—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Rhonda and I met at a potluck lunch last summer hosted by the farm I get most of my summer and fall vegetables from. I attended with my mom, she with her son. We all enjoyed meeting each other.
I invited her and her son to sample my famous no-packaging vegetable stew, sharing with her how many people who try it tell me I don't understand the plight of a single mother in a food desert. They accepted my invitation, as you'll hear in our conversations.
You'll also hear how much she enjoyed the food, which led her to invite me to the Bronx, where she lives, to cook for her community to learn how to do it. You can see a few minutes of that cooking demonstration in my post, My Bronx cooking demonstration video, including a brief glimpse of her setting the table up.
We've become friends, cooking and eating together now a few times. You can hear the friendship developing in our conversations.
The quote you just heard was Rhonda's description how showing people how to cook the way I showed them could save time and money for people to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables. After Rhonda and my first conversation, I recommend watching the video of my going to the Bronx for the group Rhonda assembled at a church for me to demonstrate cooking my famous no-packaging vegetable stew. This conversation came shortly after that potluck. Rhonda and I share hear how that event went. One woman said you couldn't cook that way up there, but then everyone else said it was possible. Rhonda knew everyone there, so listen to our episode to hear her read. Rhonda sounded to me upbeat about her Bronx community finding value in learning this way to cook from scratch. She says the transition takes time, but that once started, the transition would happen. On a personal level, I feel vindicated from people repeatedly evaluating my suggestions that this style of cooking could help people by my identity---or rather their perception of it---instead of how it could help people and communities. There's no question that different neighborhoods have different access to food versus doof. My questions to you Do you accept that difference? Do you consider it fair? What are you doing to change it? I don't think we have to accept it. I'm helping change it. I'm helping reverse the trend of doof producers extracting money from communities with less defense to their manipulations. They claim to offer convenience but make people dependent, creating lifestyles to spend less time with family to work at low wages. I recommend you help this process instead of sustaining what McDonald's and Starbucks are doing---perpetuating poor health and impoverishing people and communities. Rhonda and I have become friends, over vegetables. She met my mom, I met her son and community. Food brings people together---in my experience, more when you meet the farmers and prepare fruits and vegetables from scratch.
You'll hear about Rhonda and how we met in the beginning of our conversation, but I brought her in for a different reason than most of my other guests. I invite a lot of people to my famous no-packaging vegetable stew. Though I created the stew with accessibility from the start, people kept saying I didn't understand that for some people they were less accessible, especially the "single mother in a food desert with three kids and three jobs." None of them were single mothers from food deserts. Well, no need to speculate. We can hear from Rhonda. I think you'll find our conversation surprising and enlightening. We met for stew once before, with her son, to eat and record, but got so caught up in cooking and eating, we postponed recording to this time. I believe I can say you'll hear a friendship developing. I find that acting environmentally creates community and connection, every time. Polluting tends to separate. After all, you don't want to pollute your friends' worlds, so we distance ourselves from people when we pollute. In the time I took to edit the audio, we had that potluck in the Bronx, where cooked stew for the community group she assembled. The video is in My Bronx cooking demonstration video.