Meeting
Notes
Thank
you to those that attended the first Food Justice Committee meeting! We went over:
- - Why we’re here
- - Goals of the committee
- - How the committee will work
- - 4H After School Program
Some of the food justice interest
of those who were able to attend were: GMOs, food politics, nutrition, the
industry, appreciation of food, farming, hunger & access locally,
volunteering, youth.
We’re going to have a discussion
at our weekly meetings on these topics. We’ll all share in taking on a leading
a discussion based on our interest where we can share what we have
read/watched/heard and have a discussion as a group about the information and
how we can address that particular in Willimantic. From that, we can plan our
events. This is no pressure or formality required whatsoever!
Next
Meeting
Our next meeting is Monday,
January 30th at 1pm again in the CCE. Becky is going to investigate
information on the local status of the population and food security. We will
discuss her findings next week. Feel free to search around too and if you find
anything, bring it to next week’s meeting.
Whitney brought up some
interesting ideas after the meeting in regards to food waste, dumpster diving,
and Chartwells. We’ll get into that too!
4H After
School Program
This Thursday we will be starting
a Food & Nutrition After School Program at Windham Middle School. Thank you
to those who expressed interest in helping with this initiative. We will be
working with 11 middle schoolers on Thursdays from 4pm-5pm. We will plan and
put on a basic curriculum on how plants grow (i.e. lessons on soil, sunlight,
water, parts of a plant, etc) and healthy eating (i.e. “my plate”, reading food
labels, etc). Starting in March, we will go to Sweeney Elementary School on
Fridays and work with the Middle Schoolers to enable them to teach the younger
kids the same lessons! Should be a lot of fun J If you would like to
as volunteer as well, please let me know ASAP.
Resources
Courtesy of Dr. Curran:
http://farmlandgrab.org.
Good source of international data and current research.
http://www.fao.org. The
UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. Excellent general and country-specific
information and current research. Good for globalization data.
http://www.usda.gov. US
Department of Agriculture. Good source for food recalls (agency archives
goes back to 1996), food research, rural community data, food security and
nutrition data, info on WIC and child nutrition.
www.epa.gov. US
Environmental Protection Agency. Info on environmental regulation of
agricultural chemicals, on agriculture-related contamination, pesticides,
climate change, and sustainability.
www.fda.gov. Food and Drug
Administration. Good info on food safety and recalls, regulatory science, and
globalization.
www.ufw.org. United Farm
Workers site. Great data on US farm labor practices, current research,
pesticide data, good video lab too.
www.un.org. The UN site
where there’s additional data under the headings of development, human rights,
and the World Food Programme.
www.worldbank.org.
The World Bank site where you can search specific projects related to food
production and get data on world hunger.
www.imf.org. International
Monetary Fund. Another good source for country-specific data.
Books: Diet for a Dead Planet, Banana, The Omnivore’s
Dilemma, The Compassionate Carnivore, and Fashionable Foodn Fast Food Nation,
The Death of Ramon Garcia, Food Politics, What to Eat.
Have a great week and I hope to see you at our next
meeting, Monday January 30th at 1pm in the CCE!
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