COMMUNITY:
Are you looking for others in your community who can help organize an Eat-In?
Find your nearest Slow Food chapter. Slow Food is a global, grassroots movement with many thousands of members linking the right to the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment. Slow Food USA is the member-supported national organization in the U.S. Slow Food Nation is the event that brought 60,000 people to San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, 2008, in order to unify and galvanize the movement and broadcast the pressing issues concerning our food system to a much wider audience.
Look to networks of people organizing on campuses, on farms, in schools and in communities:
The Real Food Challenge is a student-run campaign to redirect 20% of all food purchased by colleges and universities in the U.S. to real food by 2020.
Serve Your Country Food is a map, network and database of young farmers in the U.S.
Kitchen Gardeners International is a network of individuals, families and communities growing and cooking their own food and promoting sustainable local food systems. Eat the View is their petition for the next President of the United States to plant an organic garden on the White House lawn.
Farm to School is a network of community-based organizations working to bring healthy food from local farms to schoolchildren nationwide.
The Student/Farmworker Alliance is a national network of students and youth organizing with farmworkers to eliminate sweatshop conditions and modern-day slavery in the fields.
Food Not Bombs is a national movement and volunteer-based organization that shares free vegetarian food with hungry people and protests war and poverty. Food Not Bombs has been organizing Eat-Ins (they call them “vegan potlucks”) for twenty-eight years.
Green for All is a national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Demand that your local government commit to creating green-collar jobs and remind them that sustainable food production (both rural and urban) is essential to a green economy.
Find ways to engage more people in bringing good, clean and fair food to your community:
Food Declaration.org is a petition for policymakers to reform federal food policy according to twelve principles of a healthy food and agriculture system. Email it to everyone you know and start talking food politics.
Follow discussions of issues in the movement to build a sustainable food system:
The Slow Food Nation Blog is a collaborative forum discussing our broken food system and highlighting the people, organizations and communities that are trying to fix it.
Brahm Ahmadi of The People's Grocery writes about his work developing creative solutions to health problems in West Oakland, CA that stem from a lack of access to and knowledge about fresh, healthy food.
Tom Philpott's "Victual Reality" column on Grist.org covers issues in food politics.