Becoming a Community Chef (Post 4)

What's on Your Plate? trailer. Courtesy of Aubin Pictures.

Ever since I decided to embark on a cooking program for kids, I've been thinking more and more about food and eating experiences in my own childhood, especially as they relate to my mother. This, perhaps, lead me to attend the recent screening of What's on Your Plate?, a new documentary by Catherine Gund, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park.

Mom raised me, for the most part, on whole foods and grains. She didn't like to cook, yet she had little tolerance for packaged foodstuffs, and candy, she said, would lead to cavities she couldn't afford to have filled. When I asked for money for fruit-flavored Mambas or Jolly Ranchers, she taught me to make desserts like fruit salad ambrosia. She showed me the tortures of dieting too—I witnessed her bouts with the cottage cheese, and grapefruit regimens of the 1980s, and watched her sweat on a nearly empty stomach with Jane Fonda. I moved in with my father during my teens and soon gained 30 pounds on a diet of pizza, chips, soda and licorice. Mom was horrified. It took years for me to realize that mom's rules were not about denial, but genuine concern for my health. Today, she is a diabetic and, unfortunately, in complete denial about her condition. Now it is me that tells mom how to eat.

What's on Your Plate? reveals that the number of people with diabetes is expected to grow, one day afflicting 50 percent of the adult population; 1 of every 3 children; and 2 of every 3 Black or Latino kids. I was shocked by these statistics, but given that diabetes is already the fourth leading cause of global death by disease; diagnoses in the U.S. increased by more than 13 percent in just two years; and type 2 diabetes (formerly known as "adult-onset") has more than doubled among the nation's child and adolescent groups since the 1970s, it is quite logical to predict that this situation will worsen. Though, the subject of diabetes is rather marginal in What's on Your Plate?, Gund is clearly interested in showing the link between food challenges in urban and low-income communities, specifically in New York City, and current health epidemics. According to an article by Peter Daniels for the World Socialist Website (2006), the incidence of diabetes (usually type 2) is significantly worse in New York than it is in other cities. He writes:

Type 2 diabetes is in many important respects a disease of poverty...The better-off neighborhoods of New York have rates of diabetes of less than 3 percent. In the wealthiest area, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, with a population of about 206,000, the rate is 1 percent or less. In East Harlem, directly north of the East Side, the rate among the neighborhood’s 106,000 residents is a whopping 16 percent, the highest in the city...A survey showed that food stores in the Upper East Side were more than three times as likely to carry healthier foods like fresh fruit, low-fat diary products and high-fiber bread as their counterparts in East Harlem.

Having grown up in the suburbs of the California Bay Area, I once thought (naively) that the “food deserts” of big cities were myth. But after working in one of San Francisco’s largest government housing communities, living in the South Bronx, Harlem and, today, Brooklyn, I see that food inequality is very real. This certainly plays a role in economically and racially disproportionate health statistics.

Safiyah (left); Sadie (center); and Bryant Terry (right). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

While films like The Future of Food, and the more recent Food, Inc. get down to the nitty gritty of American food politics (and make you want to slap someone), What's on Your Plate? is a more palatable, positive approach. Cute animations interspersed throughout the documentary remind me of early PBS commercials that told us to eat our vegetables; children and families are obviously Gund's target audience. Her daughter, Sadie Rain Hope-Gund, and her best friend Safiyah Kai Russell Riddle, lead and narrate the film. These two seventh graders impress me with their astute questions and seemingly sincere interest in the nutritional well being of their families, friends and the city at large. They take their audience from farm to farmers market, science class to cafeteria, home kitchen to Chipotle, as they investigate the urban food system. Along their way, they stop at Downtown Yarns on the Lower East Side where they talk to Roger Schulte and Maureen Cooke. Cooke’s father died from complications of diabetes; Schulte, like many people, didn’t even know he had the disease. But thinking back to all of Sadie and Safiyah's adventures, meeting with people such as Amy and Kevin Miceli of Ciao for Now, Chef Jorge Collazo of the NYC Dept. of Ed, Richard Ball of Schoharie Valley Farms, and eco-Chef Bryant Terry, what stuck with me most were the words of Chicago-based poet and teacher, Idris Goodwin: "In this day and age, [good] food shouldn't be a luxury.”

If the Obama Administration's goal is to ensure a generation of healthy, productive, nutritionally-aware children, it seems to me that films like What’s On Your Plate? should be part of the larger plan.

Nutty Chocolate Chip Cookies (a recipe for children with diabetes):

Ingredients
2/3 c. light margarine, softened
2/3 c. brown sugar, firmly packed
2/3 c. sucralose
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/4 c. pecans, chopped

Go to Kids Health.Org for instructions.

Note: Contrary to widespread belief, sugar does not cause diabetes. According to the American Diabetes Association, sweets and desserts are "no more 'off limits' to people with diabetes, than they are to people without diabetes."