Translator: lisa thompson Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
As Laurie suggested,
I want to begin by going back in time
to October of 1960
when John F. Kennedy
landed at the Ypsilanti airport in southern Michigan,
Willow Run.
It was 1:45 in the morning,
and Kennedy was in the last days of a tight election with Richard Nixon,
and by the time he made it to the campus at the University of Michigan
and the campus hotel where he was going to stay that night,
he was exhausted.
The University of Michigan was not interested in exhaustion, however.
There were 10,000 people who had come out to meet him,
and there was a microphone set out on the front of the campus steps.
And though the speechwriters
were all holed up in the back room of the memorial union,
thinking or drinking or whatever it is speechwriters do,
Kennedy knew he had to say something.
(Mimicking JFK) "I came here to go to bed," he said.
(Laughter)
And then in three minutes,
at 2:00 in the morning,
without ever consulting a speechwriter
or taking a poll,
Kennedy proposed one of the most enduring ideas of his short life.
He proposed the Peace Corps,
and shortly after he was elected, he made it happen.
That makes this year the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps.
200,000 men and women have served in 139 countries now ...
doing small acts,
bringing improvements in education and agriculture and health
to communities that need it.
And along the way, those small acts have contributed to big goals,
solving big problems
like diffusing the atomic anger of the Cold War without a bomb
or helping build America's image overseas
as not just a nation of power
but one also of promise.
More than anything,
the Peace Corps has shown that young leaders and national service
can be an important tool in answering big problems.
Now, we've been hearing about big problems all day today.
We know the statistics:
one in three American children is on track to develop type-2 diabetes,
one in two of our children of color.
We have more people living in prisons in America today
than we have left able to make a living as farmers.
We have an obesity epidemic so far out of control
that military leaders call it a crisis of national security.
Already 27% of young men and women in America
wouldn't qualify for military service
because they're too fat to fight.
Unless we do something to put this runaway food system back on track,
we are headed for the biggest and most expensive healthcare crisis
we can imagine,
far larger and far harder to fix than the one we're in right now.
So looking at those big problems
and looking for a solution,
my question to you today,
even though I'm much less handsome than John F. Kennedy
and even though I stand here
just as a representative of many others who have had this idea,
my question to you is:
What could America look like 50 years from now
if together we start a Peace Corps for school food?
31 million children eat school food five days a week,
getting more than half their calories from school lunch,
school breakfast, and school snack.
What we feed our kids in school and what we teach them about food there
affects how they grow,
how they learn,
what they're going to feed their own families,
and how long they will live.
School is where it all begins.
Now, what could this Peace Corps for school food,
the Food Corps, look like?
I don't think we need the federal government
to wholly run and fund this kind of program.
They have enough to deal with in Washington as it is.
But a small amount of support,
a strategic investment from the government,
a stamp of approval
could give us just the kind of fulcrum we need
against which we can leverage the support of foundations
and corporations and individual philanthropists
who believe all children deserve a healthy future.
There's a model
for this kind of public-private partnership through national service.
It's AmeriCorps,
and it's been blessed by broad bipartisan support
from leaders like John McCain and Orrin Hatch and President Obama,
and it's responsible for some of the best work,
the most innovative work going on in America today -
organizations like Teach For America and City Year and Habitat for Humanity.
I don't think we need a massive non-profit organization
to reinvent the work of fixing school food, either.
There are organizations already working in all 50 states
to do this work:
bringing measurable improvement to school food.
We just to help them scale up.
We need to identify those organizations that are most effective on the ground
and give them boots,
give them workers,
and help them do more.
Have a troop surge for school food ...
service members who spend a year of modestly paid public service,
making lives better for the children who need the help most.
Finding those service members shouldn't be too hard.
We have a generation of young people who are longing for meaningful work.
I think we have half a generation just looking for work.
But if we tap into this desire,
this passion we've been hearing about today
for young people to find a way to roll up their sleeves
and put down their iPhones for a minute,
get their hands in the dirt,
grow food, help kids,
connect with communities,
make things better,
I think we could have an idea that really grows.
Now, where would these service members go?
John F. Kennedy talked a lot about the new frontier,
but it's the old frontier that needs us now.
It's places like Iowa,
where rural children growing up in small towns
surrounded by the nation's richest topsoil
too often don't get regular access to fresh fruits and vegetables.
It's places like Mississippi and Arkansas and across the South,
where the social and racial determinants of health
have one in five children already suffering from obesity
and far higher rates among children of color and low-income kids.
And it's places like the Southwest and American Indian communities
where some of the highest rates of diabetes in the world have taken root.
Like the Tohono O'odham Nation in Arizona,
a place where in Kennedy's time,
type-2 diabetes,
what was then called adult-onset diabetes,
was unheard of.
Well, today, it's diagnosed in children there as young as six,
and 60% of the adult population is estimated to have the disease.
These are the places where the legacies of racism,
the legacies of poverty
have already erected tall barriers to success.
And the obesity epidemic and the cost of diet-related disease
are only building those walls higher.
We have to break those down,
and the change needs to come from young leaders from within,
well-trained and well-supported,
and joined by service men and women from elsewhere in the country.
What will these service members do
in their year of poorly paid but intensely meaningful work?
(Laughter)
FoodCorps service members
can probably take their cue from the Peace Corps as well.
Originally, that program focused on education
and agriculture
and health.
Well, in this case, education means nutrition education:
teaching kids what healthy food looks like
and being a young role model
who shows that eating well and exercising might actually be cool.
It means ...
agriculture, which in this context is school gardens.
Helping kids touch and grow and taste
foods that are good for them,
foods that they may never have had a chance to try before,
like lettuce.
(Laughter)
It means health,
which in this case is about giving those kids regular, daily access
to the healthy foods they've studied and grown
through Farm to School programs
that connect local producers
growing the freshest high quality food there is,
with school cafeterias that are hungry for it.
It means turning those cafeterias
into places where healthy food is celebrated,
even in some small ways, marketed to kids,
using a few of the tricks we've picked up
from the fast food industry that's controlled that demographic for decades.
Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and philosopher and poet,
talks about there being three kinds of solutions.
There are solutions that deepen the problem they were meant to fix.
That's like responding to global warming by getting a bigger air conditioner.
(Laughter)
Then there are solutions that just kind of push the problem around.
Corn-based ethanol maybe,
which seems like such a sustainable solution
when you're just staring at a field of corn ready for harvest,
doesn't look quite so good when you remember
that to grow that one acre of corn
and fertilize it just one time with anhydrous ammonia fertilizer,
you burn 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas.
Then there's the third kind of solution.
Wendell Berry calls it solving for pattern.
Those are solutions that don't cause more problems
or cause problems to get deeper;
they cause more solutions.
And I think this could be one of those kinds of solutions.
Think what could happen if we start this steamrolling.
Think what could happen
if instead of just helping kids escape obesity,
we also start helping young service members
get a foothold in jobs in food and agriculture,
if we start helping farmers find local markets in schools,
if we start helping communities come together to build a garden
and realize they have the power to fix other issues -
social and environmental justice -
just by working together.
Imagine 50 years from now
if we got these things to really snowball,
if we got these solutions to keep causing more solutions,
I think some of the problems we've been hearing and thinking about today
would get a little bit smaller.
That's my hope.
I think all we have to do
is take that tired, old idea of food service
and reimagine it
as something a little bit old and a little bit new:
real food
and national service.
Thank you.
(Applause)