Tuesdays at Greenleaf - STUDENT INSIGHTS

Each Greenleaf meeting begins with a quote which is discussed by students. Tuesday was no different and the quote that we discussed is written below.

All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

An undeniably powerful quote which the Denver Venture School students digested with ease. I am continually impressed with the insight of these students and the new and wonderful ideas that they bring to the table. There is nothing more exciting then seeing the youth of today and the leaders of tomorrow exceed my wildest expectations. -- Back to the quote.

The students unpacked the quote and quickly related it to the food system. One student related our indirect impacts on each other to that of the predator - prey relationship seen within nature; how removing an animal or plant can wreak havoc on an ecosystem and the need to find a new homeostatic balance. Another student followed up by talking about how the the potential perils of the monoculture/industrial agriculture system (albeit unknowingly) have a magnified impact on our population because the scale is so big. I believe the recent Salmonella and E. Coli outbreaks and Irish Potato famine were mentioned. More discussion followed.

In the end we decided that we all need to work to fulfill our full potential while having a positive impact on the earth as students, neighbors and businesses. For some that might mean working harder in class and for others that may mean working to change farming practices so that our necessity to feed the worlds population does not have a negative impact on laborers, our land and our health.

You Are What You Eat

BY: Sylvia DeLay

You are what you eat. So the saying goes reminding us that our food choices can make or break our health. But is this really the whole story?

Studies like this and this clearly demonstrate that the choices we make every day have a huge impact on our health. Will it be Whole Foods and a jog tonight or a whole lot of fatty food and some video games?

But what many of these studies do not touch upon is the context in which we make choices. As much as we like to believe we have complete control of our lives, our choices aren’t dictated simply by personal desires. We are affected by a whole host of factors such as our individual resources (education, income and wealth), neighborhood resources (housing, access to healthy food, and transportation options), opportunity structures (job availability and school systems) and systems of power (how our entire culture is structured).

Where we grow up, the level of education we have access to, the amount of money we earn—all have effects on our health. Furthermore, race and ethnicity –independent of socioeconomic status—have a significant effect on health.

The infant mortality rate in Colorado’s Black population is 16.9 percent versus 4.9 percent in the White population. The rate of childhood obesity among Colorado’s Latino population is more than twice that of the White population.

So although it will definitely improve our health if we each put down our greasy food and get off our collective bum, it’s also critical to fight for social and policy changes that offer more people the choice to be healthy.