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Originally published on The Huffington Post.

Jamie Oliver's reality television show efforts to start a "food revolution" in Huntington, West Va., have instigated some fascinating conversations about school meals.

Arun Gupta wrote a fascinating piece on Alternet how, in his opinion, Oliver's effort is a failure because after three weeks of serving these fresher, healthier meals, students still choose the pizzas and other processed foods. Oliver's meals are also over budget and have not always complied with federal nutrition standards.

While Oliver's brash declaration contains some delusions of grandeur, it is premature to call the revolution a failure. Our food choices combine availability, taste, cost, time availability, and attitudes and perceptions of our friends, family and community. Choices are also impacted by larger drivers such as food and agricultural policies and the marketing campaigns of the food industry. Three weeks of hard work by a celebrity chef can certainly help change people's perceptions about food, but it can't begin to shift the larger food system that has billions of public and private...

Michelle Obama and Jamie Oliver have brought national attention to the childhood obesity epidemic, which threatens our country with a health care crisis of even greater proportions to the one we currently face.  At the same, a new generation of young adults is fired-up and  ready to engage with their food system and serve their country in a meaningful way.  

A new program, which germinated during a meeting of the IATP Food and Society Fellows,  promises to bring these issues together:  Food Corps, a project of the National Farm to School Network, will recruit young adults for a yearlong term of public service in school food systems. Once stationed, FoodCorps members will build Farm to School supply chains, expand food system and nutrition education programs, and build and tend school food gardens.

The planning team, led by IATP FOod and Society Fellows, Curt Ellis and Deb Eschmeyer, has raised $215,000 in grants from the Kellogg Foundation and AmeriCorps for the planning process leading to the launch of Food Corps in early 2011. Food Corps volunteers will receive one-year placements at schools across the country, with benefits similar to the Americorps...

Originally posted by Kitchen Gardeners

I recently had the good fortune to travel to Cuba as part of trip organized by the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance and the IATP Food and Society Fellows program.  The organic and urban agriculture revolution that is under way there is nothing short of amazing, but what a lot of people don't know is the amount of hardship Cubans have been through to get to where they are.  Unlike with most people in the US and other wealthy countries, growing their own and doing it organically were not really choices for Cubans: they did it to survive. Or to put it more flippantly, when life gave the Cubans limes (mint and rum), they decided to make mojitos. 

I'm sharing some of my own reflections on what I saw through the video above. Although the gardens and farms we saw were picture perfect, Cuba's food system is far from perfect, but even in its imperfection it offers much food for thought about gardening's role in our societies and how that role may change as we move more into the post-carbon world that Cuba has been acclimating itself to over the past 20 years.

In the end, each city will have to make its own path to sustainable food security for its residents and what works in tropical Havana may not translate to Hartford, Connecticut or Hamburg, Germany.  The road is going to be long and bumpy, but as the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu so famously said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and the most important thing is getting started on that journey. 

Rosa’s expression falls suddenly when I ask. “There was no food. All the markets were closed. There was nothing.” We stand on the roof of an urban garden, examining the growth of tiny seedlings. She tells me how her friends became so emaciated that she no longer recognized their faces. “I didn’t know how to grow things. I just knew I had to eat.” Rosa explains how sheer hunger compelled her to make soil from heaps of leaves and stone, and she began keeping chickens on the balcony of her third floor apartment.

At first, this seems like the makings of a post-apocalyptic science fiction film in which even basic necessities like food and water are scarce. But, this is not a galaxy far, far away. Rosa’s story is a snapshot of what we can learn from history.

Cuba, 1991. A newscaster announces the collapse of the Soviet Union. The most immediate impact was the loss of nearly all of the oil imports by the former USSR. Almost overnight, Cuba lost 90 percent of its oil, leaving its transportation and agricultural systems paralyzed.  

However, Cuba survived the crisis by creating small farms, encouraging urban agriculture and shifting from machine to manual labor. Abandoning the machinery method of industrial agricultural, Cubans used human and animal labor and replaced chemical fertilizers with organic farming techniques that used more labor but fewer fossil fuels.    ...