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A recap of last night’s screening, via the Harlem Harvest Festival and Fresh Food Summit website:

As I write this, Harlem, Bronx, and even Brooklyn residents are still milling around the Harlem4 headquarters, discussing what we can do to turn Harlem from a Food Desert into a food destination, gossiping, and polishing off the last of the food.

It was a great night with tons of people, and the food was delicious. Harlem Seeds was nice enough to come in and give a presentation on how to feed your family well and cheaply. As Rosalind Francis talked about organic food, CSAs (community supported agriculture), and tips on incorporating healthy food into every day meals, kids and grownups nibbled on herb-roasted lemon chicken, fresh green salad with arugula, romaine, mesclun, cucumber, and red onions, roasted eggplant with roasted tomato and soy cheese on whole wheat toast, and sipped on a pear spritzer. There were a lot of happy mouths munching!

After the presentation, everyone crowded in the back to watch a screening of Fly on the Wall. It’s an enlightening ten-minute film that follows artist Marna Chester as she hangs posters encouraging healthy eating in bodegas in a low income neighborhood of Brooklyn. She talks to the owners about why they sell junk instead of fruit.

“I know this is bad for you,” one bodega owner said. “It breaks kids’ teeth. But I will go out of business if I don’t sell it.”

How sad! But not as sad as the hopeful guy who opened a fruit store, and promptly went out of business a month later.

There was a bright spot, however. After having a long conversation with a bodega owner, Marna came back a couple months later to find her poster still in the window, and mounds of fresh fruit inside the bodega. The owner admitted that once he started putting it out, he actually started to sell it. Food for thought….

After the movie wrapped up, Chet Whye led a discussion.

“Why is it that uptown, I go to a bodega and it only has a smattering of fresh fruit,” he asked, “while downtown they have fresh fruit inside and out?”

“[Bodega owners] make that assumption coming into a neighborhood, that people don’t want fresh fruit. It’s a preconceived notion they have,” one woman answered. People nodded their heads in agreement.

“A lot of the store owners we talked to said they don’t eat anything they sell,” the director of the movie, Jenny Montasir, said. “What does that say?”

Other great quotes:

“Normally you don’t shop at a bodega. You go there looking for convenience food. I think there is a shortage of grocery stores here.”

“A lot of people don’t understand why fresh eating is so important. Instead of telling them just that it’s good for you, we need to say why. We need to start with the children. I think education is the main thing.”

Jenny: “It’s such a complicated problem. If you are in a neighborhood and there is only one supermarket, you have ten fast food places or bodegas in between you and the supermarket. We’re busy, we have children, we don’t have time.”

“I don’t know how to cook half of those vegetables, so I see that, and I know I should eat that, but I don’t know how. When they are selling it, they just have ‘leeks, blah blah blah’. If they had just something, a sign above it saying, ‘salt and boil it’ or something, that would help.”

Marna, “It’s challenging yourself to just do it. It’s not easy the first time, but it will get easier.”

“If you have any sort of relationship with your corner grocery store, ask them to start supplying apples or other fruit. Then go and buy those apples.”

“Make a list and stick to it. Don’t buy cans of food because it’s on sale. Get some fresh food from the farmers.”

One thing that came out of the discussion: we need to learn to prepare our own food. Looking at a mound of vegetables in the store can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. Guacomole, hummus, tortilla chips, are all easy to do. Why buy them? Start small, make mistakes, keep going, and you’ll get it. After all, nothing worth doing is ever easy. Eating right for our health, and feeding our kids right – that is definitely worth doing.

Fly on the Wall is screening this Thursday, 8/26, as part of the Harlem Harvest Festival and Food Summit. Please join what is sure to be a fun event- a cooking demonstration by Harlem Seeds, the film, and a great conversation on food!

The evening starts at 6PM at the Harlem4 Center (2479 Frederick Douglass Blvd below 133rd st, B/C train to 135th St). More details below- hope to see you there!

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Trigger: Harlem Harvest Festival and Food Summit

A few shots from the first Harlem4 Garden Party in a series of weekly community garden meet n’ greets. Be sure to check the Harlem Harvest Festival website for future parties, and a diverse series of events leading up to October’s Fresh Food Summit!

More photos from the Carrie McCracken Truce Community Garden here.

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Trigger: Harlem Harvest Festival and Fresh Food Summit

[UPDATE] Fly on the Wall, food deserts, and grassroots activism.

How does one explain the concept of “food desert” to a five year-old? For two teachers at Achievement First Crown Heights Elementary School, it was easy as printing out a large neighborhood map. They marked every bodega with a “B”, fast food joints with “F”, and supermarkets with “S”. As the one “S” quickly got lost among the B’s and F’s, the children understood. The complex issue of food accessibility and imbalance was as simple as a stroll up the block.

“But I don’t want to live in a food desert,” one student sadly replied. The teachers had an idea.

Taking a note from Fly on the Wall and Carrotmob consumer activism, they developed a summer project for their students focusing on the economic side of the issue: if the bodegas and smaller shops that dot the landscape of a food desert sell healthy items- but no one buys them- they risk going out of business.

The curriculum:

The students made posters along the lines of Marna’s idea.

They also wrote interview questions for store owners.

Parents filled out a survey of the food situation in the neighborhood.

The students made multiple trips to a local bodega: to hang their posters, ask the owner questions, and execute their own Carrotmob.

The owner agreed to carry more healthy items encouraged by the demand for such options.

More info:
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Trigger: Crown Heights Carrotmob for Healthy Food

From 7/30 to 8/5, the IFC Center New York will screen the stunning Tibetan documentary, SUMMER PASTURE, as part of DocuWeeks 2010. This week-long theatrical showcase in NY (and a following week in Los Angeles) will qualify the film for Academy Award consideration. Don’t miss this rare and intimate glimpse into the life of a nomadic Tibetan family!

This doc is visually breathtaking…I can’t wait to see it on the big screen!

NY Screening Info
L.A. Screening Info

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Trigger:
www.facebook.com/summerpasture
www.summerpasturefilm.com

A huge update to come on how Fly on the Wall was used as an educational tool for a summer Economics course at Achievement First Crown Heights Elementary School. These kids are amazing! Part of their project was working with the Carrotmob initiative. Via the Carrotmob blog:

A group of students and teachers in Crown Heights are using the carrotmob model of consumer activism to encourage a local corner store to stock healthier foods. (Go to www.carrotmob.org to watch an awesome cartoon that neatly explains carrotmob consumer activism in less than 3 minutes.)

Across the street from the school, Achievement First Crown Heights Elementary, is a bodega called 765 Grocery and Deli. Like most corner stores or “bodegas” 765 mainly sells packaged foods and sodas. However, I’ve also noticed that they have some healthy “real” fruit juices, that they are always attentive to the customers and are always gracious to the students who shop there. The manager, Chris says he has been wanting to improve the store’s appearance and inventory and therefore welcomes our interest.

At first he will start stocking apples, oranges, bananas, and kid sized bottles of water and low-fat milk. Hopefully this could be just the first step on the way to fresh vegetables as well. This community needs to show Chris that we appreciate a business who wants to support the community. If he wants to support us, we need to support him.

That leads to the next part of the carrotmob plan, we need you to participate in a friendly “mob” at the store. On a specific date and time, TBD, we will organize a mob of consumers to go to the store and buy its new healthy foods. This will encourage the business to continue to make changes that will be more supportive of our community’s health needs.

We will keep you posted on the specifics of the event. For now, please pass this link to friends and stay tuned for video of our kids organizing the event!

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Trigger: Carrotmob

The scarcity of healthy food in a neighborhood is an incredibly complicated problem. So where do we begin? I built the “story” of Fly on the Wall upon five main issues related to the topic of food accessibility. All five arose with ease during Marna’s simple conversations with Brooklyn store owners:

1. Food deserts: A lack of access to nutritious food
2. Food imbalance: A saturation of junk food vs. healthy options
3. Personal agency: Do people like or want healthy food? (a question of education and of choice)
4. Structural dilemma: Can healthy food be affordable?
5. Economic viability: The risk for businesses to provide healthy alternatives

These concerns naturally overlap, and often become frustratingly tangled. But the story of Fly on the Wall unfolds under the umbrella of Marna’s activism, her decision to speak up and to take action.

I did have the opportunity, presenting the film alone to a group of teenagers, to ask what they thought about this. One said he didn’t really like anyone telling him what he should or should not do. Another argued that this was not Marna’s intention, nor was it her point. The student appreciated her concern and the value in discussing the problem face-to-face with those affected by it.

So what can we do as individuals, in spite of the odds against us, to address food accessibility in our neighborhoods? This issue is ripe for a conversation on activism. Because it hits us where we live, there is even more potential to demand that things change.

Fly on the Wall will be screened tomorrow at the Green Scene Fest at Harlem Children’s Zone! The community festival runs from 12-3pm at HCZ, 300 West 134th Street between St. Nicholas and Frederick Douglas Blvd.

Back in March I showed my short to a group of aspiring filmmakers and their leaders. Here’s a taste of the food discussion that followed:

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Trigger: Harlem Children’s Zone

This summer Groundwork for Success scholars will learn the art of bookbinding through a project led by Brooklyn artist and food activist Marna Chester. The project entitled Eat Better Now is in its second phase and will later be developed in to a short documentary film.

Marna created the project in an effort to promote healthful eating habits in underserved communities.

“Food has a profound impact on our lives,” says Marna. “I want to offer a hands-on experience of seeking out a recipe and creating it. I see potential in this exercise to stir conversation between neighbors and to tap into a shared history.”

Groundwork families, staff, and community residents are encouraged to submit recipes at each of our eight program sites. The handwritten recipe consists of up to six healthy ingredients as well as personal stories and photos about the recipe’s source. The will be collected in June and used as part of the community cookbook.

Beginning in July a group of Groundwork for Success scholars will work with Marna to start hand-binding the recipes in an effort to make 75 books. Each scholar participating in the binding project will keep a copy of the cookbook. The others will be distributed at community potluck.

The project’s culminating potluck invites neighbors to be documented as they go from store to kitchen to create their recipe.

Take a look at Fly on the Wall, a brief introduction to the problem on healthy food inequity.

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Trigger: Groundwork Inc newsletter

I received a message from someone sort of amazed by the idea behind Fly on the Wall. He said, “Fighting big food with a poster is a David and Goliath story, to be sure.”

How can public art be used as a tool for change? Certainly a good question.

I like this idea by street artist JR.

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Trigger: Street Attack