Sustainability Through Food: November's already over?

 Well, after a stressed, busy, (and yet, for Vanderbilt, normal) November in which our daily lives were all thrown happily askew for a week as we went home, we can all firmly say that flexibility was the theme of our month.   Strangely, although our individual paths went all sorts of crazy directions, they all managed to converge into one by the end.  Our planned big project for this month was to help Beyond Tutoring by cooking a meal for their kids or teaching the kids some cooking skills, but bureaucratic red tape unfortunately postponed this idea until next semester.  So, what did we do as we tried to rearrange our schedules to incorporate a new project?  Well, we actually did a lot.

Jose and Caitlin (your author) organized a group of Vanderbilt students to attend the School Of the Americas (SOA) protest at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia on November 19-21st.  The SOA is a US military academy that trains Latin American officers and soldiers.  Unfortunately, many of its graduates have atrocious human rights records, such as former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, yet the school is still open and running as normal.  Although the main focus of the trip was to learn about ending US militarization in Latin America (…and beyond), we learned an immense amount about the path of food from plant to plate, for the weekend also included many workshops by progressive organizations at the local convention center.

We met members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and attended a talk by the maker of the documentary Killer Coke.  The CIW’s modern slavery museum was astounding as we viewed the shackles with which people had been held as slaves in the Southeast US.  The slavery cases ranged from the years 1997 and 2008.  Coca-Cola, meanwhile, can be held guilty for a vast number of crimes ranging from supporting the murder of union workers in its factories in Colombia to child labor and environmental abuse in El Salvador.  (For more info, go to www.killercoke.org and www.ciw-online.org)

What does this say about the consumption of food in the United States?  The hegemony of transnational corporations seems to have become more important than the livelihood of countless human beings across the world, including Americans.  Surely there are better ways to feed and sustain ourselves rather than subjugating those that certain groups have decided are less than or deviant from the status quo.

Everyone else in our group learned new things about our groups theme or utilized knowledge that we’ve learned this semester as well.  For example, Hayley volunteered at the Dismas House and helped cook chicken alfredo, Lydia helped cook breakfast for dinner on her TBS retreat, and Sarah learned how to make her grandma’s sweet potatoes over Thanksgiving.  Lastly, we were finally able to do something as a group together.  We watched Supersize Me and learned even more about America’s food industry.