Monday, September 6, 2010

Student Food Initiative:






       The Student Food Initiative (SFI) is a collective of students at Juniata College who—through assorted opinions and tactics—collaborate out of an interest and concern for the state and future of our current
food system.

We realize the danger of eating more than thinking.

Therefore, we are invested in exploring, communicating, and acting for a just, connected and responsible food system. In order for us to engage in the process of influencing the workings of the food system, we must consider all spheres: personal, local, national and global.

We ask questions that challenge the paradoxes of our world: the simultaneous existence of 1 billion overweight people and 1 billion starving people.

We try to connect the relationships between the worsening state of our environment and the production, distribution and consumption of food.

We realize the current food system was born out of a history of global inequality and exploitation that has continued, and changes only in form.

 We are conscious of the increasing corporate control over the majority of the food system and its institutions.

 We recognize the inhumane practices of major agricultural industries: the widespread use of harmful poisons and misinformation, the exploitation of small farmers, and the enslavement of farm workers.

We emphasize the fact that most of the farmers in the world are women and coincidentally the most economically and physically vulnerable group.

We entertain the complexity of our current food situation, which must now provide for a growing population, function within a globalized market, and satisfiy a consumptive culture.

We bare this knowledge with serious responsibility, argument and research.

Through our actions, we hope to not only minimize our impact on the environment and human beings, but also to actively supplement and support a new way of producing, living, and consuming.

We confidently support new local, organic, low-input food systems and stand boldly in solidarity with the acceleration of food sovereignty.

We are interested in pursuing and creating open dialogues and debate to learn about new ways of improving our relationship with food and the people who are involved at all levels of the food system.

 For if “we are what we eat,” we would like to know what it is that we “are.”