Arnell Hinkle, the founding executive director of CANFIT (which stands for Communities, Adolescents, Nutrition, and Fitness) may be based in downtown Berkeley, but her work to improve the lives of low-income youth of color takes her across the country and around the globe.

She has been involved in development projects in India, Ecuador and Scotland, and spent last year on a Fullbright public policy fellowship in Wellington, New Zealand working with Maori and Pacific Island groups.

A kind of community food coach for young folk, the registered dietician who holds a masters in public health has worked as a restaurant chef, organic farmer, and as a project coordinator of the Hunger and Chronic Disease Prevention Program at the Contra Costa County Health Services Department.

Now, CANFIT offers training and technical assistance to help communities across the nation. Its goal: preventing obesity and other chronic lifestyle diseases by improving access to safe, affordable, culturally appropriate, and healthy food. It also focuses on physical activity after school for low-income adolescent youth in urban or rural settings, and ethnic-specific organizations.

Hinkle, who jokingly describes herself as ageless, lives in South Berkeley with her husband. She has received numerous awards for her work, including from the Rockefeller and Robert Wood Johnson foundations and the American Public Health Association. In 2009-2010 she was an IATP Food and Community Fellow.

We spoke over sandwiches at Café Panini last week.

How do you relate to youth?

I come from a similar background, so I can talk from my experience, growing up poor in St. Louis, eating overcooked vegetables and meat at every meal — a very Midwestern diet.  And then I talk about learning about health and how I came to be doing what I’m doing and why I do it.

I also talk about how your food is a part of who you are but it doesn’t have to define you. Sometimes people will say I won’t eat that because that’s “white people” food—say, something like the sprouts in this sandwich—and you have to kind of tear that apart: why is it that you have that perception?

We work on getting youth to understand that if they eat a more nutrient-rich diet they’ll feel more satisfied. At the same time we recognize real concerns, like that fast food places may be the safest place in a community for youth to hang out.

How did you get into this line of work?

As a teen, I was part of an after-school program, where I met other kids from around the city, and one of my friends was a vegetarian. I must have been about 14, and I remember thinking: okay, there are other ways of eating.

My mom worked so I often had to start the family meal. I did a lot of experimenting with cooking, baking, trying different foods. I liked to cook. I ended up getting a scholarship to Princeton and so I went away to school and as  a way to earn money I started catering events. And when I got out of school I realized I needed a skill. I had a great education but no skill.

So I applied to a culinary school in Boston but, in the meantime, a friend took me to Martha’s Vineyard and I fell in love with the place and ended up getting a summer job at this old hotel that had a European-trained chef and he took me on as an apprentice. I figured I’d learn more from this chef than I would at culinary school so I stayed through the winter and then for another three years after that working at different places.

I worked cheffing for about seven years, catering, restaurants, and at a retreat center. It was when I started growing things—and working with the soil—that I realized a lot of what I was serving people, cream, butter, and meat, wasn’t very good for them. That’s when my interest in nutrition began.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your work and the biggest challenge?

That’s easy: the best part is going into communities, making relationships, and seeing the light bulb go on around change and how it can improve individual and community health. The toughest part: funding. Now, we get smaller amounts of money for shorter amounts of times with a lot more guidelines attached to it.

Does being in Berkeley help or hinder what you do?

Well personally, it’s great because I live a mile from my job, so I get to walk to work. And it’s a great place to live. But we haven’t worked on a project here in years. Sometimes coming from here is a detriment because so often when people hear Berkeley they think: you have it all made and you have no issues as far as food is concerned.

Any projects of note you’d like to mention?

We work with an American Indian reservation community in Arizona who are trying to return to their traditional foods, both growing them and having them served in their schools and senior centers, foods like corn, beans, desert plants. They even opened their own cafe.

Our Mo Project, a contest for youth who shoot their own 90 second PSAs on bringing about healthy change in their communities, is pretty inspiring.

Now that we have adolescents’ attention and have made progress getting them plugged into food and community health, we’re working on how we can get youth to become the next generation of leaders on these issues. We’re developing a guide on food-system careers for low-income youth of color.

Photos: Top: One of CANFIT’s programs is the MO Project which uses media and technology to encourage youth to advocate for nutrition and physical activity issues in their schools and community. Photo: CANFIT. Middle: Arnell Hinkle, executive director of CANFIT. Bottom: A CANFIT after-school wellness learning community program in Oakland in May this year. Photo: CANFIT

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Retired City of Berkeley health outreach worker Joy Moore, 59, is anything but retired.

A long-time local food activist, Moore has played a key role in community efforts to reform school lunch in the Berkeley Unified School District, co-founded Farm Fresh Choice, which brings quality, affordable produce to people of lesser means, and was a member of the Berkeley Food Policy Council, a coalition of community and city groups founded in 1999 to increase community food access and improve health for all the city’s residents.

One of the council’s projects: Farm Fresh Choice, which provides local, sustainable fruits and vegetables to residents in West and South Berkeley neighborhoods who may have economic, transportation, or cultural obstacles that prevent them from, say, shopping at Berkeley Bowl or frequenting the regular Berkeley Farmers’ Markets. The Ecology Center serves as fiscal sponsor for both farmers’ market options.

Nowadays, Moore can be found tending the school garden, talking up healthy eating, and serving fruit smoothies and sauteed greens at the other high school in town Berkeley Technology Academy (B-Tech), designed for students who struggle to succeed at Berkeley High. She also runs an after-school cooking program at the school her grandson attends, Claremont Middle School in Oakland.

In 2007 she earned a horticultural certificate from UC Santa Cruz and she currently takes classes at Berkeley City College, with the aim of getting a teaching credential. (In the 1970s Moore attended UC Berkeley and explored theater, womens’, and African American studies programs but did not graduate.)

A volunteer producer at KPFA radio and occasional guest host for programs such as About Health, she is also featured in the film-in-progress Edible City. You can view a clip of Joy Moore’s Edible City interview.

Moore lives in a downtown apartment and is board secretary for Affordable Housing Associates. We met near her home at the Royal Ground Coffee House and continued our conversation on a walk to B-Tech, where Moore checked on the garden.

This past weekend, Moore was a special guest at the Lunch Love Community big screen launch at the Pacific Film Archive at 2:30 p.m. Lunch Love Community, which features Moore, is a series of shareable short films (which will form the basis of a pending longer documentary) about the community effort to overhaul school food in Berkeley.

Why did you get involved in school food reform?

My daughter, who is now 36, was having dozens of seizures a day when she was younger, she also didn’t eat or sleep, and experienced behavioral problems at school.  Through a lot of trial and error I discovered that she had severe allergies to artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. So I had to think very carefully about what she ate. When I cut out processed food her seizures subsided and her behavior improved.

But at the time, the medical establishment—which I’m wary of anyway—the school district, and MediCal tried to force me to put my daughter on Ritalin to address behavioral issues in school that they said were associated with Attention Deficit Disorder.

I never accepted that diagnosis and found a respected allergist, Ben Feingold, who supported my approach to deal with my daughter’s health concerns through dietary change.

When I saw what was available to eat at my daughter’s school–it was just terrible–I knew I had to do something to improve cafeteria food for all the public school kids in Berkeley.

How do you approach giving young people an edible education?

I’m trying to elevate the status of food and gardening in our culture. Good nutrition is associated with so much: I tell my kids it gives you muscles, strong nails, impacts mood, acne, energy—whatever it is they care about now—that’s how you reach them.

Everything we put into our mouth’s isn’t food. I want kids to know that and make smart choices for themselves. So I’m trying to raise the consciousness of all our children about food and health. My mission is really simple: it’s to get kids to value good food.

There’s nothing like biting into an organic peach and having that delicious juice dripping down your face and onto your neck. But many of our children, who only eat conventional produce–if they eat it at all–often haven’t had that experience. They’ve only known hard, tasteless produce. I try to change that.

What was your intent at the recent EcoFarm Conference panel you moderated on urban youth and food?

For people to see the positive things happening in all our communities around food and farming. When most people think of urban youth they think of crime, right? Violence, gangs, drugs. Here were examples of youth involved in food and gardening programs like Rooted in Community, Oakland Food Connection, and Urban Releaf all bringing about change in under-served neighborhoods. All young people of color. I did not have to look hard to find them.

What’s good about working on food access issues in Berkeley?

The collaboration of so many people in the community working together to bring about change and make a difference. Farm Fresh Choice has always been a group effort. It was inspiring working with other parents like Eric Weaver, Marcy Greenhut, Beebo Turman, and Yolanda Huang on the city’s Child Nutrition Advisory Committee to help get rid of soda machines in the Berkeley schools and bring in farmers’ market salad bars.

What’s challenging about trying to make change in this town?

I don’t see many brown people running the programs for our people. And when someone like Alice Waters serves up barbecue at Berkeley High, as she did, and she makes shredded, pulled-pork tacos with no sauce—what I think of as frou frou food—there’s a tremendous cultural disconnect, particular with the African American students.

Alice Waters has done many good things to change school food but if you look in her kitchen you won’t see many brown people, and you don’t see many brown people working in the garden at the Edible Schoolyard either. You know what I’m saying? We need to start our own Chez Panisse.

Some might decide to take it easy at your stage of life but you keep working hard. What motivates you?

The Berkeley Public Health Department did a study about 10 years ago that revealed huge racial disparities in life expectancy in this city. Fifty percent of brown people in this town die before age 75, compared with only 36 percent of European people, and many of those deaths are due to chronic diseases that could be avoided if people had access to nutritious food. I don’t want that for my grandsons. That’s what keeps me going.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Photos: Top, Sarah Henry. Center and bottom, Sophie Constantinou.

Last month I reconnected with my southern roots and traveled to my hometown, Atlanta, Georgia for a week’s immersion into the current developments around the local food movement and school garden education, particularly with my family’s organization, Seeds of Nutrition. My trip, however, was filled with much more than a visit to a few school gardens. I would soon be surprised by the South’s progress in the sustainable food movement.

This newer leg of the Mendez Foundation, Seeds of Nutrition, has developed into a school-based education program offering experiential learning through gardens and cooking. Prior to Slow Food Nation, I worked with the Mendez Foundation to create a scope and sequence for this curriculum that teaches elementary children about where their food comes from. Now based in Atlanta, Seeds of Nutrition has taken hold in three Atlanta public schools. It involves school children in every step from planting to harvesting to chopping and tasting. Teachers and administrators are filled with excitement as they have seen the Seeds of Nutrition lessons reinforce their day-to-day lessons in math, science and language arts, rather than pull time from these core competencies. In Atlanta, schoolteachers and parents are asking for school gardens and recognize the importance and potential of the school garden as the logical venue to teach the year’s curriculum through experiential learning activities.

My week in the South was to end with the 12th annual Georgia Organics conference. This year’s conference was a record-setting success, drawing more than 1,100 attendees. Overall, it was very impressive and featured workshops by Slow Food’s Erika Lesser and Josh Viertel, Will Allen of Growing Power, Will Harris of White Oak Pastures, and the famous Barefoot Farmer, a biodynamic farmer from Tennessee, among others. The workshops covered the usual topics: from biodiversity to institutional purchasing to young farmers, with a panel of elementary and high school students making changes in their communities, young farmers, and Severine Fleming of the Greenhorns. And, the closing feast featured beautiful, southern food from local farms and chefs. With Michael Pollan’s closing keynote address, the energy in the tent was undeniable.

The conference weekend ended with a Slow Food Southeast Leaders regional meeting at Love is Love Farm, a CSA farm in metro Atlanta operated by Joe Reynolds and Judith Winfrey. When not working the land at Love is Love, Judith puts in her time as the co-leader of Slow Food Atlanta, and Joe is the farm educator with Seeds of Nutrition. The South is truly doing it and there is quite a wave of momentum and excitement flowing through Georgia right now. People are moving and shaking.

That was supposed to be the end of my trip — an inspiring conference with like-minded people. But, a temptation to stay for a reggae show kept me in the Atlanta area for a few more days. Little did I know that I would miss hearing the Original Wailers for a surprise adventure. At the conference, I met Daron “Farmer D” Joffe. In retrospect, knowing now that we have mutual friends out here in California, we were destined to meet there. Farmer D sits on the board and was previously Vice President of Georgia Organics. I had heard of his many ventures and accomplishments, and was soon able to take a look at some of them firsthand. With aligned missions of spreading the work and word of sustainable agriculture to all, we embarked on a journey through coastal Georgia to visit some of his farm projects.

Our first stop was historic Savannah where he is consulting with the Bethesda Boys Home, the oldest boys home in the country, to install a biodynamic farm, which will provide not only produce, but educational and micro-enterprise opportunities for the boys. As with most of Farmer D’s work, he maintains a perspective of social justice and giving back to the community. After stopping at a local restaurant in Savannah, Cha Bella, that is exercising the farm-to-table protocol, we visited the restaurant’s farm, also a Farmer D project. This little farm not only grows food for the restaurant, but also offers educational opportunities to youth. A group of college students from Vermont’s Middlebury College came to the farm for a volunteer day to contribute their time to the Planting Community Project, a community food project (CFP) grant from the USDA, spearheaded by Farmer D in partnership with Union Mission, a Savannah shelter for men, women and families. The project focuses on connecting homeless individuals with limited resource farmers; and in addition to providing access to local organic produce, participants learn about organic growing, cooking and entrepreneurship.

Our next stop was Cumberland Island, the nation’s largest National Park Island, complete with wild horses, gators, wilderness and turn-of-the-century architecture. The Greyfield Inn on the island hired Farmer D to install an organic vegetable garden for the inn’s restaurant. Eventually the Greyfield Inn will also use the gardens and its produce to bring in chefs from around the nation to offer guests a complete farm-to-table experience. In one 13 hour day we transformed overgrown beds of weeds filled with legless lizards and sand gnats into ripe and fertile beds replete with Farmer D’s biodynamic compost (a certified biodynamic product that he makes from the compostable waste gathered from Whole Foods Markets all over the southeast) and his organic fertilizer, ready to be planted with greens, herbs, root veggies, and flowers. In alignment with biodynamic principles, and on the new moon, we prepared the beds with a biodynamic prep so they could begin their transformation.

A few islands north would be our last stop. The farm on Hampton Island provides produce to the island’s Culinary Program, and more impressively, is a venue to bring school children through for agricultural learning. Seventy-five kindergarteners arrived from the Savannah Country Day School to spend the day learning about where food comes from at this pristine farm. Farmer D and his co-educators lead the children through explorations of how plants and animals grow. From having their own school gardens and rich field trips such as this, these little Georgia kindergartners were quite literate about food origins.

This was my first exposure to the South’s sustainable agriculture uprising. It was a refreshing feeling, one of pure joy. I’ve lived away from the South for 14 years now, and noticed a major shift on this trip. The sustainable food movement wave is spanning across the country into pockets we may not have expected a decade ago. Not that sustainable agriculture is new to the South. Will Harris’ family-owned grass-fed beef operation in Bluffton, GA, White Oak Pastures, has been in operation for five generations. But I witnessed for the first time a shift of awareness in Atlanta and beyond. Schools, parents, institutions, and communities are ripe for change. Their arms are open and they are ready to take the steps. The South shall rise again!

We live in a time where there is a seemingly endless parade of information streaming across our brains.  And increasingly, this information is ecological in scope – green, eco, natural and sustainable.

This is especially true when it comes to food, where the increased eco-awareness in the past year has been dramatic.  Oprah is now promoting the humane treatment of animals, and Safeway and Wal-mart are rapidly increasing their sales of organic products.

But, do we really understand what all this information means?  Do we, as a society, have the background to separate the truly green from the green-washed?

In our primary schools, teachers are still hobbled by restrictive No Child Left Behind regulations, forcing them to cut “electives” like classes on ecology and the environment.

And a sobering new study of over 1000 colleges and universities conducted by the National Wildlife Federation indicates, “There is a widening gap between where education actually is on teaching sustainability versus where it should be.”  There are fewer environmental courses and programs in our nation’s college campuses now than there were in 2001, the study found.

So as a nation, we are arguably receiving less environmental education than before at a time when we have to understand more environmental facts and details.

What is the solution to this growing dichotomy? We need to include Ecology in our discussion of all things green.  We need to return Eco- and Green back to their roots.  “Eco” comes from the ancient Greek word “oikos” which means “house” – the place where we live.  What this means, fundamentally, is that our ecology is the place where we live; we are not separate from it.

When it comes to an understanding of food, an integrated ecological context has significant implications.

Currently, most thinking about food is linear.  That is, people buy food, transport it home, prepare it, eat it and throw away the waste.  That’s the extent of our common awareness.

Even if we extend that discussion to organic foods, this simply extends this linear model one notch – moving the “beginning” from the store back to the organic farm.  And if we include local food in the mix, it simply makes the distances traveled smaller, and the number of steps fewer.

An alternative to this would be to recognize that food comes from a cyclical system. A circle has no beginning and no end, and neither does the food cycle.  To be sustainable, the entire food system needs to be in balance.  Therefore, we can’t pay attention to certain parts of the cycle, say organic farming, and then ignore the rest and pretend we are acting sustainably.

I hasten to clarify that I am not diminishing the importance of organic farms, or of supporting local food networks. On the contrary, they are vitally important. But they are no more important than supporting efficient compost and waste procedures, or streamlining our wholesale and retail operations.

These ideas can give valuable context to foster understanding of unfamiliar ideas. For example, if someone brings up “Vineyard Irrigation”, as mentioned in the New York Times Magazine Food Issue, then even if you don’t understand the specifics, you already know what part of the food cycle you are addressing, and what sustainability issues are addressed. A quite different set of issues arises when the conversation moves on to “Biofortification.”

More superficially, an integration of true ecological ideas into common understanding will help prevent a consumer backlash. If we continue on in the direction we’ve been going, Eco and Green will become completely meaningless, and people will start to distrust such labeling.  This will lead to a widespread rejection of all Sustainable minded products and companies, which will be understandable but disastrous.  We need truth in labeling, and an understanding of the issues. We simply can’t afford not to.

So I urge you all to become Ecotarians, to pay attention to the entire ecological cycle as you garden, shop, cook, eat, and compost. With this broader context in mind, we can begin to pave a path toward true sustainability.

Interested? Want to hear more? For our readers that live in the Los Angeles area, Aaron French will present “Eating Greener: The Ecology of Food and Why It Matters” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) on November 9. The presentation is a part of Sustainable Sundays, a new program at NHM, which allows visitors the opportunity to learn from museum scientists and guest researchers about international conservation issues. The presentation begins at 12:30 p.m. on November 9. Tickets can be purchased at the door; $9 for adults and $2 for kids. Conservation International’s Jen Morris will also be presenting information about investing in global pro-conservation, small- and medium-sized businesses at 2:30 p.m. For more information about Sustainable Sundays, please visit: http://www.nhm.org/calendar/ssundays.html