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| | Dear Friend of FRESH,
No need to bury the lede.
The FRESH office is moving. Starting this week we will be working out of office space at St James Episcopal Church on Federal Street. We are so grateful to Father Ranjit Matthews, Ellen Merrill and the whole team at St. James for welcoming us. We are excited to be sharing a hall with Reona Dyess and the folks at the Drop In Learning Center. St. James is such a dynamic faith community and such a force for good in New London and we look forward to being around that energy!
Please stop by: 78 Federal Street, enter through the Seabury Center.
Our PO Box, email, website and phone number remain the same.
FRESH New London PO Box 285 New London, CT 06320
Office: 860-574-9006 Email: info@freshnewlondon.org |
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| | TABLE OF CONTENTS:
MY SELF-DISCOVERY THROUGH FOOD JUSTICE: Julie's Reflections
A WINTER READING LIST: Change and Constancy |
| | MY SELF DISCOVERY THROUGH FOOD JUSTICE by Julie Rosali Garay-Perez
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| I was born on Puerto Rico, a small island in the Caribbean. When I was 4 years old my family of 5 came to join my father in the United States.
I grew up in New London, Connecticut, a community that was mostly low-income and working class Latinx and Black folks.
When I was 14, I began my food justice journey at FRESH New London and have continued on for 8 years. We do most of our work at an urban farm where we help young people develop themselves in many ways: through hands on work at the farm, presenting and public speaking, and developing a critical lens when it comes to our food systems, our city and our state.
I grew up in this movement. I started at the age of 14 trying to understand how and why food can be an injustice. Mirna, a tall, powerful, Latinx women of color, was my first food justice educator at FRESH, a former middle school teacher of mine, and a longtime family friend In high school she became my educator in the realm of food, justice, health and solidarity (I had no idea what that meant but she used it a lot, so I associated it with being fancy/smart). I started my adventure in Spring 2011.....
Read the rest of this powerful, searching essay on the NESAWG Blog |
| | READINGS FOR CHANGE AND CONSTANCY: It's A New Year, Ya'll |
| | For a food justice organization that spends most of its time and energy in the hard work for growing food, winter is suppose to be a time for reflection, evaluating, planning and recharging.
We are trying to do that these days, but our recharge and reflection is being interrupted by the logistics and inevitable disarray of the office move, undermined by the uncertainty about our new long term site for growing food and community gardening, and made more confused and confounding by the larger swirl of uncertainty as the political crisis bursts out of the beltway and the government shut down affects our community.
So, in the midst of everything else, we are trying to do some reading and research, trying to think about our place -- as individuals, as an organization, as part of social movements-- in the change and the constancy that is life in 2019.
by Robinson Meyer, Tuesday, January 15, 2019, The Atlantic
Penniman is an author, activist, farmer, and cofounder of Soul Fire Farm. In this book, she offers a manual for African-heritage people to reclaim their dignified agency in the food system. Farming While Black provides readers with tips on navigating many aspects of small-scale farming including finding land and resources, raising animals sustainably and humanely, and building the food movement through education, direct action, and policy change. Penniman also includes the stories of farmers and activists keeping African wisdom and farming practices alive.
This short book argues that we produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, its being grown and distributed wrong. We can transition from the existing exploitative system to feed the planet and protect it from climate change and related threats.
The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption by Dahr Jamail (The New Press, 2019) After nearly a decade overseas as a war reporter, the acclaimed journalist Dahr Jamail returned to America to renew his passion for mountaineering, only to find that the slopes he had once climbed have been irrevocably changed by climate disruption. In response, Jamail embarks on a journey to the geographical front lines of this crisis—from Alaska to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, via the Amazon rainforest—in order to discover the consequences to nature and to humans of the loss of ice.
The Farm Bill: A Citizen's Guide by Daniel Imhoff and Christina Badaracco (Island Press, 2019) This Citizen's Guide breaks down the nearly 1,000 page document, decoding political jargon into understandable language and graphics accessible for both policymakers and citizens. Readers will learn about how the bill evolved and how it will determine the direction of food policy into the future. Imhoff and Badaracco outline the three main components of the Farm Bill—farm subsidies, food stamps, and conservation programs—to help readers understand the full implications of the decisions they, and their politicians, make.
Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South by Rick Van Noy (Unicversity fo Georgia Press, 2019) Like Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking work Silent Spring, Rick Van Noy’s Sudden Spring is a call to action to mitigate the current trends in our environmental degradation. By highlighting stories of people and places adapting to the impacts of a warmer climate, Van Noy shows us what communities in the South are doing to become more climate resilient and to survive a slow deluge of environmental challenges. .
Food Justice Now! Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle by Joshua Sbicca (University of Minnesota, 2019) Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them.
Let us know if you read any of these books, or suggest others for our reading list! |
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WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
Interested in supporting FRESH with a tax-deductible donation? Follow this link: http://www.freshnewlondon.org/support-us |
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