10

Extending the Dinner Table to the Wide World

Dinner sits at the hub of a wheel with spokes extending in many directions. One spoke is an opportunity to have a conversation about economic disparities that lead to poverty, diabetes, and obesity; another spoke reminds us to protect the environment by not wasting food and by eating in a “green way”; while other spokes serve as starting points for school-age kids to become activists or as bridges to fund-raisers in the service of social justice. Dinner can also be a passport to other countries. Food is the ultimate connector—to our environment, to our fellow citizens who don’t have enough to eat, and to our basic humanity—because everyone must eat to live. This chapter is about some of the ways that the dinner table can be a classroom for global citizenship and a jumping off point for making a difference in the world.

EXPAND THE GUEST LIST: DINNER AS A PASSPORT

A couple of times a year my dinner table becomes an international hub. If you closed your eyes, you might think you were at the Olympics dining hall, with young adults from countries as far flung as China, Pakistan, India, Italy, Ecuador, Greece, and Saudi Arabia. These gatherings happen because my husband, a Boston University professor, teaches a weekly journalism class to about a dozen international graduate students. The class is aimed at improving their writing skills and helping them learn the folkways of living and working in the United States—everything from the rules of baseball to the most common swearwords, to the American teaching practice of asking open-ended questions in class. The class also serves as a soft landing place for homesick young adults who, often for the first time in their lives, are living far away from their families. The students form tight bonds with one another, and they know that they have an adult, my husband, to call on in an emergency—a trip to the ER, a bout of insomnia after covering the Marathon bombings, or shock after a fellow student’s fatal bicycle accident.

Every September, we invite these students to our home for dinner. What began as our welcome-to-America-dinner has become much more—it’s now an opportunity for us to learn about different countries and cultures. Along the way, we’ve been inspired by the courage it takes to travel halfway around the world to get an advanced degree in a field of communication when English is neither your first nor even your second language.

A week before the dinner party, we send a note to all the students asking about food preferences and allergies. Usually they reply that they eat everything, with a few adding that they are vegetarians or observe Halal. Food allergies seem distinctly American, or maybe these students are too polite to make special requests. (When I invite my students, a group of psychiatry residents, for dinner, a list of verboten foods almost always comes back: No mushrooms, no tree nuts, no lactose, no carbs, and “nothing with a mother.”)

For the first few years, the international journalism dinner was a potluck. We made it that way because we believed that the students would like to share their home country cuisine. But few actually had the time or the inclination to cook, so after a few dinners that featured takeout Styrofoam tubs, we realized that what these students craved was a home-cooked meal, even if the food was strange and unfamiliar. So, my husband, ever the teacher, decided to create an early Thanksgiving celebration where he could teach them about different holiday foods and their meanings. But turkeys are hard to find in September. The butcher offered to sell us turkey wings, breasts, and drumsticks, which we could have assembled like a Lego sculpture. Luckily, we tracked down a whole one at a poultry farm. Also on the menu was our family’s time-honored Thanksgiving lineup: sweet potato pudding with marshmallows, stuffing, roasted vegetables, cranberry sauce, and pecan and apple pies.

Teaching about culture, of course, goes both ways. Dinner was called for 7 p.m., but at 6:45, Ahmed, a young man from Saudi Arabia, arrived, explaining that it is considered polite in his country to arrive early. At 7:30, Primm from Thailand arrived, explaining that it’s considered polite to be 30 minutes late. Almost no one came empty-handed, bringing tea and silk pajamas from China, a wall hanging from Pakistan, flowers, wine, and scarves. This graciousness is lovely and unexpected. I now always pack some gifts when I travel to another country in case I’m invited to someone’s home.

The students were homesick for their families, and even though the food was strange, my husband and I, roughly the ages of their parents, functioned in locus parentis for the evening. Over dinner we talked about many topics: the ways that their fellow American students interacted with them; the foods they ate when they were sick and the ones they just found comforting; the differences in marriage laws in their countries; the media they read every day; and how often they were in touch with their families.

After many of these dinners, I’m still intrigued by the ways food practices are both similar and startlingly different. In particular, I’ve looked into the different foods that people eat when they aren’t feeling well or when they need a helping of comfort.

LEARN ABOUT OTHER CULTURES THROUGH EXPLORING “INVALID” FOODS

Over the years I have become intrigued by the cultural differences and similarities that show up around the foods that children eat when they are feeling poorly. Sejal, from India, told me that when she was sick as a child she ate rice flour blended with a grinder, cooked in water, and then mixed with yogurt into a porridge consistency. Khyati, another Indian student, ate khichdi—a mixture of rice and mung dai, a form of green lentils pressure-cooked with a little bit of salt and turmeric. This was then paired with buttermilk and the end result was a pale yellow. A Chinese journalist remembered that she ate jook—a soup made with chicken stock and a piece of ginger root, boiled with rice until the rice is broken down and the soup is the consistency of a watery porridge. Aspasia, a journalist from Greece, ate angel hair pasta soup, accompanied by small pieces of boiled chicken, with a lot of lemon juice. Bibi, a student from Kuwait, ate plain chicken broth with small pieces of chicken. So many of these “invalid foods” are carbohydrates, the building blocks for serotonin; these are the foods that people with atypical depression often crave. Maybe sushi, porridge, noodle soup, and angel pasta soup are invalid foods because of their common carbohydrate base.

Many of these foods are yellow or white. I’ve heard that yellow is a cue to eat and that a lot of yellow foods—such as bananas, corn, lemons, and squash—are brimming with Vitamin C, which is good for the immune system. Perhaps there’s an evolutionary reason to eat yellow foods when we are sick.

A lot of “sick” foods include the generous use of spices, particularly when someone has a cold or fever. One young man from Nigeria told me that when he had a bad cold his mother made him a pepper soup—a super spicy brown broth loaded with chicken, veggies, and plantain. Capsaicin, a natural compound in peppers, can help thin mucous and clear stuffy noses. Salt, which flavors chicken soup, also helps to thin mucous. A young man from Jordan remembered eating lots of onions, fresh mint, and radishes, along with a drink made with fresh ginger, lemon, and honey.

According to evolutionary biologists Jennifer Billing and Paul Sherman, who looked at almost 100 cookbooks from thirty-six countries, certain spices serve an antibacterial function.¹ Garlic, onion, allspice, and oregano inhibit every bacterium they have been tested on. And some foods are more powerful when paired with others. For example, lemon juice and lime juice act synergistically to enhance the antibacterial effects of certain spices. And such spices as garlic, ginger, cinnamon, and chilies have for centuries been used to attack pneumonia, high blood pressure, and nausea.

What do you want when you’re sick? Do you gravitate toward the foods your parents gave you when you had a fever or a cold? Or do you find yourself craving a food that has nothing to do with your cultural background but that may have universal medicinal properties, such as chicken soup?

When I think of my older son’s food preferences when he was sick, I’m hard-pressed to find either a cultural explanation or a medicinal one. He’d raise his head wanly off the couch pillow and ask for sushi and a vanilla milkshake. In retrospect, I think he was asking for comfort foods, not “sick foods.” He was probably taking a mental health day rather than a sick day off from school.

MAKE CONNECTIONS TO FOOD JUSTICE

When I was a girl, my mother would admonish me if I didn’t finish everything on my plate: “Children are starving in Biafra. You should be grateful for your food and eat it all.” This was my first inkling of the way that my dinner could connect beyond my own plate. But, there are really dozens of leaps to make from a dinner plate to social justice issues.

For starters, take environmentalism: The carbon footprint of a family dinner expands when the food is transported from far away, so eating locally grown foods is one way to help the environment. Food that’s thrown away will end up in landfills, decomposing and giving off methane, a greenhouse gas twenty-five times more powerful in global warming than carbon dioxide. So avoiding food waste is helpful to our planet. A family of four is estimated to waste the equivalent of more than $2,000 a year on food that gets thrown out. Think how far that money could go toward feeding the more than one in six children in America that are hungry.²

Income disparities and injustices are also magnified by food choices: fast-food restaurants that produce supersize portions of high-fat, salty, and sugary foods are prevalent in low-income neighborhoods, where there are also more liquor stores and mini-marts than grocery stores selling fresh produce.³ Racial disparities also play a role in who has access to healthy food: Compared to white households, there are four times as many black and Hispanic households that are considered “food insecure.”⁴

Tristram Stuart, an international authority on food waste, runs the global organization Feedback. Feedback is aimed at raising awareness and offering solutions to the problem of food waste in affluent countries.⁵ Tristram is a “freegan”—he takes food from bins outside supermarkets and gleans perfectly good (though cosmetically imperfect) produce from farms and redistributes it. Most notably, he uses this scavenged food in his Feeding 5000 campaign, where 5,000 people eat for free in big outdoor festivals, consuming food that would otherwise have gone to waste.

I spoke to Tristram by phone from his office in London to find out how he thinks children and families can help tackle the problem of food waste.

“I have tried to reawaken the proximity that families have to their food,” he said. “Supermarkets give the illusion of a cornucopia, of infinite produce. It’s hard in that environment, when you see stacks of bananas, to connect to a plantation in Ecuador, to all the bananas that were thrown out because they didn’t look so perfect, to the deforestation that went into growing those bananas. My efforts are to reconnect people to how they treat their food.”⁶

He explained that once families understand these connections, they’ll intuitively figure out ways to save food scraps, use leftovers, and make smoothies out of brown bananas. He added that children are the ambassadors of this movement who can be counted on to nag their parents to be better global citizens. Children are quick studies. They “get” how silly and shameful it is to throw out perfectly good food just because it’s discolored or misshapen.

Talking to your children about these connections is one way to get them thinking about becoming food justice activists. But there are other ways that are more action-oriented.

Cultivate a gardening activist

The garden can be a place to grow beans and to cultivate activism. Roger Doiron, who spearheaded the Obama White House garden by mobilizing a network of gardening activists across the country, describes gardening as a subversive activity.

“Food is a form of power, and by growing your own food, then you’re taking power away from those who have power over your health.”⁷ He also asserts that gardening is a healthy gateway drug to other forms of food freedom: Once you start growing your own food, you have to learn to cook and preserve it.

At the Ford School in Lynn, Massachusetts, just a few miles north of Boston, there’s a garden built over blacktop. There you will find elementary school activist gardeners planting taro, jalapeño peppers, and more than thirty other vegetables, alongside a veteran activist, David Gass. David heads up the neighborhood advocacy group, Highlands Coalition, but his activist roots go back to 1964 and the tumultuous days of voter registration in Mississippi. The elementary school is home to families who have emigrated from countries as widespread as El Salvador, Haiti, Ethiopia, Iraq, Cambodia, and the Dominican Republic, and where 90 percent of kids qualify for free breakfasts.

In 2008, the principal, Dr. Claire Crane, spearheaded the creation of this 1,500-square-foot garden, which hugs a brick wall running the length of the school. The goal was simple, but bold: to engage the students in healthy eating, given that their obesity rates were twice as high as the national average.⁸

The genius of the garden is the way that the surrounding families have gotten involved. Many of the neighbors bring sophisticated agricultural knowledge from their home countries, where they grew up on farms before immigrating to Lynn, a poor city and a veritable food desert. Sometimes this knowledge brings surprises: A Nigerian man harvested what Gass thought was a weed. It turned out to be a leafy green, callaloo, that he cooked up for lunch. Another neighbor pulled up another “weed,” which was really a Cambodian herb that jazzed up some chicken soup.

The garden has transformed the neighborhood, which used to be plagued by gang activity. Since the creation of this garden and another one down the street, there has been a dramatic decrease in drugs and shootings. Gass told me about a family that wanted to move out of the neighborhood because of the prevalence of crime. Grateful for the increased sense of safety, this family now contributes rainwater into the garden from the roof of their house.

Gass, who has worked in housing development and real estate, understands the ins and outs of banks and evictions, a knowledge that came in handy with a three-generation Cambodian family that was about to be evicted. Gass advocated for them at the local bank and prevented their eviction. The family, which had farmed for the Khmer Rouge before moving to Lynn, asked what it could do in return. Gass asked the family members for their help in the garden: The family made trellises and planted long beans, ginseng, and bok choy—contributions that were novel delicacies to many kids at the school.

“Kids who don’t eat vegetables light up when they eat those long beans,” Gass told me.

When I go to the Ford School to help run community dinners, I love to stroll through the garden, a messy, packed area where low-tech materials make high-tech solutions. Most crops are planted in raised soil beds, but tomato plants are growing in five-gallon buckets, and chives are sprouting from a plastic shoe organizer that hangs off a fence. Raised beds are watered by drip irrigation; there are no pesticides used on the fifty-plus different species growing on a block-long narrow space. There’s also an aquaponics project: A large fish tank supports the growth of plants, which are nourished by goldfish excrement. There’s vertical gardening too, with pipes—recycled from a generous plumbing company—that stretch six feet into the air. And there’s a worm factory churning through food scraps, producing top-grade compost to nourish the soil for the future. The children at the Ford Elementary School help with the planting and harvesting, and they are the proud winners of several prizes at the annual Topsfield Fair, America’s oldest agricultural fair.

In the process, they’re encouraged to teach their families what they’ve learned about healthy eating. The hands-on engagement gets kids to form a strong connection to fresh, healthy food. Wandering through the garden, I notice some laminated signs sticking out of the ground. From Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Another sign reads: “Avoid food with ingredients that a third-grader can’t pronounce.” And a third: “Try new kinds of plants, animals, and fungi, not just new foods. More diversity in species is nutritionally better.” The hope is that this knowledge of healthy food will help drive down the skyrocketing obesity rates in this community.

The children at the Ford School are part of a growing movement of “Farm to School” programs that improve the health of children and communities with such activities as planting school gardens, teaching cooking, bringing local foods to school cafeterias, and taking farm field trips. Across the country, schools are becoming champions of improving food access and health to their students. As of 2013, Farm to School programs have reached more than 38,000 schools and 21 million children in all 50 states.⁹

Alice Waters—the founder of the celebrated Berkeley, California, restaurant Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard, a national project to bring gardens to public schools—calls for a revolution in public education, which she named the “Delicious Revolution.” This revolution will occur “when the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with experience in the garden, and sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world.”¹⁰ The children who garden at the Ford School are on the front lines of the Delicious Revolution.

If you want your children to be part of the Delicious Revolution, you can plant gardens in your backyard (or in your front yard, if that’s where the sun shines), or in pots that perch on windowsills. Gardening, at school or at home, instills a deep appreciation for food and for the people who grew it. There’s nothing quite as powerful as growing your own fruit from seed and then eating it if you want to develop a respect for food and the work that goes into creating it. This appreciation can be the first step toward advocating for access to safe, healthy food and for protection of our valuable resources. When children are involved in planting, watering, staking, fertilizing, and harvesting a cup of raspberries, they’ll think twice about squandering a single berry. When children appreciate the work that goes into growing their food, they learn to become stewards of the land.

Engage your kids in saving the planet

I was shocked to learn that 40 percent of food produced in the United States never gets eaten. It’s tossed away on over-portioned plates at home; it rots in refrigerators when we buy too much; it gets thrown out by supermarkets when nonregulated expiration dates dictate that perfectly good food is over the hill; and it is disposed of on farms that throw away imperfectly sized and shaped fruits and vegetables.

It’s estimated that American families will throw out the equivalent of $165 billion worth of food each year.¹¹ The environmental cost of this waste begins with the toxic gas methane that is given off when food scraps decompose in landfills. This accounts for 25 percent of all methane emissions.¹² If food waste were a country, it would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions after China and the United States.¹³

When one in six Americans lacks a secure supply of food, and billions more lack food globally, wasting perfectly good food also becomes a moral issue. If waste was cut by even 15 percent, the food saved could feed more than 25 millions Americans every year.¹⁴ Pope Francis recently lent his voice to this issue on World Environment Day when he said, “Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry.”¹⁵

Many organizations have sprung up to redistribute excess food from restaurants, college cafeterias, and supermarkets and bring it to shelters and soup kitchens. There are also efforts to glean surplus produce from farms and transport it to those in need.¹⁶ Some states, like California, Arizona, Oregon, and Colorado, have passed bills allowing growers to receive a tax credit when they give excess produce to food banks. Certain corporations are beginning to alter their production practices to cut down on wasted food. There is much to be done.

Every day, families that think globally and act locally can also make a difference in cutting down on food waste.

Prevent unnecessary food waste with better refrigerator and freezer practices:

• Don’t let ice build up in your freezer; this cuts down on space for keeping food (and uses up extra energy).

• Store yogurt or cheese (foods with a low safety risk) on upper fridge shelves, which are slightly warmer.

• Store meat, poultry, and fish (foods with a high safety risk) on the lower shelves, which are cooler.

• Put fruits and vegetables that have a tendency to rot or break down—peppers, mushrooms, berries, and pears—in a low-humidity drawer in the fridge.

• To conserve energy, don’t leave the fridge open, even when you’re doing a quick activity like pouring milk in your cereal.

• Put condiments on the fridge door, as this is the warmest part.

• Keep your fridge at 40 degrees or below, as bacteria grow most rapidly between 40 and 140 degrees.

• Freeze unused ingredients rather than waiting for them to rot. You can freeze foods before the “use by” date and then defrost them when you need them, and use within twenty-four hours. You can freeze eggs, meat, and bread, for example, when they are close to their expiration date

Prevent unnecessary food waste with better buying, preparation, and serving practices:

• The size of the average American plate expanded by 36 percent from 1960 to 2007. Switching to eating off a smaller plate can help prevent waste.

• Read and critically assess the expiration labels on food. The “sell by,” “use by,” and “best before” dates do not usually pertain to the safety of the food and are not regulated by any government agency. Instead, the dating system misleads you into thinking that you must discard food that actually may still be perfectly fine. As a result, we needlessly throw out billions of pounds of food.¹⁷

• Buy imperfect products, like misshapen vegetables.

• If you find that you have bought too much food, or if you are going to be away and your food will rot in your absence, you can donate this perfectly good food to a food bank or homeless shelter. Consult the Feeding America Food Bank Locator to find an organization near you.

• Create interesting meals from leftovers: My favorite recycled recipe is tomato bread soup, which is a delicious way to use up stale bread and ends of loaves and imperfect tomatoes (see recipe that follows).

• Or repurpose food items: You can use leftover tea to marinate meat before cooking. Or reuse an old tea bag to make a cold brew and then use it as a cleaning solution to remove grease and grime on mirrors.¹⁸

TOMATO BREAD SOUP

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 onion, diced

1 celery stalk, diced

1 carrot stick, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 fennel bulb, diced

2 cups stale bread, cut into cubes (if you only have fresh bread, you can lightly toast it)

1 (28-ounce) can plum tomatoes (pureed in a food processor) or 4 fresh tomatoes

1 quart vegetable or chicken stock

¼ cup red wine

½ cup chopped fresh basil leaves

Grated Parmesan cheese

In a Dutch oven or heavy soup pan, heat the oil and throw in the onion, celery, carrots, garlic, and fennel, sautéing over medium heat until soft. Then toss in the bread and stir for about 1 minute, or until it is coated in oil.

Add the tomatoes, basil leaves, stock, and wine, and simmer over low heat for about 30 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve with generous amounts of Parmesan cheese on top.

TEACH KIDS TO COMPOST: TURN WASTE INTO GOLD

Composting is a cheap, natural way to get something from nothing; in a few months your discarded garbage is transformed into a nutrient-rich food for your garden. Composting at home for a year can save globalwarming gasses equivalent to what your washing machine produces in three months.¹⁹

Composting is an easy job to assign to a child because it’s basically just dumping food scraps into a pile, where they will rot and turn into wonderful fertilizer while reducing your flow of garbage. To begin, you can make or purchase a plastic or wooden bin (often subsidized by your local government because it wants to divert materials from its waste stream). If grass clippings and shredded leaves are available toss them together in alternating layers. Otherwise, just get started with whatever food scraps you have on hand—eggshells, tea bags, coffee grinds, potato peels, discarded pumpkins, watermelon rinds, tough broccoli stalks, and almost anything else. Best to leave out fish bones or meat since those could attract a party of skunks and rodents making whoopee in your backyard.

The compost pile also needs oxygen and water. Use a shovel or a pitchfork to lift everything and turn it around, aerating the mess, and bringing different materials into contact with one another (which helps the rotting process). Do this at least once a month, or whenever you think of it. Water the pile or collect rainwater and use that to keep it moist but not soggy.

If you really want to go all-in, buy bags full of compost starters—bugs and worms—but your own worms will eventually make their way to your compost, where they’ll eat it and excrete the aftereffects.

How long it will take the composting process to transform your garbage into rich fertilizer is a bit of a mystery, but you’ll know it’s ready to spread on vegetable and flowerbeds when the stuff at the bottom of the bin is textured, blacker than regular soil, and when you can’t recognize the disparate parts.

EAT LOCAL, EAT GREEN

A typical American meal contains ingredients from five foreign countries. After all, we’ve become a culture that wants the food it wants, any time of year. For instance, we eat apples in the spring from New Zealand, watermelon in the winter from Chile, and asparagus in the fall from Argentina. Even domestically grown produce travels an average of 1,500 miles before it’s sold.²⁰ All that globetrotting on the part of our food dramatically increases fuel consumption and pollution. So eating locally grown foods is a tangible way to make the environment cleaner. Can you eat one dinner a week with foods that are grown within 100 miles of where you live? It’s easy enough to do in the summer when farmer’s markets are overflowing with produce, but what can you rustle up in January? In Massachusetts, I can make meal of roasted potatoes, beets, parsnips, and apples with a locally caught cod, or a frittata with onions, herbs grown on the windowsill, and spinach. (Make sure the spinach is sold loose rather than in a plastic container to keep down the fossil fuels expended in production.) You might think you could throw in some frozen asparagus for this experiment, but frozen vegetables triple the carbon footprint.²¹ Eating locally grown foods is not an easy challenge, unless you devote your life to it, as some do. I know I couldn’t go without coffee for more than a day.

EAT LOWER ON THE FOOD CHAIN

The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that if Americans eliminated as little as a one-quarter pound serving of beef per week, the reduction in global warming gas emission would be the equivalent of taking four to six million cars off the road.²² That’s because beef production, more than the production of pork, chicken, fruits, or vegetables, takes the greatest toll on the environment. Cows release methane gas in their manure. Cows also require wide expanses of grazing land, usually the result of deforestation. And then there is all the irrigation needed to pump the water needed to grow the corn to feed the cows. Besides, eating less meat and more fruits and vegetables has the added bonus of being less expensive and better for your health.

COOK TO RAISE MONEY

Some people raise money and awareness for a charity by biking, walking, or running, but you can also cook or bake your way to making a difference. When my mother died after a long struggle with cancer, I wanted to do something that could help stop this disease from claiming more lives. When I thought of all the bake sales I had participated in at my sons’ schools, it occurred to me that cooking was more my speed than soliciting pledges for a walk-a-thon. My teenage sons were also reeling from their grandmother’s death. I thought they would appreciate the opportunity to raise money for cancer research, and I knew I’d enjoy talking about my mother while hanging out together in the kitchen.

I asked them if they’d like to make portable dinner parties. The idea was simple: People could buy a dinner from us, we could cook and deliver it, and the proceeds would go to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. And so we began “Serving up a Cure”—or dinner parties to go. My sons wrote emails soliciting their friends’ parents, designed a menu, and purchased restaurant-size aluminum containers for transport. Then they called up their friends and enlisted them to help. Before I knew it, the kitchen was chock-a-block with teenagers chopping, cutting, and assembling dinners into a box.

My sons also wrote the menu, parodying the over-the-top menu prose of trendy restaurants, and promising slightly more than we were going to deliver. It featured:

• Mediterranean Flatbread—”Flatbread topped with a mix of caramelized onions, chiffonade of kale, thyme, asiago, and olive nicoise.”

• Roman-Style Artichokes—”A ready-to-eat artichoke heart steamed and rubbed in mint, parsley, and olive oil, served in its own juices.”

• Rice Salad—”A refreshing mix of rustic wild rices with craisins and Alabama pecans finished with mint and orange zest.”

• Chicken Roulades—”A tenderized chicken breast rolled to perfection with fresh garden pesto, and a stuffing made from toasted pine nuts, roasted garlic, mozzarella, and kalamata olives.”

• Dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream served with homemade chocolate-dipped biscotti, accompanied by balsamic-macerated berries.

Not too shabby!

We made dozens of these dinners and charged $50 a person, raising thousands of dollars in the process, and having a blast. I think my children learned about the deep satisfaction that comes from contributing to something bigger than them. Together, we had the experience of doing good in the world while having a good time.

CHANGING THE WORLD ONE LOAF AT A TIME

Challah for Hunger (CfH) is a national organization that “bakes for a difference.” The organization leverages the same idea I had with my sons—having fun in the kitchen while doing good in the world—across sixty college campuses. Founded in 2004 by Eli Winkelman, a Scripps College student, the idea was to bake challahs (braided Jewish loaves of bread), sell them, and send the money to support Muslim refugees in Sudan.

As Bill Clinton described the organization—”Jewish girls baking Jewish bread saving Muslim kids’ lives in Africa that have been overlooked by other people.”²³ But actually, it’s not just Jewish girls. The organization attracts Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, and atheist male and female students. Carly Zimmerman, the current director of CfH, explained: “ We are rooted in Jewish values, but gathering around food and wanting to make a difference attracts all kinds of students.”²⁴

Over the past 10 years, the organization has raised about $600,000. Half of that money goes to fight genocide in Darfur. The other half goes to local social justice organizations selected by each individual chapter. Caryn Roth, an adviser to college chapters, explained that it’s not the bread that gets sent to Darfur. Instead, the profits from selling the bread might pay for a solar cooker for Sudanese women who previously risked being raped when they had to leave their camp to look for wood. With the money from the sale of only six challah loaves, these women can now afford a slow cooker with two pots per family. Making this connection between baking and activism might be the greatest thing since sliced bread for many busy college students wanting to make a difference in the world.

The MIT chapter of CfH meets most Thursday nights for six hours of mixing, kneading, and baking. On a frigid February night I joined this group of about 10 future astrophysicists, neuroscientists, and engineers. As they compared problem sets due for the next day’s classes, I thought, “Baking isn’t rocket science, but I’m baking with rocket scientists!”

These college students come to bake for a variety of reasons. One young woman was directing a play above the kitchen, and the yeasty smell of baking bread drew her downstairs. Caroline, a talkative woman who grew up doing a lot of charity work through her church, told me she came because she liked the bread and stayed because it was awesome. Still others, like Jill, the head of this club, are like family members who come to the dinner table for the food but linger because of the conversation. The baking brings them to the club, but talk about social justice keeps them coming back.

By 11 p.m., the seventy-five loaves were done. As was customary for this group, they made three kinds of challah—plain, cinnamon with sugar, and Nutella. Plus, there is always one special flavor of the week. That week it was Reese’s Cup challah. Other weeks they’ve made challah with peanut butter and jelly, pumpkin pie filling, and “challa-ween” (candy challah). One student tells me confidentially that while all the challahs are vegan, they advertise them as “plain” or “vegan,” since some students don’t like the sound of “vegan challah.” Then they delivered them hot out of the oven to dorms all over campus. For a few minutes, the club members were campus rock stars, as their fellow students were so grateful to have their Thursday night problem sets interrupted by a bread delivery. There will be no trace of the bread by Friday.

This group sends half its weekly profits (about $300) to Darfur, and the other half to a local organization, Food for Free, which rescues fresh food that would otherwise go to waste and distributes it within the local emergency food system. Five hours of work earns each baking participant a loaf of bread. That seems like ample payment, given the other perks and pleasures of the evening, such as one young man entertaining the group by juggling several dough balls. Over and over, this group of intense young scientists and engineers tell me how therapeutic it is to knead and punch the dough, what a stress reliever it is to bake bread. For an evening, they are separated from their phones and computer screens, since they would ruin their devices with their sticky, doughy fingers.

Advice from Challah for Hunger activists to other budding activists:

• Record everything when you start a project. Be organized and keep as much information as possible.

• Just “do it.” Buy the ingredients, and gather friends together to bake.

• “Make for yourself a teacher,” or find people you can learn from and then go learn from them.

• Start with the question “Why am I doing this?” and try to inspire others to ask the question.

• Collaborate with other organizations.

• Don’t give up, even when there are obstacles like safety issues with food. Instead, get advice from someone in the food industry.

• Keep reminding yourself and the people you’re working with about why the cause is important. Keep connecting back to the reason you are doing the cooking or the baking.

CHALLAH FOR HUNGER BREAD (MAKES 2 FAMILY-SIZE LOAVES OR 6 INDIVIDUAL LOAVES)

The following recipe uses instant yeast. If you are using active dry or another kind of yeast you’ll need to make modifications.

¾ cup sugar

½ cup vegetable oil

½ tablespoon salt

2½ cups water

6 to 8 cups all-purpose flour, divided

1 tablespoon instant yeast

Additional oil

Prep your space! Clean surfaces, hands, put hair up, and take off rings, etc.

Mix the sugar, ½ cup oil, salt, and water in a large bowl, mixing until everything is dissolved.

Add 3 cups of the flour and mix. You will not necessarily be able to get rid of all the clumps of flour yet; that’s okay. Just keep going.

In a separate, small bowl, combine 1 tablespoon instant yeast with 1 cup of the flour. After the yeast has been thoroughly mixed into the flour, add the mixture to the dough bowl.

Continue adding flour, between 2 and 4 more cups. As your mixture becomes more solid, add the flour more and more slowly. Add flour until you reach the point when, if you press the dough gently with clean fingers, no dough sticks to your hands.

Let the dough rest for 10 minutes. Take a break! Then knead, using the heel of your hand, (not your fingers) for 6 minutes. (You may have to add some flour while kneading, but be conservative.)

Put the dough back in the bowl, cover with a skim of oil, and then drape a towel over the bowl; let it rise for at least 1 hour (but monitor it to make sure it doesn’t overflow the bowl). You can let the dough rise overnight in the fridge (the rising process slows down in cooler temperatures).

Braid the dough and, if desired, add an egg wash. If you have time, let the loaf rise before you bake it. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 to 40 minutes, or until golden brown.

My note: If you are adding other ingredients (like garlic and herb, banana chunks, chocolate chips, or apple pie filler), the group uses the strand method. Once the dough is made, each pre-measured pound of dough is divided in half, and rolled out into an 8-inch snake. Make a trough down the middle of this strand, and sprinkle or spread on the toppings. Then pinch the strand back together and braid it. Then bring the strands together into a round shape.

Questions or comments? Contact Carly at [email protected].

A PLOT OF LAND, A PLOT OF TIME

Dinner can be the secure base from which children explore the wider world. Food lies at the center of a living web that connects us as global citizens since we all have to eat to live. As stewards of the planet we need to share the limited and precious natural resources to grow our food. At dinner we can talk about these connections, and talk can lead to action. Talking about foods from other cultures can lead to cooking those foods, or to inviting international guests to our home. Talking about the environmental consequences of wasting food can lead to composting, eating green, using leftovers, or redistributing unused food. Talking about the economic disparities that limit access to healthy food in poor communities can lead to joining forces with food justice groups and to urban gardening. Any of these conversations can lead to raising money for social justice organizations through cooking or baking.

Dinner is like a small plot of land that can be seeded, fertilized, and coaxed to yield a series of crops. Dinner is a small plot of time that can be sowed to reap comfort, fun, play, and curiosity about the wider world, playful and meaningful conversation, and even action to change the world one meal at a time.