Noticing Small Changes

The Small Change Fund has refreshed its website.  Check out the Eastwood Food Project's page.  It states our intention in a clear, crisp way.  It also shows that nickles, dimes, quarters and dollars have been quietly accumulating during a season of dormancy -- almost $3,000!  Ideas have been gestating too.  We've been patiently waiting to see what might take root in the imaginations of Eastwood students.  As soon as we hear what's on their minds, we'll share the news here.



But today, we're remembering Susan.  52 years ago on this day, she began creating the work of art that became her life.  It was exquisite, one-of-a-kind, complete with vibrant colours, soft pastels and dark undertones.  While we wished for more minutes, hours, days and years together, we're with her now in what Canadian folk singer Ian Tamblyn calls the "25th hour of the day:"

In the 25th hour of the day I made my peace
And in that time allowed I unveiled a masterpiece
All the lessons they were learned
All the lost had been returned
All debts were repaid
In that glorious hour of the day.

And in the 25th hour of the day all was done
No stone was left unturned, no song unsung
Not one lingering 'might have been',
Or 'If I could do it over again'
For in that hour 'over again' was easily arranged.

In the 25th hour of the day I closed my book
And for the first time in many years I had a chance to look around me
No one calling on the phone - oh my god how the boys have grown ...
But it was not too late, in that glorious hour of the day.

And in the 25th hour of the day all was revealed
And though you may not believe, all wounds were healed
And in that hour the lost were found
So we walked to higher ground
And there watched the sun refuse to go down
In that glorious hour of the day.

In the 25th hour of the day I made my peace.

(This song appears only on an early version of Tamblyn's album When Will I See You Again?  You can hear him sing a few bars on this video at 4:11.)

Solving Big Problems

If you plug the words Susan's Change Purse into Google, our page on the Small Change Fund website is the first link you'll find.  The second link is for a website providing tools, drills and exercises to improve math literacy.  It will take you to a math problem -- question #118486 -- which reads as follows:

Susan's change purse contains quarters, dimes, and nickels. She has twice as many nickels as quarters and four more nickels than dimes. She has a total of $5.10. How many coins of each kind does Susan have in her purse?

I suffer from the mother of all math phobias.  Just reading this problem causes me to hyperventilate (unlike my sister Susan who was a wizard with numbers.)  It is an affliction for which I hold Eastwood at least partially responsible.  My advanced math teacher in grades 9 and 12 taught to the top five percent of the class and left the rest of us to fend for ourselves.  I depended entirely on intensive tutoring at exam time from my brilliant, unflappable friend Susan Bowen (now MacNeil) to get across the finish line every year.

So, this funny coincidence got me thinking about the complicated equation that prevents too many Eastwood students from accessing healthy food and from being ready to learn each morning.  At first glance, it is a problem that appears much too big to solve. We know it has something to do with the growing gap in family income and a bushel of social issues found in the Eastwood community and in every community across Canada.  Add the economics of food production and environmental sustainability to the mix and my head starts to spin.  Yet, even a remedial student like me can see that the problem of inequality holds within it solutions to the other problems.

Too often, this conclusion leads us to give up and to abandon our efforts -- large and small -- for a better world.  We have been taught that equality is a dream, the stuff of literature and poetry.  Inequality is a mathematical fact, an economic reality.  Why then are more equal societies like Japan and Sweden performing better by every measure than those with a wider spread between rich and poor citizens like Canada and the United States?

I've been reading The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.  Its authors offer convincing evidence that societies are bound to become more equal in the long run.  They say that the trend toward greater equality is "almost unstoppable," running like "a river of human progress:"

"It runs from the first constitutional limits on the 'divine' (and arbitrary) right of kings, and continues on through the slow development of democracy and the establishment of the principle of equality before the law.  It swells with the abolition of slavery and the extension of the franchise to include non-property-owners and women. It picks up pace with the development of free education, health services and systems of minimum income maintenance covering periods of unemployment and sickness.

It runs on to include legislation to protect the rights of employees and tenants, and legislation to prevent racial discrimination. It includes the decline of forms of class deference. The abolition of capital and corporal punishment is also part of it. So too is the growing agitation for greater equality of opportunity -- regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and religion ... all are manifestations of growing equality."

Through our work on Susan's Change Purse, we're stepping into this river with the confidence that comes from knowing it bends toward justice and its flow depends on us.  We expect dams, rapids, eddies and more.  But luckily, my high school friend and math tutor Susan Bowen MacNeil grew up to be a hospital nutritionist.  With her help and yours too, the complicated equation at the core of Eastwood's food access issue can be reduced to a few simpler ones within our collective power to solve.  Starting with the small math problem on the algebra homework help website.  When you've figured it out, will you please share the answer with me?

PS:  University of Toronto's Jordan Peterson talks about The Spirit Level and related issues in this 10-minute video.  A time-saving alternative to reading the book.  Also, we've started a Facebook fan page for Susan's Change Purse.  Signal your support for this work by becoming a fan today.

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin

After a long winter's nap, this first post of a new season is more about Susan than her change purse and less about food than sustenance. In Susan's memory, we planted a lilac tree last fall in the front garden of our family house in Lakefield, Ontario. It bloomed in the first weeks of May and its fragrant blossoms are slowly giving way to a mass of green leaves. Still young, a fragile beauty in the middle of a mature garden, this tree is bringing comfort in these days leading up to Susan's birthday on May 29th. In the grief of greenness, we begin afresh, afresh, afresh ...

Food Rules for the Rest of Us

More food for thought for Susan's Change Purse.  Here's a recent article from Yes! Magazine (February 2010) by Berit Anderson, an editorial intern.

I admit it. When it comes to food, I am spoiled rotten. I grew up on a diet of produce plucked from my mother’s garden, eggs I gathered from our henhouse in a wicker basket lined with straw, steaks carved from the cow that once spent its days trimming the neighbor’s field, and more fresh fruit than I knew what to do with. That all changed when I moved into the real world, became an unpaid intern and was forced to find my own means of sustenance at the grocery store. Despite the sexy brown sheen of the free-range antibiotic-free egg, I simply couldn’t afford to spend $5 on twelve of them.

So when Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, visited Bainbridge Island to promote his new book, Food Rules, I was a bit nonplussed by his message: “Eat real food, not too much, mostly vegetables." Personally I found Pollan’s mantra at once obvious and too simplistic. I was fairly certain I’d gotten the same advice from my grandmother recently, which did nothing to change the price of eggs.

Still, the message is a valuable one. At times I take for granted the knowledge and awareness that comes with having a grandmother so hip to the value of real food. Not everyone is so lucky. This was driven home when I overheard a pair of high school girls discussing the validity of Michael Pollan’s suggestion that they need not eat each meal with the express purpose of stuffing themselves.

“I’ve got to try that,” one commented enthusiastically.

These girls are a perfect example of what makes Pollan’s work so influential. It is brilliant in its simplicity. Pollan has taken an expansively complicated political topic (the role of big agriculture in American food theology) and broken it down to an unprecedented level of accessibility that doesn’t force anyone to point fingers. “Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients.” “Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.” “You are what you eat, but you are also what what you eat eats.”

Pollan is also a persuasive and engaging speaker, full of interesting facts and dry wit. Faced with a crowd of rapt Bainbridge liberals holding wine glasses, he first taunts them with Twinkies and chocolate cereal from the local Safeway, then launches into a detailed history of Big Agriculture’s role in the bastardization of American food theology. By the end of the evening, his audience is so enthralled with his account of "nutritionism," the fallacy that the way to good health is the consumption of certain buzzworthy nutrients, that Pollan is the recipient of a standing ovation.

Still, this group of enthusiastic local produce consumers is not the audience who most needs to hear his message. And Pollan knows it. In an effort to spread the benefits of real food beyond the well-to-do, he is selling Food Rules, a simplistic guide for healthy eating, for a mere $5 on Amazon (other retailers, $11).

While keeping his price low is a good step, it is only the first in spreading awareness about the value of real food. What I didn’t ask, and should have, is what kind of educational outreach Pollan has undertaken outside of liberal, food-secure communities like Bainbridge Island.

After all, if two Bainbridge Island girls don’t understand the importance of eating real food, in moderation, how many young people living in the inner-city do? How many youth in small, rural towns without easy, affordable access to fresh produce do? What about those who live in neighborhoods rife with fast-food joints? Those whose household incomes make eating in these joints the easiest, most economically viable option for overworked parents?

Healthy food is the foundation of social justice, says Will Allen. And he knows, because he grows a lot of both.

Food Rules certainly serves as a helpful tool in this fight, but it is just the beginning. We must continue to educate others and ourselves about the role that income and race play in the American corporate food saga.

Most importantly, we must educate children about real food from an early, formative age. They, in turn, will share their newfound knowledge at home, affecting household food consumption choices.

There are growing movements in this direction. Farm to School programs, which bring fresh, healthy, real food from local farms to school cafeterias are becoming more and more prevalent. College campuses across the country are choosing to take part in the Real Food Challenge, committing to obtaining an increased percentage of cafeteria food from local and socially just sources. Environmentally geared independent and charter secondary schools are popping up across the country. More and more farmers markets are accepting food stamps, making fresh produce more accessible than ever to those who qualify for federal assistance programs.

As I look ahead, to my future beyond Yes! Magazine, I see myself working toward this goal of increased understanding of food, environment, and health in communities across the United States. Meanwhile, I look forward to a day when I can once again afford the alluringly smooth brown of the free-range, antibiotic-free egg.

Ready for the Revolution

On Thursday, I dropped in on Eastwood's principal Nancy Strobel for an hour.  This was our first opportunity to talk in person about Susan's Change Purse and the Eastwood Food Project since the idea was hatched. 

Our conversation began with the school's immediate need for granola bars.  Nancy and her staff have discovered that the bars are an easy, inexpensive way to deliver a hit of nutrition every morning to anyone who might need one.  Before long, we were talking about meal vouchers -- the variance between what they can afford and what they need.  By the end of our discussion, we were thinking together about ways to engage student leaders.  We agreed that their leadership retreat in June would be the right place and time to invite them into the conversation.

So, the first call on the coins and dollars in Susan's Change Purse is for a case of granola bars -- to be delivered monthly.  At last count, we had $1,220 in the purse with several pledges of more in hand.  Our family contribution is not included in this amount.  We're waiting to see what the mix of activities might be by the end of this first year and how much money is needed.  Minimally, we'll match what the community has contributed and top up our initial gift every year.  In time, we hope that Eastwood's students and staff will play a more direct role in determining how the money in the purse is managed and spent.  But today, we're focused on getting our first case of (low-fat, high fibre) granola bars to the school for March 2010.

As for change on a bigger scale, I was inspired by British chef Jamie Oliver speech at the annual TED conference this week.  He is one of the 2010 TED Prize winners.  TED is a small 25-year old nonprofit interested in social innovation or what it calls "ideas worth spreading."  It hosts annual conferences in Long Beach and Oxford bringing together fascinating thinker-doers from around the world.  They are invited to give the talk of their lives -- in no more than 18 minutes.  Annually, a $100,000 prize is awarded to three exceptional individuals for their "one wish to change the world."

Jamie Oliver's wish is to transform the way we feed ourselves and our children.  He's taking aim at childhood obesity with his Food Revolution.  Listen to his winning TED Talk by clicking here.  Then think about contributing to Susan's Change Purse to start the revolution in one school and one neighbourhood -- and for one generation of students -- with one case of granola bars.

The Stop

Susan's Change Purse has been inspired by The Stop, a community food justice centre in Toronto.  Now that's our kind of food bank!  I'm in Belfast in Northern Ireland today, thinking about how far we've travelled since the Great Famine of 1844.  Not far enough.

Do All That You Can

"Do all that you can with what you have for as long as you can."  Open Susan's Change Purse and we find this message waiting for us there.  An invitation to take stock of our resources and to be resourceful with them.  A promise to persevere.  The possibility of a silver lining.