Mapping Our Food

You are what you eat. Last year’s publication of “Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan (NY Times 10 Best Books of 2006), amplified this age-old sentiment to a clarion call for confronting our entire industrial food system, not just to improve our nutritional health, but to save our societies. The Slow Food Movement, the Community Supported Agriculture Movement, Farmer’s Markets, the Grass-fed meat and small organic food producers’ trends, all are expanding exponentially. Northern California is a hub of these discussions, but for the average person, and certainly the average urban youth, taking advantage of the availability of local healthy food in season is still complicated. The local store, filled with processed goodies, is where youth end up spending their money. What if they had a direct relationship to the producers, if they intimately knew the stories of local farmers, and became aware of how processed or industrial foods are essentially making us sick and destroying our local landscapes? This is the question Mapping Our Food hopes to address.

This Spring we will work with a group of youth from Martin Luther King, Jr Middle School to map and capture the stories of our local agricultural providers, as well as what the local industrial food distributors know about their food. MLK Middle School is known as the home of the Edible Schoolyard project started with support from Alice Waters of Chez Pannise Restaurant.

Below is a map of the farms and producers that work with the Ecology Center of Berkeley, as part of their Farmer's Market Program.

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