Fair Food Network is excited to be partnering with Hazon on the following three calls to action. You can learn more about all of these issues by reading Oran Hesterman’s Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All. Together, we can move from being conscious consumers to engaged citizens and transform our food system!
- The first call to action is in your kitchen. Make a commitment to spend an additional $10 per week on food the source of which you can trace and trust. It may be $10 at the farmers’ market where you’ve just had a discussion with the grower; it may be $10 toward a buying club or a CSA. This $10 is not just for you and your satiation. It is a transformative $10 spent with intention, or kavannah, toward a fair food system.
- The second call takes place in YOUR Jewish community, whether it be a synagogue, havura, Hebrew school or even where you volunteer. Make a commitment to engage the leadership of that institution (maybe it’s you!) to view food as a critical issue in the development of your community (because it is). Find one way you can make a change in the way things are done. This may mean exclusively seeking out caterers who source locally for your celebrations, partnering with a farm to provide produce for school lunches, setting up a Sunday Farmers’ Market, or laying out an expanded set of kosher guidelines for the types of foods you will serve at your institution’s events.
- The third call takes place at the policy level. With discussions around the 2012 Farm Bill beginning soon, it is important to let your elected representatives know that as their constituent, you want THEM to engage with food policy issues. Start by familiarizing yourself with the issues that will be up for discussion. It is too early to make hyper-specific political demands, but it isn’t too early to tell your representatives that you want them to be involved.Contact your Senators and Representatives and ask the following:
[myquote]My name is ____ and I want Senator/Representative _____ to know that as a voting constituent, it is important to me that he/she is engaged with issues of access to healthy food and the 2012 Farm Bill. I want him/her to hear my concerns that the Farm Bill safety netinclude small and mid-size family farmers and that it pay attention to reestablishing a regional food systems infrastructure.[/myquote]