President Obama has made the community college system a centerpiece of his education agenda, pushing for more resources and talking up their benefits. A community college grad myself, I checked in with a few of my community college friends to see how the good food movement is playing out on their campuses.

Beyond the Russian storefronts of Brighton Beach, all the way at the southern tip of Brooklyn, Kingsborough Community College (KCC)’s Culinary Arts program is part of an emerging trend at community colleges across the country. The program teaches students to consider the “before” and “after” of the food they are cooking and serving. The “before” is the supply chain, and learning about it has led to teachers and students plowing over lawns in favor of vegetable plots and honeybee boxes. The “after” is the health of customers, and with obesity at all-time highs, demand is growing for cooks that know how to prepare delicious food without extreme amounts of fat, sugar and calories – especially in institutional contexts like schools and hospitals.

Culinary Program Director and professor Jonathan Deutsch is of the belief that expensive culinary education is not the only route to good food. Many of his students are fully subsidized through state and federal programs, and when they graduate, their impact on the surrounding community is palpable. For example, one graduate now has contracts with local yeshivas (Jewish theological schools) to prepare scratch cooked kosher school lunches.  According to Deutsch, that student’s education at KCC helped her introduce a higher level of food service at her new job. “Her baked homemade fish sticks are a far cry from what you would think of as institutional food,” says Deutsch. Another graduate is a nursing home food service manager who is proudly serving scratch-cooked meals to elderly residents, cooked onsite. Others have gone on to own restaurants or work as pastry chefs in high-end restaurants.

Many volunteer at the on-campus organic farm, which supplies produce to the on-campus kitchen (teaching students how to improvise with its bounty) and processes compost from their cooking experiments. “I don’t see myself steering them towards a specific career path but rather hope that they’ll be able to navigate their careers better, adapt to changes, and be prepared to have intelligent views on these issues as they move up,” says Deutsch. A full course-load at KCC costs just $2,125 per semester for New York residents.

Out on the West Coast, Merritt College in the Oakland hills is well known as the birthplace of the Black Panthers. In 2010, Merritt added a new certificate program: Urban Agroecology. An experiment partially funded by the Department of Labor under a program called Community-Based Job Training, it brings together ex-offenders and other low-income Oakland residents with “barriers to employment” to learn new job skills. Students are subsidized to learn skills like clean-energy retrofitting. And now, composting. Peralta Community College District, Merritt’s administrative umbrella, enrolls 7,000 students across multiple campuses, in both certificate and Associates (A.A.) degree programs.

Rachel Brand co-designed and teaches in the new program at Merritt (full disclosure: we were high school classmates). She received a M.A. in Sociology and Agroecology at U.C. Santa Cruz and is passionate about community colleges. “Community colleges are the best places to train for good food jobs,” says Brand. “There is a huge cross-section of people. It doesn’t take being super-educated or wealthy to understand healthy, local food.” I visited the class last spring and found Brand’s students collectively savvy about the larger food system and individually passionate to figure out how growing and cooking their own food could lead to better health. Finding them jobs is not easy, but their lives have already been transformed by their education. You can watch a video on their work here.

The final stop on my community college leadership tour was Hawaii. Beyond the tourist enclaves of sunny beaches and fluorescent cocktails, Hawaii has long been a leader in environmental and local food activism. More isolated than any other archipelago in the world, the early years of the state were characterized by a colonial-style food system: everything from lettuce to SPAM were flown in at exorbitant prices and often depressing quality. Hawaii residents are increasingly questioning that 1950s paradigm, and Slow Food chapters, food policy councils, organic farms and Pacific Islander-led food security projects are flourishing statewide.

University of Hawaii Maui College, a combined 2- and 4-year college on Hawaii’s 3^rd-largest island recently established a New Farmers Institute (also funded by the Department of Labor), where students are able to concentrate on Cultural and Natural Resources Management. This means that alongside on-farm financial planning, they discuss indigenous bioethics and effective cultivation of traditional Hawaiian food plants like taro, sweet potatoes and breadfruit.

For those more interested in working indoors, Maui College’s Culinary Academy trains chefs to work in local restaurants and resorts – from a whole-foods perspective. The program’s external programs coordinator, Chris Speere is a chef and longtime activist with Slow Food Maui. He trains students in everything from running a successful catering business to creating value-added food items, like Hawaiian Sea Salt infused with Thai Basil, Maui Lavender, and other locally grown herbs. Partnerships with local businesses and larger chains like Whole Foods have led to job training and visits from professional chefs. A Food Innovation Center is currently being built, to incubate local businesses and further explore how Maui crops can be cultivated and consumed more locally.

“Our kids in Hawaii have the best tastebuds in the nation,” says Speere, which he credited to their multicultural heritage and early exposure to a myriad of different foods. Sheldon Simeon (Top Chef Seattle, two-time James Beard Award semifinalist) is among the many accomplished grads of the Maui Culinary Academy. “We have a whole generation of people disconnected from their food source. It’s not their fault. We forgot to teach them, show them, give them food that has meaning,” says Speere. He’s determined to harness his students’ innate love of food and turn it into successful local businesses and fulfilling careers.

With the cost of private education and unpaid internships increasingly the purview of a privileged few, community colleges deserve a second look. Sure, you can teach yourself how to cook or compost and do a fine job at it, but for those who want to upgrade their skills, practice using professional equipment, and receive mentorship that can last a lifetime, community colleges are increasingly rising to the challenge.

Seattle is where Asian America intersects with food and environmental justice, as I discovered when I spoke there recently as part of a “Sustainable Growth Summit” convened by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Seattle embodies the diversity, contradictions and great talent that define our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: wealth and poverty, hunger and abundance, access or exclusion based on citizenship and English language proficiency.

Thus it made sense that the event was held at North Seattle Community College, which recently received Federal designation as an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution. Many don’t know that the largest sector of AAPI college enrollment (47 percent) is at community colleges; NSCC President Mark Mitsui began the day describing their college’s new sustainability efforts (including cafeteria composting) and reminding visitors to count community colleges as key partners in building the so-called “green economy.”

I led a panel on “Local Foods for Economic Development,” and it attracted a diverse and opinionated mix of students, farmers, activists and one food-justice bookseller. WHIAAPI Commissioner Kamuela Enos is the director of education programs at Ma’o Organic Farms in Oahu, Hawaii and a rising star of the AAPI sustainable agriculture movement. The program he works with trains community college students in organic farming and wholesale and retail sales, with an emphasis on traditional crops and indigenous farming techniques. Wearing cheery shirts with the company motto “No Panic, Go Organic!” students learn how to sell high-quality produce through various channels including a local CSA, farmers markets, and to chefs across the Islands. Ma’o is accomplishing all this in an area in Oahu with levels of poverty near 20 percent, with some census tracts exceeding 50 percent.

A more sobering perspective was offered by Washington State Extension Officer Bee Cha, who coordinates their Hmong Outreach Program. While the farmers he works with are experts at fruit, vegetable and flower cultivation, language and cultural barriers have made it difficult for them to achieve financial stability. Hmong farmers enliven Pike Place Market with a stunning cornucopia of flowers, but Bee described their difficulties breaking into the higher-margin wedding and corporate flower market.

Finally, USDA Washington State Business & Cooperative Programs Director Tuana Jones shared some of the tools her office can offer to AAPI farmers and entrepreneurs: assistance setting up a cooperative, grant programs for cold storage and marketing assistance, connections to farmers markets, and more. I used to work with Rural Development (which administers the Business and Cooperative Programs) in Washington, DC and have great respect for their work. Under the Obama administration they’ve made local and regional foods a new priority, and Tuana spoke expertly on their work in that arena.

There is a rich history of AAPIs in farming, fishing, canning and food retail in Seattle, and the day after the Summit I toured the historic Chinatown/International District. We visited Danny Woo Community Garden, a glorious patch of green in the middle of the city managed by Interim CDA, a community development and low-income housing provider. The garden is tended by elderly gardeners and their young apprentices, who celebrate the harvest every year with a free Filipino-style “Pig Roast” in the garden. Seattle is a backyard chicken mecca (city government named 2010 the Year of Urban Agriculture), and the Danny Woo Garden recently expanded their chicken coops and added an affordable “Urban Farm Camp” for local children to learn about chickens, food and agriculture.

Some of the greatest ideas in food justice and sustainability are being born in Seattle’s AAPI communities. I hope the rest of the country takes note, and Seattleites, please let me know what I missed in the comments below.

UPDATE: After this piece was published, I received additional statistics from Bee Cha of Washington State Extension: Roughly 80% of Hmong farmers in the area grow flowers, and out of about 90 Hmong farms in Washington, only 4 farmers own their land. Access to markets is especially important for these hardworking flower growers.

Here’s a link to the immigrant farmers program he works with:

On the National Park Service website, under the heading, “Things To Do at Minidoka National Historic Site,” you will find this:

Walk through the remains of the entry station, waiting room, and rock garden. Read the names on the plaques. Try to imagine what it must have been like to be brought to this remote area. Look around and compare what you see to your own more comfortable surroundings.

Soon, this contemplative visit to the Minidoka War Relocation Center will have a much different feel–and smell.  After decades of activism to get the former incarceration camp named a national historic monument, an Idaho dairy wants to build a Confined Animal Feeding Operation, or CAFO, just 1.2 miles away.

The history of America’s wartime imprisonment along racial lines is an under-told story: most Americans have read barely a paragraph about it in their high school textbooks, and young Japanese Americans struggle to glean more information from relatives and libraries.  But domestic incarceration under the auspices of “military necessity” did happen, and in some of the harshest rural climates in the United States: Jerome (Arkansas), Tulelake (California) and Topaz (Utah) are just a few.  The camps are in various stages of disintegration today, depending on the success of camp survivors and their descendants to get the federal government to preserve and maintain the grounds for interested visitors, Japanese American and otherwise.  Minidoka camp is located in Hunt, Idaho, and when it was operational (between 1942 and 1945), it formed the eighth largest city in the state.  President Clinton declared it a National Monument in 2001 and it’s now under National Park Service jurisdiction.

In 2008, the Jerome County Commissioners approved a permit request by Big Sky Dairy to begin construction of a 13,000-cow dairy CAFO.  Keep in mind that the Environmental Protection Agency defines a “large CAFO” for dairy cows as any facility with over 700 cattle.  With over 18 times that number, the proposed facility near Minidoka is a key battleground in the fight over the safety, cleanliness and environmental and aesthetic impact of super-sized CAFOs.  It’s also an opportunity to look at how Japanese Americans and other interested parties are–or are not–brought into the debate on how industrial food is produced in the United States.

Because Idaho law only permits public comment from residents living within one mile of a proposed feedlot, and none of the former incarcerees still live there, Japanese Americans were initially locked out of the public comment process.  While this absurd limitation was finally rescinded, a judge recently upheld the right of the CAFO to begin construction. A group of camp survivors and their supporters called Friends of Minidoka and the national Japanese American Citizens League have joined with local groups Idaho Concerned Area Residents for the Environment (ICARE) and the Idaho Rural Council to fight the CAFO in court; they are considering an appeal of the most recent ruling.  While the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Minidoka one of the 11 Most Endangered Historic Places in the United States, a lack of national awareness and mounting legal fees mean the site is still in jeopardy.

Joelle Hervic is an environmental lawyer who worked on CAFO issues in the Chesapeake Bay as Senior Attorney at Waterkeeper Alliance, an international river and waterway protection network.  Ms. Hervic expressed dismay at the proposed Minidoka CAFO.  “Not only is it completely inappropriate to have a CAFO located in such close proximity to the Minidoka historic site because it is disrespectful, but also there are serious environmental and health concerns associated with CAFOs.  Typically, these types of CAFOs store manure and other farm wastes, which are often toxic, in gigantic tanks or ‘lagoons’ that can hold millions of gallons of manure and urine.  Untreated animal manure from CAFOs is up to 160 times more toxic than raw municipal sewage. In addition, antibiotic residues, heavy metals and harmful bacteria from CAFOs can leach into water supplies,” said Hervic. Adding to the danger, the Minidoka site is known for extreme dust storms, raising concerns of cross-contamination of fecal matter and industrial waste into nearby farms and residences.

The CAFO controversy in southern Idaho is not the only place in rural America that tensions fester over what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II, and how, or even if, that legacy should be remembered.  In some instances, they have turned violent: a group of survivors and descendants visiting the former Tule Lake camp near the Oregon-California border in 2006 found their tour bus shot up with BB guns after an evening cultural program in the town of Klamath Falls.

In Minidoka, by contrast, the CAFO issue has brought together local people and former internees.  “Local people will really suffer (if the CAFO is built).  They have to live there,” said Emily Momohara, an art professor and board member of Friends of Minidoka.  Her grandparents and great-grandparents were held at Minidoka during the war.  “One farmer has started putting up American flags and helping us with our pilgrimages.  He doesn’t want his kids drinking that water either,” she said.

When these American concentration camps were thrown together in the panicked first few months of U.S. involvement in World War II, their locations were chosen for their desolation and sometimes, harsh weather conditions.  Prominent men from Japanese American religious, educational, and civic institutions were quickly rounded up and sent to Department of Justice high-security sites like frigid Bismarck, North Dakota, and scorching Crystal City, Texas.  Families, including infants, the elderly, the sick, and orphans were scattered among the 10 remaining camps.  After the war, cheaply erected barracks were sometimes sold to returning GIs for $1 each, and the land itself was given away in lotteries for returning veterans.  Baby boomer families began building lives–and farms–where Japanese and Japanese-American families were imprisoned just a few years earlier.  Some moved onto land that had been tilled and irrigated by Japanese incarcerees, forming a direct link between the camps and modern food production.

Every year there are Americans who become newly aware of the forced removal of Japanese Americans and seek to unearth information about this disturbing period of our history.  Imagine if you were to study a map and make the dusty trek to Minidoka one day, perhaps with a small bundle of flowers to leave on the memorial obelisk outside the former gates of the camp.  But as you pull up to the site, the overwhelming smell of animal waste fills the car, your lungs, your head.  The sounds of animals compete with your thoughts as you try to make sense of this place, and craft something meaningful out of your trek to this remote locale.

If construction proceeds as planned, a CAFO at Minidoka would disrespect not only those who were imprisoned but also their descendants who deserve to know the truth about what happened to their family members.  As a National Historic Site, Minidoka (like the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall) exists to teach future generations about the dangers of hysteria and hate, particularly in times of war.  This is what all Americans stand to lose if construction of a 13,000-cow CAFO is allowed just one mile from Minidoka.

To donate to the Minidoka Committee Legal Fund, go here.

We Americans can be notoriously self-centered when it comes to, well, everything. In the environmental and food-justice movements, voices from Europe or Africa struggle to be included in the American discussion. But as a young country, we would do well to learn from other countries who never stopped plowing, harvesting, and eating in a sustainable way.

Recently I joined 200 other young people to participate in a pilot agriculture-experience program in Japan. Here’s the very simple idea: send 18 to 40-year-old city slickers to rural communities for a free five-day trip to learn farming, meet local people, and perhaps be tempted to adopt that way of life for themselves. Administrated by an environmental nonprofit group, a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture paid our food, bullet train fare, lodging — everything (and I’m not even a citizen!). Seems extravagant, but compared to the amount of money spent on recent bank bailouts it’s a very cheap form of stimulus — and benefits rural areas, young people, and the agricultural sector simultaneously. We were dispatched to rural communities across the country — I went to a tiny village called Kanna-machi (“God-Flowing Town”) a few hours north of Tokyo. Over half its 2600 residents are over 65 years old, reflecting the aging of the farming sector that is occurring all around the world.

Still, Japan remains a lot closer to its agricultural roots than the United States. Elementary school children take day trips to rice fields to practice planting and harvesting, and kitchen gardens are less of a novelty than common practice for many people. Walking through suburban or rural neighborhoods in the summer or fall it is easy to find a roadside shelf heavy with Welsh onions, potatoes, or squash and a battered box with a slit: “Leave 100 yen here.”

For those of us who are sincere about changing American food systems, we may learn a lot from books and the Internet. But nothing quite matches learning how to plow the earth from an experienced human teacher.

In my case, that teacher was Kurosawa-san. His family has been growing potatoes, cucumbers, sweet peas, and other row crops for generations in a sloping valley overlooking the Kanna river valley. When my teammates and I from the “Inaka de Hatarakitai!” program (loosely translated as “Countryside Working Squad!”) showed up at his farm, he regarded us skeptically. We were pale, skinny, and sneezing uncontrollably from the spring pollen, which rose in yellow clouds from the hills behind us (partially a result of 1960s monoculture timber policies, but that’s another story). Typical useless city folk, dressed in too-clean work clothes and fluorescent rubber boots.

Still, he patiently guided us through a spring clearing and planting day. Using hand plows and pure muscle, we started by turning over a dry crumbly field that had been left all winter. Stab its front tines into the ground, use feet and thigh power to get a deeper mouthful of soil, heave everything out, sling it to the side. Repeat. Repeat. After about two straight hours of crunching through this field, I started to realize a few things. One was that my flimsy city body needed a rest and probably accepted too quickly when Kurosawa-san’s wife invited us inside for a midmorning break of hot green tea, homemade manju (rice cakes filled with sweet bean paste), homemade pickles, and other treats. (Kurosawa-san refutes the image of the overworked, overstressed Japanese: “In the old days, we always had a 10 a.m. snack break, a one-hour lunch time, and mochi and tea at 3 p.m. The 3 o’clock break-time is very important, as is the homemade sake at night.”)

The second thing that working in Kanna helped me realize is that all sustainable farms have families somewhere in them.  Plants can be cranky and cantankerous; their care demands patience and knowledge built up over good years and bad years.  Farms cannot be run by economists, nor worked by undocumented immigrants in exploitative conditions, as is increasingly the norm in many parts of the U.S.

But the New York Times criticizes Japanese family farms as “tiny and woefully inefficient,” and American pressure is relentless for Japan to “reform” its agricultural and trade policies towards large-scale monoculture farming. But that would crush the thousands of small farms being tended with love by people like Kurosawa-san. When the sun started to set over the stunning Kanna valley, we surveyed our work with satisfaction: a neatly furrowed field of potatoes, waiting for the spring rains and a hot summer.

The next day, we took a tour of an organic agriculture farm owned and worked by the Okamotos, a couple in their 80s. With help from a local economic development advisor, they’d transitioned their entire farm to certified organic but were desperate for young people to help them work it. Perched on two flat portions of a hillside, their family gravestones overlook the fields, a traditional practice largely abandoned in modern Japan. How does someone treat the land differently when generations of ancestors are sitting right next door?

Many of my farming colleagues were recently laid off or otherwise adrift on a perennial sea of part-time work, casualties of a 1999 deregulation of Japan’s lifetime employment system. Some were obviously depressed over their lives not living up to an image of prosperity and consumerism projected 24 hours a day by Japanese mass media. Yet, in Kanna-machi I saw awkward computer boys and shy secretaries came out of their shells doing farm work and experiencing the pride of tangible achievement.

We cheered when the cooks at the city-run inn we were staying at served each evening’s meal and described its provenance: shiitake mushrooms from Nishimura’s farm, wild butterbur-blossom tempura, locally made konnyaku jelly, and on and on. By the conclusion of the program, we had all gained a few pounds and become fast nakama (tight friends). We set up a Kanna-machi group on Mixi (Japan’s largest social networking site) with the goal of returning next summer to help Okamoto-san’s harvest. In our debriefing session, everyone was surprised to discover that the most notable part of the program was meeting great people and learning from farmers like Okamoto. We had come to learn about the land and possibly jump-start a new career — and had ended up experienced a healing we hadn’t realized we needed. When we commit ourselves to taking care of forgotten corners of the land, we also commit to taking care of forgotten members of our society. What is more efficient than that?

The Japanese model is just one option. As Daniel Duane recently pointed out in Mother Jones magazine, the proliferation of farmers markets in the U.S. has not been matched by an equivalent expansion of small-scale, organic farms. This could lead to an undermining of the very concept of farmers markets. We need massive young farmer training programs, especially ones that focus on low-income Americans, the unemployed, people of color, the formerly incarcerated, and immigrants. Besides the glory of weeding, prospective young farmers need information on purchasing land, dealing with the USDA and other bureaucracies, and the basics necessary for any business: sales, distribution, taxes, and staffing. If the green movement is serious about expanding sustainable agriculture and healthy food for all, programs like the one I experienced in Kanna are a great place to start.