If you believe local food is important, if you want to eat more of it, if you want to be a food system change-maker, join Vicki Robin, creator of the 10-Day Local Food Challenge and author of Blessing the Hands that Feed Us and Your Money or Your Life, for this informative and enlivening call.
She will report on this global grassroots campaign to encourage people to commit, for 10 days, to eating within 100 miles of home, and the results from the 2014 and 2015 polling they do to understand what it will take to put more local on our plates. Hundreds of people from nearly a dozen countries took on the game. What did they learn? Like? Stumble on?
Shocked awake by learning that her island depends almost entirely on “imported” food from the global industrial system, Vicki undertook a month-long 10-mile diet, writing a book about it called Blessing the Hands that Feed Us. The Challenge offers others this serious fun game for their own awakening. Hundreds of eaters from half a dozen (or more) countries undertook the Challenge in October. Learn what happened and what you can do.
This teleclass is just as much about you as it is about the report on LFC2015, though. What changes are you and your community making for a more resilient food system? Where do you see reason for hope? Need for change? Unrealized opportunities? Write to Vicki@localfoodchallenge.org to share your stories briefly – whether your passion comes from the LFC or elsewhere – and as many as possible will be given a chance to speak.
We all know that local food builds community, builds relationships, builds health, and builds local economies. We know that kids who grow kale or carrots are forever changed. We know that the food on school and hospital trays is often highly processed and unhealthy, even in rich, diverse farming communities.
The 10-Day Local Food Challenge is rooted in this knowledge and is one strategy for empowering eaters to be change-makers through “putting their mouths (eating) where their mouths (professed values) are” – and then talking to friends, farmers, grocers and leaders.
The beacon for the 10-Day Local Food Challenge is to speed the change by holding a the possibility of 50% of food – across the planet – produced within 500 miles by 2050. See Vicki’s TEDx talk for her articulation of that vision. Moving in that direction can change everything about how we source food, change the economy, improve health and empower eaters (that would be all of us). Game on!
