are on the fringes of urban areas. A quarter of Americans eat at least one meal a day from a fast food joint. Heavy attention to standardized testing has not perceptibly improved children's performance in schools.

Community health ... behavioral and academic problems ... low quality school lunches ... junk food ... failing family farms ... solid waste management. Do they form a pattern that can be solved for?

ECOLOGICAL LITERACY

Says Fritjof Capra, "The first step to creating sustainable communities is understanding the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. We call that understanding `ecoliteracy,' from the title of a book by David Orr [another CEL board member]."

According to Fritjof, thinking systemically requires several shifts in thinking: from the parts to the whole; from objects to relationships; from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge; from contents to patterns; from quantity to quality; from hierarchies to networks; from structure to process.

Understanding these shifts is basic to the curriculum CEL proposes. But "curriculum" to CEL is much more than courses, facts, and concepts to grasp. It is about the totality of a student's experiences, contexts, and relationships.