FoodCorps | Curt Ellis | TEDxManhattan

FoodCorps: Ask Not What Your Country Can Feed You; Ask What You Can Feed Your Country.

Co-Founder of the Brooklyn-based documentary production company Wicked Delicate and co-creator of the Peabody award winning film King Corn, Curt Ellis is now focused on launching the national AmeriCorps school garden program FoodCorps, which promises to combat childhood obesity while training a new generation of farmers.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

As Laurie suggested,

I want to begin by going back in time

to October of 1960

when John F. Kennedy

landed at the Ypsilanti airport
in southern Michigan,

Willow Run.

It was 1:45 in the morning,

and Kennedy was in the last days
of a tight election with Richard Nixon,

and by the time he made it to the campus
at the University of Michigan

and the campus hotel
where he was going to stay that night,

he was exhausted.

The University of Michigan
was not interested in exhaustion, however.

There were 10,000 people
who had come out to meet him,

and there was a microphone
set out on the front of the campus steps.

And though the speechwriters

were all holed up in the back room
of the memorial union,

thinking or drinking
or whatever it is speechwriters do,

Kennedy knew he had to say something.

(Mimicking JFK)
"I came here to go to bed," he said.

(Laughter)

And then in three minutes,

at 2:00 in the morning,

without ever consulting a speechwriter

or taking a poll,

Kennedy proposed one of the most
enduring ideas of his short life.

He proposed the Peace Corps,

and shortly after he was elected,
he made it happen.

That makes this year
the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps.

200,000 men and women
have served in 139 countries now ...

doing small acts,

bringing improvements in education
and agriculture and health

to communities that need it.

And along the way, those small acts
have contributed to big goals,

solving big problems

like diffusing the atomic anger
of the Cold War without a bomb

or helping build America's image overseas

as not just a nation of power

but one also of promise.

More than anything,

the Peace Corps has shown
that young leaders and national service

can be an important tool
in answering big problems.

Now, we've been hearing
about big problems all day today.

We know the statistics:

one in three American children
is on track to develop type-2 diabetes,

one in two of our children of color.

We have more people
living in prisons in America today

than we have left
able to make a living as farmers.

We have an obesity epidemic
so far out of control

that military leaders call it
a crisis of national security.

Already 27% of young men
and women in America

wouldn't qualify for military service

because they're too fat to fight.

Unless we do something to put
this runaway food system back on track,

we are headed for the biggest
and most expensive healthcare crisis

we can imagine,

far larger and far harder to fix
than the one we're in right now.

So looking at those big problems

and looking for a solution,

my question to you today,

even though I'm much less handsome
than John F. Kennedy

and even though I stand here

just as a representative
of many others who have had this idea,

my question to you is:

What could America look like
50 years from now

if together we start
a Peace Corps for school food?

31 million children
eat school food five days a week,

getting more than half their calories
from school lunch,

school breakfast, and school snack.

What we feed our kids in school
and what we teach them about food there

affects how they grow,

how they learn,

what they're going to feed
their own families,

and how long they will live.

School is where it all begins.

Now, what could
this Peace Corps for school food,

the Food Corps, look like?

I don't think we need
the federal government

to wholly run and fund
this kind of program.

They have enough to deal with
in Washington as it is.

But a small amount of support,

a strategic investment
from the government,

a stamp of approval

could give us just
the kind of fulcrum we need

against which we can leverage
the support of foundations

and corporations
and individual philanthropists

who believe all children
deserve a healthy future.

There's a model

for this kind of public-private
partnership through national service.

It's AmeriCorps,

and it's been blessed
by broad bipartisan support

from leaders like John McCain
and Orrin Hatch and President Obama,

and it's responsible
for some of the best work,

the most innovative work
going on in America today -

organizations like Teach For America
and City Year and Habitat for Humanity.

I don't think we need
a massive non-profit organization

to reinvent the work
of fixing school food, either.

There are organizations
already working in all 50 states

to do this work:

bringing measurable improvement
to school food.

We just to help them scale up.

We need to identify those organizations
that are most effective on the ground

and give them boots,

give them workers,

and help them do more.

Have a troop surge for school food ...

service members who spend
a year of modestly paid public service,

making lives better for the children
who need the help most.

Finding those service members
shouldn't be too hard.

We have a generation of young people
who are longing for meaningful work.

I think we have half a generation
just looking for work.

But if we tap into this desire,

this passion we've
been hearing about today

for young people
to find a way to roll up their sleeves

and put down their iPhones for a minute,

get their hands in the dirt,

grow food, help kids,

connect with communities,

make things better,

I think we could have an idea
that really grows.

Now, where would these service members go?

John F. Kennedy talked a lot
about the new frontier,

but it's the old frontier
that needs us now.

It's places like Iowa,

where rural children
growing up in small towns

surrounded by
the nation's richest topsoil

too often don't get regular access
to fresh fruits and vegetables.

It's places like Mississippi
and Arkansas and across the South,

where the social and racial
determinants of health

have one in five children
already suffering from obesity

and far higher rates among
children of color and low-income kids.

And it's places like the Southwest
and American Indian communities

where some of the highest rates of
diabetes in the world have taken root.

Like the Tohono O'odham Nation in Arizona,

a place where in Kennedy's time,

type-2 diabetes,

what was then called adult-onset diabetes,

was unheard of.

Well, today, it's diagnosed
in children there as young as six,

and 60% of the adult population
is estimated to have the disease.

These are the places
where the legacies of racism,

the legacies of poverty

have already erected
tall barriers to success.

And the obesity epidemic
and the cost of diet-related disease

are only building those walls higher.

We have to break those down,

and the change needs to come
from young leaders from within,

well-trained and well-supported,

and joined by service men and women
from elsewhere in the country.

What will these service members do

in their year of poorly paid
but intensely meaningful work?

(Laughter)

FoodCorps service members

can probably take their cue
from the Peace Corps as well.

Originally, that program
focused on education

and agriculture

and health.

Well, in this case,
education means nutrition education:

teaching kids what healthy food looks like

and being a young role model

who shows that eating well and exercising
might actually be cool.

It means ...

agriculture, which in this context
is school gardens.

Helping kids touch and grow and taste

foods that are good for them,

foods that they may never
have had a chance to try before,

like lettuce.

(Laughter)

It means health,

which in this case is about
giving those kids regular, daily access

to the healthy foods
they've studied and grown

through Farm to School programs

that connect local producers

growing the freshest
high quality food there is,

with school cafeterias
that are hungry for it.

It means turning those cafeterias

into places where healthy food
is celebrated,

even in some small ways, marketed to kids,

using a few of the tricks we've picked up

from the fast food industry that's
controlled that demographic for decades.

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer
and philosopher and poet,

talks about there being
three kinds of solutions.

There are solutions that deepen
the problem they were meant to fix.

That's like responding to global warming
by getting a bigger air conditioner.

(Laughter)

Then there are solutions that just
kind of push the problem around.

Corn-based ethanol maybe,

which seems like
such a sustainable solution

when you're just staring
at a field of corn ready for harvest,

doesn't look quite so good
when you remember

that to grow that one acre of corn

and fertilize it just one time
with anhydrous ammonia fertilizer,

you burn 2,000 cubic feet of natural gas.

Then there's the third kind of solution.

Wendell Berry
calls it solving for pattern.

Those are solutions
that don't cause more problems

or cause problems to get deeper;

they cause more solutions.

And I think this could be
one of those kinds of solutions.

Think what could happen
if we start this steamrolling.

Think what could happen

if instead of just
helping kids escape obesity,

we also start
helping young service members

get a foothold
in jobs in food and agriculture,

if we start helping farmers
find local markets in schools,

if we start helping communities
come together to build a garden

and realize they have the power
to fix other issues -

social and environmental justice -

just by working together.

Imagine 50 years from now

if we got these things to really snowball,

if we got these solutions
to keep causing more solutions,

I think some of the problems we've been
hearing and thinking about today

would get a little bit smaller.

That's my hope.

I think all we have to do

is take that tired,
old idea of food service

and reimagine it

as something a little bit old
and a little bit new:

real food

and national service.

Thank you.

(Applause)