October, 2013
I would like to start off this blog by talking about a very inspiring conference that I had the opportunity to attend last weekend. I was invited to attend Whole Foods Vision Day in Seattle to discuss and learn about the long-term vision of the company as it expands throughout the PNW. While I could go on about what it’s like to work for a company that sponsors events like this or how my work will be effected by what I learned, what I would like to focus on are the guest speakers the event and how they effected me personally and how I interact with food in an urban setting.

While there were a wide range of speakers including the founder and CEO of Pacific Foods, micro-loan project leaders from Africa, and the leader of a store located in downtown Detroit that is part of the new Whole City Foundation, there was one who stood out to me in particular. Chef Ann Couper, aka The Renegade Lunch Lady, once spent her time “bumming” around ski slopes and moving from job to job to becoming an internationally renowned Chef was incredibly inspiring. Her most prominent message about this part of her life was that it does not matter where you came from or how little experience you have, as long as you are driven by something you truly believe in anything as possible. As corny as that sounds, she was not alone in this respect. Multiple speakers had founded their companies or non-profit organizations on their vision, personal drive, and, not much else. It really spoke to me regarding the impact that an individual can have on the world regardless of any seemingly insurmountable boundaries.

After becoming a respected chef, Chef Ann’s primary goal was to re-evaluate the diet of schoolchildren. After having success working with a private elementary school to redesign school meals with a greater emphasis on nutrition, she set out to fight for a paradigm shift for school lunches. As someone who grew up eating things like ‘fruit’ cups and greasy pizza in public school, I can definitely see the value in encouraging healthy eating by having a salad bar. Through her work, Chef Ann has encouraged healthy eating and granted nearly 3000 salad bars to schools across the US through information databases like The Lunchbox and the Salad Bars 2 Schools organization.

Chef Ann’s work has truly inspired me. She saw the terrible state of what is passing for food for thousands of students and decided to do something about it herself and, in doing so, contributed to a movement that will teach these thousands of students the value of healthy eating. In many ways, our society is like a city. An individual living in a city can often feel a sense of isolation and confusion – all around are complex processes and interactions that, without greater understanding, can be completely dumbfounding. In psychology, the concepts of social loafing and the bystander effect detail the notion that in large groups there is a diffusion of responsibility – the larger the group the greater the diffusion. In a city the degree of diffusion is so great that it is often forgotten all together. Most people choose to focus on their own lives and ignore their role as individuals in a community. On a nation wide scale, the diffusion is far greater – indeed it is only thanks to patriotic symbols as well as a common culture and language that individuals are able to grapple with nation-wide issues at all. The majority simply goes about their lives with an exponentially decreasing level of interaction as their lives are examined from a local perspective to a national perspective. That is why those an individual that chooses to tackle such an institutionalized issue as school meals really stands out to me. While it is true that our small daily activities can aggregate into a much larger impact on the world (think globally, act locally), it is important to remember that our society is flexible.

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