Food = Community

By Elizabeth Whitehurst

During my senior year in college, I worked part-time at a locally-owned health food store, ringing up organic herbs and agave nectar, stocking kombucha tea and fair trade energy drinks. Gary, who tended fields when he left work, taught me the best way to chop an onion. Afternoons when business was slow became long, warm, winding conversations.

Each week, I also volunteered at a local soup kitchen. There, I served beef stroganoff and broccoli cheddar soup, usually meals leftover from my university dining hall or a local restaurant. I chatted with slow-moving old men in flannel about their granddaughters and wiped up juice spilled by young hands. Suzanne brought her accordion each week, someone would always hop to the piano bench and Alice would always sing.

Food is community: the teaching, the talking, the sharing, the singing.

But food is also privilege. What kept those fixed-income seniors from the soup kitchen out of the whole foods store wasn’t just financial, but cultural: what do you mean you don’t serve meat? And what the heck is hemp milk?

Even the presence of a locally-owned health food store is a sign of privilege: access to fresh, nutritious food is severely limited in many urban neighborhoods, especially low-income and black neighborhoods.

I am so inspired by how the student food movement is expanding: not just from school to school or from campus to Congress, but from dining halls into neighborhoods. I’m lucky enough to be part of the Campus Kitchens Project, where student volunteers are constantly coming up with exciting ways to get food—whether it’s leftover linguini from the dining hall or broccoli greens from their community garden—to people who are hungry.

In the wider world of the food movement, community food security initiatives from Belo Horizonte to Washington DC are not only exploring exciting possibilities, but making them real.

I’ve never gone hungry. I know what arugula is, I have time and space to cook slowly for kind friends, and the money to frequent the farmer’s market. Yet I think my greatest privilege might be those conversations and those soup kitchen songs.

I want all that privilege for everyone. I want each of us to have the resources—financial, emotional, cultural, temporal—to nourish ourselves, and enjoy ourselves and each other. I want us to leave enough resources—water, soil, space—so that we might someday be the ancestors of a people who do the same.